self-improvement Archives - Page 27 of 28

The Worst Dating Advice In the World (and Why It Really Works)

December 21, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 142 Comments

There are a number of cliches when it comes to dating advice out there, each of them hollow and infuriating.

But none of them are quite as mystifying as the perennial classic: “The best way to find a girlfriend is to not want one so badly.”

“Don’t try so hard and it’ll happen.” “You’ll only find a relationship if you aren’t looking so hard…”

It’s gets tossed out almost as often as “Just be yourself” and is about as useful, but with the added benefit of borrowed authority and meaning by sounding like a zen koan delivered by an ancient master. “Meditate on this truth and you will understand the path of the Player, grasshopper.”

"Thanks for the dating advice, Kwai Chang Kane". — Next person who says it is going to learn that the sound of “one hand clapping” is someone smacking the stupid out of them.

More often than not, this is the advice handed out by someone who believes in the binary state of dating skills – you’re either good or you’re not. It’s advice hinged on the idea that dating should be effortless and that attraction is magical and you can’t actually create it; your dating future is in the hands of fate, so there’s nothing you can really do to force the issue.

Thing is though – and you had to know by now that a twist was coming – they’re not entirely wrong.

The idea – that your best success comes with less effort – is sound. The issue is that most people misunderstand why this is true.

[Read more…]

Short Cuts and Magic Bullets

December 14, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 284 Comments

I get a lot of marketing emails from various dating gurus.

Call it a professional hazard; sometimes it’s because I get someone who wants me to “review” (i.e. plug) their product or service, sometimes it’s because bots harvested my email, sometimes it’s because I was interested in seeing what they had to say.

Now while there are folks out there who I think actually have something to valuable to say, 99% of the marketing blasts I get all promise the same thing: amazing results that will just supercharge your dating life with this one simple trick. If you just watch this video/subscribe to this newsletter/buy this ebook, you will learn the one secret that will make sex rain from the sky for you.

Which is kind of disturbing when you think about it... — Which is kind of disturbing when you think about it…

Now, in fairness, I’m not going to complain about somebody trying to make a buck; I mean, c’mon – this is my job.

The problem is what they’re selling: snake-oil. Bullshit and placebos dressed up as advice and packaged to convince you that it’s the guaranteed cure for all of your dating issues.

This is one of the biggest issues I have with the self-help movement in general and the Pick-Up Artist community in particular1: the idea that there is some magic bullet, some special trick or formula that will let you leapfrog over all of the real work and drop you straight into the Player’s Life that you’ve always wanted.

The problem is that there is no substitute for putting in the work. So many of these little “magic bullets” become a part of the conversation when it comes to improving one’s dating life – especially amongst frustrated men – and it ultimately retards your actual growth; in fact in many cases, it will actively make you worse.

So let’s look at a couple of the more common ones that you’re likely to run into.

[Read more…]

Aside from, y’know, the tendency towards a toxic view of masculinity, promoting an adversarial approach to gender relations and treating women as sexual objects rather than as people [↩]

Keep Moving Forward

December 10, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 140 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation lately.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that in less than a week, I’m going to be running for my life in order to avoid being devoured by a swarm of flesh-eating zombies.

Or was that a metaphor for the appeal of conformity in modern society... I forget. — “Help! I’m being chased by a metaphor for mindless consumerism!”

Stick with me, I’ll be coming back to this.

I bring up motivation because the process of training for surviving the Zombie Apocalypse reminded me a lot of what it was like at the beginning of my journey to get better with women. Which is a bit of an odd comparison but it makes sense when you think about it.

You see, everything is easy and exciting at the very beginning of any project; it’s all new and shiny and full of potential. Your head is swimming with visions of future success, whether it’s outpacing the zombie hordes or surrounding yourself with a harem of incredibly sexy people who think the sun rises and sets in your pants.

Trying to improve your life and get better at dating tends to follow a particular pattern. The early days may be tough, but they’re the sort of difficulty you can surmount without too much effort. In the beginning, it’s everything you’d hoped for and you’re wondering why you never tried this before. The positive feedback you’re getting from the early progress is almost intoxicating…

And then you hit the wall.

Suddenly that gentle difficulty curve you’ve been following has turned into a goddamn cliff. You’re no longer making any progress; hell, you may well be getting worse.

It’s disheartening and discouraging, and it just. Keeps. Happening.

You’ve put in all of this effort to spruce up your look, update your online dating profile, and approaching people and it’s going nowhere.

How are you supposed to keep going when you’ve put in all of this effort and you’re still getting nowhere? When you’re racking up rejection after rejection, when every email you send on OKCupid is met with thundering silence and every Saturday night is long dark night of the soul? What incentive do you have to keep trying when all you’re getting is heartache and misery?

How do you keep moving forward when everything inside you is screaming for you to give up, to quit, to let it all go because it’s just never going to work?

You have to know how to push yourself back up and keep moving forward.

[Read more…]

The Problem With Neediness (Or: The Anti-Sex Equation)

November 30, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove

There’s a recurring thread I’ve seen lately online, whether it’s in the comments here or in a few of the other forae where I lurk: an increasing sense of desperation for a relationship.

As we’re running headlong into the holiday season, it’s only natural for the singletons amongst us to look around at all of the happy couples with a certain level of bitterness and envy. When you’re single and alone in a season that celebrates relationships and togetherness1 it’s hard not to feel an empty hole in your life that can only be filled with the sort of love that’s only found in coffee commercials.

When did coffee get turned into the Prime Romantic Beverage anyway? — Nothing says “true love” like shitty instant coffee…

But because the strongest force in the universe is irony rather than gravity, it can seem that the harder you strive for finding that special someone, the more it slips away from you. This in turn makes you even more determined to find it… and so the cycle perpetuates itself. As this goes on, you become increasingly bitter and upset, complaining about the “impossible standards” of others while simultaneously trying to meet or exceed those standards because you know that your life will be incomplete until you find that special someone.

The problem is that you’ve fallen into a classic trap: you’ve started becoming desperate and needy.

And neediness is the antithesis of attraction. It is the magic formula to make relationships disappear and drive off potential life-partners. It is the magical formula to make sex disappear.

[Read more…]

and is immediately followed up by the Lover’s Day of Holy Obligation – an equally shitty time to be single [↩]

This Is Why You Fail (Or: What’s Holding You Back In Dating)

October 22, 2012 by Dr. NerdLove 475 Comments

Let me paint a common story for you: It’s been a while since you’ve started trying to get better at dating and it seems like you’re no further along than you have been before. If anything, you’re actually getting worse. The more posts you read, the more approaches you make… none of it seems to be working. You’ve plateaued. You’ve stalled out. You’re not getting any responses from your online dating profile. You’re getting nowhere meeting people in person.

You’re angry.

You’re depressed.

You’re frustrated.

The longer this goes on, the more you’re becoming convinced more than ever that this whole dating/sex/talking to other people thing is something that other people do and you’d be better off weighing the pros and cons of a monastic life of quiet desperation and a poetic death via alcoholism interspersed with self-pitying and slightly arch animated gif parades on Tumblr1.

"Now would you like to give me a nice paper-cut and pour lemon-juice on it while you're at it?" — “Thanks Doc, you’re really helping here.”

In short: you’re failing miserably and you don’t know why.

Trust me, I know that feeling; it’s something everybody goes through when you’re trying to get better at anything, especially something as personally defining as dating and relationships. As far as I could tell, I was doing everything right, so why the hell was I fucking up every. God. Damn. TIME??

Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t a case of my technique being bad2 or women being bitches or any number of other things I told myself to explain my failures away. I was sabotaging myself in a number of ways that I didn’t even realize… and until I took the time to recognize this and actually address these issues, I was never going to get better.

Over the years I’ve seen these issues crop up again and again; I’ve seen them in friends, in the letters I’ve gotten as Dr. NerdLove, even in myself in different aspects of my daily life. The things that hold us back in dating almost always systematically bleed into the other parts of our lives as well and it’s only when we can be honest with ourselves, confront and address these issues that we can manage to move forward and start making the progress we know we can achieve.

So I want to present a list of the most common3 reasons why you fail.

[Read more…]

That’s still a thing, right? Tumblr’s like the new LiveJournal, ya? [↩]
although it definitely needed work [↩]
that is, the ones I’ve seen most often. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list. [↩]