This page is about getting ready to date by working on yourself first. It holds seven lessons from my dating course, and together they cover your bad habits, loving yourself, a daily system for healthy living, how you look, spiritual growth, seeing people as people, and what you actually want in a partner. It is part 2 of 6 of the course.
I recorded these lessons in early 2015. I was married then, and I was talking as a husband who had stopped drinking in April 2014. Since then my marriage ended in divorce in December 2025. I'm a single dad of two in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I've been on about fifty dates in the year since, with no lasting relationship yet. I've left the lessons exactly as I recorded them.
In Get honest about your bad habits, I tell how it was a breakthrough to admit to my wife, a few months in, that I drank too much and played too many video games. I also describe how my drinking and my dating kept getting in each other's way. In Love yourself and you will be lovable, I say you can't love someone else more than you love yourself, and I connect my excessive habits to that. I say I'd had an average of 50 to 100 hangovers a year for the last 10 years, except 2014.
The lesson on building a successful system is really about a daily system for healthy living. The title speaks of a healthy weight, but what I describe is my own routine: up at 5:30 if my wife had to work and 6:30 if not, in bed around 9:30 or 10:30, an hour on the couch in the morning, a real breakfast, then work, exercise and time with friends. I say a system like that protects you from trivial decisions and shows you who is worth changing it for. It is my experience, not medical advice.
In Work a little bit each day on how you look, I tell the story of my football jersey years and the frustrations in college. In my senior year I bought some clothes and started looking nicer every day, and I had my first girlfriend. I compare your body to a car you can keep improving. Again, this is only what I did and what I saw. The benefits of developing spiritually says I treated dating like an addiction, with a high before the date and a crash after, and that a spiritual foundation lets you lovingly say no.
In Understand there is no "opposite sex," only people, I describe the role-playing and object thinking I was stuck in when I was younger. I say I felt a change around the fifth date with my wife. The last lesson, Discover what matters most to you in a partner, argues that the one thing that really matters is how it feels when you are together, with mutual attraction at the base. I tell the story of an early online date where I knew right away and stayed for an hour anyway. I also say my wife and I had huge differences, on guns and on politics, and that those could be dealt with.
The course continues with Online Dating Course: From a Great Profile to a First Date. If you want the beginning, the previous part is How to Date, Fall in Love, and Live Happily Ever After: Start Here. I now work with people one on one as a dating coach, and you can find out more at my dating coaching page.
On this page
Every lesson is below in full, in course order, each under its own heading.
- 5) Get honest about your bad habits (January 6, 2015)
- 6) Love yourself and you will be lovable (January 3, 2015)
- 8) Start building a successful system for maintaining a healthy weight (January 10, 2015)
- 9) Work a little bit each day on how you look (January 6, 2015)
- 10) The benefits of developing spiritually (January 6, 2015)
- 11) Understand there is no "opposite sex" only people (January 6, 2015)
- 12) Discover what matters most to you in a partner (early 2015)
5) Get honest about your bad habits
From my video published January 6, 2015.
Whether you're in a relationship now, or you're single and not looking to be in one anytime soon, or you're single and trying to be in one, getting honest with yourself about your bad habits is really helpful for understanding what areas you can improve in.
I had a big breakthrough with my wife when, after just a few months, I was honest enough to admit to her, "Hey, I drink too much and I play too many video games, and I'm willing to work on both of those to be the best person I can with you." That was a big breakthrough for me. I had not been willing to do that in my previous relationships. I had consistently only wanted to say, "I'm perfect just how I am. I've got no problems, and what are you going to do about it?" I had that attitude that I was just fine the way I was, and I was not humble enough to say, "Okay, I've got a few problems. I'm willing to look at them and do something about it."
Getting humble about who you are
Getting humble about who you are is very helpful whether you're single or in a relationship, no matter where you're at. If you can get humble on your own and take an honest look at what problems you have, then you can be a much better person to date. If you're so entrenched in your problems, it can be hard to work through dating like that.
There were periods of my life when I drank so much that it was hard for me to date. I had to work through it. I made bad decisions when I was dating and drinking all the time, and the two always got in the way of each other. Dating would get in the way of my drinking, and then I'd do something to get the dating out of the way. My drinking would get in the way of my dating, so then I'd try to do something with dating to get the drinking out of the way. I'd promise to make a date with a girl so I wouldn't get drunk.
When my wife and I were first dating, I was tiptoeing around with my drinking and my dating, trying to keep them separate. Of course, when we moved in together, I only made it a few months before the dating and the drinking came together full speed.
Figure out who you are first
If you can get honest about your problems earlier with yourself, and start figuring out who you are, what your issues are, what you can do better and what opportunities you have to improve, then you can look to date someone who ends up in a relationship with you. Take this opportunity right now to figure out who you are and get to know yourself, and then you can look to be with someone in a similar place to where you are now. You can find more lessons like this one in my Dating playlist.
6) Love yourself and you will be lovable
From my video published January 3, 2015.
If you want to be lovable, you've got to love yourself. You can't love someone else more than you love yourself. You might think you can, but the truth is that I've found I cannot love someone else more than I love myself. If I want to love someone else and be a good husband, I have to love myself.
Here's a concrete way of putting that. I often get my wife flowers. I try to keep a fresh set of flowers around for her all the time because she likes them and it makes me feel good about myself. I do it out of love for myself. I get her flowers because it makes me feel good about myself, and she likes them. But the biggest impact is that I feel like I'm a good husband, and that helps me feel good about myself. Everything ends up coming back around to me.
The only person you can control is you
If you want to be a great lover, you've got to be able to love yourself, because no matter how much you want to do or think you can offer for someone, you can't be them in their head 24/7. You can't live and run their entire life for them. Ultimately, the only one you can really control and do anything about is you. The only one I can do anything about and control is me. So if I want to be a great lover, I have to be able to love myself.
The biggest thing my wife helped me with was loving myself. I was not very good at loving myself before I met my wife. She helped me develop the ability, the inspiration and the motivation to love myself, and I'm a much better husband when I love myself. If I'm going around telling myself I'm a horrible person, if I'm going around saying horrible things about myself in my head, guess what's going to come out of my mouth? Horrible things. Mean things. It may not come out nearly as often. If I say a hundred mean things to myself in my head, maybe one will come out of my mouth. But it will come out.
You absolutely cannot love another person more than you love yourself. You might be able to outwardly treat them better than you inwardly treat yourself, but ultimately you cannot do better for another person than you can do for yourself. The reason is all of those little details. You might be telling yourself in your head, "God, I'm such a jerk. Man, I don't deserve this. I'm an awful person." You may not say it just like that. You might say, "Man, I'm always late. I never get good grades on a test. Man, I'm ugly. I'm dirty. I'm filthy. I'm a cheat. I'm a liar." There are a ton of other ways you might say it. "I'm not confident in my appearance. I don't want anyone to see me."
I remember a girl in college who ran in the dark because she didn't want anyone to see her running in the daytime. She was willing to risk having bad things happen while running at night by herself, because she didn't think people would see her during the day and like what they saw. That is not loving yourself. That's hating yourself.
How hating yourself shows up in a relationship
If you hate yourself, you will treat the people in your life with hate in all of the little details. I know I've done it a lot. I had a girlfriend in college during a period when I was particularly good at hating myself, and she got all kinds of those little actions. I was not big into buying her flowers, because I figured she didn't really need any flowers. I hadn't done anything wrong, I thought. In reality I was doing things wrong all the time and not maximizing the good I could do. I was terrible in a relationship before I learned to love myself better.
Loving myself and treating myself well makes it easy to treat other people well. If you find someone who's treating you badly, they're almost always treating themselves worse. Someone doesn't go around calling you a bunch of names, putting you down and trying to make you feel bad without living with that all day, every day. You don't see people who are happy inside the way I'm happy inside going around treating people badly. I don't treat people badly now because I'm happy inside. I can accept what other people do. I don't have to take my emotions out on them, because I'm happy. I love myself. I'm tolerant of myself. I might screw up. I probably will screw up, probably even making this video. That's okay. I'll do it again if I have to. I'll edit it if I have to. I will beg your forgiveness when it's not perfect. I'm okay with myself now, and this is the first time in my life I've been okay with myself.
It's a miracle I found a wife who was able to love me even when I could barely love myself. She suffered a lot because I ultimately didn't love myself. I wrote about this more in the things I want out of other people I can give to myself, and I go further into learning to love in Learn Love: How to Learn to Love and Find the Right Person.
Excessive habits and self-love
One of the problems I have is with excessive habits like drinking, gambling and video games. I would go into those habits all the time out of not loving myself. "Oh, I've been bad. I should just get drunk. I'll have some fun," and then I'd really suffer afterwards. I didn't think of it like that consciously, but look at it this way. If you're treating yourself badly, if you're doing things that hurt yourself, how do you really feel about yourself? I probably had an average of 50 to 100 hangovers a year for the last 10 years, except 2014. I stopped drinking in April. I'd had enough. If I love myself, I don't do that. If I love myself, why would I want to do something that would make me sick?
Think about it with food. If some food was expired and I had other food in the house, I certainly wouldn't go eat the expired food on purpose. If I love myself, I'd think, "I'll throw that out." But if I was sitting there thinking I'm a bad person, with a bunch of negative thoughts about myself, then I might think, "You bought that food, and you're going to eat it." That's hating yourself. That is not treating yourself with love.
When you don't love yourself, it's hard for other people to love you. You might get lucky and find someone who loves themselves and is willing to love you while you figure out how to love yourself. But ultimately, if you want to be happy and you want to be a great lover, you've got to love yourself. You're with yourself 24/7, every day, for your whole life. There's no one more important to love than you, and no one outside of you can fix you. My wife certainly inspired me to want to do better, but ultimately I am the one who's got to do better every single day. I am the one who has to love and take care of myself mentally every day, regardless of whatever's done outside of me.
Letting negative thoughts be
If you expect someone else to be a great lover, if you expect someone else to love you, what you get will be in proportion to how much you love yourself. If you can stop all those negative thoughts, and I don't mean stop them with more negativity, you'll be in a better place. For example, if you think, "God, I'm always late," you don't stop that by then thinking, "Oh, you're such a hateful person to yourself." You let that thought be. "I'm always late. Okay." You don't take it seriously. You just dismiss it, the same as you would dismiss a comment from someone else that you didn't believe.
If I tried to tell you right now, "You are an awful person," you would probably just say, "No, I'm not. You're welcome to think that." If I got you mad by saying that, the only way I could do it is because you believe it. If I tell you you're an awful person and you get mad, "No, I'm not," it's because deep down you agree with me. If someone comes up to me now and says I'm an awful person, I'm like, "Okay." I don't react to it. If someone tells me, "Jerry, you've been cussing too much lately," I think, "Yeah, you're probably right, I have." But when you told me I was cussing too much before, I'd cuss right back at you.
Self-love and who you attract
If you want to be a great lover, you've got to love yourself. Starting with loving yourself gives you the best opportunity to get everything else right when it comes to love, dating and relationships, because love starts with self-love. And the more you love yourself, the more you will be attracted to someone else who loves themselves. At the peak of me hating myself, I was attracted to a girl who hated herself, and you can imagine how that went. Not good. The more I loved myself, the more I was attracted to my wife, and she loves herself. We have a wonderful relationship because both of us love ourselves. That's what it's all about. If you can love yourself, then you can love someone else. You can find more lessons like this in my Dating playlist.
8) Start building a successful system for maintaining a healthy weight
From my video published January 10, 2015.
A healthy system for living is something you do every day. To give you an example, I'll give you mine. Every day I get up in the morning around the same time: 5:30 if my wife has to go to work, 6:30 if not. I get up around that same time so my body knows exactly when I'm supposed to get up, and therefore my body also knows when I'm supposed to go to sleep. So I make a good bedtime that's consistent and matches my time getting up. I go to bed around 9:30 if I'm getting up at 5:30, and around 10:30 if I'm getting up at 6:30. That's a system for sleep, and it's one of those essential things. Sleep is so important for mood.
Part of making a great, healthy person out of you is building a system of things you do every day that work for you to stay healthy. I'm going through mine. I have a system for sleep: I go to bed around the same time and get up at the same time. Every night I go to bed and I have no trouble falling asleep, because my body knows it's supposed to go to sleep between 10 and 11 after I've gotten into bed between 9:30 and 10:30. My body knows what to do, so it does it. It's predictable, and it likes that.
My morning system
When I get up, as soon as I hear the alarm, I immediately get out of bed. No questions, no "well, this." I tell myself there's no reason I can't get out of bed to go sit on the couch, so I go sit on the couch. I pray. I meditate. I have a little something to energize me, like fruit juice, a banana, or even just a bottle of water. So I have a system for eating also. I eat something as soon as I get up every single day, even if it's small, just a little bit of something to let my body know, "Oh, we're awake. We should start revving everything up." I spend about an hour on the couch thinking, meditating and praying. I have a book I read a little bit of every morning. Sometimes in the morning I'll look at my phone. So I have a system for the first hour I'm awake, where I don't have to do anything. If you have to get up early, set your time to get up earlier than that.
After that hour, every morning I eat something substantial. I have a breakfast burrito, even if it's just 300 calories, or I have a sandwich for more calories if I want to go longer without eating again. Then I come in here and make these videos and do work. After that, if it's a weekend, I do something with my wife. If it's a weekday, I continue doing more work, getting my courses done. Then I go to the gym or do some kind of exercise, and then I go to a support group locally. Then I have time to play video games and call my mom, my brother and other friends. Then I watch something with my wife and go to bed. That's what I do almost every single day. I have a system for living healthy, and when you have a system for living healthy, it's a lot easier to deal with everything else in your life, including dating.
Systems and dating
I didn't have a system like that before, except when I lived with my parents. Then my dating was incredibly easy because I had a similar system there. I got up around the same time, I went to the gym or exercised almost every day, and I ate lunch and dinner at almost the same time every day. I wasn't up early enough to eat breakfast, so I didn't have a system for that, and I played video games at night and went to bed late. That worked well for my dating, except here's the thing: I was not willing to integrate the girl I was dating into my life. I did not find a girl I cared about enough to actually modify my schedule for her.
It's a good thing to note that if you have a system for living healthy, when you meet the right person you will modify that system to accommodate their schedule. I get up at 5:30, and at 6:30 on days off, because my wife has to get up at 5:30, or chooses to get up at 5:30, for work. My wife takes about an hour before work to get herself ready in the morning, and she mostly sits quietly and relaxes for most of that time. So I've built my system around my wife's system and around what my wife needs to do. If you don't have someone you're dating and you meet someone, you will be willing to modify your system around them if they're the right person.
If you have a healthy system for living and you meet someone and you will not change it for them, that tells you something. For example, I was dating a girl when I lived with my parents, and I was not willing to give up my Call of Duty time at night with my friends to hang out with her. That was a great thing, because then our relationship quickly ended. I tried a few times, and I said no, I don't want to give up my time with my friends to go to bed early with you. Now here I am, and I've given up a lot of time playing with my friends in order to get up early with my wife. With the right person you will do the right things.
A system protects you
A healthy system for living protects you from getting into things lots of times. Look at me: I have very little opportunity to screw around with anything in my life. Nearly every day of my life is planned out from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed. A healthy system helps so much because it takes out all those stupid, and by stupid I mean trivial, decisions. I know when I'm going to eat in the morning. I even know what clothes I'm going to wear. I just take clothes out of the closet in a certain order, whatever order I hung them up in, and if I'm not willing to wear something, I take those clothes out of the rotation and put them in a "maybe someday I'll give them away or throw them out, or put them back in" category. I have a system for healthy living that works for me, and that system protects me from a lot of things going wrong.
If you're single, having a system for your own healthy living will help you not be attracted to, and not include, the wrong people in your life, and it will help the right people get through your system. If you get up at 9:30 every morning and you start dating someone who gets up at 5:30, then if you like them enough you will get up at 5:30. If you do not like them enough, but you love yourself enough to do your system every day, you will not modify it, and the relationship will not work out. It's a beautiful thing. I've learned this the hard way.
As with everything else, you don't have to copy my system. Make a system that works for you to take care of yourself, whether you're in a relationship or single. My wife has her own thing she does, and I have a system that works for me to take care of myself and stay healthy every day. When you've got dating, relationships, marriage, family and friends, everything gets ridiculously easier with a system. So start setting up your own system for healthy living, then you'll be best prepared to date, have a relationship, be married, be a friend or be a family member, whatever, successfully. I talked about related ideas in Dating Is the Most Worthwhile Thing You Can Possibly Do and in Learn Love: How to Learn to Love and Find the Right Person, and there are more lessons like this in my Dating playlist.
9) Work a little bit each day on how you look
From my video published January 6, 2015.
A big part of dating success is how attractive you are. You can very easily win the affection of someone else, or miss out on it, based on how attractive you are. If you accept that fact, then you can be willing to work at it a bit. The only way you can work at it is a little bit each day. You can't do any grand thing that's going to suddenly change your appearance miraculously. You can do surgeries and all kinds of other things that seem to offer that, but ultimately your appearance is a daily thing. You can put on a lot of makeup, you can try to work out at the gym a lot, and you can wear nice clothes. But if you work at your appearance a little bit every day, rather than trying to binge at it, then you can be confident you look right at the right time.
You don't know when you will need to look your best
A few years ago, back when I often paid no attention to my appearance on most days, someone gave me a good comment: you don't know when you're going to need to look your best. With online dating, you might be able to predict it a bit more, because you know you're going out with someone today or next week. The fact is, you don't know exactly when you're going to meet the love of your life. So you want to at least look decent all the time. I don't mean you have to fix yourself up crazily or do a whole lot, but doing a little bit every day tends to be powerful.
So I try to do a little something with my hair about every day. My wife likes it like this, and I like it like this too. I try to wear some clean clothes every day. I try to work out a little every day. I try to pay attention to my diet every day. I try to do a little bit on my appearance every day. That way I get powerful results in the long term, because I'm not going to lose 50 pounds overnight. I'm not going to suddenly find hair that styles itself. I'm not going to do anything with my clothes that will solve that problem for the rest of my life. All I can do is present the kind of appearance that I want people to see me as, which is a simple and, at the same time, attractive person. That's what I want to show. If you accept that appearance is very important for dating, then you are willing to do something about it.
The football jersey years
When I was younger, I'm grateful that for most of my life I was a handsome young man, and I did not like the whole appearance thing in dating. I used to wear football jerseys. I never did anything with my hair, which is why I usually had a buzz cut. I did not like to wear nice clothes or dress nicely. I just didn't like that. And I consistently had frustrations dating. A girl who was nice enough to explain it to me said, "Jerry, girls don't usually like guys wearing football jerseys, or at least the kind of girls you're trying to date tend not to like that. You need to do something with your appearance."
After three years of college with so many dating frustrations, I finally got it. I hadn't had a girlfriend all through college. Then in my senior year, I bought some clothes and started trying to consistently look nicer every day. All of a sudden I found myself with lots of girls wanting to date me, and I had my first girlfriend. Paying attention to my daily appearance was one of the bigger things I did in terms of effect, and it took relatively little time. You don't have to do anything crazy. Just do what you can do. Try to wear something that makes you look nice, and do a little something with your hair, whether you're a guy or a gal. Wear clothes that are right for you, whatever you like and are comfortable in, but also whatever makes you look attractive.
Looking good for the person you love
What I do is try to look my best each day. It's easy enough to say, "Well, I'm already married, so who do I need to look attractive for?" My wife. I want to look attractive for her, and she consistently looks attractive for me every day. I've found the love of my life, and I want to look good for her. I'm not trying to do a bait and switch where I try on the first few dates and then just let it go. I try to look good for her every day, and that's the simple part about it. When you just try to do your best to work on your appearance a little bit every day, then you can have confidence in dating that your appearance is right.
I know it's very hard to be out there and successfully date if you're overweight or have some deformity, but it's also hard if you don't wear decent clothes. My brother often wore a lot of dirty skating clothes and just didn't look very clean, and he had a lot of frustrations with that in his dating. Now his wife has encouraged him to dress a little nicer and wear some new shirts, and that helps him. If there are things you're given that you can't do much with, like a deformity, you don't have to fix it. You just have to do your best and accept it: "Okay, I've got a birthmark here," or "Okay, I've got a lazy eye," or whatever it is. Do your best with what you've got. You can't let what you can't control get in the way of doing something about what you can control.
My brother and I have both been fairly handsome young men for most of our lives, and both of us did not pay very much attention to our appearance. When I started paying attention to my appearance, my dating got a whole lot easier. My wife said that was one of the things that made her want to go out with me and be my girlfriend: that I was attractive. Imagine if I hadn't been paying much attention to my appearance. I might still be miserable somewhere, frustrated with the world. So work on your appearance a little bit each day so that you are ready when the right person comes along. There are lots of right people out there, and all you have to do is do your best with what you've got.
Think of your body like a car
It's like having a car. Your car might not be the best looking car, and it might not run that great, but you can do things that will make it look nicer and function better. You can take it to the dealer, you can get a car wash. There are lots of simple things you can do that can turn almost any car into a car that's nice to have and nice to drive. Look at your body that way. There are things you can't control about your body. If you are big right now, you're not going to shrink right now. But in my experience, if you try every day to watch and notice what you eat, and at least try to exercise, then someday you may be a bit smaller. I've been much heavier before than I am now, and the only way I've been able to get a little bit lighter is to notice what I eat. So you've got to work with what you have and maximize what you do have. You can never allow what you have to get in the way or be an excuse for not doing all you can do. I hope this lesson about appearance has been honest and useful, and I wrote more on this in Men on Dating Apps: Look Your Best or Stick to In Person. If you want more lessons like it, see my Dating playlist.
10) The benefits of developing spiritually
From my video published January 6, 2015.
Why dating turns into an addiction
Dating and relationships are extremely challenging, and they are challenging because you are looking at someone else in your life who is outside of you and outside of your control. That is a big distraction, and it often ends up being an addiction. Most people are literally addicted to and codependent on the person they are dating. I have experienced a lot of that firsthand, where I felt I had to get my pain and my pleasure from the person I was dating.
Developing spiritually has helped me be a much better husband. When I am in a bad mood, I do not have to take it out on my wife, and when she is in a bad mood, I do not have to poke and prod her and make it worse. I can quietly accept my bad mood and be here, present in the moment. I can think about who I really am, and the honest answer is that I do not know who I really am. My spiritual foundation helps me fantastically as a husband.
I suffered a lot dating. I like to say dating was the hardest, most frustrating thing I ever did. Now I have a huge amount of spiritual peace, and I look at how helpful that would have been for dating. If you are connected with your spirituality when you start trying to date, I feel that helps a lot for successful dating. I wrote more about learning to love and finding the right person in Learn Love: How to Learn to Love and Find the Right Person.
I look back and all of my dating was just like an addiction, and I have had plenty of addictions in my life. I would get so excited and put everything into it. The whole week had to wait, and I had to push through the week until I could go out. Then the date would be great and I would be high on life, and then I would come crashing down into reality and be so frustrated. It felt a lot like all of my other addictions.
Loving someone and still saying no
One of the reasons my wife has been so good for me is that she had a very good spiritual foundation coming into our relationship, one she was raised with and practiced throughout her life. She had a huge strength in that and still does. She was able to deal with me however I was, and she got through our initial dating phase despite my craziness and her own. Having that spiritual foundation makes it so much easier to connect with the right person and to accept the things that do not go right.
For example, I had an issue recently in my group, where the person who was sponsoring me ended up getting voted out of the group. I found I can still love him and appreciate him as a person, and love the group, and understand that what is right for the group may not be having him in it. I do not have to hate him or push myself away from him. I can love him and love the group at the same time.
I was looking at how remarkable that would be for dating. You can go out with someone, love them as a person and appreciate them, and at the same time love and appreciate yourself and see that this person is not right to be with you in a relationship. You can lovingly tell someone no. That seems like a beautiful thing to me, because then there is no reason to feel all of the negative feelings, the hatred, the resentment and the suffering that went along with all of my dating. All of my dating was so painful all the time, for me or for the girl who was working with me in it.
Having a good spiritual foundation is something you can work on right now that will make dating so much easier. When you can lovingly say no, and lovingly be patient with the person you have decided to date, it starts a miracle. You are not worried about the future and resenting the past all the time. You are here in the present, and you can truly enjoy time with someone without trying to hang on to it so tight and never let it slip away. That is a beautiful thing.
What I would tell myself ten years ago
If I could talk to myself ten years ago, spiritual development would be one of the biggest points I would make: if you do not want to suffer so much from dating, you have got to start learning and discovering your own spirituality. I often thought things like that were crap when I was younger. I thought, what does God do up there in heaven? I did not see any of the divine in myself, and that made life always frustrating, because everything that happened was outside of me, in the world. I very rarely looked inside myself at what I was contributing. I was such a victim all the time. In relationships I loved to play both the person who was causing problems and then the victim, and that comes from not having a good spiritual foundation.
I do not need to be the victim or the perpetrator anymore. I am just Jerry. That is all I am. I am no better than you and no worse than you. I am just Jerry, and that gives me a lot of foundation and peace in a relationship. I do not know how any girl ever put up with me for more than one date, except that they were as crazy as me, or they had a good spiritual foundation like my wife.
I am grateful now to have gained a spiritual foundation that gives me peace regardless of what is going on. I do not know what is going on in the world outside of me, and dating is one of those things that will push your buttons in all the right and wrong ways. The worst times of my life, in terms of short term intense pain, were all related to dating. I went through losing a parent, which has been very hard to deal with, but I have grown so much out of that, too. Dating gave me a lot of opportunities to grow when I was younger, and I consistently used those opportunities to get mad and take out resentments on the world. I am grateful now that I do not have to do that, and you do not have to do that when it comes to dating either. Know that dating is challenging, and that having a good foundation and good love for yourself will make dating infinitely easier. You can find more lessons like this in my Dating playlist.
11) Understand there is no "opposite sex" only people
From my video published January 6, 2015.
There is no opposite sex, only people
In dating, the idea of the opposite sex, or even, if you are dating the same sex, the idea of a group of people who are dateable, is usually quite poisonous. It creates a dichotomy between you and your gender and the other gender. The other gender is supposedly mysterious. No, the other gender is not mysterious. They are people, just like you. I am a person just like you. Because I might have a different body does not mean we are fundamentally different. We do not think differently. We do not act differently. We just are people. You and I are just people.
This opposite sex thing was a big thing I did wrong in my dating. I remember being in high school and reading articles about how to please women and how to pick them up. Most of the articles were written as if women were some object I was to take advantage of. It was hard for me to even think of a woman outside of being some useful part of me, as if I were possessing her and she were some bigger part of me. That led me to a lot of bad thinking in terms of trying to get women. There is nothing to get about women that there is not to get about men. All of us are just people. Whether you are trying to date someone old or young, the same sex, a different ethnicity or religion, or someone from a different part of the country, we are all just people. There is no opposite sex.
This idea of an opposite sex is very limiting because it encourages playing roles. Well, I am the man, so I should do this. I am the woman, so I should do this. That is very, very limiting, especially these days. If you want a great relationship, you have got to just look for people.
My wife was a breakthrough
My wife was a gigantic breakthrough. She was the first girl I can remember dating where, very early on, around the fifth date, I looked at her and thought, wow, she is a sister, she is a daughter. That was a giant breakthrough for me, to not look at a woman just as a sexual object for my own gratification. That is the problem with the opposite sex idea. It tends to create that external, object mentality. If you look at everyone as just a person, just like you are, that makes it a lot easier. Everyone has problems.
My dad had a line he liked to use. When you see a beautiful woman, there is someone who is tired of sleeping with her. When you see a beautiful woman, picture her in the bathroom. It is the same idea as what I am saying. Regardless of how attractive people are, how much money they have, where they are from, or how old or young they are, we are all just people. Removing the idea of the opposite sex makes it so much easier to look at it like you are trying to find a friend, someone you like. There is no difference between trying to find a good friend and trying to find a good spouse. It is the same fundamental thing. I wrote about a related point in Dating Is the Most Worthwhile Thing You Can Possibly Do.
Now, the details are always different. Yes, I have sex with my wife. I do not have sex with my other friends and other people in my life. That is different. But I also play video games with some of my friends and not with others. I have a couple of friends I play Call of Duty Advanced Warfare with, and most friends I do not play that with. Heroes of the Storm, I play with one friend and no one else, though that could change. I create courses with some people and not with others. There are always differences in the outward details. The fact that you will have sex with the person you are dating does not make it any different from the rest of the dynamics of a friendship and of being a good, loving person and family member. That is just one part of a relationship, and it should be a very special, wonderful, meaningful part.
Compliments are compliments
When I was younger, I thought of everything in terms of sex. Sex was all I could think about when I looked at an attractive woman, and if I did not think you were attractive enough to want to have sex with, I hardly noticed you at all. My wife helped me notice that I was getting a lot of compliments from older women that I had been ignoring all my life. If a compliment was not coming from a woman I thought was sexually attractive, I completely ignored it. I might have been there with my body, but I ignored it.
I saw my friends go on a bachelor party, going out to the bars and looking for validation from other women. I realized I do not need to go out to a bar and do that. I do not drink, to make things even more simple, but I do not need validation from other women. First, I get a lot of validation from my wife. Second, there are all kinds of women about my mom's age who say really nice things to me all the time, and that is just as good a validation as anywhere else. It is the same as if my brother says something nice about me, or my friends, or one of my coworkers. Another guy I am teaching a course with always says really nice things about me and what I am doing, and I guess I say really nice things back to him about what he is doing. There is no difference in that. A compliment is a compliment, whether it comes from a dying old man, a beautiful young lady, a five year old kid, a mother with two kids, or a guy in prison for murder. It is all just the same. We are all just people. Putting judgments and labels on other people is extremely limiting, especially when it comes to dating.
Stereotypes are useless
Many women today are in a position like my wife was: they have a good career, they are attractive, they are highly dateable, and they find there is no man matching that criteria. If I had not had a wife, then before I met my wife I would have been a dateable man, with a career, wanting to go places and do things, around 25 plus years old. For every man like that there are two or three women in the same category, because most of those women were not willing to look outside of their ideas of what the opposite sex should be. A lot of men are willing to do that, as long as the woman is attractive. Men are often able to go out with both older women and younger women without much hesitation, whereas women usually only go out with older men. Men are often willing to date regardless of ethnicity, whereas women often get more picky about that. But again, these are all just stereotypes, and you can see they are utterly useless. Even what I just said to you has no meaning for you individually.
If you can see that all of these things are useless when it comes to dating, the only thing you need to know is that people are all people just like you. You are trying to date someone just like you. I am fundamentally just like you. There is no difference. Once you see that, the world of dating opens up and becomes a huge possibility of finding a new friend who is there for you all the time. It is really exciting. It is hard to find a good friend because you do not do as much friend dating, but finding a person to date is a wonderful, beautiful experience. It does not matter about any of the stereotypes or opposite sex expectations, or any expectations about gender, age, race or job. You can see the futility of even the few things I tried to tell you.
So drop all of those opposite sex ideas, drop all of those job and career ideas, drop all of those irrelevant ideas, and just look at it as I am looking for a friend. I am looking for someone I can love and who can love me back. I am looking for a family member. That makes it so much easier. You do not have to understand women, all you have to do is understand yourself. You do not have to understand men, all you have to do is understand yourself, and you can understand yourself all the time. Once you understand yourself, you see you are just trying to date someone else who is just like you. They have good days and bad days. They have things they like and things they do not like. Then the miracle happens. You do not have to look up cheesy websites about tricks to pick women up. You just be yourself and you will run into someone else just being themselves who is right for you at some point, if you have not already. For a more recent look at that idea, see Be Yourself in Dating: Why It Isn't the Whole Answer. I hope this has been helpful for your journey in dating, and you can find more in my Dating playlist.
12) Discover what matters most to you in a partner
From my video recorded in early 2015.
The only thing that really matters
Before you try to actually date anyone, it is probably a good idea to figure out what you really need and what really matters. Usually there is only one thing that really matters to you, and that is how it feels when you are together. That might be simplified, but I mean how you each feel when you are together: not only how you feel when you are with them, but how they feel when they are with you too. To me, that is the only thing that matters. Nothing else really matters. What I will try to do is break down some of the individual parts of that.
For me, mutual attractiveness is huge in how you feel together. I just do not have any chemistry, and I do not have the ability to feel great with someone I am looking at as a romantic partner, a wife, dating, however you put it, if I am not physically attracted to them, if my body is not attracted to them. That is half of it, and the other half is that they have to feel the same way about me.
Knowing immediately
The main mistake I made was going out with girls I knew I was not attracted to. I did not need 30 minutes, an hour or 10 days to decide. I knew immediately, absolutely immediately, if I was not attracted to them. I went out with a lot of girls where I could see as soon as they walked up that I should have said, nope, sorry, this is not going to work, let us not waste either of our time.
I remember one of the first online dates I ever went on. This girl was sitting on the back of a pickup truck with her friend. I drove up, saw it was her, looked over, and thought, I should never have gone out with her. I might as well have kept driving, but I had this sense of guilt or responsibility because I had told her I would go out with her. I parked the car a few spaces down, sat there for a minute, and then proceeded to have a date that was not good for either of us for the next hour. Then I told her I did not think we should go out again. I could have avoided all of that pain and suffering for myself by admitting right away, oops, I messed up on that one, I am not attracted to her, and there is no point in trying anything else from here.
I made that mistake a bunch of times. One of my ex-girlfriends is an example. I had been talking to her online for so long that by the time I met her, I had all of these mind things invested, but as soon as I met her, my body said nope. It is not that she was not attractive. There are lots of guys, I am sure, who would have found her attractive. I did not find her physically and viscerally attractive. She certainly had the parts a woman has, she certainly looked like a woman, and she was cute, but my body did not find her as a whole attractive. A lot of attractiveness comes from within, and when you are physically with someone, your body can so instantly see that. It is not reasonable and it is not rational. It does not require any thought. Your body can immediately see it, and your body often will respond with a thought. When I was doing it wrong, the thought was disappointment. The thought was ew. The thought was no. The thought was negative.
When my wife walked in for our first date, my thought was, whoa, wow. That was not a thought I had very frequently when I saw a woman. My wife walked in, I thought whoa, and she had the same thought about me. That is why we have a wonderful relationship: our first thought was most honest and most positive, and we both instantly were very attracted to each other. We only sent a few messages online. I wrote about a night like that in The Most Incredible Date of My Life.
Everything else can be dealt with
Here is the thing. That is the foundation of discovering what you want in a partner, and it is generally not negotiable. If you are not attracted to someone, all you are going to do is beat your head against a brick wall the entire time you try to interact with them. There is nothing wrong with being friends with people you are not attracted to, and there are all kinds of possibilities there. But if you want to find someone you will have an exceptional relationship with, you absolutely must be attracted to them, and everything else makes no difference.
My wife and I had huge differences on things. She could not stand guns and I loved guns. She was a pretty liberal Democrat, and I was a guy who had tea party on my dating profile. You have got to appreciate that almost all of these other seemingly important things are irrelevant, and that mutual attractiveness is all that really matters in looking for a partner. That is my experience of trying to do this. I have done it mostly wrong lots of times and finally got it right.
Here is something my dad said that helped put it in perspective. It is a lot nicer when a woman is bitching at you and she at least has a pretty face. It just makes so much sense.
It does not matter what you look like physically. There is someone out there who will be attracted to you as soon as they see you, and you will be attracted to them as soon as you see them. It does not matter if you are a little heavy. It does not matter if your face is a little bit of a disaster, or it sags, or your neck is up a little bit, or you are bald, or you are really old, or really young. It does not matter. Attractiveness comes from within, and a person who has attractiveness within will share that and radiate it, and it comes out in all kinds of little details.
I always thought it was strange when I was younger. I was outwardly very negative about girls who were overweight, but I still found it strange that some overweight girls could still look really attractive and others looked completely unattractive to me. I did not get how one girl could look okay even though she was big, and another one did not. I just thought all overweight girls were nasty, and I was often overweight myself, so that is probably why that happened.
It has to be mutual
Discovering what matters most in a partner comes down to mutual attraction. Everything else can be dealt with. My wife and I dealt with our differences on all kinds of mental things, but that physical and irrational attraction is all that matters. It has to be mutual. It does not matter how you feel about them if they do not feel that way about you. If you do not believe me, go walk around, look at good looking people you are attracted to, and watch them ignore you. That is only half of it. So finding who you are attracted to is incredibly important, critical, and that is all you really need in a partner. Simplify it and save each other time.
If you are not mutually attracted to each other, please do not waste anyone's time, because it is nothing personal. If you are not attracted to someone you go out with, it is not personal. It just does not work. Sorry. The same goes if someone does it to you: you are not attractive to them, sorry, it is not a big deal, try again, and again. You know how many times I tried before I met my wife, when she walked in and I was like, wow, and she was like, wow. You know how many times I failed, where I had a wow and the girl did not, or the girl had a wow and I did not. It is hard, but that is okay. For more on that, read She Didn't Feel the Spark, So I Studied Romantic Chemistry. Once you know what you are looking for, you can find it. Now that I have told you exactly what I think there is to look for, maybe it will be a little easier for you. I hope this has helped you discover the only thing that really matters when you are looking for a partner in this life, and you can find more in my Dating playlist.