“Losing at Love?” You’re Playing the Wrong Game

The New York Times is one of my primary news sources. I think their international news coverage is great, and they also focus in-depth on a lot of topics I think are important, such as the Supreme Court, reproductive rights, and the environment. I take the print edition Monday through Friday as it offers my eyes a break from the various screens I look at all day.

The publication’s strong points are enough for me to weather one of its glaring weaknesses, which is its unceasing matrimania. That’s a term coined by Bella DePaulo which refers to the hyping of marriage, weddings, and coupling.

Over the decades, the Wedding Announcements in the Times have become their own cultural force because of the mountains of submissions they receive and the almost impossibly perfect and accomplished couples that were featured. You know, the kind of people who would regale you with the story of that one time they made a mistake just to see what it felt like.

Recognizing changes in the culture, the Announcements (now called Mini-Vows) no longer require formal pictures, but allow couples to submit “fun, candid photographs.” They also appear to be making an effort to diversify beyond “Ivy League white boy meets Ivy League white girl.”

The matrimania, however, remains stubbornly the same, and not just confined to the rebranded Mini-Vows. Just last Thursday, the Style section in the print edition carried an article called “Losing at Love? A Coach May Help You Win” about the increasing popularity of dating and divorce coaches.

Two facts in this article that sat only a few lines apart ought to make you very suspicious of the “love coaching” industry. First, the coaches themselves charge exorbitant fees. There’s the online dating coach that charges $100/hour, and the divorce coach that charges $6,000 for a six-month plan. Second, there is no barrier to entry to the profession of coaching. If one wants to be a coach, one simply has to start calling themselves “coach” and then search for clients.

Let Coach Lucas give you some advice. If someone wants to charge you thousands of dollars for their services and they don’t have to prove to you that they can even spell marriage, consider burying that money in the woods instead. It will be safer there. Well, except for the $200 you owe me for these few lines of advice. I’ll bill you if you can’t pay now. Damn, this is easy…early retirement, here I come!

The headline of this article is what’s most offensive to my single-man sensibilities because YOU CAN’T FUCKING “LOSE” AT LOVE. There may be times in our lives where love feels much less abundant, but love can only make us better, and it will never drag our point total into the negative.

Things at which you can lose? Dating and romantic relationships. The coaches assume that losing means not being in a relationship, but I define losing completely differently. For me, when you get your self-worth crushed by dating, that’s losing. When you realize that one of the primary reasons your romantic partner needs you is because you are simultaneously the pressure release valve and punching bag for all the shit in their life they can’t or won’t work out for themselves, that’s losing.

The dating coaches don’t want you to win at love, they want you to master the convoluted and asinine rules of modern dating and romance. The $100/hour online dating coach I mentioned above spends part of his time with a client giving tips on tweaking bios and profile pictures. Can the game be given away any more blatantly? It’s not about love. It’s about digital trickery, a smoke and mirrors act to get someone you don’t know from Adam (or Eve) in your orbit.

Rather than spend my time and money on that nonsense, I’d rather count the ways I’m “winning” at love, using the truly expansive nature of that word:

• When my cat greets me and purrs on my arrival home, I’m winning at love.
• When I put a spider outside instead of smashing it to bits, I’m winning at love.
• When the first smell of cut grass in the spring gives me a momentary surge of hope, I’m winning at love.
• When I create anything, from Medium essays to dinner, I’m winning at love.
• When the creative work of another person moves me to tears, I’m winning at love.
• When I see someone I haven’t spoken to in weeks or months and the conversation picks up like it was yesterday, I’m winning at love.
• When I see how relationships grow organically with others in my life without the need to force things to be a certain way, I’m winning at love.
• When I set boundaries in my life to ensure adequate nutrition, rest, and recreation, I’m winning at love.
• When I embrace the totality of my life experience and understand that none of it needs to be served up to others for judgement of my
• worthiness, I’m winning at love.
• When I tell anyone with no professional qualifications who feels that I’m “losing,” and offers to charge a hefty fee to fix it, to fuck right off down the street, I’m winning at love.

You are winning at love too, in ways you might not even be recognizing. I can say that with confidence because just by being a human you already intrinsically know how to love and are worthy of it. I encourage you to look at those ways you are winning, and, if you need help doing so, to take that journey with a qualified and licensed therapist if you have access to one that’s a good fit.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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You might also like these from The Good Men Project:

.. In Modern Relationships, We Cheat Every Single Day

Compliments Men Would Love to Hear More Often

.10 Things Good Men Should Never Do in a Relationship

It’s Not Just Sex That He is Longing For. It’s This

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