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Jordan Gray says that there are plenty of good men out there. And they’re easily found once you know how to find them.
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This article goes out to all of my (hetero) female readers…
On average, I get about ten messages per week from my female readers around the world along the lines of “Where have all of the good men gone? Where are the guys who will open the door for you? Why do men only want to hook up and not have a real relationship?”
Let me get something absolutely straight right off the bat…
Whatever you continually attract into your life, reflects back at you and the way that you a) live your life, and b) expect the world to behave.
And this concept doesn’t just apply to romantic partners (the quality of food you consume, the money you make, the exercise habits you maintain, the depth of friendships that you have, etc.) but for simplicities sake I will focus on romantic partners.
Blaming your cities socially cold ways (excuses), or hook-up culture (a sexy sounding term invented by a PR team), or the high divorce rate (which is bullshit), are just walls that you are erecting in order to hide behind.
In my experience and the experience of hundreds of my private clients, the higher your standards the more you attract people with high standards. So even if there is a large amount of truth to the concept of our modern dating climate being geared towards a ‘hookup culture’ mentality, who cares about what 90% of people are doing? You’re not trying to date 90% of people.
Beliefs are funny things.
Have you ever heard of confirmation bias? Basically it says that when you expect the world to act a certain way you will select information from your environment that will further reinforce that way of thinking. So if you expect men to be a certain way, you’ll more readily attract men who will agree with your existing viewpoint.
I have one client who went on a month long man-loving journey where she wrote down a list of five things she loved about men every day, and she verbally praised a different man in her life every day. Now, her history (childhood experiences and dating history) had given her a ton of evidence to the contrary and the month long exercise was not an easy one for her… but she did it. She decided that she had had enough of her old way of thinking and she wanted to expect more from men. And, what do you know, when she expected more from the men in her life she started to attract higher quality men with standards as high as hers.
In my first year of business I was incredibly hard on myself (still a work in progress) about my businesses rate of success. I have always intentionally surrounded myself with a crowd that few people would call an “easy” crowd… as in they have incredibly high standards and so I often feel like the small fish in a big pond.
I went to my therapist to ask her advice on how I could stop being so hard on myself.
“How can I be happy with my business that is doing $5,000 per month when I have close friends my age who are doing over $100,000 per month? It feels like I’ll never be able to catch up.” And her advice was as elegant as it was profound. She told me “If you want to find someone who is doing better than you, you can find it. And if you want to find someone who is doing worse than you, you can find that too. You’re deciding what you want to pay attention to.”
And it’s the exact same thing when it comes to partner finding.
If you tell yourself that there’s any validity to the concept of “hookup culture” that mainstream media loves to talk about, and you assume that all men just want sex with no attachment, the world will happily provide you with lots of feedback of that being the truth. But if you decide to assume that the majority of men are kind, compassionate, generous, loving individuals who want a committed intimacy just as much as you do then the world will provide you with lots of evidence to support that version of your reality.
As hippy-dippy Secret-ish as it is, thoughts become things.
Know what you want, have the courage to ask for it, and honour yourself enough to only stop searching once you’ve found it.
Stop settling with partners that you’re not proud of. If you’re with someone that isn’t right for you then you’re only taking them away from the other person who is right for them.
If you are on a path of growth, self-awareness, intentionality, and becoming the best version of yourself possible, then you will inevitably meet and attract people that are living their lives the exact same way.
Put another way, if you’re crawling your way through a full marathon then you’ll notice the other people that are doing the same and the sprinters will be a blur from your vantage point. But when you get up on your own two feet and start taking responsibility for the fact that you want to run with the fast crowd, you’ll be able to keep pace with the runners and the people on their hands and knees will be the blurs.
The choice, as always, is yours.
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If you enjoyed this post, you might also love checking out:
7 Powerful Trust Exercises For Couples
10 Questions To Ask To Go Deep In Your Relationship
7 Things All Women Need In A Relationship
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You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project
Compliments Men Would Love to Hear More Often | Thirty-One Reasons Men Don’t Cheat | What Makes a Man Attractive? | Here’s What Happens When You Find The One |
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This post originally appeared at JordanGrayConsulting.com
Photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com
Overseas is great, get a language and get out. I lived pretty high on the hog, partied like crazy, live in a new condo and spent less than 10k last year all told. The girls here are interested in a conversation and never shut me down because of my height or age (5-6 & 47) – but EVERY American girl has. Where have all the “Good Men” gone? You parked a lot of them in the friend zone, you avoided a big segment of them because they didn’t meet your checklist, many are divorced – and won’t do it again,… Read more »
Silke,, “Even if we subtract the infertile and those to ill to start a family ,it looks to me that women in fertile age outnumber men in their own age group” First of all, I’m talking about age distributions and not opinions, and I got my figures from official demographic statistics. Where are YOU looking? I have no idea how many men or women around 30 who really want to get married and have kids, but I venture to say that you really don’t either! In Sweden, the figure for men at the age of 40 with kids are 85%… Read more »
Figures are Norwegian research . Here we have 25% of men at the age 40 that has no children and the report also say that statistics show that men who reach the age of 40 and have no children, they nearly never get children later on,
Ok,
In the swedish statistics, they actually point out that the figure decrease from 24-25% to around 20% from the age of 40 to 50-55 for men.
But again, those men are neccessarily mating with younger fertile women, effectively taking them “off the market” for the younger men in the same situation.
Why are you so angry????????
“Why are you so angry????????”
I don’t know, maybe because you keep diverting from the subject, and then telling me not to.
Or maybe because you come off as condescending and lecturing, and then get angry and cut me off when I call you upon it.
Or maybe I’m just not angry at all, but you perceive me that way because I stand up to you and don’t just go “Yes ma’am!” to any opinion you try to pull off as facts or statistics.
OK FlyingKal I promise to never ever respond to any of your comments from no on.
And by the way, I am a sociologist.
Just one last, (please?)
Which one was it, and why will it stop you from responding in the future?
I mean, I’m not really angry, and I don’t mind, but the question caught me off guard, and from where I’m sitting, you seem to set a different standard for yourself than you expect from me or from most anyone else. (To me, you seem to be the angry one…)
And, is your job title important or relevant in our discussion?
Where is the anger being displayed Silke?
When I come across FlyingKal’s comments, I always read them and I’ve never found his comments to contain anger.
Not very nice of you to use this tactic to shut down a conversation.
This IS hippy dippy ridiculousness that is close to essentially saying to women, “if you don’t have a good man, there is something wrong with you.” I thought your stuff was a little suspect but now I am sure. If you are looking for the right man rather than a man, you have to be lucky enough to find your match. And, finding a man that is your match — not perfect but perfect for you — is a zero sum game. Women largely outnumber men and when you hold your standards high, their chances are exponentially limited. I have… Read more »
Amy Somehow the whole point of the article just slipped right by you. This article is based on the “Law of Attraction” and the basic tenets of quantum field theory. Literally, when we project an idea, thought and/or belief into the world/Universe, the complementary energy will be reflected back. Simply meaning that what you put your intention upon (perspective, belief, point of view) is what you’ll create. To take it further, by focusing your attention, attitude and belief in a way that positively describes what you’re look for, you’re creating a ‘vibrational’ field around your desire. That literally increases in… Read more »
Angela Somehow the whole point of the article just slipped right by you. This article is based on the “Law of Attraction” and the basic tenets of quantum field theory. Literally, when we project an idea, thought and/or belief into the world/Universe, the complementary energy will be reflected back. Simply meaning that what you put your intention upon (perspective, belief, point of view) is what you’ll create. To take it further, by focusing your attention, attitude and belief in a way that positively describes what you’re look for, you’re creating a ‘vibrational’ field around your desire. That literally increases in… Read more »
Angela, regarding the “women highly outnumber men”,
There are (roughly) 1.05 baby boy born to every baby girl born in U.S. and most of western societies. And men outnumber women throughout adolescense and most of the fertile age, until men start to “die off” at an increasing rate around 50-60 years-old.
This does not negate your statement about women outnumbering men, bt it gives a bit of perspective since most people in the age where they are usually looking to create a family, will find themselves in the opposite circumstances of men outnumering women.
FlyingKal Today women marry around 28-29 ,on average. Do you really say men in the same age group that also want to start a family outnumber women? Why are 25% men of the age 40+ childless? Are all of them seen as not dateable ,not good enough? I don’t think so. Women with higher education like to marry men with higher education. I understand that since we like and interesting conversation at the breakfast table…. Even if we subtract the infertile and those to ill to start a family ,it looks to me that women in fertile age outnumber men… Read more »
Typo
When men are older …they become more eager to commit ,at least it is my experience.,
And one more thing FlyingKal , in the West today men have a larger group of women to choose from because they can find women 30 years younger , and also up to older women ( if they dare) than them self. They also have the option to go abroad to find a wife ,in places like Thailand , And men do! And I have nothing negative so say about that ,as long as they treat her with dignity and respect. Do you think women are so naive that they bring in husbands from abroad ( among all the young… Read more »
“men have a larger group of women to choose from because they can find women 30 years younger ” No, they are competing with men who are also 30 years younger, who at 60 would mean those 30 year old women usually have more men than women at their age so in fact 30 year old women tend to have a MUCH LARGER portion of men to date. Women who are 60 have a hard time finding men because the gender ratio leaves more women than men at around 35 years of age in Australia) and worsens every year, especially… Read more »
Cited directly from SCB, the official swedish central institute for statistics (my translation):
“The portion of women at the age of 45 who not have kids have varied between 12-14% over the last 50 years. Men at the same age are childless at a somewhat higher rate (15-21%, the number has been decreasing over the last few years). The main explanation for this is there being more men than women in the fertile age span.”
Best regards,
K
Sperm donors would probably count as childless too.
I started out agreeing with this article — don’t generalize that there are ‘no good men’ out there. Got it. But I have to say, I agree with Angela. I have high standards. I always have. I am also an introvert, so I don’t do well with the bar scene or random online dates (tried quite a few), etc. Being a 50 y.o. woman in a college town, I have a hard time catching the eye of any man, much less one who would meet my standards. I am involved in causes I believe in, participate in all kinds of… Read more »
True, true, true. Don’t know why people just don’t get it. I guess it’s better for them to feel victimized. Both men and women do it a lot. And I see whole lot of it on these articles on GMP. Sad.
As always, thank you, Jordan.
Ditto half the social justicey jargon in fashion today, like “oppression”, “privilege”, etc.
Jordan,
Great insight and great article!
People forget that you attract more “bees” with honey than you do with vinegar.
Thanks, Roger