You Dont Have a Dating Problem

You Don’t Have a Dating Problem

Most men who come to me think they have a dating problem. They don’t. They have a positioning and community problem, and dating is simply where it shows up.

Think of it the way you would think about a business. You can have a great product, but if it is not on the right high street, or it is not in the right rooms, it will never reach its market. Twenty years of doing this work has taught me that a man’s romantic life runs on exactly the same logic. There is a skill part, and there is an environment part, and almost everyone arrives having worked on neither.

I took a call recently from a man living out in the middle of nowhere. He was frustrated that he wasn’t meeting anyone, and he was convinced the problem was what he was saying and doing. It wasn’t. He needed to be somewhere with volume, and somewhere the candidates were qualified. Not an app. Not the pub down the road because it happens to be convenient. Men run that loop unconsciously for years, and a decade goes by.

Fix the positioning and the community, and the dating becomes a byproduct.

Why the Apps Keep You Stuck

I don’t dismiss the apps entirely. They are a pathway. The trouble starts when a man substitutes them for a social life, and that is exactly what is happening.

Think about what a network actually is: nodes connected to each other. People used to meet in the village, where there were only so many nodes to work with. Now there is a digital layer on top and more connections than at any point in history. The result is a paradox of choice so wide that nobody ever really decides anything.

And the odds are poor. Roughly one in five people find real success on dating apps, and the ones who do tend to understand how to sell an image. They know what has to be visible for the male or the female gaze. Most men have no background in that, so it was never going to work for them. What happens instead is they get monetised to the roof by whatever the latest gimmick is.

Here is the question worth sitting with. Why am I on an app at all? Why does that look like a reasonable route to meeting someone?

The honest answer, almost every time, is the same: because I don’t have a community. The app is not the strategy. It is the symptom.

If you possess the tools, there is an opportunity every single day from the moment you leave your house. You just need context. Picking up a coffee. Where you have brunch. Where you take that meeting. A lot of men take every call from home now because it is convenient and you can stack them, but you could take that meeting in a hotel lobby instead. Then between calls there is someone across the room who looks curious, and you have the chance to find out.

Why Men Stopped Approaching

Three things happened over the last decade, and together they took the ordinary daytime approach out of circulation.

Men lost the context. Me Too was an important awareness campaign. The fallout was that men who had been giving it a go started second-guessing everything. Is this acceptable? Have I been told this is harassment? What went missing in the noise was the line itself, which is not complicated: the continued pursuit of an unwanted interaction is harassment. Paying a woman a compliment on the street or at the bar is not.

The frustrating part is what that costs both sides. Women are out in the world every day hoping for a romantic experience to begin, and men are bottling it because they have decided there is a social consequence waiting for them.

The traditional pub went. The ordinary high street bar, the kind of place where you were a bit rusty and gave it a go anyway, is where men learned their stripes. You took a small risk. You positioned yourself near someone and waited to see whether they would speak first. All of that is practice, and most of those rooms have closed.

Nightlife became curated. WhatsApp groups and invite apps decide who is in the room now. If you are not on the list, you are not at the event where the people you want to meet actually are, and you spend your nights on the fringe of whatever is really going on.

Which brings you back to the same point. Who you know, and which rooms you are in, matters more than anything you say once you are there.

Fix the Environment First

When a man tells me he isn’t meeting anyone, I don’t start with what he says to women. I start with what his week looks like.

Find the more social version of what you already do. Say you run. You go out on your own, three times a week, headphones in. There is an obvious social version of that and it is a running club. You already enjoy the activity, so you are not forcing yourself into a room you hate. You are simply doing the same thing where other people are.

Then audit the ratio. This is the part men don’t want to hear. When I start working with someone I look at what he is actually doing and signalling. Often it is football with the lads, drinks with the lads, five-a-side with the lads. Then he tells me he isn’t meeting women. What did you expect?

And the answer comes back: yes, but it’s the Arsenal game. Who cares. This is your time, and you are getting a terrible return on it. Be in environments where the ratio is in your favour.

That advice is not only for men. Women do this consciously and far better than we do. A smart woman will put herself where the men she wants to meet already are, whether that is the pub showing the rugby or a classic car concourse full of affluent men who are happy to explain the cars. She has thought about where to stand. Most men never have.

It sounds too simple, and it is. It is uncommon sense. The obvious thing is sitting right there and we make it difficult.

It Isn’t Rejection, It’s Exposure

I am careful with language here, because the word you use decides how it feels. I don’t call it rejection. I call it exposure.

If something doesn’t work out, it means the values weren’t aligned, and that is completely fine. Two people meeting is a process of finding out whether the alignment is there. Nothing is being withheld from you.

I was at the driving range recently with a colleague. I don’t play golf and I had no idea what I was doing. The first few swings were embarrassing. But every swing I was asking questions and adjusting something. Changing the grip. Changing the posture. And slowly the ball started going straight.

That is how it works with anything you want to improve. You have to be curious enough to get better.

But notice the other half of it. I had a hundred balls to hit. If you have spoken to three people, you have three data points, and three data points teach you nothing. Most men are not doing a small amount of work badly. They are doing almost no work at all and then drawing conclusions from it.

And the conclusion is always the same one: women are difficult, men are awful, the whole thing is rigged. That is what happens when you meet a hundred people on an app, repeat the identical pattern each time, fix nothing, and sit in victimhood.

Maybe it’s you. And if it is you, that is good news, because you can do something about you.

After a Breakup, Start With Responsibility

The first chapter of my book is about taking responsibility, and it is first for a reason.

It is easy to come out of something and decide your ex was the problem. She was crazy. He was an arsehole. Sometimes that is partly true. It is never the whole picture, and the whole picture is the only part you can use.

Things end the way they do for reasons. Respect usually goes before anything else does, and respect goes when boundaries were never set, or when you looked past things you should not have looked past. Give someone enough room and they take it.

Start somewhere unexpected: be grateful for the experience. I don’t care what they did. Be realistic that there was a good period before the thing happened, and sit with that honestly rather than rewriting the whole relationship as a disaster. Removing the negativity is not softness. It is what lets you look at it clearly.

Then ask the harder question. Is there a pattern here?

I worked with a client who had been through a series of relationships where she accepted treatment she should not have. One abusive partner is bad luck. Three consecutive ones is information. When we looked properly, the thread went back to her mother, and the men she was drawn to all had a particular quality in the first few weeks that felt familiar to her.

That is the trap. Familiar is not the same as good for you. It is just familiar.

Once you can ask why you are responding to something, you can stop responding to it. None of that is available while it is somebody else’s fault.

What Makes a Man Attractive Beyond Looks

Boundaries. The people pleaser is the least attractive man in the room. He has forgotten that his own views and opinions carry weight, and he is usually too frightened of losing her to say what he thinks. She can feel it immediately, and what she feels is absence.

Ambition, future planning, a direction of travel. Not money. Movement.

Status, because status signals safety. This is the one men consistently miss. They hear status and think it is about showing off, so they reject the idea. It isn’t about showing off. It is about whether a woman can relax around you.

Think about a father with a daughter. What is he preparing her for? He is telling her to pick a man who is stable, a man who will make her feel safe. Her mother is telling her the same thing. That conversation has been happening her whole life, long before she met you.

So stop being surprised by it, and stop reducing it to who picks up the bill. Safety is not a transaction. It is the sense that you are solid, that you hold a line, and that nothing is going to fall apart if things get difficult.

She Is Not a Ten

Here is a psychological trick, and I only use it because it gets men moving.

You see a woman and she has a lot of the things on your visual list. Your head says ten. The moment you label her a ten you have told yourself she is reserved for men who are not you, and it is extraordinarily difficult for a woman to find a man attractive who already sees himself as beneath her. You lost before you moved.

So when you catch yourself doing it, say five.

She is a five because you know nothing about her. She might have walked through life on pretty privilege without ever working on herself, and there may be nothing there that can hold your attention for an hour. You have no idea yet. Elevating a stranger into a celebrity on sight makes no sense.

Call her a five and the thought becomes: let me go and find out whether she is anything more. Now you are in control of your own reaction, and there is a chance of an actual conversation.

This also explains something women notice and find baffling. The most beautiful woman in the room often gets the least attention. Men find her daunting, so they approach the woman they rate lower, because a no from her is survivable and a no from the one they actually want is not. It is bonkers. It is also exactly what is happening.

Where to Start This Week

The biggest misconception in dating is that you need to go out and get a date. You don’t. You need to fix the lifestyle, and meeting someone becomes the byproduct.

Three things, and you can start all of them before Sunday.

1. Look at the population where you live. You don’t have to be in a major city, but you do have to be honest about what is around you. Within your town’s population there is a small cohort that is actually your market. Work out who they are and where they already gather.
2. Pick the social version of one thing you already do. Not something new that you will quit in a fortnight. Something you already like, done where other people are, on the same night every week. Recurring beats impressive.
3. Speak to two people you would normally walk past. No agenda, no outcome, no line. You are collecting data points, and right now you have almost none.

If you want the structured version of this work, that is what I do. Twenty years of it, with men who are serious about changing the shape of their life rather than optimising a profile.

But start with the three above. Most of what men pay me for in the first month is simply this, done properly.

This article is drawn from my conversation with Yaz on The Breakup Diet. The full interview covers rejection, dating after heartbreak and why men and women fall in love on different timelines.