A common piece of advice given towards men who struggle with dating and lack confidence is just “fake it till you make it.” It’s easy to see why — it helps to at least evince an attractive quality even when you lack that quality naturally. It’s also a better piece of advice than simply telling them to be confident, as evidenced by its most common rebuttal: it’s hard to be confident when you don’t have the experience or skills that instill confidence. Nevertheless, both pieces of advice are flawed, in part because they involve a level of deception (either towards oneself or towards others), but also because they conflate, to an extent, confidence with a closely related, but distinct, virtue: courage.

Both confidence and courage entail a certain resolve in the face of situations that may be considered intimidating, so there’s at least a resemblance between the two. But they differ in that the former is characterized by an assuredness that one will receive what they want, where the latter involves confronting the possibility that they may not get what they want. So, confidence is characterized by lack of fear in dating situations, but courage is characterized by the acknowledgment of one’s fear, but with a degree of mastery over that fear.

Courage has some advantages over both genuine and affected confidence. Over both forms, courage is better adapted to uncertainty than either. It’s easy to have genuine confidence in a situation one is familiar with. As for affected confidence, courage has the advantage in that it involves fewer mental gymnastics. It is, therefore, a more honest approach for a man who struggles with dating. On that note, it has fewer tensions with other virtues. Not only more honest, it involves a more temperate approach to speaking about oneself that neither diminishes nor blusters.

Now to the best parts: courage is traditionally associated as a masculine virtue, and due to its resemblance to confidence, can be considered an attractive quality as well. Even better is this: confidence is often the fruit of exercising courage. Thus, it makes more sense to promote it over false confidence.