Reply To: Frustrated to the max

[Eric Disco]

Hey Man,

I can understand your frustration. I’ve been there myself. Sometimes trying to date women you wonder if you have leprosy and nobody’s telling you.

Online dating can in some ways be more daunting than approaching women. That’s because you are investing a lot more with a woman before you know whether she is attracted to you. You might spend three hours with her on that first date and then you never hear from her again. Ouch! That will leave you feeling like there is something wrong with you. Contrast this with approaching a woman and getting rejected after a minute. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do online dating, I do it. Just saying that it can be emotionally draining.

There’s a few things I would recommend for you. The first is to find something that interests you more than women. Relationships with women work better when that relationship is secondary to something else in your life.

For example, when I was writing a book, finishing my book was more important to me than any one woman. And they felt that. Women were attracted to me because I had a passion. When I finished my book and had no passion in my life, my dating life started to suffer even though I was focusing on it more. Then when I found another passion, dating became easier again. If your emotional well-being is linked to being with a woman, they will feel it and lose attraction for you.

My second recommendation is to have a gameplan for when you start to get into a relationship with a woman. Your plan includes when and what you text her, where you take her on dates, how long those dates are, how soon you hook up with her, etc.

So for example, after your first online date, what do you text her? Maybe the next day you text her a ping, “I think I need to find a job with half the hours that pays me twice as much.” After she responds, you say, “I’m gonna check out an art gallery opening on Thursday, want to join me?”

When you text her, what you text, how soon you text her, where you take her out, the length of your date–all that stuff is variable. The plan here is to reduce as many variables as possible. If you keep changing everything up, you won’t know what works and what doesn’t work.

Once you have a gameplan, you can start to change up the variables to see where you might be fucking up. Maybe wait two days to text her after your date. Then the next time, text her right after the date or even invite her on the next date during the first date. Maybe only have one single drink with a girl and end the date after that. See how that works. Play around with being more coy versus more straight forward.

Once you find something that works, keep doing it! Try to only change up one variable at a time so that you can really tell what works and what doesn’t.

The other benefit of this is that you can actually ask someone (like us) to help fill in the gaps if you feel your game is weak somewhere.

Eric