ENCORE: 'Love wasn't safe': writer Neil Strauss rethinks his pickup artist past in The Truth
'Love wasn't safe. It felt needy.'To some, seduction is an art. To others, it's a cutthroat sport.
A decade ago, the writer Neil Strauss gained fame when his how-to guide to pick up women called The Game became a bestseller.— a "bro" bible for young men looking for shortcuts to sex.
"The Game was more a symptom of underlying problems than the reason I ended up in sex addiction therapy," Strauss tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti in an interview in November.
The book also made Strauss a very rich man. But in the intervening years, Strauss says he's given up on playing the game — that he's a changed man. He says he's learned that the seducer's art is based on male insecurity and fear of the opposite sex.
Strauss' new book is called, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships and he tells Tremonti how his focus for this book "was a late maturity."
"This book took five or six years of experience to do. And it wasn't until I realized that every relationship crashed and burned that I really had to say okay, it's not relationships that are broken, it's nothing wrong with partners, it's really all me," says Strauss.
Love wasn't safe. It felt needy.- Neil Strauss, author of The Game and The Truth
Even though Strauss was aware intellectually of his role in failed relationships, he says he "had to go do the emotional healing."
For Strauss, love was never easy to accept, he was always "running away from intimacy."
"If someone starts to love me too much, I get terrified and scared ... love wasn't safe, it felt needy."
Strauss tells Tremonti the most important lesson he learned from his journey was to embrace "complete and total humility."
"There's no way I was going to think myself out of it. And I had to just really get humble, and submit, and recognize that I knew nothing and from there I could have a change," says Strauss.
"The truth is that we know nothing."
This segment was produced by The Current's Howard Goldenthal.