Haven’t dated in almost 10 years

2020-04-09T00:06:42+00:00

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SnapSocialGuru · 2020-04-09T00:09:27+00:00

Hey man. Welcome back to the dating scene. It sounds like you’re coming in with a great attitude and a solid idea of what you need to improve.

I compiled a list of “top resources” to consume, especially during this time of COVID.

Check it out, and let me know if you have questions:

https://www.reddit.com/user/SnapSocialGuru/comments/fwpm43/top_pua_dating_resources_during_covid19/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

erect_sean · 2020-04-09T00:57:54+00:00

The tough part is the lockdown as you said. You really can't go out to bars to talk to women. The good news is you recognize some points to work on. As far as meditation goes I;d recommend Insight Timer app. It's free and the best thing is that it has guided meditations to help you get started and creating a habit.

As far as "seduction" material, I would probably recommend only 2 things, one the book Fundamentals of Female Dynamics and the second one is to find RSD infield videos to look what talking confidently with women looks like.

Finally, I don't know what your work situation is like but if you've got extra time try investing it in a hobby or something that you've always wanted to learn. For me it has been learning to cook and I think it can help you with you confidence knowing you can be better even in small things.

dkinginthenorth · 2020-04-09T04:54:46+00:00

Read Models by Mark Manson it will help you a lot

swaglordobama · 2020-04-09T09:38:23+00:00

Don't overcomplicate the process. Phase one is to just go out, have fun, be social, meet people, especially bar and restaurant owners (they will help a lot later). Once you're comfortable in social interactions and have a few good female friends, phase two is about focusing more on dates, bring the dates to the places that know you well.

Logistics are important, have a plan to lead things to a place where sex can happen.

ImJustSo · 2020-04-09T14:05:31+00:00

Every action is a choice, but no feeling is ever a choice.

Apply that sentence to everything in your life.

Can't look a girl in the eyes because it makes you uncomfortable? Or because you've chosen to not look her in the eyes?

Can't ask a girl out because you're afraid of rejection? Or because you've chosen to not ask her out?

Everything is simplified to just feelings and just actions. Once you realize that you can separate the two things, nothing stops you ever again.

I am allowed to be afraid. I am allowed to be uncomfortable. I am allowed to be anxious. I am allowed to feel whatever I feel.

I'm not allowed to look away. I'm not allowed to run away. I'm not allowed to cower. I'm not allowed to avoid this or that, because of feeling.

I hold myself accountable. I acknowledge my feelings. Then I choose the correct action, despite whatever feelings I have about the actions.

Therefore, I appear to be the most confident mother fucker you've ever seen walk into a room. Confidence is choosing the best thing for you and not letting your feelings dictate who you will be. Your actions dictate who you are.

I choose to be a good man to others and I choose to be a good man to myself. Those choices lead to a confidence in knowing who I am. Those choices lead to comfort that I'm allowed to just be, just feel whatever I feel, but know that I'm going to choose better than how I feel.

FancyRedditAccount · 2020-04-09T04:28:10+00:00

Looks like you're probably gonna need to wait a little more than another year for a vaccine first, before you can really start dating again, too.

decapitate_the_rich · 2020-04-09T07:37:18+00:00

In a very similar situation and enjoying all the replies.

Daybyhour69er · 2020-04-09T08:16:54+00:00

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2020-04-09T10:06:02+00:00

Think about what advice you'd give to your twenty year old self...and implement it now... it's never too late to start again! Good luck mate!

Workamaholic · 2020-04-09T15:43:49+00:00

This is tough, a lot of things changed in dating in 10 years, but a lot of things remain the same. I would say the most difficult thing to tackle, and the thing you need to understand is your belief system.

I think everyone grows up with a messed up belief system, and the only way to change it is to challenge it with actions and experience. Here’s a few beliefs that can, in my opinion, do more damage than good if left unchecked.

Bullshit self-limiting Beliefs

#1 Rejection is the worst feeling in the world. It’s unbearable and permanently scars you. - This just plain isn’t true. I’ve had a series of embarrassing moments where not just one but MANY people rejected me at once. A whole room thought I looked like an idiot. Because I did, but honestly no one gives a shit. In the long term, and frankly even the next day it was mostly forgotten about. You need to understand and truly believe that it’s not that bad. Because it isn’t. It’s hard to really believe this, to truly feel it until you’ve gone through it, so go out (when it’s socially safe) and get fucking rejected. Trust me, you’ll find that it’s those rejections that shape you in the best way, they harden you if you take them as a learning experience. But don’t ever beat yourself up for them. It’s all part of the experience of growth. A phrase I like to remember “Inaction is the feeling of future possibilities rejecting you.” The only rejection that really hurts, is in-action. Train yourself to act on your instincts and your attraction.

#2 The Only Way to Happiness is to have Sexually Attractive Partners. - This belief is hard to give up, but I assure you it’s essential to help get yourself into the right mind space. I think societally as men we are told that success is being rich, powerful, and desired. To a degree, absolutely, those things feel great, but don’t believe anyone who says that’s the whole story. That type happiness is weak, it’s dependent on other things so it fades and can leave people in a hard state (cue Middle-Age Identity) crisis. I think it’s an essential part of everyone’s journey to find what makes them happy and to fight for those things, but I can tell you in my own life, living a life to try and challenge myself in the areas of courage, compassion, and connection has yielded fantastic results. I’ll tell you what happens if you keep believing a partner is the key to happiness, that neediness will push them away. Most people and especially women don’t want to be relied on as your single source of happiness, it doesn’t feel good.

#3 Women are attracted the same way as men.” A general belief that women are only interested in dating men who are at or above their level of attraction and caste. This is just un-fucking true. In my experience, women ARE looking to have an emotional connection with someone who makes them feel. That’s it. They are mostly emotionally lead and it’s a beautiful thing to appreciate, not deride. That emotional connection is hard to find for a woman, they can find sexy looking guys that want to pound them poorly and leave. That’s not really what they want, not forever at least. It’s good to think about how the shoe feels on the other foot. Being desired superficially is fun to imagine but the novelty fades real fast. You’ll hear stories from women who after having decent sex with a man and still feel terribly alone or just emotionally un-engaged. Now, getting yourself to a level where you can engage with a woman emotionally takes effort and growth, I’m a huge fan of Karen Brody’s book “Open Her” about this. I promise I’m not a book plug, she just gives you a first-hand insight on how different types of masculinity feel. But that leads me to my last one.

#4 You have to change yourself for someone else in order to be happy.” This, in my opinion is the big-daddy of self limiting beliefs. It’s so fucking pervasive that it can creep into your life if you don’t police it. If you’re changing to suit someone else, please fucking don’t. Nobody wants this and it’s the origins of what are called co-dependent relationships. You are ultimately in charge of your life, your feelings, your actions, your beliefs, your opinions, your desires, you HAVE to hold yourself accountable to your choices, they are what can make you, YOU. So, stand up for what YOU believe you should be, how YOU feel, what actions YOU take. Make no mistake, this is a battle and it’s a bit of a fight at times. It’s really easy to fall into doing things because you think other people will appreciate you for them, here and there, not so bad, but you need to make sure that you’re constantly speaking and acting on your OWN inner voice. I believe that this is a true core of masculinity, and at a certain point because of shame or something, some of us give up the reigns to our own lives and it takes time and inner work to grab them again. Generally a hard truth to grasp is that the answer is usually not easy. The better things in life for you are on the other side of discomfort and struggle, but push and get to them. I’d highly recommend David Goggins book “Can’t Hurt Me” about the power of tenacity and true inner strength.

Hope that was helpful. Good luck on your journey. Remember that self-improvement is the only true dating advice and you’re always worth the investment.

Manny_120 · 2020-04-09T01:14:17+00:00

First thing that you will need to do is focus on just being yourself most of the time and stop doubting your abilities on approaching or talking to any women out there.... second and the last thing is handle it with a little bit of care and do not over extend yourself to conversations that you know to yourself are not gonna end up very well. I hope these few points that I gave will help you somehow to manage to get back on the dating scene.

WIA20XX · 2020-04-09T02:14:29+00:00

Therapy.

You can do a lot of it via webcam these days.

If you don't fix the internals, no pickup material will help

awwhorsefeathers · 2020-04-09T12:37:25+00:00

“Tripp Advice” on YouTube is the dating master. He’s the guy to watch for learning how to play the dating game in an authenticate and ethical, yet skilled way.

EternalJourney · 2020-04-10T13:05:13+00:00

Honestly, given your problems with eye contact and the rest of your text, it feels to me like you got serious issues when it comes to self esteem. It might be advisable for you to visit a therapist to solve the underlying issues.

If you decide not to, I clearly respect that and then my advice for you would primarily be to focus on your Inner Game. Read about it (here or on seductionbase) and try to get the basics covered. Mind you, Inner Game only works when you got real life references to manifest your new belief system.

E.g. when you start to reprogram yourself and tell yourself that you are the price and that girl could not do any better than with you, then you need something in real life to back this up. So start working on your life as well, start working out (this one helped me TREMENDOUSLY), try to be the best version of yourself and improve yourself every day.

If you have this habit of daily self-improvement down, than this is a very good anchor point for you inner game - you might not be the best right now, but goddamn you are on your way there and the fact alone that you are working on yourself makes you a so much better choice than 60% of the lazy-ass guys out there.

Meditation is a very good instrument that (if applied long term) can help you focus your thoughts (e.g. get out of your head) and even redirect them towards a more positive self-image.

Exercise is good, because naturally you will be happier because of the dopamin that your body spreads and because it provides you with a purpose. Further girls will see you in a different way if you are a muscular guy and increase your chances at game. No excuses brother, I know gyms are closed right now but a bench and weights on amazon cost rougly 150$ and last a lifetime. If you want further advice on how to train effectively just PM me. Bit of story from me: when I was 20 I was the most skinny guy in school, which hampered my self-image, I had zero presence in a room and obviously girls did not get naturally attracted to me. Now, 6 years later (took me 1 year of constant and disciplined work out/bulking phase to get to my form) I got a James Bond type body and the routine to work out every second day is unshakeable. Now I am in the situation, where girls approach ME, not the other way round. Mind you though, in parallel I also developed confidence, got academically succesful etc. but this pillars significance is HUGE in my opinion.

Approaching is necessary component of game and should also be applied, but since chances are high that this might crush your self-esteem too much initially, I would recommend to first focus on Inner Game/exercising for a month and then begin to approach. But baby step! And get the mindset down that every approach is a success, because how many guys would even have the balls to cold approach a girl?

Design your life in a way that it makes you happy, that you generally feel good - develop hobbies, start reading, doing yoga, poker whatever it is. Happy lifestyle is attractive as fuck.

Hope this gives you some orientation on how to go on in your journey. Feel free to hit me up if you got any questions.

recyclablebanthas · 2020-04-13T02:47:33+00:00

If you take a car into the mechanic and say, it's broke...... they're going to have questions. Similarly with a doctor if you go in and say you don't feel well.

This sort of thing is often complicated and so a little more context is needed before we can really get a better feel for what's going on under the hood and what you could do to change course.

1

M/35- have only had one gf when I was 21.

Couple questions about this, to establish context:

How did you meet her?
- Who opened who and how?
- Where were you?
- What were you doing?
- What did you talk about in your first conversation?
How did you ask her out?
What did you do for your first meet/date?
What went well in the relationship?
How long did you date her?
What went wrong in the end?
How did it end?
Are you still friends with her now?

2

Went through my twenties and early thirties being incredibly jaded and depressed.....social anxiety....

What was your social life like?

Describe your friendship circles?
- How did you meet them?
- How many people are in one of your friendship circles?
- How many circles do you have?
What do you do socially?
What were you doing socially when you had that GF?

3

I’ve been working on myself, coming to some hard truths about my past, and how I can better myself (add better jobs, exercise, meditation, etc). I’ve realized I’m really fucking lonely.

What truths?

In any case, it sounds like whatever you've been doing, you've come to this social/dating issue as something else on the list you're ready to work on.

So that's good and shows momentum.

4

I’m looking for advise on getting back to not even dating, but socializing/ flirting.

Let's hammer out the terminology here. What is socialization, really?

Socializing is an interaction between two (or more) people.
It involves two key components: receiving and sending information.
Receiving = listening & paying attention closely so one gets the signals being sent.
- Some signals are verbal, many are non-verbal.
Sending = talking & non-verbal communication like body language.
Seduction and dating = One subset of "socializing." The good news is, when you get down to it, the same core skills go into chatting with an old lady in line at the grocery store, as go into picking up on a girl.

Usually the common problems guys have can be categorized as an issue with either sending or receiving.

Receiving: the guy is not actively listening or not paying attention in general, for whatever reason. Maybe he's in his head. The end result is that he lacks the information he needs to know when he could be taking action.
- Example: He's preoccupied with anxiety and misses a cue that a girl is wanting to talk to him. Often, he'll ironically walk away thinking the girl wasn't interested at all.
Sending: the guy lacks confidence and can't or won't put himself out there.
- Example: He might even know a girl is into him, but talks himself out of believing it's true. That way, he has no reason to act. Later, he'll realize he missed an opportunity, but only after his chance has passed.

5

-figuring out what the fuck confidence looks like to me.

This isn't something anyone can really answer for you in the end, but the answer involves a couple key things:

Building the realization that you can trust yourself.
- This in turn, involves building up skills or competencies in areas that are important to your life.
- It also involves acknowledging what you're good at right now. Impostor syndrome and variations on it, are super common.
Winning battles in your own mind. We often have a voice of self-doubt in our heads. Like a narrative that pops up at pivotal moments. The voice that tells us we suck, etc. This voice will often have irrational things to say. Building up confidence involves starting to fact-check that voice. Because sometimes the things it says will be completely bullshit and that's when you have to debate it and win.

6

-Being present and mindful in the moment (something I was always running say from)

This is nothing more than paying attention. If you're not present, it means you're in your head, over-analyzing. Pushing your awareness outside of yourself helps a lot. Focus on taking information in. Scanning, rather than mulling something over in your mind.

The great thing about this, is that information is power. We're talking about one half of socialization here. If you have more real time information because you're paying attention or at least trying to, you'll have more to talk about that people will relate to.

7

-when I was really young, I had issues with eye contact and tone of voice.

What were the eye contact issues? You ended up looking down? Could we categorize this as part of the confidence problem?

What was the tone of voice problem?

8

-Keeping conversation is a big one. I can do it, but it’s gotta be on stuff I like.

This is a problem with receiving, as mentioned above.

If you're actively listening, you'll have more to talk about. If you're tapping into what's going on right then, or using things people have said, in what you talk about, you have plenty of better things to talk about that will work better than gambling that people will be up for talking about whatever you happen to like.

The key aspect of how you get from Receiving/active listening, to Sending/making conversation, is in following up on what someone has said. If someone was just talking about their day, ask them a follow-up on what they just said about their day.

Ask people to elaborate and clarify what they said, or about something they left out. And so on.

I have a problem coming up with shit on the spot.....

This is the thing: You don't need to come up with shit on the spot. The people around you and the situation, are providing a ton of free material, if you push your focus outside of your head. If you're spending time thinking about what to talk about, you're wasting your energy when the world is providing you material.

2020-04-09T17:58:25+00:00

[permanently deleted]

Title	Haven’t dated in almost 10 years
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	50
Comments	70
Date	April 8, 2020 11:59 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/seduction
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/fxhuzb/havent_dated_in_almost_10_years/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/seduction/havent-dated-in-almost-10-years.1493688 https://theredarchive.com/post/1493688

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