Seeing Rana again on Saturday

She wants me to come to her apartment so she can cook me breakfast/brunch and show me her apartment. I'm sure it's going to involve more french kissing, but I wonder what else she expects from me?

Bob died today

Bob was a school teacher in the New York City public school system. I think he was in his early fifties. For the last several months, people noticed that he was looking thinner and sickly, but he never went to see a doctor. This Monday he called in sick from work, and then today he was found dead in his apartment.

Bob never had a girlfriend. I know that he suffered from my problem, but other people don't understand that. "He must be gay" people said, and they assume that he died of AIDS. People just can't comprehend how a non-gay man could never have a girlfriend. But I know. Bob was a guy who was not only too shy to have a girlfriend, but he was too shy to even go see a doctor when he was obviously sick, and he paid for his problem with his life.

I only met Bob a few times, but still I am incredibly sad to find out about his death. And I know that I could turn out like Bob, a lonely man in his fifties who dies because he's afraid to go see the doctor. For every other type of illness there is medical research and public awareness, but Bob and I and others who suffer from male virginity suffer in anonymity and without anyone caring about our problem. In fact, I try to write about this honestly, and people call me a "shithead" because of it.

I'm glad I didn't find out about Bob until after my date with Rana, because then I would have felt bad all evening. The date involved some more tongue action while we were watching a movie. She really likes to touch me and kiss me. I think Rana might be able to save me from Bob's fate if I am able to overcome my fears and inhibitions and let her.

Rana's email

This email she sent me on Sunday evening is so sweet:

I feel myself very lucky that I have a chance to meet you and I think we are going to improve our friendship by sharing many things together. I had outstanding weekend , Thank you, I can't wait to see you on Wednesday.

I am sending you my kisses.

This is really one of the nicest emails I've ever received. (Please forgive her English, as I pointed out before, this isn't her native language. She has a Master's degree in a rigorous subject area.)

French kissing Rana

Today, for only the second time in my life, I French kissed.

Let's back up a few days. This Eastern European girl named Rana contacted me on an online dating service, and I saw her for the first time on Thursday, and then again on Saturday and again today.

The bad part is that I really didn't like the kissing that much. Putting tongues into other people's mouths? Kind of yucky. I should have had a raging hard on the whole time, but I didn't. Is it because I don't find her that attractive? Or because I'm so used to pleasuring myself that I'm no longer capabable of doing it properly with a live girl?

Back when I was in high school or college, all I had to do was look at a pretty girl and then boing! This doesn't really happen anymore. This is why it's important for a guy to lose his virginity at an early age when he can get it up so easily. My flagging sex drive, combined with the fact that she's not the world's most attractive girl (but she's cute in her way) and my nervousness about doing anything sexual could be fatal to my desire to overcome my problem.

Rana could tell that something wasn't quite right. I told her I was shy. But as we know, there's a lot more going on than just me being shy.

Rana is the one making all the first moves in this relationship. I don't think I've ever met anyone who has liked me so much. Maybe it's because she's a foreigner. As I mentioned before, women are biologically programmed to avoid losers, but what makes someone a loser is very highly cultural specific, and having been in the U.S. for only three years or so, she is unable to read my loser signals.

I'm surprised that Rana is so aggressive. She comes from a country where most of the people are Muslim, so I figured she'd be really uptight and it would be safe to invite her up to my apartment. Boy was I wrong about that.

I really like the fact that someone likes me so much. I wish I found her more attractive. I don't see myself falling in love with her the way I fell in love with Jenny.

I guess Rana now thinks I'm her boyfriend, or something like that.

Yes, I'm really a virgin

Based upon reading some of the comments, people still seem to have hard time believing I'm a virgin. But I don't understand why it's hard to believe. Does everyone think it's so easy to get laid?

This speculation is actually downright mean, because it's dismissive of what's, for me, a very bad situation. Being a virgin isn't the same as being someone who has never been to Paris, easily fixed by booking a vacation. My virginity is a symptom of my social phobias involving women and physical intimacy. This fear prevents me from doing what it takes to establish a romantic relationship with a woman.

This is a big deal for me because I can never experience the joy of being in love with someone who loves me back, never have a normal life where I eventually get married and have children.

Why do people think I'd be faking it? One suggestion is that it's a prank I'm pulling just for fun. While I do find a sort of strange amusement that people are actually reading this, normally when people hear about a guy putting in so much effort to pull this sort of a prank, they often say "there's a guy who really needs to get laid." Yes, if I had a girlfriend I'd probably be too busy to blog.

The other suggested motivation for faking this blog is that it will help me get some sympathy sex from women who feel pity for my virginness. That's extremely unlikely to happen. Women don't want to have sex with virgins. That is part of the problem with being a virgin. And the older a woman is, the more she's turned off by the idea.

As the Modern Guy wrote:

For most males the opportunity to be the duke of defloration in a girl's life is the opportunity to leave his mark. It presents a unique challenge in which he is charged with the quest of penetrating her most powerful defense systems. This also creates a great deal of responsibility for the man in this situation; the pressure of being her first and (for a time at least) only. But for most guys this is more of an honor than a burden.

For females that theory does not seem to apply in the same manner. Upon interviewing a few females, I discovered that some girls like a guy who has had a chance to hone his skills. They would rather have experience than viridity. I also found that sometimes females see male virgins who are in their 20's as being undesirable due to the fact that they have struck out during the first quartile of their life. It is as if they are unwilling to "take a chance" on a guy who has been previously passed over by others.

This really ties in to my previous post. Women are biologically programmed to avoid casual sex with virgins.

Insecurities and evolutionary biology

People wrote in comments to the last post that I have "insecurities."

Of course I do. To be insecure is to be lacking in confidence. Confidence in an activity comes from being successful at it. A heart surgeon who has done hundreds of heart operations would be confident in his ability to perform another surgery because of his track record of success. But if you suddenly found yourself in an operating room holding a scalpel, and you were supposed to start surgery, you would be justifiably insecure.

Similarly, past success with women would naturally make a man confident that he would be successful again. On the other hand, since I've had nothing but failure with women, I would naturally be extremely insecure when it comes to women. There are some people who are able to fake confidence even though they have no basis for it, but unfortunately I am not one of those relatively rare people.

Because women like men who are confident, this becomes either a virtuous or vicious circle. The man who is succesful with women becomes more confident, which makes him even more attractive to women, which makes him even more successful, inflating his confidence even more. But I am, unfortunately, on the vicious end of that circle.

Women say they like men who are confident. Women say a lot of things they like about men, much of it not true, but I believe that women like confident men because it has a bio-evolutionary basis. Evolutionary biology teaches us that women look for a mate who will maximize their offspring's evolutionary fitness. Sometimes this is wrongly stated as giving their children a survival advantage, but this is only part of it. A woman will want to have boy children who will pass on their genes to as many women as possible, maximzing the spread of her own genes. Thus the alpha male is the preferred mate for a woman, because whatever genes make a man an alpha male will hopefully be passed on to male children who will themselves become alpha males.

Evolutionary biologists often wrongly try to define the alpha male in terms of particular physical characteristics, but this overlooks the fact that humans are complicated social animals, and alpha maleness is as much a social construct as it is one based on some particular characteristic such as being tall or muscular. But because the alpha male is, by definition, someone who is highly successful with women, he will naturally be very confident around women. This is the biological reason why women like men who are confident. It is a sign of alpha maleness. Women who had sex with confident men were more successful in spreading their genes.

My second date with Sarah

Remember Sarah? I finally went on that second date with her. We wound up eating another full course meal at an expensive Upper West Side restaurant, setting me back another $100. (I saved $20 this time by not ordering desert.)

At the end of the date, I didn't get any "buy signals" like I got the last time. I think that maybe she is put off by the virginness that I radiate. Or maybe she just uses men for expensive dinners and figures she can milk each guy for two expensive dates.

Tomorrow I have a date with this fat girl. Now I know that some of my female readers will think it's offensive to use the term "fat girl," but really how else do I describe her? "Big girl," "large girl," 5'8" and maybe as much as 200 lbs girl? It all means the same thing, and it's a very important aspect of who she is.

The fat girl is really into me, we were holding hands and hugging and stuff on the first date, I think I'm more comfortable with her because I know she's beneath me (figuratively so far), and I don't feel like I need to impress her. I can just be myself. But just myself isn't good enough for a pretty girl like Sarah who fancies eating out at expensive restaurants.

The fat girl is also actually quite a pleasant person to talk to. She has two Ivy League degrees, her MBA is from one of the most prestigious business schools in the country, so she's quite smart and she has a very good job. If any of that stuff was actually important to men, she'd be a primo catch and she'd never be interested in me.

Followup on my previously blogged about dates

I wore jeans and a polo shirt out to my date on Sunday with Felicia, which was the suggestion of a woman Felicia's age who is a veteran New Yorker (whom I know in the real world and not online). So I was surpised when Felicia shows up looking all formal in a black and white skirt, with a black top thing preppily tied around her shoulders, and wearing a lot of matching silver colored jewelry.

I'm inclined to think that SHE'S the one who made the fashion faux pas here. My problem is with social phobia specific to physical intimacy with women and not with fashion.

Felicia is 35, but she looks older than 35. I'd have guessed she was 40 if I didn't know better. I don't mean to sound like I'm saying that she's not good enough for me, because that would only be an excuse for my real problem which is fear of pursuing this. This is why I called her today, but I just got her voicemail.

Felicia has good qualities such as she's tall, flirty, and has a pretty good body, certainly better than mine, and I will write more about my pathetic body in the future because that's an important source of my problems with women.

I called Sarah tonight too, but also just got her voicemail. I think I might like Sarah better, but that's probably because I only had one date with her.

It also occurred to me yesterday that these negative affirmations are not helping me at all, yet I don't see how I can realistically imagine doing the deed with these prospects. It's like one of the commentors said, I can't have sex for the first time with a woman I really like.