I Used to Rush Every Woman Into Falling for Me
I used to try to get a woman to fall in love with me as fast as possible. And if it wasn't happening right away, I would give up. I figured that if we weren't instantly building chemistry, if we weren't immediately escalating, if we hadn't kissed by the second date, if we hadn't had sex by the third date, then this was dead. There was nothing here. It was a waste of time. I've seen how crazy that is as it's played out over the long term, and I've watched what's happened in other people's lives as well. I laid a lot of those mistakes out in I Went on 20+ Dates After My Divorce. Here's Everything I Was Doing Wrong.
So now I'm going to take my time. I'm going to take it slow. I'm not going to rush it, because I can see why I tried to rush in dating before: I was afraid that if a woman really got to know me, she wouldn't like me and she'd leave me. The basic idea was that I'd try to get a woman hooked emotionally, and especially to have sex as soon as possible, because then it would be much harder to break up with me, much harder to leave me. You see, I was afraid that if a woman knew the real version of me, she wouldn't want to stick around. So I tried to move as fast as possible so that I could secure access to a woman and sex and build a life, and then maybe a woman would tolerate me after she got to know me. I went into that fear in You Can't Find Love While Trying Not to Get Hurt.
The problem with that is it's a bad strategy. When you're making a big decision, is it usually a good idea to rush into it without thinking and without doing much research? Or is it a good idea to try to think it through, ask some people's opinions, and see how you feel over a longer period of time? Take college, for example. I did piss-poor college planning and research because I was playing video games just about every day. I put the minimal effort into picking out a college, and I ended up going to the University of South Carolina on a scholarship I did not want. I didn't want to go there. It was my backup option, because I didn't put much effort in.
Dating Feels Exhausting Because We're Performing
A lot of us find dating today so exhausting, and we don't have time for it, because we're overwhelmed doing too many things that don't matter. We waste our time trying to get more views online when it doesn't pay the bills for most of you. It does pay the bills for me, because I'm a professional and I've done this for 15 years. But for most of you, you're wasting time trying to get views online. You're trying to impress too many people. You're trying to make money you don't need, or you're trying to do too many things. And then dating is exhausting on top of that, because you feel like you have to perform.
I know what that's like. I'd show up on a date thinking, well, I can't say this. I can't say that. I've got to get this woman to like me, to lust over me, to want me, to feel chemistry. Do I need to ask her to kiss tonight? Do I need to hold her hand? Man, dating is so much better when we just approach another person and investigate: would we like to know them as a friend? Would this person even be a friend?
Earlier this year I got way too excited about a woman because she did yoga, she was attractive, she played tennis, and she was a content creator. Those were like checking boxes, and I've since realized those are not big things that really matter for having a relationship. A lot of us are dating today with way too superficial ideas. Superficial, in terms of dating, the way I see it, means you're not really looking at what's important. I've said before that it's not you, it's the dating apps, and the apps train us to screen on exactly this surface stuff.
What's important to me in dating is health. Is a woman healthy? Are we healthy together? Is she mentally and physically healthy? Number two is family. Does she want family? Does she love family? Does she love kids? Is family an important part of her life? Number three is communication. Can we talk? Can we understand each other? Can we respect each other? And I can't get to know those three things very well on one, two, three, four, five, even six, maybe even 10 or 20 dates. I just can't evaluate all of that very well, because a woman might look really healthy on the surface, but then you find out about some mental health issues that just destroy everything. Or a woman might say she wants family, and then the next day say that she doesn't want kids, that she doesn't have time for that. Or a woman might appear to communicate when she's trying really hard to impress me, but when you see her on a bad day, she's not responding to text messages. I worked through the question of how to find the right person in Learn Love Episode 3.
So what I've learned is that I don't want to get a woman lusting really hard over me. I want a woman who's curious and wants to see if I'm worth getting to know better.
My 15-Year Marriage Started With Both of Us Performing
Now, I acknowledge the difficulty: if you take more time to get to know somebody, you can have a sunk cost, where you put all this time into someone who ends up not being worth it. After you get to know them better, you're like, man, I just wasted my time. Here's the thing, though. In the short term it might look like that, but think about the long term. I just got divorced last year, and we were together 15 years. If we had tried to be friends first, I guarantee you it wouldn't have worked. My ex used to say, lots of times when we were married, that the two of us wouldn't have been friends or met naturally if we hadn't met through online dating. And then she'd say that when we did meet through online dating, we pretty much didn't communicate except to set up a second date and a third date and so on. We didn't spend much time talking on the phone.
We were both kind of just rushing to have sex, while also trying to act like we were waiting. We were both performing, and both focusing mostly on: wow, I'm so attracted to her. I want her so bad. I want her to like me. I'm going to try to avoid saying things that will make her not like me. Maybe occasionally throw out a little thing here or there to test her a little bit, to get her emotional. The two of us were just locked in on getting laid, and she'd hate to admit that. What she'd also hate to admit is that there was another guy who was trying to get to know her more slowly, and she chose me instead of him, even though on paper he was a better option, because I was feeling and fueling chemistry more. I was doing everything I could to get her to fall in love with me, to fall for me.
But she wasn't even seeing the real version of me. I made sure to hide my alcoholism from her. I'm sober 12 and a half years now, but back then I did not have a single drink with her on any of our first dates. Not until we'd had sex and were in a committed relationship did I have a single drink around her. Now think about how dishonest that was. Drinking was such an important part of my life, and I minimized it because I knew a woman with any level of sanity, or any kind of knowledge of alcoholism, would not want to be around a guy who drank the way I did, who binge drank, who would drink for 10, 12-plus hours, get wasted, be in bed with a hangover the next day, and then do it again as soon as possible.
The Queen: How One Great Week Fooled Me
That's what I see as the main problem people are having in dating today: this bounce back and forth that comes from desperation. Ideally, what we would do in dating is take it slow with a bunch of people at once, by simply having a bunch of people as friends. I credit Ashley Cummings, in the discussion she had with me, for helping me see this. And I definitely ripped off the basic idea for this title from a woman I dated earlier, whom I nicknamed the queen, because I told her "you're my queen" after a week of dating.
I see now how nuts that was. Really? You've known this woman a week, and this woman's your queen? This woman is everything you've been looking for? Bro, you don't know this woman. You don't know somebody when you've only met them and dated them for a week. You don't know them, because anybody can have a great week. But soon enough I got super excited about this woman. I spent 12 hours or so with her in the first week, and I was crying. I was like, this is great. I found the love of my life. And then over the next two weeks she withdrew and showed me the negative side of her personality: the side that couldn't be bothered to pay attention to me, that would play games, that would take 10-plus hours to respond to a text while doing a whole bunch of other stuff like editing videos. She showed me over those next two weeks all the things that were not so friendly, not the kind of person I would want to date.
If I had taken things slower with her, I would have seen that. And she said she wanted to take things slow. This is the crazy part: a lot of us do want to take things slow, but we get so desperate, because a lot of us today are having a hard time dating. We're using too many of the wrong things to screen people, and that puts us in a position where we're often single, or we get with the wrong person. Then, when we get with the wrong person and break up, we're not happy, and we think it's somehow them. I wrote about wanting to do this differently in I Want Love to Find Me the Real Way.
Be Friends With Lots of Women for Months
The better way that I'm seeing, and the way I'm doing things now, is that I want to be friends with a woman and get to know her over months. The way to do that is to get to know and be friends with lots of women for months. This allows me to not just be obsessed with one woman. It allows me to see which woman is consistently more interested in me, and it allows me to see if I think about her, and if I miss her when she's not messaging me. When I first started doing this, which I described in I Started Talking to 14 Women at Once. Everything Changed., the whole thing shifted for me.
This also allows me to provide an equal opportunity to every woman and to treat women the same as I treat my guy friends. When you're trying to date really fast instead of taking things slow, what you end up doing is giving the people you're dating special treatment. It can feel good when you're on the receiving end of it, having all those flirty text messages and constant attention. But it feels horrible when that's withdrawn. The woman who was texting me all day every day, sending flirty messages, seven messages in the morning with songs to listen to and all these things, suddenly switches. Literally in a period of a few days, she switches to now she doesn't have time to talk to me. She can't talk to me. She's canceling our date. She's taking hours and hours to respond to messages. I'm lucky to get one message from her all day, and it'll be a question like, "Hey, what are you up to today?" Then 10 hours later I get this exhausted voice memo reply. And it's like, wait a minute, what happened to the woman who three or four days ago was all over me, super enthusiastic and in love with me? Where did that woman go? Who is this woman now who doesn't have time for me?
That's the problem with dating fast: you over-invest, and then it's brutal pulling back. But I understand how challenging it is to make the switch, because at first it's like, well, I don't even know anybody to be friends with. I pushed away a bunch of women I could have just been friends with. And how do you even be friends with somebody without trying to jump in bed with them, or navigate dating, or get jealous?
Everybody Gets Treated the Same
Here's what I do now, and I'll go deeper on this in future posts. Everybody's equal. I treat everybody the same, and that means when I'm getting to know a woman, I'm not giving her special extra attention. I'm not thinking about her all the time. I actually sit back and wait for the woman to invite me to do something. I wait for the woman to text me first, because this is how I operate with my guy friends. I don't go around good-morning texting my guy friends. Not a single person in the world gets a good morning text from me, especially if they didn't send one, and especially if I sent the last message. There's nobody I just go around saying good morning to, or constantly checking up on, wondering how they're doing. I don't do that with my guy friends. I don't do that with my brother. When my daughter is with her mom, I won't even message my daughter all day. Sometimes I will. If I'm not going to see her all day, she's 11, I'll send her a "good morning, hope you have a nice day" text. But other times I don't, and that's my daughter. There are days I don't call my mother, because if she wants to call me, she knows where I'm at.
And yet I'd been giving these women all this special treatment, trying to get them to fall in love with me by messaging them all the time, and then it doesn't work. This is a different lesson from the one in I Thought Waiting to Text Made Me More Attractive. I Was Wrong. Back then I was playing games with timing to seem attractive; now I'm simply treating a woman like every other friend. It's so nice, because now every woman is just a friend until she reaches out and wants to date. I only respond to what women send to me. If a woman doesn't message me, I'm not going to message her. If a woman drops off in her messaging with me, I will drop off in my messaging with her. If a woman takes forever to reply, I can still be more responsive than that. But if a woman in the past has proven she's unreliable, inconsistent, prone to not responding to my text messages and ghosting me, and then she suddenly shows up again, I'm not going to continue the conversation. She's going to have to do more work than usual and prove that she actually wants to be at least a friend.
This protects me. This gives me a clear focus for my energy. This allows me to just let the women who want to date me present themselves. And I make it clear when I communicate with women, too. For example, I have a woman friend who's married, so there's no possible dating interest there, and she called me today. I almost never reach out or call her or ask how she's doing first, because it seems to me, at least, that women tend to be the social planners. They tend to have many more friends than men, they tend to organize and be involved in more social activities than men, and from my view, what women tend to present to me, at least, is that their lives are busier than mine. They have more options for places to go and people to see, especially girlfriends and places they're invited.
So I look at it this way: if a woman's not inviting me to something, if a woman's not interested in seeing me enough to send me the first text, if a woman is not the one who makes sure she's getting attention from me, then I treat her the way I treat everybody else. You're just a friend. This allows me to see over time which women are consistent, and it allows the women to fall for me slowly, because I'm not out here trying to make them lust after me. And if they go find some other guy and bang him on the first date, then that's fine with me, because they haven't taken up much space in my life anyway. As I put it in You're Winning at Dating Even When It Doesn't Work Out, that's not a loss.
The Woman Has to Escalate Every Step
And then maybe at some point there's a woman who sees, hey, this is Jerry, and I really like Jerry because I really know Jerry. In the long term, that's what I want. In the short term, friendship provides a lot of the validation I was seeking from dating. A lot of times, when you're trying to rush into dating, you'll also blow up things that could have been a friendship. What I'm finding now is that women start in the friend zone with me and get no special treatment, and thus the only way things escalate is if the woman escalates things with me: if she starts texting me more often, if she starts sending me photos, if she asks me to do something, if she starts calling me. I do not escalate things anymore, because I'd prefer to take as long as possible to get to know a woman. When you don't do that, you end up married to somebody, having kids with somebody, and wondering, how the hell did we get here? We're such different people. We don't seem compatible in so many ways. Oh, we were just in a hurry, and we both didn't research each other that much. That's a big part of why I can't date like I did 15 years ago.
With going slow, I'm able to have lots of women as friends. I'm able to get validation from my women friends, and then I'm able to just sit back and relax. If a woman invites me to something, I'll consider going to it. Otherwise I'm at home filming videos, going to meetings, hanging out with my kids. And this is a place that's peaceful. I'm around women. I'm interested in women. But I'm not out there trying to get a woman to fall in love with me, because if a woman falls in love with me, I want her to know who I really am and what I really stand for, not some fake, superficial, surface version of me. I want her to know the kind of jokes I like, to know my exact financial situation, to know what I do on YouTube and the kind of videos I make, and how I feel. To me, that's where you can have real, long-term, lasting love: when you get to know each other at that level. That's the kind of love I described in The Right Person Makes You Want to Give, Not Take.
So to me, the ideal dating strategy, at least for straight dating, is to be friends with a lot of the kind of people you might like to date, take your time getting to know them, and don't put expectations on it. These days, at least to me, it seems the woman needs to escalate things, and I don't escalate things anymore. If you want to get my phone number, go out, kiss me, have sex with me, it is a hundred percent up to the woman to escalate every single step of that, because I'm satisfied just being friends otherwise. And I know that the more women I'm friends with, the more likely one of them falls in love with me. If I have a woman as a friend, in many cases, not all, but in many cases, I would be willing to escalate. You can watch how all of this has unfolded over the past year on my Dating playlist.
Thank you for reading. If this post is helpful for you, go to jerrybanfield.com and grab a review. You can tell me your dating situation, and I will give you my perspective on it. Telling so many people about my thoughts and my dating situation and getting feedback has been incredibly helpful for me to get at peace with dating and stop using ineffective strategies. I'm there to help you. All my links are at jerrybanfield.com.