A few weeks ago I visited my parents for a few days. As they don’t need the space, they kept my room the way it was when I moved out. This put me in the convenient position that I never really had to go through my things and decide what I wanted to keep. However, this time, the thought of having essentially a storage room in my parents’ house struck me as odd, so I began throwing out a lot of things. As I was going through my collection of well over 1,000 books, of which I threw out a good 90%, I unexpectedly came across something I forget I had ever bothered with: a notebook, essentially a diary, of young pre-Sleazy Aaron. This took me far down memory lane.

Some of my notes were downright fascinating, as they showed how much my perception changed over the years. As I have shared previously, I deliberately abstained from women until my mid-to-late 20s, as I viewed them as a distraction. Yet, I don’t even remember a time in my life in which women didn’t show their interest. One of those women I encountered when I was around 22. Let’s call her Lexy. She was two or three years older than me. I considered her rather attractive, and she was pleasant enough to hang out with. After all, just because I didn’t want to bother with a relationship doesn’t mean I was opposed to the idea of enjoying the company of young, beautiful women.

Our friendship lasted around two years. It didn’t bother me that she had a boyfriend as I wasn’t pining for her, after all. According to my notes, which allowed me to vividly remember some of our encounters, though, there was a marked shift in her behavior in the last few weeks. She used to tell me about her boyfriend who travelled the world as a cameraman, and how great he was. We used to meet up in public places, like cafes. Yet, the very last time we ever hung out she claimed that she really wanted to see my apartment. Note that it certainly wasn’t the case that I had just recently moved in.

Things got a bit weird that day. She showed up with a bottle of wine (!) at my place, in the afternoon, which was pretty suspicious to begin with. Shortly after walking into my apartment, she began checking out the place, but in a rather peculiar way. “What’s that?”, she curiously asked, and scuttled over to my desk. I stood in the foyer, befuddled, and with a bottle of wine in my hands. She then bent forward, but kept her legs completely straight, in order to inspect my notes. That was obviously a completely ridiculous pretense for her to allow me to let me have a long hard look at her ass.

I found that a bit odd as our friendship had been completely platonic all that time. Eventually, we sit down. She sits very close to me, so that our legs tough, and now Lexy wants me to have some alcohol. Back then I was a teetotaler. I literally never drank any alcohol. My stance softened a bit, meaning that I have the occasional glass of wine nowadays, but back then I rejected alcohol outright. Thus, she sat on my sofa, glass of wine in hand, and waiting for pre-Sleazy Aaron to make a move, which I never did.

The conversation never really took off, and after less than an hour, she was gone. I found this a bit strange back then, but, looking back, it’s pretty obvious what happened. I think to her I was simply a convenient plan B in case the relationship with her boyfriend went sour. This doesn’t mean that I would have been next in line for a relationship, but it was clear as day that she was pining for dick. I reached out to her a few weeks later, which was roughly the frequency with which we had caught up with each other, but she didn’t even bother to respond.

Had I been more of a “normie” back then, though, I think my life would very well have taken a turn for the worse. In fact, I am convinced that one of the biggest mistakes a guy can make is to commit to a woman in adolescence. You’re nothing but easy prey. Lexy, at age 24, most certainly had been sexually active for close to a decade. Young Aaron Not-Sleazy at age 22 had a sexual history that included nothing besides making out with some girl at age 16.

So far you have only learnt about two aspects that would have made Aaron and Lexy an odd pairing. One, she was older than me. Two, she was a lot more experienced than me and, quite obviously, wasn’t afraid to strategically use sex. As I had gotten to know her quite well, though, I was also aware that she had a few screws loose. I mean, she was really friendly, very good looking, and had the ability to think critically about a few issues. Yet, after about a year or so of casually hanging out, she opened up a lot more, and then my interest in meeting with her took a bit of a hit. I learnt that she was highly superstitious. She told me about the spiritual significance of the necklace she was wearing, pontificated about the importance of having a “dream catcher” over one’s bed, and even insisted I read some of her favorite books, a series of books in fact. Man, that was the most inane crap I have ever seen printed on paper! The author claimed that he had “conversations with God”, and because those books sold so well, there was no shortage of sequels. I couldn’t even make it past the first few pages.

Still, I didn’t mind her company and simply tuned out when she started talking nonsense, and there was no shortage of. My notebook includes, among other, a passage where I amuse myself about her claims that “the earth had a soul” and that when we, as humans, cut down a tree, whatever metaphysical creature dwells at the center of the earth, suffers. Compared to that, her insistence I stop eating meat are almost cute. Back then I was quite the cynic, so I remarked that if she only learnt to strategically shut up, she’d make a “beautiful lapdog”.

Quite frankly, I wasn’t immune to the allures of women back then, I just wasn’t very motivated to pursue them. Partly, this had to do with my very conservative upbringing, but also with the experience of one of my brothers going through divorce. In any case, the lesson I got was that promiscuous women are trouble, and that if you marry the wrong woman, you’ll get screwed. So, I just didn’t bother, rubbed one out when I got horny, and went back to reading books written by the greatest minds that ever lived afterwards.

I don’t want to wildly speculate, but let’s just assume I had shown less self-control back then. Hooking up with a woman a little bit older than you is hardly the end of the world when you’re young, but let’s think a few years into the future. Let’s say you’re your typical horny guy, 22 years old, and there is a 25-year-old woman who wants to get into your pants. Maybe that’s because she’s expecting that you’ll turn into a decent meal ticket in a few years. Now think of the bigger picture: a horny 22 year-old may not mind a slightly older woman. However, extrapolate a few years, or decades into the future, and you’ll realize what an incredibly stupid decision it would have been to get involved with an older woman. I couldn’t find Lexy online, but it’s safe to say that she has hit the wall a few years ago already. (The only open question is how badly she has hit the wall.) I chuckled when that thought occurred to me. When I started racking up notches, it didn’t take me long at all until I largely avoided women who were not at least five years younger than me. That was easy to do as the places I hung out in had women from their early to late 20s, and right next to one another, the former are certainly a lot more attractive.

I can’t even imagine why any guy would want to get involved with a woman around his age, to be honest, and this only gets worse the older you get. If I were a woman, I’d now be in prime-wall hitting age. Fortunately, I am a man, and as a consequence of having kept my dick in my pants in my adolescence and early adulthood, I was able to position myself to get women who were much younger than me. There was no shortage of older women signaling their interest, but why bother if you have the choice? The lesson for guys, though, is that it may be worth waiting until you get to the point where you will be more attractive to women. Dodging a few bullets in your early 20s will set you up to do that in your late 20s or early 30s.