How many girls have you asked out? How many straight nos have you received?

Back in college I asked out a string of girls, big string, tried to ask one a day for a while and learned several things.

1) A girl will give her number to a stray dog.

2) You can tell a girl wasn’t interested if she doesn’t pick up her phone, or you receive a call from her boyfriend.

3) If a girl gives you a straight no, thank her, she just refrained from wasting your time.

I went through the full scenario at a conservative estimate at thirty times. Pretty frustrating, but the good that came out of it was that it made me dedicated to understanding the whole issue of men and women.

Here’s the deal, women are human beings. Being human, just like the rest of us, they want to avoid hurting someone’s feelings and avoid confrontation. It’s a lot easier to just give a guy your number (interestingly enough I never received a fake number, she just didn’t pick up), than to give him a straight no and risk a conversation where a guy demands she explain why she won’t go out with him. Not a pleasant prospect.

At first I was angry, stayed angry for a while. The worst part was hopes being raised by getting a phone number, and then being dashed. Again and again. And Again. When a girl gave me a straight no after fifteen flakes I verbally thanked her for not wasting my time.

The fact of the matter is things are a lot more complicated than they were in my father’s day. According to him the standard sequence was, you asked a girl out, she said yes or no, if she said no you acted like a man and moved on. If she said yes and after a few dates declined again, you acted like a man and moved on. Saved women the unnecessary experience of having to justify herself and saved men from a lack of clarity. Not so now.

What’s the solution? Get better with women in general. The more attraction you generate on the front end, the more likely she is to pick up, and I tell you it feels great when you finally hear that voice on the other end of the line.

Next, accept it for what it is. If a girl doesn’t pick up, leave a message, ask her to respond, if she doesn’t move on. Don’t take it too hard if it doesn’t go your way. If she isn’t straight with you, it’s not a serious failing. Don’t get angry, don’t get bitter, it’s just the rules of the game as it stands. If it happens a few times, no big deal luck of the draw.

If it happens thirty times in a row, check for a whole in your game. Move forward, get feedback, adjust course. Don’t overthink, don’t underthink, remember your principles. As long as you move forward and adjust based on feedback it will get better.

Michael D.

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This is why it seems difficult to have better social skills with women in general. If you’re talking to a girl that you don’t know you’re flying blind with regard to whether or not she likes you. And, I know it was true for me, that I had a general attitude that the cards were stacked against me. I also didn’t think that there was anything I could really do, not really, to change myself.

Why did I think this way? Because I felt it. Somewhere along the way I picked up enough bad experiences to implant the idea in my mind and the feeling in my body that, hey, you know you’re not good enough. There are only two opinions in the world you can never escape from, God’s opinion of you, and your opinion of yourself. So, my opinion was no good.

Saying that you have to get success first, to believe that you are capable of attracting women is backwards. If you don’t start out believing “I am good enough”, then you won’t get success, or, if you do, you’ll still feel like a fraud. But, the good news is that if you come from this place of hopelessness, you don’t have to stay there.

The key is to get your beliefs in line with reality. The fact that you have free will, that you can make better decisions, learn new skills, is a fact. Read bios of people who’ve turned their lives around. Look for success stories. Look at the Bible, where people are consistently blessed by God for doing right, and reproved for doing wrong. God is not cruel, I don’t believe He is harsh on people for things that are beyond their control. I also don’t think He’s arbitrary, He blesses people who please Him, and what they do to please Him is under their control. But, it’s a fact that gets sidelined in the face of bad emotions and memories of past failures.

“Manliness” is a virtue, it’s the chief thing that is attractive to women and is heavily under our control. The key exercise is, when faced with a memory of past failure, or bad emotions about interacting with women, is to consciously reject it as untrue that you can’t do better. Then act like you can do better. Course correct.  A little courage, and you’ll find you feel better about yourself and your prospects almost instanteously.It may be a while before your feelings and beliefs  consistently (every time) coincide with each other, where you not only improve, but feel great about the process (and positive emotions shine through to women, very attractive), but it’s a nearly inevitable result.

Small steps towards acting by by the truth, and rejecting hopelessness not only as unpleasant, but as false, will reap some of the biggest rewards in your relationships with women, perhaps more than anything else. It’s foundational.

Michael D.

Unfortunately it’s also true that trying to be confident and funny leads to a man bombing nine times out of ten. Knowing why women say these things, and why your attempts fail, however can lead you to the key to creating instant real attraction to women. Not knowing why is the root of the problem that most men when they try to “be what women want” and end up crashing and burning.

Women aren’t being dishonest. They really do like confident, funny men. The thing is, confident, funny behaviors are “secondary”. They are the side effects of the primal qualities of the naturally attractive man. He acts confident because he is strong and courageous, and that strength and courage creates changes in his body language and personal style which women label confidence. He says humorous things, because he is relaxed and secure, the same way it’s always easier to be funny around your friends, you are relaxed and secure with them.

This is also why attempts to be confident or funny fail when you directly pursue them. When you go after side effects instead of primal principles, you come off as “macho”, posturing inauthentic masculinity, or “clownish”, humor that stems from a desire to be liked more than anything else.

Most of what concerns us are really the secondary effects of the major choices that we make. Thoughts present themselves to our minds and we validate or invalidate them based on our real principles, leading to action or inaction. A man who postures at manliness is a man who has validated the idea that he is not a man, but has to pretend to be to get what he wants. A man who is really confident has validated the idea that he is a man and doesn’t need to posture.

The concrete steps you can take are as follows. Courage is present in all of us a little bit. We have all done brave things, even if they were only little brave things. We know how to be courageous. But courage is like a muscle, to get stronger, you have to use it. Every time a fearful thought presents itself to your mind, their reaches a point, where you can make a deliberate choice to either validate that thought, accept it as genuine, or invalidate it, not let it be a factor. And we all know when a fear is big enough to legitimately change our actions, nobody feels guilty about not walking into traffic. It is the illegitimate fears that nail us, that weaken our strength, cause us to feel guilty and think ill of ourselves.

Every fear is like an object being presented to you, in your mind,  regardless of your feelings, you also know whether it should cause you to change course or not. Fear of a girl you don’t know not liking you is total nonsense. So, you can validate it, and get the bonus prizes of shame, guilt, and regret, or you can invalidate it, with the added bonuses of increased strength and confidence.

No one can make this decision for you, which is kind of like being a man,

Michael D.

In the Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis describes the present as the point of time in our experience which most resembles eternity. It is the only time where choices can be made that can result in happiness, or unhappiness later.

About a week ago, I met up with a girl I had briefly went out with a year ago. We got to talking about dating and related issues and I was open and honest with her. I described how I should have “handled” some of her behavior in the past. She had a problem with cancelling at the last minute, and back then I put up with it, even when it was clear that it was done for reasons that basically stated that I wasn’t a priority. As we spent the evening together, she got flirty, touched my hip, etc., things she didn’t do while we were dating. In short I acted like a man, and by the end of our time she wanted to get back together.

I told her no. Nice enough girl, but not for me.

The point being, she reacted to the way I was acting RIGHT THEN. How I acted in the past was not nearly as real to her as the way I was acting right then.

If you screw up, the tendency is to either retreat or overcompensate, as a way of distancing yourself from a mistake. None of that really works, it can usually be sensed for what it is. We all know how desperate “try hard” behavior is kind of repulsive. The guy who tries too hard to be funny, or puts on macho airs, is a figure of fun.

If attracting women can be narrowed down to one quality it is “manliness”, the quality of being a man. If you do so something “unmanly”, like act insecure, for example, the only cure is to start acting manly right now. Not to overcompensate, clearly the action of an unmanly guy trying to bolster himself in the eyes of others, or show cowardice, perhaps the deadliest failing regarding “manliness”, but to act manly.

Acting manly puts more money in the account that you just drew from by screwing up. As a result your mistakes will more than likely be forgiven and blown past like they didn’t happen. One of the greatest lessons I learned is that people are really forgiving if you bring extra value into their life. On the darkside, this is why sometimes even really great girls will stick with guys are contemptible, but manly, just because the attraction is “too strong”.

You can’t go back in time, and you can’t act in the future. No doubt rectifying past mistakes and planning for the future are good things to do, but everything important definitionally happens in the present. Focus your efforts there and making yourself secure, your confidence and personal power will grow,

It doesn’t happen any other way,

Michael D.

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Checkout Chick: “Would you like to go out some time if I asked?”

Me: “Hey, that’s very nice, I’m not really looking to date anybody right now.”

What just happened? Was that me blowing someone off? In one moment, I was inside the mind of every girl who’d ever told me she was interested. In that moment I understood.

Most of your nightmares about a girl “rejecting” you are not real. Among non-Christians it is extremely rare for a girl to give you a hard “no” or a mean “no”. Among Christian women it is virtually non existent. Why don’t women just give a clear no, if they’re not interested? For the same reason I told Checkout Chick that I wasn’t interested in dating anyone right now.

I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I felt very flattered, but just wasn’t interested. I wanted to communicate that I wasn’t interested in a way that protected her from feeling bad about herself. I remembered all the women in the past who had given me similar responses. I used to be slightly angry that women never gave me a clear no when they weren’t interested. I see now that they just didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

I’m not alone in this either, my colleague John S. has had to do the same thing. A woman expresses interest, but you don’t reciprocate and you have to tell her something. Learning to recognize this behavior in women will keep you from wasting your time pursuing or mooning after a girl who is just not interested.

A quick rule of thumb for seeing whether or not a woman is really interested is just noticing if she’s making an effort, contributing anything at all to the interaction. If you want to get coffee on Saturday, but she’s “busy”, she might be trying to dissuade you, or she might actually be busy! If she’s open to you, she will be willing to work out another time, or continue interacting or just trying to contribute something. As long as she’s “giving” something to the interaction don’t assume that you haven’t got a chance.

If she’s not giving something to the interaction though, then she’s probably not really interested. The upside to that though is that you can stop spending your time on that avenue. That frees up your time and energy for someone or something else. You’ll find that you’re actually relieved when a girl gives you this kind of signal, you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time.

So, if a girl’s not interested, but won’t be clear, don’t be angry, she’s just trying to let you down easy. Once you notice when this is happening, you become free of uncertainty and actually feel like you’re making progress. You’re also tuning up your social sense, and it makes it that much more exciting when you notice that a girl really is interested.

Keep your eyes open, 

Michael D.

Guys were not asking girls out and… that’s it. And when that rare eventuality arose, were, according to my female friends, a favored line was, “I think God wants us to be together.” The favored reaction was an internal dialogue of, “Must get away from the crazy person.”

I had one friend who believed that you shouldn’t date until you could provide for a wife. And even then you shouldn’t date, you should court, by which he meant, ask a girl’s father for permission. So dating in college was right out. I had a girl I knew tell me that you should get to know a girl for several months before you asked her out.

I watched countless numbers of my friends hem and haw and “befriend” girls before beginning a tentative relationship that ended in heartbreak. I was called disrespectful for flirting (although the girls in question didn’t voice the complaint). We had a speaker in chapel even mention the “not asking out” phenomenon, who suggested that a guy find out a girl’s schedule and run into her “accidentally”, to much murmurings of “stalker” [Incidentally, the speaker in question was an older gentleman who was a very solid guy otherwise]. When I asked girls out, and they actually went out with me, it seems that most of the time they thought I wanted to be friends. How emasculating is that by the way?

Talking to ministers the answer was always some variation of “God has somebody out there for you.” Of course guys often got devastated by breakups thinking that the one God had for them is now gone and they’re doomed to a life of loneliness.

The fruits of all of this was, to my view, a madhouse. We all were trying to play a game where the rules were constantly changing. Not that I didn’t see some good relationships of course, but the general rule was that nothing went well on purpose. I remember talking with my father about this one evening and his response was that Big Christian U. was some sort of hive of insanity.

There was no standard “societal” procedure to begin a relationship with a girl, and the attempt to introduce one (”courting”) seemed, at least to me, to be contrived and disconnected from reality.

In the absence of a structure, the only real solution is to find the “rules” that all forms of male/female interaction have abided by historically. Forms may change, but there are commonalities that stretch across the majority of them. Fundamental principles, that, if known, can help successful relationships with women to begin.

Nearly every society in existence has had some sort of concern with perpetuating itself. Every society has an inherent incentive, if it believes in itself, to ensure that mating goes off without a hitch, families stay together and that cultural values are imparted to the young. The American church’s general answer appears to be summed up in “God has somebody out there for you.” Or a set of rules, like the one CD I got from my “courtship” friend entitled “Biblical Rules for Dating” and managed not to quote the Bible a single time. All of this seemed to be code for, “I don’t know, and can’t really be bothered to find out.” Not, of course, to impugn anyone’s character, I’m sure it was the best answer they knew, it just wasn’t really good enough to actually help.

What I found though is a better answer. One that can actually help.

If you’re new to this site, look around and see if anything resonates with you. Also consider signing up for our list, we’re putting together new content that won’t be found on the blog, where you can learn some of the principles that, I think, define all great relationships.

Just ask yourself one question, “Should something this basic have to be so confusing?”,  

Michael D.

I think, as Christians, we all know that sin is ultimately foolish. That, eventually “crime doesn’t pay”. That, since it offends God, it is not worth it. Of course that knowledge seems a little less real when you’re in the present moment.

I think we have an unnatural fear of doing the right thing out of self interest. It doesn’t seem to matter to us that the Bible appeals to self interest to get men to come to God all the time. It doesn’t seem to occur to us that since God cares about our own well being, that we should care about it as well.

I think the main problem is an understanding of sin that is primarily statutory. We think that God just laid down a bunch of rules arbitrarily. Not that we would say that out loud, but it’s how we act. The problem of sin is that is “privation”, that it is lacking. The nature of sin is more like an act of exchanging 5 dollars for 1 dollar than it is driving over the speed limit. The 1 dollars worth of pleasure or safety that costs us 5 dollars of the same.

If you deliberately choose cowardice, you got a dollar of safety and lost five dollars of strength. Repeated acts of cowardice and you start to go broke spiritually. The same goes for neediness or any other behavior that gets in your way.

Now, the important point is that you don’t have to wait for it to cost you. Every time you act cowardly, the payment on your character is immediate. Almost no one ever does evil for its own sake. They always do it for the sake of some good they want to acheive. However if the goal is “goodness”, you always get a lot less “goodness” in sin than you would otherwise.

Every sin is foolish, not only later, but at the time. In my opinion, that’s why folly is bound up so heavily with sin in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

It may sound like it’s crazy to say that doing the right thing is easier on some level than doing the wrong thing. But definitionally this is the case. The trick is, do you want to feel right or be right? If you choose feeling right over being right, you won’t really feel right for long if at all.

So, don’t act like a fool, go with your judgement over your feelings, if you have to choose. If something feels right and is right, than that’s golden! Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not slamming on feelings, and I think it’s perverse to say that someone should go around feeling miserable all of the time. It’s just that your judgement will take you further than whatever passions are occuring in your body at the time.

Michael D.

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Anything judgements you make about yourself have a tendency to filter through. If you view yourself as fundamentally unattractive to women, you can’t be surprised if women treat you the way you treat yourself.

The difficulty arises in that you can’t just say, “I am attractive to women” ten times and switch this thing around. The only real cure for a bad thing is a good thing. Just saying the words like magic isn’t going to solve the problem. You need reasons to believe you’re attractive to women, and reasons to believe that the old self image of “I am unattractive” is not true. Then you need the courage to act on what your mind is telling you.

The greatest dating difficulties for men occur long before they take those first three steps towards the girl, let alone before they’re in a relationship. If a man judges himself unequal to the task of securing a woman’s affection, every step he takes towards a woman will be marred by a mind that is fighting itself, that is acting against a what he “knows” to be true. I personally ruined a really great relationship for pretty much this reason. On a heart level, I thought I wasn’t good enough, and I acted out on that.

Your “self image” is important and, although the term sound’s cheesy, it’s deadly important. The only real way to fix it is to be completely honest with yourself about your faults and about your virtues. As Christian men, we often avoid thinking about the last half, and often think wrongly about the first half.

We often search for a moral “safety margin”, we think that if we think of ourselves as worse than we are we can avoid pride. We also avoid recognizing our own virtues for thinking that it’s “prideful”.

The only problem with this understandable line of thought, is that we’re using lies to get to virtue, and that does not work. God has given each of us great gifts, to disclaim these gifts is pride. To think of ourselves as worse than we are is unjust.

The reality is that you may have to spend some time working on yourself to really be ready for a relationship. But, even if that’s the case, you’ll have far better relationships than you would otherwise.

And you’ll be more ready for them,

Michael D.

Despair and recklessness alternating back and forth, you don’t think you have a chance with this chick to start with, then you charge in, get bad feedback, a little more despair, rally with recklessness. That is why the process feels painful.

Would you typically get on your hands and knees and crawl to get something out of someone you’ve never met? Just because you’re not physically prostrate doesn’t mean you’re not emotionally prostrate. You’re doing the emotional equivalent of getting on your hands and knees and begging her to like you. Does this seem likely to work? Does it seem likely to make you feel good about yourself?

The fact of the matter is that her opinion shouldn’t mean that much to you until you know her well enough to know that it matters. This, of course, doesn’t mean complete indifference (BTW, if anybody has to say “I don’t care what people think of me”, clearly they do).

This is all well and good to say, of course, everybody “knows” that you can’t come off as desperate, but most men’s solution is to be desperate and try really hard not to seem so. That’s why there’s a stiff strained quality to a man caught in the despair/recklessness cycle, nervous laughter, etc.

However not being desperate is easier than you might think. Aquinas has a great section in the Summa on the qualities of the ”magnanimous” man. What he means by “magnanimous”, isn’t purely generosity, the sense by which we mean it, but more a sense of “greatness”, someone who is really proficient at something, even if that activity is being a man. One of the byproducts of this kind of magnanimity is security. The magnanimous man is secure, feels safe and has a slower, more natural presentation of himself.

According to Aquinas the key to this seems to be that he is only concerning himself with a very few things. When you’re in the despair/recklessness cycle, you’re kind of in a mental fog, trying to do too much at once, your mind is racing to find all sorts of ways to make her like you.

The key is to decide beforehand, perhaps even in your room long beforehand, what things you’ll deliberately focus on when talking to a girl, and the things that you will not focus on. A good list might be

Focus on:

Getting to know her, Revealing a little bit of my own personality so she can get to know me,

Do not focus on:

Wondering whether or not she likes me, wondering what will seem cool to her, anything that seems like “begging” behavior or might be,

The key part of this focus, or non focus, is deliberate intent. You can’t stop ideas from presenting themselves to your mind, or some old holdover feelings of insecurity. But, if you notice you start trending another way, shift your focus back to where you want it to go. “What should I be focusing on?” Remember your list.

And put the begging bowl down,

Michael D.

If you’ve gotten to hello and had a good interaction, it is best to set up a date right then and there. This is also one of the few times where having some concrete plan beforehand is a good idea. Suggest dinner, coffee, walk in the park, whatever, and set up a date and time. Asking for her phone number flows naturally, so you can coordinate.

This is a solid idea for several reasons. First, it robs the whole “getting the digits” thing of formality. It makes it easier for her to give you her phone number. Next, if you set a date and time, you can cut down on the irritating problem of getting a girl’s phone number, only to have her never pick up. You probably won’t completely get rid of this problem, but the “flake rate” will start trending down.

This is also a good “leading” behavior, and can communicate decisiveness. You also are seeing how “serious” she is about you, giving her a chance to say no. So on that level it’s also a great time and effort saving device.

An extra word about “fear” since that seems to be the dominant experience holding most men who have trouble dating back. I know that when I first started, actually talking to girls was a big enough step, and I  didn’t usually take it to the next step.

 Aquinas makes a distinction between two kinds of fear, a rational fear, the kind of thing that keeps you from walking out into traffic, and irrational fear. Irrational fear is, generally, when you let a fear of a small thing overwhelm your pursuit of a greater thing. This is why we admire courage, if there was nothing to fear it wouldn’t be that laudable.

You don’t have to “feel” brave to “be” brave,

Michael d.