I’m 30 and haven’t really had much dating experience. It boggles my mind how people are already married by 30. How does dating work? Serious question.
If you're not working out, then start. It will help immensely. If you're not eating right, then start. These are the two most important things you can do, especially if you don't know where to start.
Leverage existing social networks - have friends who are couples? get to know them better, its possible they'll know someone they can set you up with.
Dating apps can work for some people but they can be an absolute grind and can leave you disillusioned and discouraged.
Don't resort to "tricks", don't "try" too hard, and don't think you have to become someone you're not comfortable with - just become the best version of yourself you can be, and just get yourself out there. Everything else will eventually fall into place.
Edit: someone mentioned improv - I would say this is 100% one of the best group activities you can do - they are inclusive, supportive, and have a diverse group of men and women. You will make friends, increase confidence, and be a part of a community.
Think of it like an investment. The more and longer you invest in your social life, the more rewards you will reap.
I've been doing salsa somewhere between 2 and 5 nights a week more-or-less continuously for the last 6 years. By those who know me, i'm generally regarded as one of the best relative to my experience level (this is something I really struggle to accept, but I hear it enough to be willing to share it), and the vast majority of my friends are women. All of this has had zero impact on my confidence with women as far as dating or relationships are concerned, or even just casual purely platonic conversation with either women or men.
My takeaway from this is, that if you are going to invest in an activity for the purpose of meeting people and building confidence, you'll want to to choose an activity that actually throws you into the situations you struggle with. So now i'm looking for a parallel interest, improv is actually pretty appealing.
I don't really love improv as a form of comedy but the practice is beneficial. I've even recommended it with success to direct reports of mine.
+ Unless your goal is to hookup or just have fun, avoid dating apps. Dating apps are basically meat markets with a layer of social skills. Instead focus on engaging in activities that you really enjoy and meeting people through them - hiking, classic cinema, etc. Instead of judging purely on looks you'll have a chance to interact with possible partners and start with strong common ground. You'll also gain meaningful friendships this way which is beneficial in a lot of other ways.
+ Do focus on self improvement. Do active things (that are also enjoyable and fun), have a robust career, and seriously spend time introspecting your own personality and mind. Learn the finer points of manners, make sure to have spotless hygiene, and clean up your style.
+ Important note here - charisma, like everything else, can be studied and learned. I had terrible charisma until I spent time learning it. Ask a socially skilled confidant to (gently) critique your charisma and give you feedback. Consider taking something like improv if you do better in a classroom setting.
+ 60/40. 60% of your attention should be focused on your partner and their needs. You don't want to hog all the attention, but you also don't want to dote on them like some kind of clingy rescue animal. Given that people tend to be a little bit self biased, 60/40 tends to be a good split to keep in mind. Small gestures (filling their glass before yours, pulling chairs out for them, etc) go a very very long way.
+ Treat other people well, and treat other people personably. That is to say, treat others (whether it's a romantic partner or a random waiter) as if they are a good friend, and that you will see them quite frequently.
2. Go on a date. Follow KISS principle: evening time, grab a drink, socialize. Use FORD principle to create conversation. Test the waters with various topics of interests, talk about stuff that you find passionate (people usually gravitate to you if you speak passionately about something)
3. ??? Seriously, choose your own adventure.
4. You're dating. Second date, choose an activity or something else not drinking related (unless you bond over drinking... maybe that's your thing, no judgement).
Things are not so simple. In fact, the very nature of social interaction is such that it cannot be preemptively, logically broken down and solved.
Many men have trouble getting past step 1 on the dating apps you list. The funnel of capture, so to speak, from message to response can be extremely wide, both on and offline.
Of course, I believe I am describing the perspective of a male.
With a high risk of being labeled a weird PUA-- social interaction is easily able to be broken down logically. Humans are animals, and just like animals can be trained and managed, humans can be trained and managed. It can be analyzed with data if you're willing to whip up a spreadsheet. It can be treated using business principles if you're so inclined.
Also, don't call yourself a male, just like you wouldn't call a woman a "female" IRL. It is dehumanizing.
No, they are simple. But at the same time, as you say, they cannot be logically solved. There is no logic, be yourself, talk about what you like, and you might find someone.
The hard truth is that this person might not be in the league you "targeted".
Edit: removed unnecessary snarky sentence.
Go forth into the world and find someone. Expect failure. She may find fault in you. You may find fault in her. Evaluate her as much as she evaluates you. Evaluate your approach, how you speak etc. You’ll need to improve and change.
Being afraid to approach means you equate failure with some kind of death. That by itself is a faulty belief you’ll need experience to get rid of.
If you want homework: approach 300 women and see how you go. Vary every approach, change the time, place, activity. Document each attempt: What worked, what didn’t.
Have fun.
Most of the people you're attracted to won't feel the same about you, or be in a position to act on it if they are. That's just how it is, and for the most part, there's nothing you can do about it. Sure, being friendly and personable won't hurt, but what they find attractive is one of their attributes, not yours. If you're going to base your definition of success or failure on how a stranger feels about you, you're going to find yourself very disappointed a lot of the time.
A conversation with another human being isn't a failure just because it didn't end with a sexual encounter or you getting their number. It's perfectly acceptable to just shoot the shit with a stranger for 5 minutes and both go on with your day without even exchanging names if that's how it feels like it's going. That's still a step up from spending that 5 minutes furtively glancing at them from across the room, and you've actually had some social interaction with another human being.
Also, can we just quit with this "friendzone" thing? It's not some heinous insult for a woman to consider you a friend. Great, you're attracted to her. I'm happy for you. But if she doesn't feel the same way, then you establish communication at the lowest common protocol. She's proposed friends. If you can communicate as friends, you have a new friend - is that really so bad? If you can't communicate as friends, you negotiate further down to the next available protocol, and now you're just an acquaintance who says hi when you happen to be in the same room.
We're talking about having a conversation with another human being. You don't need to interview them or manipulate them towards some goal - just have a conversation without an ulterior motive. You might be surprised at what you see when you stop looking so hard.
Then I realized, I care too much.. I care if I will "invade" their space, if they feel comfortable, if they will think I am a creep or so.
Nowadays, if I want to talk to someone, I just do. It works wonder, I think we create this "cage" of social fear on our own due to our insecurities.
But you’re right, with the right person, things just resonate. You don’t have to put an extreme amount of effort or be worried about little things.
I always struggled with thinking my competition had a huge advantage by having experience in all those things. But now that I have significant experience myself (married + 2 kids), I realize that wasn't really the case. You can go from a level 0 kisser to a level 3 kisser in an evening or two (most people never make it past level 3). And plus, the people worth dating won't reject you on inexperience in those things alone.
On one extreme, if you're good looking and rich, then maybe 99% of people you meet will like you. If you're plain looking and poor then maybe only 0.01% will like you so you just need to try MUCH harder.
Being average does make it easier to form genuine (healthy) relationships though so it's not all bad. You don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention.
It's stressful sometimes, but very much worth it for me.
Oh, and I have no idea how dating as an adult works. I've never done it!
edit:
As far as actually dating goes... this can be made complicated and probably not best advised on HN. But the TL;DR:
1. Take care of yourself; being healthy, fit, and attractive makes this all a whole lot easier.
2. Make yourself available; put yourself out there, spend time in public spaces where people your age congregate and socialize. Cafes work well for this. Special interest groups like meetup or other sporting leagues also work. You can fallback on online dating services, but it's not ideal.
3. Pay attention to signals; women do all sorts of things to communicate interest. Adjusting their hair, clothes, overt and excessive stretching in your field of view, repeated smiling, eye-fucking, unnecessary physical contact. These are invitations, open a dialog if you're interested, say hi.
There's more that can be said, but I think that pretty much covers the fundamentals.
#1 is the most impactful in my experience. A sexy physique under well-fitting clothes goes such a long way, it can be quite annoying if you're not interested in the attention.
I'll disagree with a lot of the advice given here. The pictures on online dating sites are what you make of them. I didn't even like my wife's pictures, I only messaged her because she was playing 4 truths and a lie on her profile and I wanted to call out the lie. I also read The Game and some PUA communities, but soured on them when a.) all my female friends told me "Dude, you're skeevy just for even mentioning them" and a married coworker was like "Well, it works on some girls - usually the type that's a total trainwreck in a relationship anyway."
Things that did work:
1. Send lots of messages, and go on lots of dates. I think I sent about 250 messages and went on 30+ first dates. Only 3 led to a second date, and the two that were not my wife were previous offline acquaintances that happened to pop up on my OKCupid matches. (I dated them for like 15 and 8 dates, respectively, before deciding that it wasn't really working.)
2. Dating is basically entirely emotional. Whatever rational thoughts you're having about it are probably useless, and probably counterproductive (other than avoiding obvious pitfalls like dating someone who's married, someone who's cheated on everyone they've always dated, someone who wants a totally different lifestyle from you, someone who wants kids when you don't, etc). Go with your gut on everything. Don't trust your gut? Work on that problem first before dating.
3. "Common wisdom" is more foolish than most people think. I had a couple coworkers take me out on a shopping makeover, where they helped me pick out some very stylish new clothes that got me complements from a bunch of my other friends. What was my eventual wife's reaction? "Well, he's cute, but I think he may be gay. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here..." And then she called me SkinnyJeans to all her female friends for the next 2 months (this was 2012, it was the style then). She didn't (and doesn't) care about appearances; that was part of what makes us a good match.
4. Broaden your idea of what a good partner might look like. As a kid, I had an image of my eventual wife: thin, white, blonde, popular, gracious, and smart. My wife is the latter 3 of these, but she's a stocky Taiwanese-American. And similarly, I'm not a bald Mexican soccer player named Santiago. ;-) (Ironically, both of us previously dated people who pretty much entirely matched our checklist, and found we couldn't stand talking to them.)
5. Related to the last 2 points, you aren't looking for America's sweetheart, you're looking for your sweetheart. Our couple's counselor told us that one common failure mode for people who get married young is that they marry the image of what popular culture says they should want, which presents a lot of problems when they grow older and realize that they have preferences & values that are distinct from what the culture around them values.
6. When you meet the right person, you'll know. Well, sort of. I knew within 20 minutes of meeting my wife that she was a lot more fun and easier to talk to than any other first date I'd been on. I didn't know for sure that I wanted her to be my wife until about 6 months after we got married. Most of my objections in the intervening 3 years were fears masquerading as rational objections - "Am I really ready to settle down?", "But she's not who I thought I would marry", "It's weird having her family so close by when mine is all the way across the country", "What'll this mean for my startup dreams?".
7. Learn to recognize fear. If you want to be with someone even though you're afraid of it, you must really love them. Listen to that and not the fear. (Note that I said "it" instead of "them" - if you fear the person, that's a real problem you should listen to. Many people don't fear the person, they fear the relationship and what it means for their self-identity.)
8. Consider therapy. It's cliche, but you have to learn to love yourself before you can expect other people to love you. I was bullied pretty intensively in middle school, which included a lot of sexualized teasing of the form "I can't imagine nostrademons ever getting a girlfriend", even from my "friends". I internalized that over the next 18 years, such that even long after I'd left my home state and everyone I knew behind, I was still subconsciously living it. Once I became conscious of that thought-loop and dealt with it, it was only 3 weeks until I found my wife.
I think the real value in that material is the disillusionment. If you approach it as less a collection of cheat codes or parlor tricks and more as an illustration of how what society has told you about attraction is completely, utterly, ridiculously wrong, then you'll get a lot more out of it. More modern approaches to "pick up" reflect this.
The whole point of Red Pill stuff is that there's a disconnect between what people want and what they say they want. Also I seriously doubt your female friends have ever actually read any of the material and only know what it is from second hand information. So really their opinion on it is worthless. Also first rule of fight club.
>and a married coworker was like "Well, it works on some girls - usually the type that's a total trainwreck in a relationship anyway."
First, he's married so he's not exactly PUA material. Second, it works on some people, and it just so happens that there's plenty of people out there who are trainwrecks in relationships. It's part of why they're single. It's selection bias. I don't think there's any real correlation.
Disclosure: I am not into Red Pill or PUA or The Game or whatever people call it. There is good information in there that is not obvious to some people who haven't dated much or spent time to really analyze human behavior. However there is also lots of sexism and women hating surrounding that information.
I just felt that the specific strategies employed by most of the PUA community were a.) useless and b.) worse than useless for me. And I suspect it actually was because of selection bias: if you're out there picking up girls, it's because you are not in a steady, happy relationship. Anyone who is in a steady, happy relationship drops out of the dating pool entirely. I wanted a steady, happy relationship; ergo, folks who were out there sarging every night were not very good role models for me.
That's another lesson I took from professional life that carries over into your romantic life: know which game you want to be playing, and ignore advice from people who are playing a different game.
I've got my own model of human behavior and why people make the romantic choices they do. It works for me, and it might even seem vaguely familiar to trained psychologists, but it'd probably piss off a bunch of folks in this sub-thread. Like you said, first rule of fight club.
I think ignore is too strong of a word. A lot of good ideas in the world came about from cross-pollination between two or more different domains or disciplines. Inspiration can come from anywhere, if you seek new information from all sorts of places and try plugging it into your own field of expertise.
I think that could apply here too. Even though they're playing a different game than you are, you might be able to find something useful in it that you can incorporate into your game. But you shouldn't copy+paste their advice into your game. Experiment with some of it, include bits of it that appeal to you, and leave out the rest.
If you're a single man in the bay area interested in women it's a lot harder than being in NYC or DC (not impossible, but everything is harder). If you're in an area that has a lot of people you get more social skills practice and it's easier to meet people via apps and just regular life.
The other stuff is just social skills practice, wearing nicer clothes, being in better shape etc. All those can be worked on separately, but all of that is given a difficulty modifier based on how competitive your area is.
As someone who's spent years in the bay area as a single man (some dates, one relationship) and then some time in DC the difference in difficulty is comically obvious.
Don't take it as gospel, in fact ignore most of it (specially negging, and any other kind of power plays).
But you'll see that it's possible, you will also learn to read signs.
Mostly dating consists of improving oneself, be social, don't objectify people and learn the unwritten rules.
Some genuinely helpful things I found.
1) Try making small talk conversations to every day strangers. It removes approach anxiety. Talk about the weather, the city, politics, anything. Being able to hold a stream of connected topics in a conversation is sort of a skill. Also kinda helps understand what’s creepy and what’s not. Good conversations skills are a great life skill.
2) Eye contact, volume and posture. Look into the other persons eye when talking to them. Don’t be too soft, but also not too loud. Don’t speak too fast too. When people don’t struggle to understand you, you project confidence. Dress with fitting clothes, be well trimmed and walk with a good posture.
3) have your own things, find your own happiness. Whether it’s work, hobbies, hikes, whatever. Something that you’re enjoy and you’re decently good at. Great if you have a group of friends that you regular do things with. Be happy and contempt.
4) Life is not a race. You don’t need to try too hard. Good things will eventually happen if you’re meeting women your age and having decent conversations.
All my relationships came out of meeting with friends/a group of people and having a girl at roughly the same point in life be in the same group.
You interact without any obligations at first, and at some point it becomes clear that even though you didn’t explicitly say so, you are interested in the other.
I’m not quite sure how it proceeds from there to doing ‘something’ exclusively together, but I assume this is generally the point where asking the other out to the movies happens.
To be honest, if that’s accepted after all this, it’s never been a bad relationship for me yet (even though some ended, happily married now).
I mainly went to board/video game nights, on hikes, movie nights, group dinners, museums, beach outings, and various one-off activities like scavenger hunts and mini-golf.
Eventually I became more comfortable being around women and stopped being quite so awkward around them. I got a few dates through meetup, but ultimately I met my fiancee through OKCupid. However, I don't think I would have been comfortable around her without the two years of going to as many social events that I could handle in anything that looked remotely interesting to me.
One thing I had to get over, also, is there are a lot of women in their twenties that aren't really emotionally available, for various reasons. Focused on their career, trying to figure out who they are and what they want in life, have their own struggles they're dealing with, etc. I would spend a ton of time and energy on certain women that I really fancied but they weren't really in the dating pool, even if they said they were. More like they were looking at it, and toying with the idea, but weren't serious about it.
When I did date people like this, it always felt like a struggle to keep things going, like they weren't trying very hard to keep in touch or communicate their needs or I had to keep making larger and larger gestures just to watch things fall through my fingers. It wasn't until I happened upon some relationships that were actually pretty easy to keep going and the other person made a real effort that I realized that the former was actually not the norm, and not the best I could hope for.
So I would recommend not putting too much energy into people that don't make an effort back. Just because they agree to dates doesn't mean that they're going to reciprocate your efforts. If you don't see them try to meet you at least 40% of the way (i.e. don't ever offer to pay for anything, don't come up with date ideas, don't initiate conversations, etc) after a month or two, it's probably not worth pursuing further, at least in my opinion.
The only way to actually like someone, not just push a button that says like, is to spend time with them in real life.
Do it as a job (go through 1000 a day), I assure you you'll have dates within 30 days.
Marriage is very cultural. Either way life is not a race.
Here is what happened for me:
- Used Match then POF then OKC
- Probably went on about 150 dates over the course of about 4-5 years. Sounds like a lot but averages out to 1 every 2 weeks. In reality it was probably 4 to 5 over a two week span every couple of months. Most of the time was just sending LOTS of "requests" out and playing the law of large numbers. I liked OKC too b/c they had some gamification circa early 2010s that helped you find people who were attracted to you.
- Most of the dates did not translate into 2nd dates for a long time. I attribute this to not being good at "dating" in general, flirting in particular and the low switching costs of dating in NYC for the other side e.g. if you are a pretty girl in your 20's in NYC there will "be another one soon"
-Read "The Game" by Neil Strauss. Changed my life. Primarily, I realized my model for interacting with women was based on familial roles e.g. empathy, sharing emotions etc. I realized that is great for family or long term relationships but not for first dating and the first three months.
The book taught me that being "playful" and "good natured teasing" were the most important parts initially. I realized I already had those parts of my personality but I wasn't exposing them because I thought that wasn't how dating "worked".
A lot of the stories in the book are not practical for finding quality long term relationships but a couple of points stuck out to me:
- One a lot of what you think think are limits in social interaction are in your head and therefore can be ignored
- He has a quote in the book where he says "My friends and my family failed me because they love me for who I was and not for who I could become"
- Human interaction (be it with men or women) is a lot more "programmatic" than you think it is. e.g. Saying phrase1, phrase2, phrase3 can be very different than saying phr3, phr1, phr2. How you say something can have way more impact than what you say.
- Like with persuasion in general, it can sometimes border on manipulation so it's important to have your own "line" to cross. That being said, it's a lot like working out physically: you can get bigger muscles but you can't get taller. In personality terms: you can learn funny stories to help you make friends but that won't make you a comedian. In other words, there is always a way to improve but don't fight too hard to change things you can't and don't be someone you're not.
I would also recommend these guys: https://theartofcharm.com/
They definitely offer the best combination of practical advice while also being respectful to women and offering lots of great non-dating advice.
This was a very frustrating process for me and if people are interested in the above I am happy to add more color/suggestions if it saves others the time and frustration I went through.