“Can You Just Finish Me Off With Your Hands?”

The sentence that changed my life was not spiritual, compassionate or dignified. It was spoken by a woman I barely knew in a Milan bedroom after an encounter that had disappointed both of us:

“Can you just finish me off with your hands?”

I had spent years trying to become successful with women. By then, I could approach, charm and seduce. What I could not do was remain present inside intimacy or understand sex as anything other than proof that I had finally escaped inadequacy.

In brief

• Confidence in attracting women is not the same as sexual or emotional maturity.
• Humiliation can harden shame, or reveal that an old strategy has reached its limit.
• The Tantra I found became an education in love, discipline and relationship rather than a collection of bedroom techniques.

The long apprenticeship in loneliness

For roughly 13 years after puberty, my romantic life was defined by absence. I had friends, played sport, travelled and eventually ran a business. With women, I felt powerless.

At first I disguised the loneliness through alcohol, drugs and adventure. These provided intensity and stories but did not answer the underlying question: why did intimacy seem available to everyone except me?

By my mid-twenties, the strategies had stopped working. The pain was no longer background noise. I felt that I either had to confront my fear of women or organise the rest of my life around avoiding it.

What pick-up taught me

This was before dating apps transformed courtship. Online, I discovered the pick-up community and Neil Strauss’s book The Game. Strauss began as a man who felt socially and sexually invisible, then learned a system that made attention from women appear trainable. I recognised the first man and desperately wanted to become the second.

I read, studied and eventually forced myself to practise. The beginning was brutal. I would approach women in bars or public places and absorb rejection after rejection. Every conversation felt like exposure.

Gradually, fear became less absolute. Some conversations continued. Telephone numbers became dates. Dates sometimes became sex. Pick-up gave me something real: the ability to act while afraid and survive a stranger’s refusal.

It also gave me a new way to avoid the deeper problem. I could turn women into evidence and attraction into a technical challenge.

Moving to London for a larger laboratory

In a small town, repeated approaches quickly created a reputation. London offered millions of people, countless venues and a large community of men rehearsing the same scripts.

I improved. Rejection remained common, but volume created results. There was usually another prospect, another night and another technique to test. The lonely man inside me felt relieved. The ego interpreted relief as mastery.

My behaviour during that period was not always honourable. I was more interested in proving that I could attract women than in knowing them. Yet the system rewarded the outcome and discouraged examination of the motive.

A weekend in Milan

I met Francesca near closing time in a noisy Australian bar in west London. We knew almost nothing about each other, but exchanged numbers and soon arranged for me to visit her in Milan.

The situation was unusually exposed. I was staying in her home. We had travelled rapidly from flirtation to an entire weekend together without the ordinary context that lets two people build trust. Alcohol softened the awkward first hours, and both of us understood why I had come.

Then the performance began, and the performance failed.

I had experienced sexual difficulty before, but ambiguity had protected me. This time her request removed it. She was not cruel. She wanted the encounter to reach some kind of conclusion. But I heard the sentence as a total judgement on my masculinity.

Every layer of acquired confidence disappeared. The man who could talk to strangers and arrange a weekend in another country was still frightened, disconnected and technically preoccupied when closeness actually arrived.

The difference between punishment and consequence

At the time, I imagined the universe was punishing me for using women to resolve my insecurity. Looking back, I see a more ordinary process. A strategy had delivered the result it was designed to deliver and exposed everything it had never addressed.

Pick-up could teach approach, social observation and tolerance of rejection. It could not automatically teach empathy, embodied sensitivity, erotic presence or love. I had confused access to sex with development in sexuality.

The humiliation mattered because it made that confusion impossible to maintain.

Hearing about Tantra

I told another man from the pick-up world that I would try almost anything. When he suggested Tantra, I pictured chanting, beads and vague people avoiding reality through spiritual language.

I was desperate, but not, I thought, desperate enough for that.

Several other attempted solutions failed. Eventually desperation won. I found a course in London intending to last longer in bed and perhaps learn multiple orgasm. My ambition remained technical and self-centred.

The course presented the technique inside a much wider path. Sexuality was connected with attention, willpower, emotional openness, love, devotion, discipline and respect for the feminine. Instead of improving one performance, I was being invited to examine the man performing it.

Staying one more week

I repeatedly told myself I would attend for one more week. The material kept widening. Hatha Yoga challenged my body. Meditation exposed the instability of my attention. Men’s groups required honesty and responsibility. Ideas about erotic continence asked me to experience desire without automatically discharging it.

Some of the outcomes I had originally wanted did arrive. I became more capable in lovemaking and experienced forms of orgasm that were not tied to ejaculation. But these ceased to be the most important achievements.

I learned to remain with discomfort rather than instantly escape it. I encountered love as something other than vulnerability to exploitation. I began to see women less as judges or prizes and more as people whose reality existed independently of my need for validation.

From technique to relationship

Good sex cannot be guaranteed by spiritual language, and Tantra can become another performance identity. A man may boast about retention, energy or consciousness while ignoring his partner’s actual experience.

The lesson from Milan remained useful: whatever I believed about myself had to meet another person in the body. Could I listen? Could I adjust? Could I stay present when embarrassed? Could I care about her pleasure without converting it into an examination I had to pass?

Technique supports those capacities. It cannot replace them.

What shame can and cannot teach

I do not romanticise humiliation. Shame often makes people secretive, defensive and cruel. Francesca did not owe me a transformative lesson, and I would not recommend blunt failure as a route to spiritual growth.

But once the moment existed, I had a choice. I could protect the old identity by blaming her, denying the problem or searching for another woman who might offer a more flattering verdict. Or I could accept that my development had stopped at seduction.

Pain became useful only when it was converted into responsibility.

The man I was actually trying to become

The younger man believed success meant being able to get women. Beneath that ambition was a more human longing: to be chosen, loved and free from the fear that intimacy would expose me as inadequate.

No number of conquests could settle that fear because each encounter remained another test. Tantra did not remove insecurity by declaring me powerful. It gave me practices through which insecurity could be met, examined and gradually integrated.

I eventually fell in love for the first time. I coordinated men’s groups, entered a spiritual community and experienced states I could not have imagined in the Milan flat. The path also brought difficulty, tears and contradictions. It did not perfect me.

What the failure gave me

That night marked the limit of one education and the beginning of another. Pick-up had taught me to cross a room. Tantra began teaching me how to remain when somebody was close.

The first achievement required courage. The second required vulnerability, patience and the surrender of a self-image built around control.

I remain grateful for the forces that pushed me: years of loneliness, the partial success of pick-up and the painful clarity of Francesca’s request. They did not prove that I was worthless. They showed that the man I had built was incomplete.

The man who travelled to Milan wanted evidence that he was desirable. The longer journey asked whether he could become capable of love.