Dating is… challenging, although that doesn’t even really feel like the right word to describe it.
Good relationships don’t really feel super “challenging”. Dating itself isn’t even that complicated until you lace it with the commoditized version of romance we use in Western culture. In reality, the reason dating is challenging is that most people approach it in weird ways.
Specifically, today, we’re talking about weird ways that guys approach dating. I’ve never been a girl, so I can’t write dating advice for girls.
I know that I approached dating completely wrong for years, starting from the time I started dating at the end of high school until about a year ago.
Life could have been a lot easier.
This is everything that I’d tell myself to make my dating life easier as a young adult.
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Lesson 1: Talk less.
I’ve always been an anxious person, and for a long time, I used to try to hide my anxiety by constantly talking.
I thought that if I kept my mouth moving the whole time, no one would notice how anxious I was.
This was a bad strategy for a few reasons.
First, it didn’t make me any less anxious.
Second, it didn’t actually hide my anxiety from anyone with half a brain.
Third, on the off chance that my constant blabber did hide my obvious anxiety, it also made me seem like an egotistical prick who couldn’t stop talking about himself.
None of these things are good when you’re trying to attract someone.
Talk less. Listen more.
Lesson 2: Don’t be a “social chameleon”.
The whole “nice guys finish last” thing has always been tough for me to rationalize.
I get that you shouldn’t be a doormat and let women walk all over you just so you can sleep with them, but you also shouldn’t deliberately be an asshole just so that women will sleep with you.
That’s the dilemma of the social chameleon. It encompasses both “nice guys” and jerks. It encompasses all people who are acting unnaturally to get people to like them.
Don’t be a social chameleon.
Here’s one thing you could try, and you’re going to want to sit down for this:
Acting naturally. Treating people how you actually want to be treated.
It’s a wild theory, so I won’t go too much deeper into it, but the truth is that the moment you start contorting your behavior to get someone to like you, you’ve already lost.
Lesson 3: If you’re anxious, ask yourself “what would a not anxious person do in this situation?”
My anxiety has fucked me over in dating (and in life) too many times to count.
It made me hesitate around people I was attracted to, it made me afraid to leave crappy relationships, and it made me absolutely mortified at the thought of rejection.
The best thing I ever did for myself in relationships was that I started trying to look at my situations more objectively.
I thought about the situation I was in, and then I asked myself what a friend of mine who is much less anxious than me would do.
If your anxiety didn’t exist, how would you behave?
This is a great exercise in reframing your story in all aspects of your life.
Lesson 4: Be less arrogant and more confident. Figure out the difference.
When I was first starting to date as an adult, I was in kind of a weird place in my life.
I was one of the top-ranked Jiu-Jitsu athletes in the world at my belt rank, meaning that in my specific niche community, I had a bit of status. I was objectively having success in martial arts, but I was also objectively completely lost in all other aspects of my life.
I didn’t have a consistent job at the time (I was in college), I didn’t have that much social confidence (this is what happens when you fight people all day), and I didn’t have that much self-esteem.
These things are more important in relationships than being good at kung fu.
I knew this, but I was insecure about it. Because I was insecure about the fact that I had barely anything to offer a woman (being 21 was tough), I made sure to boast about my athletic abilities and achievement.
Ugh…
Just thinking about it makes me cringe.
My attempts at being confident just came off as arrogance because they were fueled by my insecurities.
Lesson 5: Don’t blame your insecurities on anyone or anything but yourself.
I always thought that I had to have a reason to justify feeling insecure about things.
I thought that if I had a great reason, then my insecurity would be omitted.
This is a logical fallacy.
Earlier this year, I started seeing a woman who was a few years older than me.
At the time, I was living in a little studio apartment that I could barely afford, I was writing like a lunatic online every day, and I was training and teaching Jiu-Jitsu obsessively. I was working 12–16 hours per day to make my life better, but I didn’t have the tangible things that showed I was wealthy.
It made me feel unworthy.
I could take the girl I was seeing to dinner and picking up the check wasn’t going to break me, but I was insecure that I couldn’t offer more. I couldn’t take her to Paris.
I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t do that.
At first, I thought that the reason I was insecure was because of the size of my apartment or the make and model of my car.
I thought my net worth would increase my self-worth, but that’s not how it works.
Lesson 6: Stop caring so much.
For most of us, the reason we’re constantly anxious in dating is that we care too much about outcomes.
The reason you care too much about outcomes is that you have an ego about dating.
The reason that you have an ego about dating is probably from years and years of toxic masculinity telling you that if someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, you’re undesirable as a man.
If you can get past these completely distorted thoughts and just approach dating like a person, instead of a person with a fragile ego, you’ll save yourself a lot of time, money, and headache.
Lesson 7: You’re not as important as you think. Don’t protect yourself so much.
After my first “heartbreak” at 18, I was terrified of getting hurt in dating.
I was so scared that I didn’t date for 3 years. I spent 3 years preparing to date again because I was too scared to get hurt. The irony is that now, looking back I don’t even consider what happened a real heartbreak.
It was a bullshit excuse for me to let my anxiety rule my world.
True self-knowledge comes from experience. You have to drop your ego and jump into the world.
You’re going to get bumped and bruised. You’re going to get heartbroken and depressed. You’re going to get anxious and afraid.
Here’s some tough love for the road:
Get over it. You’re not the first person to get broken up with, cheated on, heartbroken, or rejected. You’ll be okay.
It’s all part of the ride.
Closing Thoughts
If I could talk to the 18-year-old version of myself, improving his dating skills would be the last thing on my mind.
However, I know it would be one of the first things that my younger self would ask my older self.
No one ever taught me how to date. No one taught me how to ask a girl out, how to tell her how I felt about her, or what the order of operations is for having a good relationship.
I hated going through my early 20s constantly wondering “what do I do now” when I was dating someone.
That’s why I thought I’d write this article on dating advice for my younger self because I know my younger self would have liked it and needed it.
Perhaps there’s a different version of my younger self out there who might get some value from these lessons.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: René Ranisch on Unsplash