This is article #29 to be published on the Get The Guy blog from my brother Stephen. Steve helped co-write the Get The Guy book and is a wealth of knowledge on dating and relationships.
(Photo: Daniel Lee)
Enter Stephen
The philosopher Alain De Botton says the best diet is to have something more fun lined up than continuing to eat.
I kind of think something similar about dating. The best plan for your love life is to have something better to do than getting a guy.
That might seem to run contrary to everything Get the Guy teaches. We tell women they should be pro-active. We tell women they can make the first move. We say waiting for Prince Charming is such a bogus strategy that even Disney got fed up of championing it after fifty years of their romantic propaganda.
But there’s a crucial distinction here that people miss: Being pro-active in your love life doesn’t mean you only focus on your love life. It doesn’t mean chasing as many dates as possible and pursuing every potential guy as if he’s the only catch in the world.
There are two areas we need to work on to improve our chances of finding someone amazing:
Area No. 1: Creating opportunities
Area No. 2: Making ourselves more choosable
The most frustrated women I meet at Matt’s seminars are usually doing too much of one without the other.
For example: First of all you get the woman who has the job of her dreams. She’s popular, smart, and fashionable, and all her friends think she’s amazing, except for one problem: She never meets any guys. This woman never puts herself on the line, and runs from every potential chance to meet a man. She’s a desirable catch many great guys would choose to date, but she never creates opportunities to get chosen. (i.e. she does lots of Area No. 2, but no Area No. 1).
Another kind of woman is the opposite: She chases guys a lot. Likely too much. She spends lots of her free time idly texting guys for attention instead of doing something that will make her more interesting, more rounded, more passionate about her life. She finds herself always trying to put herself out there and meet men, and maybe she even gets some dates out of it.
But the guys she ends up dating flake on her a lot. They get bored with her quickly and she struggles to keep them intrigued for long. Can you see the problem here? She creates plenty of opportunities to get chosen, but hasn’t spent any time making herself choosable. (i.e. too much Area No. 1, not enough Area No. 2).
How To Balance Pro-activity
Matt always says “Wait or Create”. But you also have to create in the right areas.
It’s like trying to win your dream job. If you bombard your future employer with endless emails and pleas for a position, they will probably be turned off by your seeming desperation and start to see you as lower value than you are.
But it’s also no good being the perfect candidate if you rest on your laurels and never risk getting a few knock-backs and hearing “no” now and again.
So pro-activity isn’t enough. We have to allocate our energies to different areas and manage both equally.
We have to balance out our different missions that lead to the bigger prize.
One woman’s mission might be: Meet more desirable guys.
But there’s another mission that requires just as much consideration: Become a desirable woman.
The first mission creates opportunities. The other makes us more choosable and more likely to seize those opportunities when they arise.
In the beginning this will all feel like a lot of investment. But it only takes a tiny investment every day. It can mean being just 10% more chatty or sexy when you go out. It can mean pursuing that passion that makes you more intriguing, or learning conversational techniques to be more interesting on dates, or adopting a few good habits such as working out and eating well so that you feel incredible and enjoy your own body.
Once you get going, and have these two areas working together, you’ll have built a system for attracting great guys consistently, and you’ll start to feel like you get to do the choosing in your love life. See, anyone can get lucky once. But then when you lose someone amazing, it’s easy to get needy and insecure; it’s easy to cling to one person and become obsessive if you don’t believe you can ever attract a great guy again. But if you have these two areas covered, you can move ahead with confidence: BECAUSE YOU HAVE A SYSTEM THAT WORKS. No, it won’t always deliver the love of your life to your doorstep, but it does mean you will always be desirable to high status, confident guys.
Keep it simple and divide it into the two areas above. This will give you focus on the bigger picture when you learn the techniques Matt talks about in his books and programmes.
Which area do you currently need to work on right now to improve your love life? Let me know in the comments below.
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This may sound odd, but I think that I spend so much time pursuing #2 that I missed the boat. I don’t #1, its true. But 25 years ago I was apparently attractive enough that I didn’t need to. Now that I’m a woman of substance, I seem to be completely physically undesirable. I wouldn’t give up my experiences for anything, but I do miss catching a guy’s eye.