I grew up girl-crazy. My first crush was a neighbor when I was four or five, and I had a new crush pretty much every year after that. The problem was I was completely incapable of doing anything about it.
In first grade, I wrote a love letter to a girl saying I wanted to have sex with her. I got in serious trouble. From an early age, I learned that my sexuality was dangerous and something to be ashamed of.
In seventh grade, I wrote another love letter. This time, I told my crush how insecure I felt wanting her as a fat kid when she was skinny and fit. She printed it and brought it to school. When I walked into homeroom the next morning, my classmates were standing together laughing at it.
I remember walking to the back of the classroom and deciding I would never feel anything bad again.
For the next decade, I got really fucking good at compartmentalizing pain.
I was also autistic and undiagnosed. I couldn’t read social cues, social hierarchies, or the human mating dance everyone else seemed to understand automatically. I grew up without a healthy masculine presence to guide me. In my house, men were dangerous and masculinity was horrible. Staying a harmless little boy kept everyone around me comfortable.
So that is what I learned to become.
I desperately wanted women while doing everything I could to hide that desire. I made myself friendly, agreeable, boyish, and completely sexually harmless. Women were nice to me. They just weren’t attracted to me.
By college, I was studying pickup like an academic subject. I watched seminars, attended workshops, went to parties every weekend, and practiced with a wingman for years. None of it changed my life. I was still a virgin who had never been kissed, held a woman’s hand, or gone on a date.
The night I stopped waiting
Eventually, I landed a six-figure technology job at Myspace. Before I was formally eligible for promotion, I was already being trusted to lead small front-end teams. I lived in Beverly Hills in a bachelor pad with a full bar, my own car, and a cat.
One evening, after several months at Myspace, I was sitting alone in my car after work when it finally hit me: I was living in Beverly Hills, making bank, living in a swanky bachelor pad with a full bar, with my own car and a cat—and I was still a virgin who had never been kissed or even gone on a date.
That was the moment I stopped believing time would solve the problem for me.
So I started hiring coaches. I went to workshops. I bought online programs and watched seminars. Most of them made me feel great for a weekend, and then I went home exactly the same person. It was all state pumping and fluff. Nobody could explain why none of the change lasted.
Then, at one of those workshops, I finally met a coach who saw what everyone else had missed.
His name was Brian. He recorded me practicing with a woman, and I thought I was doing great. She was laughing, smiling, touching me, and she even hugged me. Then we watched the video and I saw something completely different.
I was suppressing every visible trace of my masculinity and attraction. My voice went high. My body language and mannerisms became more feminine. I even started playing with my hair. Everything about me was saying, “I’m harmless. You never have to experience me as a sexual man.”
She told me she had a great time with me. She also wasn’t attracted to me at all. I felt like her gay friend.
For the first time, someone had seen the system underneath the problem.
I hired Brian on the spot. Working with him helped me confront the shame and self-hatred I had carried since childhood. At one of his workshops I stood up in front of a group of strange men, talked about the shame I felt growing up as a fat kid, and cried for the first time in nearly a decade. It was amazing.
Teaching my body that touch was safe
My body used to physically recoil when someone touched me. My family barely hugged, I had never experienced romantic touch, and my body had learned that sex and touch were dangerous. So I worked with trauma-informed massage therapists who helped me get comfortable with regular human touch. Then I worked with sex workers who helped me safely work through the same fear and shame around sexual touch.
Months later, I met a woman on Tinder and asked her to dinner at the Grove.
While we were walking, I got this urge to hold her hand. I was so fucking scared to even touch her. Years earlier, I had walked beside a college crush desperately wanting to take her hand and couldn’t make myself do anything.
This time, I reached out.
She grabbed my hand back and squeezed it. Then we started playing with each other’s hands and fingertips as we walked. Later, by the fountains, I grabbed her by the waist, touched her chin, and kissed her. It was romantic and sexual and flirty and great. Then she asked to come back to my place.
Adult Chris had finally arrived.
After that, the floodgates opened. I started going on dates every weekend, and a few months later I had my first girlfriend.
Learning that I could act while afraid
While I was dating my first girlfriend, I discovered Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and that changed everything again. Almost everyone in self-help gets action backwards. They tell you to change your beliefs first, and then your behavior will finally change. That lie keeps people stuck in self-help forever. ACT taught me that I could make room for fear, unhook from my thoughts, and take action based on my values. My actions could change first. My beliefs would catch up.
ACT was a big part of why I became so successful once I started dating. It helped me have conversations I would have been terrified to have before. I told my girlfriend that I had only just started dating and still wanted to explore sex with other people. I didn’t know how she would respond, but I was able to feel that fear and tell her the truth anyway.
To my surprise, she was excited for me. She became my partner in exploring swingers clubs, sex parties, BDSM dungeons, and basically every sexual fantasy I had spent my life repressing.
After several months of practicing ACT from a book, I attended another workshop. At the previous workshop, I had been unable to approach a single person. This time, my coaches could point to anyone and I would walk over immediately. Single women. Couples. People who would have terrified me before. It didn’t matter. They eventually had to invent new exercises for me because I kept doing everything they asked.
After my girlfriend and I broke up, I eventually reached a point where I was having casual sex multiple times a week.
I had achieved the fantasy—and discovered its limits.
And then, at some point, I realized I didn’t feel much of anything with most of these women. The sex wasn’t that different from masturbation. Don’t get me wrong, some of it was fun. But a lot of it was just okay, and honestly it wasn’t worth it.
Looking back, I can see that I was using women to numb myself out. I was having sex for validation—to prove that I was desirable and that I really had changed. And I think I was avoiding intimacy too, because real intimacy would have required me to be vulnerable and actually let someone know me.
Once I saw that, I decided to be celibate for six to nine months while I figured out what the hell was going on.
When I returned to dating, I came back much more grounded. I cared less about what dating a beautiful woman proved about me and more about whether I actually liked her, whether she was a good person, and whether we had a real connection.
Courage became my North Star
Buddhism deepened all of it. Smiling at Fear completely changed how I thought about courage, and courage became a North Star in my life. Meditation forced me to sit with myself and feel all the pain I had spent my life running from. It taught me that pain was something I could face without building my entire life around escaping it.
I didn’t become fearless. I became experienced at entering the fire.
Making the unconscious conscious
Being autistic eventually became one of my greatest advantages. I couldn’t read social cues, social hierarchies, or the human mating dance, so I had to learn all of it from scratch. I had to make conscious what happens unconsciously for almost everyone else. That gave me a deep technical understanding of attraction, status, courtship, body language, and all the meaning people communicate without knowing they’re doing it.
I once debugged enormous software systems. Now I do the same with human ones.
My coaching career started when my friend Jay sent me screenshots of a text exchange he thought he had ruined. The messages were some of the most horribly embarrassing, cringe texting I had ever seen. I spent four hours coaching Jay through every single thing he had done wrong, why it was wrong, and what he could try next. And you wanna know how I know it was four hours? Because I was supposed to have dinner with my parents, and I was four hours late!
A few days later Jay called me ecstatic. The woman had invited him to stay at her flat in Europe, and he was buying a plane ticket for the weekend. He told me he wanted to hire me as his new dating coach and asked what my rates were.
I had to invent a program and figure out what to charge him. That was my first client.
The next clients came through word of mouth. Men from the coaching community had seen me solve problems their established coaches could not.
I have now personally coached dozens of men, taught and influenced thousands through online communities, and reached millions through my writing about masculinity, sexuality, and dating.
The presence I needed
Men often come to me wanting to win a particular woman, learn what to say, or finally become confident. The visible problem is rarely the whole problem.
Sometimes the woman represents the status a man thinks will finally make him worth something. Sometimes all that relentless self-improvement is how he avoids decades of pain. Sometimes being “nice” is how he hides his desire and creates contracts the woman never agreed to. Sometimes he’s interacting with a fantasy of her because seeing the real person would require genuine vulnerability.
My job is to see the system—and then help him see it without making him feel defective for having built it.
When a frightened, ashamed, or deeply stuck man sits across from me, I want him to feel what it’s like to be fully seen by someone who has actually been where he is. I give him love, connection, honesty, and understanding while helping him develop the courage to face all the things he’s been avoiding.
And that changes more than how he feels during a session. He starts having the conversations he’s been avoiding. He stops putting women on pedestals and chasing people who aren’t right for him. He gets more honest about what he wants, more comfortable with his sexuality, and more willing to act even when he’s scared. Dating gets clearer. Sex gets better. His relationships get more honest. His life starts to feel like his.
Eventually, he doesn’t need me to hold him up anymore. He can stand on his own. He doesn’t need to perform masculinity, win a particular woman, or become somebody else to justify his existence.
He is already enough. The work is helping him finally experience that as true.