If you expect a story of how I hacked my dating life, read no further. This is a simple confession that might make you laugh, cry (probably not🤣), no feelings, or and ideally, do just one new thing you might have forgotten doing like I had.
Dating industry is without doubts one on the fastest growing. No surprise, loneliness is a state of mind that can kill you. We are designed to live in unions. It is backed by thousands of studies that being alone long-term makes us feel miserable, in one way or another.
I wanted to be a part of the dating business. Two years back I and my friend started organizing singles events. Long story short, 7 events later and one married couple (that made us really happy and proud that our side hustle actually influenced somebody's life in such a profound way), we stopped. My friend got married, I still tried to push it further on my own for few months but it was a pure torture, I missed the energy we created while working together, alone I just did not like it. So I let go and now I am working on other things that truly make me happy.
Here the confession comes. I spent two years working on others love lives and I did mostly everything wrong in my love life. I can't complain about my dating life, I had a lot of dates in past two years and I met some really amazing guys. Many of my friends would say I had more dates in past two years than they had in a life. So what the heck was wrong? I was organizing events for people to meet face to face and I so much promoted the idea of people talking to each other again, yet my own dates mostly came from Tinder. UAAAAAAAA ;-)
Disclaimer, i have nothing against dating apps or webs, actually on the contrary I work on next level of dating apps, but there are things that must change in the way online dating works.
Now, what have we learned from the practice when we spent hours on phone or talking with people about why they think they are still single. The reply was mostly "I am too busy to date", "I don't go out of my social circles". Yes, I agree, these really are two reasons why some people are still single. But when we talked more, we realized that there is one thing they all have in common. CHECKLIST, long and very detailed. It was not unusual to speak with a 36 years old single lady who told us: "I want somebody between 35 to 38 years old, must be from this ethnic group, follow this religion, must earn that much money, must be employed by this type of company, must have this and that education, this and that hobbies, must look like this", and blah blah blah.
Knowing what we want sometimes prevets us from getting great deals. Keep your checklist, please, but short and limited to absolutely vital conditions.
So what is the one thing that you can try doing to change your current status? Do what our parents used to do, or most probably what even you used to do in the pre-tinder era. Approach people you find attractive and start a conversation with them.
We all understand that if we want to get a good job, we might need to pick up some new skills and if we want abs, we need to change our diet and work out...but we somehow missed out the proactive concept when it comes to dating. Now there is a lot to it, the fear of rejection, the discomfort of reaching out to strangers, if you are a woman like me the little voice inside us calls why me, it should be the man to ask me out and if he doesn't why would I?
The single best advice I ever implemented in my life to overcome the fear of approaching a man and starting a conversation is this. It is called the "5-second rule". Once you spot someone you find attractive, count to five and GOOOOO talk with him or her. If you stop and start thinking about it all our fears will come up and prevent us from the action. More often you do it, more comfortable you feel about it. Now I feel like it is the single greatest idea in the world when it comes to taking the first step for anything. It never failed me and it became so automatic that I don't feel uncomfortable, and I don't need Tinder anymore.
Ready, set, GO!