Dating in the USA Has Been a Humiliation Ritual
Dating as a man in the USA has been a humiliation ritual for me in the last year since I got divorced, and I've just found the best solution, which all my friends have been trying to tell me. I'm going to explain why what I'm looking to do now is to date women that are not in the US. The value I can provide to a woman worldwide versus one in the US makes me a much better catch globally than I am at home. I have the home field disadvantage. If you've been struggling with dating as a guy in the US and you're thinking, "I'm so sick and tired of this, there's got to be a better way," there is, and I'm going to explain it to you right now.
First, let me talk about how hard I've worked in the US to find out how much women are not interested in me, at least the women that I'm really excited to be with. I'm looking to date top women in the USA. I'm an attractive guy. I'm world famous. I'm healthy. I have a fun personality. I have fathered healthy, beautiful, intelligent children, and I'm looking to do more of that. So I'm looking to date women that I'm very excited about, and I went through a lot of what that looked like in I Went on 20+ Dates After My Divorce. Here's Everything I Was Doing Wrong.
Hypergamy and Why I'm Not a Catch at Home
The problem is hypergamy, where women want a guy that offers as good or better value to them as they offer. They want a guy that they feel is a catch. I don't believe in number rating systems, but I'm using one here to emphasize a point: if, in some market value, a woman would rate herself as a seven, then a guy would need to be rated as an eight. That's what hypergamy means. Women are looking to get a guy that they're excited about, one they feel is a catch and a great deal for them.
The challenge with me is that in the USA, I'm trying to date women who are seeing me as less valuable than them, because what can I provide? Well, I've got debt, and I can provide theoretical income based on the millions I've made online. I'm healthy, I look good, but I don't really stand out that much for that. And I'm missing the superficial stuff that some of these women want, like being one of these big, huge guys that work out at the gym. I would argue I'm probably not a top 10 guy dating in a lot of the USA, which means if I'm trying to date a woman that's in even the top 20%, even if I am in the top 20%, it's difficult, because the women I tend to get excited about figure that they can do better than me. They figure they can get a guy with more money than me, with more superficial looks, with more status.
I've gone out with so many beautiful women, and they consistently say, "I'm not feeling the chemistry," or "I'd rather hang out with my girlfriend," or they don't respond to my messages at all because their lives are filled with things that are all more important than me. From what they've told me and from what I'm imagining from their point of view, I am not offering enough value to them. They're just not getting that excited about what I can do for them. What can I do for them? Father kids? So what, so many of these other guys can do the same thing. I can get married? There are so many other guys that can do the same thing.
Why My Value Goes Up Overseas
What I'm seeing is that when I start dating overseas, my value to a woman dramatically increases, because 96% or so of people worldwide live in the country they were born in. That means only about 4% of people live in a country they weren't born in. When I'm trying to date these women in the US, I'm not standing out that much compared to other guys. They find other guys with more money, or they think other guys look better, or those guys haven't been married before, or they don't already have kids, or they haven't been divorced. These are all the filters women have been giving me: "You're a great guy, but I want a guy who's never been married and doesn't have kids." "You're a great guy, but your debt is a problem." "You're a great guy, but I don't like what you do on YouTube." I'm just not giving them enough for them to get really excited about me, which is a big part of why I wrote Dating Apps Are a Bad Deal for High-Value Men.
Overseas, what I'm finding is that the women are seeing the value I can provide by being a US citizen and having the chance for them to move here. If we were to get married and go through the whole citizenship process, then they would have the chance to live here because of me, and that is offering them a ton more value. And that's a value that every guy in the US can offer. It doesn't matter your height or your looks. That alone does it. Now, this may not apply to maybe 80% of the women globally, but there's a small subsection, and maybe in some places it is the majority, of women around the world who are desperate to get out of the country they are in and would love to live in the USA. Therefore, from a hypergamy standpoint, it's, "Okay, this guy looks good, and he could help me make a life with him in the US, and he wants to be a dad and get married and have kids. That's great. I don't care about anything else." That is so much value that the woman's feeling that I am quite a catch is sufficiently satisfied by the exact same kind of woman where the only difference is where she lives. If that same woman lived in the USA, she'd be looking at me as a seven out of 10, because I wouldn't be providing that value.
What a Friend Told Me About His Country
For example, I talked to a guy recently, and he's from a country I'm not going to name, and I'm not going to name him either, because it's better that way. He said that his country is so desperate and so bad, and as he was talking about it I said, "Man, this just makes me want to go rescue some woman there." He said, "Jerry, you could do that, but it will be difficult, because the women would be so desperate to leave with you. They would say anything. They would do anything. They would act like they are your best friend. They would do anything with you in bed. They would do or say or be anyone to go back to the US with you. They would give anything to get out of their country." Again, this might not be every woman in that country, but there's a small percentage that would just give anything to get out and would leave with any guy that would take them out.
Compare that to the environment we're in, where things in the US at least feel like a matriarchy. Women are walking around looking down on most guys. Most women seem to be looking down on any guy that's at their level or below, and a lot of women think they are even higher value than a lot of the guys are. This has been a tough dating environment in the US, where so many women think they deserve every single little criteria they have and are comfortable disqualifying any guy except a guy they think is almost perfect. As my friend said, it would be hard for me to pick a woman overseas that I could be sure actually cared about me. But that conversation helped me switch my thinking around and realize that's what I need to be doing.
It Feels Like Cheating
I've had several friends who live overseas in several different countries, and they said, "Jerry, we've heard you struggling so bad in the US, crying about these women on your vlogs and how brutal they are with you." Just going out on a date, letting me spend a hundred dollars on them, acting nice, ghosting me immediately, telling me they don't have any chemistry. It has been absolutely brutal, which I got into in I Spent $10,000 on Dating to Help Build My Business and My Dating Failures Make Me Money. That's a Problem. I've literally had one single week where I had a woman I was excited about and she was excited about me. What happened? She just pulled away and ran off, and talking to her about it afterwards, she figures she can get a guy that's absolutely what she wants, and she's not interested in settling for me because I'm not a high enough rating for her. It felt brutal and dehumanizing.
So it's like, okay, are we going to complain about the world, or are we going to put ourselves in a position where the odds are in our favor? It feels like cheating trying to date overseas, because me being able to bring a woman here is so much value that I can get away with being divorced and in debt and a YouTuber. I don't even have to filter for that, because there are so many women worldwide. Obviously there are a lot of women worldwide that don't want a YouTuber who's in credit card debt and has been divorced and has two kids already. But there are so many women worldwide that I can essentially filter out all those and still have plenty left.
My friend said, "Dude, if you get on the dating apps in my country, you will get the same kind of treatment that a rich, tall, perfectly in shape athlete would get in your home country. You get on there, you will have matches with so many women that you won't be able to message all of them, because they want to have a guy from the US and move here. All you need to do is get on our dating apps and you could be talking to 50, a hundred women." I'm 42, and he said I could be talking to women in their early to mid twenties who want families, and there would be hundreds of them I could match with.
Vetting Carefully and Taking It Slow
Obviously some might be scammers, and that is a risk. You've got to be very careful. I make sure I have the woman contact me at jerrybanfield.com/date and send me a video of herself. I have video calls for hours and hours to vet women on WhatsApp to make sure it's a real woman and not some dude somewhere. And I do not send women overseas money for anything. It's purely, "Look, are we going to date? Do we have real chemistry?"
It also means something else. A lot of our dating culture is about rushing into things as soon as possible. The nice thing about dating overseas is it means you have to filter for friendship first. I have a woman I'm talking to now in Africa, a real woman, a real woman that I've spent hours and hours talking to. She's very attractive, beautiful, and has an awesome personality from what I've seen so far. And there's no chance of me seeing her for months. So that's a lot of time and energy I have to invest.
Friendship First, Not Superficial
It's a lot of time to make sure this is a real person who is having real feelings for me and who wants to see me for real. And therefore it forces me not to be so superficial, too. It forces me to get to know this woman's personality over time. I can't just jump into anything. I think that is what a lot of relationships need these days, instead of people just hooking up immediately. It's hard to take it slow in dating a lot of the time when you have such easy access to each other, and this is a lot of what I meant in I Want Love to Find Me the Real Way.
So I think the solution for a lot of guys in the US is to date overseas. And ironically, I think the same thing for a lot of women in the USA: the solution is for them to date overseas also. I know some women that have real down attitudes about the USA and guys in the USA, and then they go date overseas, and it's a very humbling experience for them. It's a very humbling experience, but they get better treatment a lot of the time overseas also, because the same kind of thing happens. The foreign guys are more interested in them than in their local women. I think it's natural for us as people to want to mix up and have culture mixing, especially since the USA is made from so many mixed cultures around the world.
The Guys With the Most Beautiful Wives Already Figured This Out
I also know a number of men locally, and some of the men I know locally that have the most beautiful wives, I've asked them, "How'd you meet her? Where's she from?" And they're listing all these countries around the world where she's from. I see so many dudes that are with just beautiful women, and it's Colombia, Thailand, Ukraine, Russia, Indonesia, China, Japan. And it's like, all right, I see what's happening here. A lot of the guys I see with the most beautiful women have a foreign wife, and they've already figured this out. Sometimes they met them when the women were in the USA, and other times they met them by going directly to the country on business or pleasure. Many of these guys have had horrible dating experiences locally. They go travel overseas, they meet a woman, and they bring her back here.
So this is my new dating strategy, and this is all about positioning yourself so that you can maximize the value you have to offer. I've made it clear how women are rating me. Women in the USA seem to be rating me as a seven out of 10, some lower to be sure, some maybe a bit higher. But overseas, I have a chance to access so many women that are just, "10 out of 10, I'll do anything for that guy." To me, rating someone 10 out of 10 means, "I'll do anything for this person," and that's what I'm looking for. I want a woman that feels that way, that's like, "If I could have this guy, I wouldn't want another one. That would be my king." That's the feeling I described in The Right Person Makes You Want to Give, Not Take.
Nine Months of Friends Telling Me to Stop Suffering
It's funny. My friends have been trying to tell me to date overseas all year, and it's taken me nine months of them telling me over and over again, "Jerry, stop suffering in the US." So I know some of you may have some significant resistance to this. You're thinking, "I can't date some woman in Africa or Asia or Australia or Europe. That's crazy." Well, what's crazy to me is continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results.
I've gone out with 25 or so women this year, which I shared in Divorced Dad in My 40s Wanting More Kids: What I've Learned Dating Again, and some of them even were from overseas. It's crazy: they've been here long enough to be indoctrinated and to have these crazy high standards for the kind of guy they should get. I think I'm at least a seven out of 10, maybe minus a couple of points for debt and divorce, depending on the woman. But it has been crazy to see what kind of guys women are getting attracted to and what the women I've gone out with expect. So many of these women would rather be single than settle for even a guy like me, or all kinds of guys similar to me, good looking guys, guys with money.
I know some of y'all are going to say, "Oh, well, it's your money. That's it." No. I know a guy that makes a lot of money, and he's had women that will go on dates with him, love bomb him, talk about planning trips with him, and ghost him. This is a guy that has a lot of money and a nice house that I've been to a few times. This is a guy that, if you just think things are about money, you would think no woman would ghost. Women ghost this guy. It is crazy.
I'm Done Chasing Women in the US
So I'm grateful that I finally got here. At this point, I'm not even interested in dating a woman in the US anymore, unless she comes on to me, unless she picks me out, unless she hits on me. And I don't even want to tell women in the US about my YouTube, because as soon as they see my YouTube, most of them lower my value in their ranking system. Whereas worldwide, I can filter for that. I covered the upside of staying single and selective in Single Men Win Big, But Keep Your Eyes Open, and this is the next step for me.
So at this point, I hope I've made it abundantly clear. If you have some resistance, open your mind to it and think about it. If you're wondering how to even get started dating worldwide and which countries to look in, I'll plan to do some more videos about that soon. This is the introduction. Step one is you need to open your mind and think abundantly. If you're thinking you can't date outside the US, that's scarcity thinking. There are billions of women on this planet. There are probably hundreds of millions of women that are single around the world. There are probably tens of millions of women around the world who would love to date a guy in the US and would rate you very highly just because of that. So think about that and open your mind to it. I still believe, as I wrote in Dating Is the Most Worthwhile Thing You Can Possibly Do, that this is worth every bit of the effort, and I'm documenting the whole journey in my Dating playlist.
If you want to talk to me about the details of exactly what I'm doing, I'm a little bit ahead of what I'm talking about here, so go to jerrybanfield.com and schedule a call with me. And if you want a shirt like this, a custom handmade shirt, I'm going to put this on my website too in my store.