Pokémon Helped Me With Dating

It was 1998 and a sensational new game hit store shelves that would eventually evolve into the world’s largest media company: Pokemon.

The game was an immediate hit, with kids trading and battling on school playgrounds during recess. I was one of those kids.

Growing up, I played Pokemon Blue, Yellow, Silver, and Sapphire. After becoming a young adult, I went on to play Pokemon Y and Moon, building competitively viable ghost monotype teams and getting my butt whooped by a Tinder match who used a full OU team. I guess there are girls who were even bigger Pokemon nerds than me.

Before Marvel came out with the Iron Man and Avengers movies, being a nerd in any way wasn’t considered cool or attractive. It probably had something to do with the fact that all these nerdy things were male-dominated. If you were a huge fan of comic books and most animes in the 2000s and earlier, people looked down on you. You became associated with the stereotypical image of the fat, smelly virgin who lived in his mother’s basement.

However, that was never true when it came to Pokemon. From the American release of the anime and Gameboy games in 1998 to Niantic’s release of Pokemon Go in 2016, male and female consumers alike have flocked to the fandom in more equal proportions than practically any other thing you could call nerdy. Ask almost any millennial woman who their favorite Pokemon is, and she’ll have an answer.

Women were coming out in droves to walk around catching Pokemon on their phones alongside men in 2016 (#TeamMystic), and lots of fans even ended up dating.

Being Pokemon fans helped these people find love.

My liking of Pokemon helped my love life in a far greater way.

I grew up with certain values I learned from playing these games, and they ultimately made my dating life a lot easier. Let me explain.

I spent countless hours leveling up my very first starter Pokemon, Squirtle, evolving it into Wartortle and, eventually, the awesome cannon-toting Blastoise. Even after defeating the Elite Four and becoming the champion of Kanto, I caught Mewtwo in my masterball and leveled it up all the way to 100.

Just getting to level 100 wasn’t good enough, though. I wanted to optimize. I went to the department store in Celadon City and loaded up on all the vitamins: Protein, Iron, HP Up, etc.

Eventually, with a full team of level 100 Pokemon with maximum boosted stats, I moved through the Pokemon world with ease, able to run through the Elite Four with nothing but muscle memory.

What does any of this have to do with dating?

If you want to win the game of Pokemon, you need to get into battles and risk fainting (losing). The experience points you get from these battles makes the next battles easier after leveling up. You need to invest your time and energy into leveling up your Pokemon in order to get better at the game.

If you want to win the game of love, you need to risk getting rejected. The experience you gain from the times you proactively try things like approaching, flirting, and asking people out makes all the next attempts easier after leveling up your skills. You need to invest your time and energy into improving those seduction skills in order to get better at dating.

Pokemon taught me that the concept of “leveling up” applied to everything else in life.

When I first started doing cold approaches, I was nervous and awkward as hell. I made tons of mistakes. I got weird looks. Lots of awkward silences. But I kept track of both my mistakes and what I did well. I focused on making one improvement at a time.

I slowly became smoother and less awkward. I slowly became less anxious and more charismatic. I was leveling up my approaching and flirting skills like a Pokemon gaining stats and learning moves. Now, as a men’s dating coach, I help others follow that same path of self-improvement.

Some people just don’t get it. Maybe they didn’t grow up playing Pokemon.

I see lots of guys thinking that dating is just about showing up and “being yourself.”

They think some people just have what it takes and some people don’t.
They think they’ll find “the one” if they just wait around doing nothing.
They think “be yourself” means not putting in any effort.
They think it’s all about looks.
They mistakenly assume that attraction works the same exact way for men and women, not realizing that their social and flirting skills matter way more than their looks (as a man, looksmaxxing will never get you as far as improving these skills).

Women are playing the same dating game, just a different version with a number of version-exclusive Pokemon. The women who successfully date in abundance have also invested in themselves by leveling up in other ways.

You might think they have it easy if they’re just born pretty, but do you have any idea how much effort it takes to actually get good at makeup and conform to these near-impossible conventional beauty standards? Can you imagine the social skills you’d need to be liked by people in a society that harshly judges your gender on what you wear and how much interest you show? Have you ever thought of why damn near every woman you’ve ever talked to secretly has anxiety (I know I’m being hyperbolic; don’t be pedantic)?

They make it look easy because they went through the hard times earlier to make it easier now. It’s always about delayed gratification.

When I first started liking girls, I was just a level 5 Squirtle.

Today, I’ve probably been with as many women as there were Pokemon in the original games (not that “body count” matters). I’m very happy with my love life and learned many valuable lessons in my journey both in-game and in real life.

I was only able to get to where I am today because I was able to recognize that I was only a teeny tiny baby Pokemon who needed to level up in the beginning, and I stuck to the grind of learning the right skills like I stuck to the grind of over-leveling my Squirtle to one-shot every gym leader’s prized pocket partner.

I embraced the risk of rejection, put myself out there, and made mistakes. Through my mistakes, I learned:

How and when to approach
How to flirt in an easy and authentic way
What to say to make people like me
How and when to break the touch barrier
How to make sure I’m not seen as “creepy”
How to get people to tell me their deepest, darkest, dirtiest secrets
How to make people “addicted” to me
How and when to escalate from holding hands, to kissing, to more
How to maintain multiple romantic or sexual relationships at the same time (is Pokemon the reason I’m polyamorous now? “Gotta catch ‘em all?” Hmm…)

These skills (and more) are as easy for me now as running through the Elite Four with a team of maxed out level 100 Pokemon, but it used to be unimaginable as a little starter Squirtle.

And back when I was just a kid on the school playground, I didn’t have all these internet resources telling me how to min-max my team.

I didn’t know that moves of certain types exclusively used the Attack stat while others used the Special stat before Gen 4. I didn’t know how to best use the vitamins I bought in Celadon City. I didn’t know that, in Gen 1, the Speed stat was tied to critical hit chance.

And because I didn’t have as many resources available today about dating, I took a very long time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I tested so many outlandish methods and theories posted by random “pickup artists” on the internet, wasting time learning neurolinguistic programming and other difficult nonsense just to get better at flirting. I figured it all out eventually, but you won’t have to go through all that.

This is normally when I would say “read my book,” but I won’t. Still trying to figure out how to stop getting my distribution limited by the curation team on this site.