As a young man, I always wanted to be “good” at dating.
I thought that if I was a master of attraction and relationships, happiness would be impossible to miss me.
The way that I would get better at dating would be simple: practice.
Looking back, this was just my social anxiety attempting to use competence in romance as a method of escapism, but still, this mindset was a great motivator for learning how to get better at having better social and romantic relationships.
I’m about to be 25 and compared to my 18-year-old self, I feel like I’ve learned millions of dating lessons that could have helped me and saved me a lot of heartbreak and heartache.
The following 2 dating lessons have been more helpful than anything else I’ve learned.
I’m glad I learned them, even if it was the hard way.
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Learn to navigate your heaviest emotions.
The stereotypical male-female conflict archetype is that the woman is overcomplicating the thing and the man just wants everything to be simple.
I spend a lot of time in the “bro world”, where men exaggerate this archetype.
Sometimes this archetype of a conflict is true, but many times, this archetype just makes men look like overly simplistic creatures who are driven by impulse. Sometimes, the inverse of the stereotype is closer to the actual fact.
Sometimes it’s the man who’s being irrationally emotional, and he doesn’t even know it.
Nonetheless, people still make it seem like most men only care about sex, food, and releasing their blind rage through video games, working out, or drinking beer with their boys.
Maybe I’m a lunatic, but that’s not how my brain works.
I love all the things above (for fuck’s sake, I fight people for a living), but my identity is more complex than just doing my work, fighting people in Jiu-Jitsu, eating red meat, and trying to date girls I’m attracted to.
Yes, all these things are very exciting to me, but if I have all of them, I’d still need to do more work to have a complete existence. It took years of therapy and journaling and working on my mind to realize that there’s more to happiness as a man than lifting weights, eating beef, and getting laid.
Lots of men are similar to me, but we don’t really know how to properly navigate our heaviest emotions.
This isn’t a cop-out for toxic masculinity, either. Men have plenty of issues, and it’s our responsibility to deal with them. We just have to deal with the additional challenge of culturally enforced emotional repression on top of the complexity of our own emotions.
It’s not that men are wildly complex — I’m not saying that either. I just feel like lots of men don’t acknowledge the complexity of their own emotions.
As you get better at handling your emotions as a man, conflict with your partner becomes easier to navigate.
Lean into your “boring side” to filter out people who aren’t right for you.
Sure, I fight people for a living, but this profession is honestly far less exciting than it sounds.
The day-to-day life of an athlete is a lot of bland, monotonous routine, followed by a few brief moments of excitement.
I even wrote a Quora answer a while back about all the things I don’t do as a result of my martial arts-focused lifestyle (drinking, hooking up with people, partying, etc), and a lot of people commented saying I was lame.
Nice.
I get it. I am not everyone’s cup of tea.
Most of my days are spent going from training sessions to private lessons to writing sessions to more training sessions, scarfing down chicken and broccoli and protein shakes in between each session.
To a lot of people, this gets boring, but I don’t really think I’m boring.
My life is more disciplined than a lot of people’s, but I’m not a blob who does nothing all day.
I love my career. I’m a work in progress, but I don’t really want to change my personality in order to get laid. That seems… kind of unethical?
That’s some nice guy shit, and we’re not about that here.
That’s why I think “how do I stop being boring so girls will like me?” is the wrong way to look at the question of attraction.
Don’t try to be interesting, try to be yourself. Try to stop being insecure.
This is the path to attracting people who you genuinely enjoy being around.
I’ve found that the more I accept who I really am and lean into being myself, the easier it is for me to attract women who actually want to date me. If I date someone and we start having conflict over who I am, I can either change myself or terminate the relationship.
The latter is the correct choice for anyone who’s independent by nature.
A relationship should enhance your experience, not complete it. The love of your life is not the only thing you’re missing. What you’re missing is self-love.
I hope you, as a man, can figure that out for yourself because no one is going to give it to you.
The best moments in relationships that I’ve had were not the moments that I felt like I was trying to impress someone with my talents or with the cash in my pocket. The best moments were the ones where I was just with another person and being my weird, disciplined self.
The best way to get dates when you’re “boring” is to like yourself for who you are so that you don’t come off like some insecure chump who’s pretending to be interesting.
It’s not about being “boring” or being “exciting”, it’s about finding people who accept you for you.
Think about it.
The more you freak out about dating, the more it sucks. Relax and enjoy it.
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Closing Thoughts
You cannot find happiness in a girl, boy, job, or anything else that’s tangible.
Happiness is the byproduct of a bunch of different habits, and having good relationships is just one of those habits. Your relationships cannot fix your life, but bad relationships can ruin your life.
The same is true with diet, exercise, or a high-paying job.
Happiness is internal and holistic, and you must do the work to get there — all by yourself.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
 What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Tibor Pápai on Unsplash
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