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Maximize Your “Luck” In Dating
Too many people rely on blind luck when it comes to relationships: hoping to meet that special someone through kismet. Others lament their bad luck – too many head games, too many emotionally unavailable partners and disintegrating relationships. The problem in both cases is that they’ve removed their locus of control and effectively miss out on the ability to influence their own fates.
If you want to maximize your good luck when it comes to dating, you have to do your homework.
Know Who You Are
I cannot stress enough how important self-awareness is when it comes to dating. Too often we don’t stop and take an honest, blunt analytical look at ourselves. We become too invested in how we want to see ourselves that we often blind ourselves to the truth, which can cause any number of problems in the dating arena. For example: I used to be a regular on the club scene back when I started getting better with women. At the time, it seemed to me like the best place to hone my skills at meeting, attracting and eventually bedding women… and yet while I was getting better, I was rarely happy or satisfied with my results. I was getting dates, even sex, but I was simply wasn’t meeting women I could connect with. I was spending too much time trying to live a lifestyle – that of the club going party guy – that simply wasn’t for me.
One of my best friends had the same relationship over and over again; he would meet someone, have a brief but intensely passionate relationship followed by to a dramatic break-up over some perceived flaw, usually leaving his exes crying and wondering what had happened. He was in love with being in love, but his expectations for a relationship were so impossibly high that no woman could possibly meet them. It wasn’t until he realized that he was using his standards as an excuse to get out of a relationship when the passion started to fade that he was able to make a relationship work for longer than weeks at a time.
If you’re consistently experiencing bad luck in relationships, you need to realize that sometimes the only common denominator connecting them is you. Taking the time to take a good hard look at your dating life can help you discover the patterns, limiting beliefs and behaviors that keep cropping up and causing you to be unlucky in love.
Know What You Want
What are you looking for? Are you looking for a future wife, or are you looking for no-strings-attached sex? Are you looking for someone quiet and refined or outgoing and dynamic? Are you looking for a geek? A Goth? A punk? A hipster? A homebody? Or are you just throwing yourself out there and just hoping for whatever happens to fall into your lap?
It seems counter-intuitive, but a lot of people aren’t honest with themselves about what they want. We all like to think that we’re rugged individualists, but we often find that we’re looking relationships – or people – that we think we’re supposed to want, rather than what we actually do. Other times we want something that seems appealing – an introvert looking for his manic pixie dream girl in hopes that she will help drag him out of his shell – without stopping to think whether it’s a person you’re actually compatible with. Like I said earlier, I spent a lot of time approaching party girls, thinking that I wanted a “player” lifestyle before I realized I would rather have a casual, low-key friends-with-benefits relationships with people who I could relate to until I was ready for something more committed.
Part of maximizing your luck in dating means knowing what you’re looking for, rather than taking a shotgun approach and hoping that fortune smiles upon you.
Know Where To Find It
Once you know who and what you’re looking for, you have to start making a point of knowing where to go. After all, to quote a particular wise sage, you won’t find gold on a sandy beach and you don’t go drilling for oil in a city street. When you’re looking for a particular type of relationship or a particular personality type or subgroup, you want to go where you are most likely to find them. Sure, you might find a socalite at the punk bar, but the odds are stacked against you. Similarly, you aren’t going to be finding too many goths at the country club or otaku at a football game. Yes, exceptions will always exist – chaos slips in to every system, no matter how closed – but you want to tilt the odds as much as you can towards finding what you’re looking for.
Even dating sites tend to cater to different types of relationships; OKCupid tends to be more oriented towards casual dating with a younger, geekier membership base while eHarmony is aimed strictly at hetero, cisgendered, professionals who are looking for long-term exclusivity.
It’s worth noting: if the type of person you’re looking for hangs out in places you can’t stand – crowded bars, noisy clubs, sporting events, etc. – you may want to take that as a sign that you’d have better luck looking for somebody else.
Be In A Position To Take Advantage
Once you’ve put yourself on the path of finding the relationship you want, you need to make sure you’re able to actually act when the time comes. Just encountering someone you’re attracted to is only half the battle; you also have to be able to actually approach them. You may have seen the punk rock goddess of your dreams at the Henry Rollins spoken-word concert, but if you’re just standing in the corner nursing your beer and trying to will her over to approach you via spontaneous telepathy, you’re blowing your opportunity. You need to be ready, willing and able to go up and introduce yourself as soon as you see her before you psych yourself out… or worse, somebody else makes his move before you do.
Accept That Shit Happens
Sadly, there are no guarantees in life. You can push the odds to your favor as much as possible and still lose out. Nobody, not Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling, not Mystery or Neil Strauss or even Dr. NerdLove goes 5 for 5 when it comes to dating. Even when you do everything right – you’re charming, funny, full of self-confidence and looking like a million dollars – you can fall flat on your face. You can never account for all the variables that can affect approaching somebody. You may be money and know you’re money, but that hot dude at the bar may have just gotten out of a relationship. The punk rock goddess at the Henry Rollins concert may have decided that she’s taking a break from dating for a while. The quiet nerdgirl at the Barnes and Noble may have a boyfriend, may have a girlfriend or may be about to move to another state.
You may screw up. You may say something wrong and shove your foot in your mouth. I’ve had times approaching women at parties or bars where I choked, literally choked, trying to talk to them.
Shit happens; it’s part of life. But letting the fear of failure keep you from making the attempt in the first place guarantees that you will never succeed. You can’t win the game if you don’t put your bet on the table in the first place.
Fortune favors the bold.
Go out and get lucky.
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