A great and under-explored topic came up on a board recently: that of losing non-community friends due to PUA. I’ll post a Cliff’s Notes version of the conversation and then my main post on the subject.

- A poster asked: “Is it wrong to pursue a girl after your friend has tried and failed with her?”
- The overwhelming response is “no, it’s not wrong,” although a couple guys commented that they’ve had problems with non-community friends getting mad about this.
- I chimed in saying I had lost a friendship in this way before.
- I was asked the following question: “Do you think that this has to do with a scarcity/abundance mindset, or is there something else at play here?”
- Another poster noted: “I think one of the main reasons is just the possibility of a deflated ego were your friend to succeed. A guy is almost sure to draw comparisons, etc, and maybe put himself down.”

Here was my response:

Both are true. Although the former was the cause and the latter was the effect. Let me explain…

He was my best friend through most of college. When I found the PUA community I started getting results pretty quickly. So whereas for two years, he and I used to stand around college parties with our beers, talking about how hot certain girls were but never approaching them, suddenly within a few months I was getting make-outs and lays. This was awesome at first, and he was excited for me, and I even tried to help him… but it soon started to generate friction, as I continued to get hotter girls more often and more consistently.

It came to a head after about a year. We both met this girl at the same time and were both into her. She was beautiful, smart, sweet, and she was responding warmly to him — something he wasn’t used to from a girl of her caliber. He asked me not to go for her, so I obliged. He blew it.

We ran into her AGAIN a few weeks later and he gamed her AGAIN. This time he got her number. But he never worked up the nerve to call her.

Another few weeks go by and I run into her by myself out at a bar and talk to her. She was giving me IOI’s and was fucking hot as shit. So I said fuck it, he had two legitimate shots and over a month to make something happen and he didn’t. He had gone after girls that I messed up with and I never cared (and at times, girls who I laid as well… but still didn’t care). So what’s the big deal? So, in this respect, yes, it was a question of scarcity versus abundance mentality. But that’s just the surface… the reverberations of that problem ran deeper and ended up crumbling the entire relationship.

I didn’t tell him I fucked her even though she became my main MLTR pretty quickly. I probably should have told him. About a month later, I brought her to a friend’s party. I was sitting on the couch with my arm around her. Completely unannounced and unexpected my buddy shows up, sees us, turns around and leaves five minutes later and has still not talked to me to this day.

In the end, it wasn’t just the scarcity/abundance mentality. It was the fact that I succeeded where he failed… and not just failed at like golf or poker or something, but with women. Most guys have a TON of pride and base a lot of their self-value on their success with women. The fact that he would have to watch me enjoy and repeatedly fuck this girl that he wanted, tried and failed would be a constant reminder of this shortcoming. I guess his ego didn’t want to deal with it. And not only that, but he probably perceived that I was doing it to gratify MY own ego… to SHOW him that I could do it, even though to me it didn’t matter either way.

They tell you when you get into this that you will lose friends. YOU WILL. Looking back, it was for the better. Overall, he had become a negative influence on my life and I had become a negative influence on his. Once we weren’t able to be lame college kegger guys together, it exposed our friendship… or lack thereof.

In the end, whatever happens is for the better. If a guy is willing to cause drama and threaten the friendship over a random girl… then maybe you should question the value of the friendship.