As evolving and complex creatures we have created a world to reflect this. From a life thousands of years ago once based on the simplest survival of food, shelter, companionship and procreation we have grown into a culture that offers so much more.

Our basic necessities are just as important as they always were yet the ways we can get, or not get, these needs met have changed.

For anyone reading this; food and shelter are likely given little more attention than the financial considerations along with the choices involved of what to eat and where to live. Choosing the right restaurant is a more challenging event than getting enough to eat.

Companionship and procreation are another story though. It seems to be human to have urges to find friends and form bonds, our tribal nature still exists within us and the drive for acceptance is a key feature of this. Included is the desire for a mate and the potential love and close relationship that comes with it.

We want that special someone in our life, or at least choice about who we can date, and yet it’s a difficult dating world out there.

We grew up surrounded by social conditioning, a pressure to prove to ourselves and our society that we are worthy and to be validated in the most simple of statements “my existence matters”.

Validation is a rush, an excitement that for some moment we are ok, we are enough, we are attractive or interesting or funny, we are loved. It’s easy to get hooked to this thrill and to seek it out day to day often to the point where the majority of the minutes of our lives are filled by this incessant need and the mini hits we can find everywhere.

It is insidious, and with the world of technology opened up to us, easy to be lost in. Validation, or the lack of it, is but a click or swipe away. How many times have you checked your email today? Your Facebook? Your online dating profile?

It’s also possible to go the other way, to check out of this unsatisfying moment with drugs, alcohol, pornography, TV or any other of the myriads of distractions available to us.

Perhaps instead it is a yearning for another that occupies us. If only I could get the man or woman of my dreams to love me then my life would be complete and I would know I have made it. And so we are out there approaching and meeting, hoping to impress and be liked for there is no drug sweeter than the ones our own bodies produce through intimacy and sexuality.

There is nothing wrong with the desires and urges written above. There is nothing wrong with wanting to find a life partner, or just someone to meet our sexual needs. It’s only a problem when, like with all addictions, these drives consume us. When we are constantly either checked out or seeking a validation hit. When we become creatures full of needs to be filled by the outside world and resentment when they aren’t.

From this place our expression and our experience becomes tainted. As men, women become objects to pursue, status symbols or just things that make us feel good, rather than people to share our feelings and experiences with. If we are in this state it is quite possible that our lives out in the world will be filled with checking out the “eye candy” around us at all times, maybe making jokes yet quite often secretly longing and yearning to have that which we see.

The interesting thing is we might not even actually know how prevalent our own neediness is and just how addicted are we to being validated. How comfortable are we truly with our own lives. We might not even know what we actually want as we have been living a life based on unspoken and unacknowledged societal conventions about what is ‘cool’ or successful.

It’s not until we remove ourselves from this cacophony of unconscious behavior that it begins to become loud, really loud. All the ways we might have been subtly manipulating others, or checked out, or clinging and grasping begin to show up and we can begin the process of working through the mess to find a more authentic, and consequently genuinely more attractive, version of ourselves.

This is the aim of a “No Woman Diet”. To remove ourselves from the unconscious patterns of our behavior by unplugging from all things distracting including, but not limited to, women. For six weeks to not chase, not date, not check them out, not fantasize and then to see what happens. How much behavior is driven towards that, how much am I trying to get something out there rather than comfortably inhabiting my own experience?

It is a practice and true rewards are possible. To distance ourselves from the social matrix and become increasingly self-authoring is a developmental movement that provides new power, comfort and elegance to be in the world. The result often is that we become a more attractive human being.

Those who are aligned with themselves and their own desires and purpose without the need to have them validated by others are attractive. There is a comfort to be around such individuals and the wonderful thing is that every human being is capable of such growth, in fact the world needs it and the side effect is… life gets better, it really does.

Check out nowomandiet.com for more on the program.