There she was sitting across from me, slowly sipping on an overpriced margarita, recanting an interesting story about some weekend mountain trip she had made with friends earlier in the summer. Her straightened dirty blond hairy barely hanging below her shoulders, her lips colored with a shade that somehow seemed to accent her skin tone and freckles at the same time, and a lovely summer dress that hung close enough to give a hint of her body without revealing too much. We had similar personalities, hobbies, got along great and had really good and frequent sex. We had been going out for close to 6 weeks and by all accounts I should be have been crazy about this girl. But the truth is, I wasn’t. I had been going back and forth on if I wanted to continue to see her after only 3 dates. She was pretty, funny and our dates would always be fun, it seemingly didn’t make any sense that I wasn’t that into her

See, she did have one big problem that as much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t look past. She had really low confidence in herself. Confidence problems that I picked up even before our first date when we had matched online. I played it off as nervousness at meeting a new person, but it never went away. And once I realized she had low confidence the more I would see it. I would start to become annoyed when it reared its head. It made no sense, she was pretty, she had a good job, she was kind, funny and had a great overall personality. Why did this great girl think so lowly of herself? That lack of confidence started to ruin my opinion of her. I started to find myself wanting to hangout and talk to her less. Her lack of confidence made me withdraw.

I dated her for another two weeks in hope that she would change or maybe I could look past her confidence issues but in the end I couldn’t and she didn’t change. I didn’t realize how much I valued confidence in a partner until I dated someone without it. And here is the thing, as much as I value that trait now; women value it so much more. I knew it was important trait that women looked for in men, but in my mind I used to undersell just how important it really was to have. But dating someone will low confidence was really an eye opener. I had never dated a woman with such outward confidence issues before; I believe that’s why I let it continue as long as I did but I won’t be as open to it in the future.

Guys on here praise the importance of confidence everyday. But I noticed a lot of other guys will argue against it, they usually blame their lack of success on looks and social status. I think this largely stems from the fact that we value beauty and attractiveness by far as the most important trait for a woman to have. Since so many of the guys here aren’t even thinking of confidence as a trait to look for in women, they think of it as overblown or worse don’t actually believe that its something really that important. After being on the other side of it, I see how unattractive quality it is for a person to be unconfident. And I guarantee I still don’t value it as much as most women out there.