Over the last six months, as I've gotten divorced and gone on first dates with something like 20 different women, the most common response I've gotten — and it actually drove me nuts — is, "You know, I just don't feel that romantic spark. The chemistry's not there. I'm just not feeling what I need to feel." And I'm like, what? What are you talking about? What do you expect you're supposed to feel on a first date with someone? I kept getting annoyed by it.
And then I realized something. The reason I was getting so annoyed is that 15 years ago I attracted an absolutely beautiful woman, ended up marrying her and having two kids with her. So I know how to create spark. I know how to make a woman feel something. I know how to do this stuff. So why am I not doing it? It was a humbling realization: I don't know what's been happening lately, but I have not been putting out that romantic spark or connection. Something I've been doing has been screwing it up.
So I finally had the humility to say, okay, maybe these women know something I don't. Obviously I'm an emotional guy who can trigger emotional reactions, have fun, be intimate, build connection, create spark, get reactions, and not be boring. I know that. But why haven't I been executing it? Because real knowledge is being able to execute. Anyone can talk about it. I can tell you how to throw a football or coach a football team, but who can actually do it? And I've had the humbling realization that even though I've dated a lot of women — not as many as some of these dating coaches, sure, but enough to know — I know how to do this, and I just haven't been doing it.
So I watched several videos, I took notes, and I'm here to share what I've learned and my plan for my next date. I've got my seventh Talkify match date coming up, looks like it's on Tuesday. I'm going out, and I'm planning to put this stuff into action. I'm teaching it to you partly to make sure I internalize it myself. One of the videos I watched was by Bobby Rio, and it was really good. What's crazy is that I already knew this stuff and had it locked down in my twenties. But as I got sober and changed my personality, I became boring. You stop being as fun as you were — partly because the relationship wanted me to change — and now I've got to bring it back.
The frame: fun, connection, and intimacy
Here's the target. To create romantic spark, in my experience you need three things: fun, connection, and intimacy. This is a perfect frame that Bobby Rio put words to, and it's worked for me in the past quite a bit. Going forward I'm holding onto it, because the opposite of all of it is being boring. And being boring is exactly what I've been doing — being too serious, especially after getting divorced. I've been going out like I'm interviewing these women to be my second wife, asking them interview-style questions.
But in my twenties, it was all about fun. All I cared about was fun. I told emotional stories all the time because I was very emotional all the time. And I was thinking about sex constantly, so I couldn't help but say stuff with sexual innuendo. When I hung out with my friends, that's all we did — constant sexual innuendo. So when I went on dates in my twenties, I was fun, I was always emotional, and I was always hinting toward sex somehow. It was clear. Some women didn't like it, but I had a pretty good conversion ratio of first dates to second to third to sleeping together, because I was fun, I was emotional, and I made my interest obvious.
Then what happened? I was in a relationship, married 13 years, with my ex 15 years, got divorced. And now I'm out here being all serious, asking women boring questions about their job. I stopped having fun. And then I stopped connecting because I was being guarded — afraid this woman couldn't handle my emotions, couldn't handle it if I showed up the way I do on my live stream. And I was afraid to even admit that I want sex, because my ex had been annoyed with my sex drive for a long time, and I felt bad about it. So it was great to look at this and see that I need to get back to what I was doing in my twenties. I am a fun guy. I make people laugh. I can tell emotional stories. I'm a very emotional person — just look at me. And I want sex; if I didn't care about sex, I don't think I'd be dating. That should be clear from hanging out with me. It shouldn't be some big question of whether I even want that. I want that.
To me these are three basic things to rotate between, and that's what I used to do intuitively: tell an emotional story, talk a little smack with the girl to make her have fun, then allude to sex somehow, a little indirectly. And then go round and round on that. I knew how to have fun. I also used to go on dates with drinking involved, and I'm sober now, so it takes being able to bring all of this immediately with a new person. If you're meeting someone off Tinder, Bumble, or Hinge, you need to be able to bring this right away.
What "fun" actually means
So what does fun mean? I was thinking — I look kind of lean, kind of skinny to some women. So one thing that could be fun on a first date, especially if a girl thinks she's strong, is to say, you think I'm lean? Let's arm wrestle. Let's see if you can beat me. That could go poorly if I lose, but it could be hilarious either way. And if she loses, I might say something like, I'm going to have to spank you for that — and now you see that last line is already moving toward intimacy.
I always used to be dangerous like that, and my ex went nuts for it. Very attractive women a lot of times — like my ex — intimidate regular men. I went on a third date through Talkify where I just flopped. This girl is very hot, she's a doctor, and I flopped. We had a little fun and a little connection, but the intimacy totally flopped, and there wasn't enough fun either. At the end of that first date, I didn't go for the kiss.
The kiss I should have gone for
I've been on several first dates where I held back on the kiss. There was this woman I really liked — she reached out to me, a mom I knew from yoga. There was so much energy there, we'd already held hands, and at the end I had this idea in my head: well, I shouldn't kiss on the first date, because when I went out with my ex 15 and a half years ago, I didn't kiss her on a first date. But come on. That was a lunch date off online dating. This woman from yoga was not a cold date from an app. We'd known each other for well over a year, seen each other at 30-plus yoga classes. She'd already made it clear she was thinking about me, expressed her interest clearly. And I didn't kiss her at the end of the date. She definitely wanted me to at least try. I had every indication. And I blew it. I talked instead of kissing.
So from now on, if I feel chemistry for a woman, I'm going for it. I'm not going to try to kiss a woman I don't feel anything for — if I'm not attracted, if I don't think she's fun, if I don't want to see her again, I'm not going to lead her on with a kiss. But with that mom, I absolutely should have. I had every signal and the perfect opportunity, and I blew it. To me, especially with women, in my experience they would rather you lead with actions than words. Instead of saying "I'm so interested in you, I really want to see you again," just kiss her — that communicates it. Now, if a woman has made it clear she doesn't want to be kissed, through body language or her dating profile, you obviously respect that boundary. But I've erred too far on the side of being afraid, anxious, and not going for it — and then the women aren't feeling the spark.
Even one time when I did kiss a girl on the first date and she seemed to really like it, a few days later she still gave me the "I didn't feel the spark" line. Why didn't she feel it? Because on that first date I did almost nothing with intimacy. I did almost nothing to allude to anything sexual. I did well on fun and connection, but a lot of it was just her talking — I didn't share enough or get her to feel quite enough. The kiss at the end was nice, but it could have been hotter if I'd done more intimacy and focused more on fun.
You can break the autopilot
The good news is that a lot of us end up thinking, well, this is just how I am. No, it's not. You have the chance to break your autopilot, to stop being a robot, and to change. In my twenties I used to crush all of this on a date intuitively, because I went out with enough women, and my personality — a little bit of a bad boy, a police officer and an intellectual, and a guy who was just really horny, which I still am — meant I naturally did this stuff. Then being married and having kids, that got pushed back a little. And now it's time to bring it back out.
Look, why do you think I dropped $7,500 on a matchmaking service? Because I'm trying to have sex. But I also really want a wife. And if you don't establish the intimacy first, the expectation clearly — look, this is all about sex, this is important to me, that's why I'm here, that's why I'm paying for dinner — then it doesn't go anywhere. To me, all of it is moving toward sex. And sex is moving toward marriage and family and a life together, but sex comes a lot sooner than marriage and family. This is my single biggest area to work on.
With the guys, I'm always talking smack, always making dirty jokes, "that's what she said." It's funny to me when guys can't even handle that. I say something a little sexual and they're like, oh, that's awkward — and I'm thinking, no wonder you're single. The men who are more comfortable with their sexuality generally laugh more at that stuff. I've been afraid of giving a woman "the wrong idea." But the wrong idea would be that I don't want to sleep with her — that's the wrong idea, unless it's honest, unless I actually don't like her, which is the case sometimes. And in that case it'd be nice to just say, look, I'm not feeling the romantic spark here, thanks for going out with me, I think someone else will have a much better time with you, have a nice life. I've been afraid of doing that too. Where did I get all this fear? When I used to date, I just blasted on in there, because I figured the worst thing you could be was a loser who didn't go for it. Twenty-five-year-old me would watch me now and say, bro, what are you doing? Get in there. So what if she doesn't like you? At least try.
Fun should be playful
So with fun, connection, and intimacy: the fun should be playful, like you're hanging out with the boys — teasing, laughing, joking, messing with her, saying unexpected things based on what she said. Because the bottom line is, what she's telling you is that she wants to feel feelings. I used to be super emotional in my twenties, so I was naturally all over the place, which made women attracted to me — though it also made me kind of hard to be in a relationship with, because I'd be on a high one day and miserable the next. So I actually feel I have a better offer now than I did before. But it takes some work to intentionally cultivate the spark, and that requires getting out of the logical brain.
A lot of men, especially those of us who work online and create content — I'm on a computer, in the command line interface, talking mostly with men, and a lot of my conversations and thinking are very logical. If this, then that. But with women, that bores them. I don't want to treat it like a job interview. The key question should be: can we have fun together? Is this a woman I'd want to spend all day every day with? Is this a woman I could take a month-long trip to Europe with and not be sick of her? I remember thinking how ridiculous it was that women want to feel something romantically — like, what does she expect to feel on the first date? Well, she expects to have fun. And to have fun, you often have to stop being logical. That's actually pretty easy: just play around, be unexpected, be willing to offend her, be willing to argue and debate with her. Anything's better than being boring. The opposite of fun is boring. Especially when a man goes out with an attractive woman, we'll often be afraid of offending her, afraid of making her mad, trying to please her — and that's the opposite of what we want to do.
The story that made my ex fall for me
That willingness to push back is exactly what got my ex's attention. When we were first dating, I'd say things that would make her so mad she couldn't talk. I remember maybe our tenth or eleventh date, we were pulling into Busch Gardens, and somehow the conversation got onto human trafficking — I was in a master's and PhD criminology program at the time. And I said, you know what, I don't think human trafficking is that big of a deal. I realize it's a thing and we should stop it, it sucks, but we've got bigger problems — like people starving. Let's handle starving first and human trafficking second. My ex is an attorney, so she tried to debate me, and I was just like, no, your position is ridiculous, you've got tens of thousands of people starving, I don't even want to hear it. And she was so mad she couldn't talk for like 30 minutes. That's what got her to feel a spark for me. She felt a depth of emotion that other men struggled to arouse in her.
Right before she committed to me, around the sixth date, she'd been out with another guy — a professor. By every external measure she should have picked him logically over me. He'd already finished grad school instead of being in it, he was much better off financially, he sounded more mature. But I was fun. I made her feel something. I went for the kiss on the second date and she loved it. He did not. He later told her, "I'm sorry I was so held back with you." I was not held back. I was blasting into fun, ready for intimacy, going for it, and emotionally connecting. I'm grateful to remember these lessons now.
So for fun, you know how to be fun. Take inventory of yourself being fun — notice when you're being fun, like I'm being fun right now, and imagine bringing this kind of personality on a date. Because I know you're tired of the usual, and women are tired of the usual too. You want her to feel something unusual. A lot of guys today have it rough — the average man is constantly rejected or ignored by women. Then you finally get out on a date with a beauty and you're terrified of messing it up, so you're not fun, and because you're not fun, you're not leaning into connection or intimacy either.
Connection is sharing an emotional experience
Connection is sharing an emotional experience, and stories are often the best way to do that. That's hard when you're being too serious or asking boring "what do you do" questions. Connection sounds more like: when my dad died, I was destroyed inside, drinking harder than ever. I woke up hopeless. I thought, I'm going to die if I keep living like this, but I don't know what to do. Please, God, help me. And then a thought came: well, I said I was willing to do anything to get sober — so part of "anything" is going to get to Alcoholics Anonymous. You can feel the emotional grip of that story, the desperation in my voice. Women want to feel something with you more than anything else.
Now, women aren't all the same. Some really appreciate logic, and if you've got a nice car and a nice watch, they may not care about any of this. But most women, in my experience, care more about what they feel with you than anything else. I have a guy I know who tells me all the time, man, you can't just have a 20-year-old Toyota Corolla and be borrowing money. And I'm like, watch me. If you can make women feel, you don't need money, you don't need a car — you could roll up on an e-bike. I'm glad I never sold that Corolla, because almost every woman I've ever dated has been in that same car, because I know how to have fun. And cursing, by the way, can be part of fun. This is all comedy — I'm trying to entertain and help people laugh.
As a man, it's on me to set the lead
As a man, it's also up to me to set the lead. I don't want women leading me anymore. I'm a good leader, maybe a great leader — I'm not a follower. I don't want to follow you, I don't want to take your lead, I'll only resent it. So I have to take the lead. And you take the lead by grabbing the emotion and setting the frame: we're here to have fun, we're here to connect, and we're here to get intimate. Even if that intimacy is just us disclosing that we don't want it with each other, that's fine.
So for connection, you tell stories with gripping emotions. It's okay to already know your best material — have it ready. I know my Alcoholics Anonymous, getting-sober story is full of emotion. My dad dying is full of emotion. Now, should I maybe not be telling emotional stories involving my ex and my kids on a first date? Probably. So I have stories ready that don't involve them. Like being a police officer and watching people get treated unfairly — not discrimination the way you'd imagine, but watching people with elite status, a politician's aide, a sheriff's cousin, fellow police officers, get special treatment and get away with anything. That ruined my innocence. It took away my idealism that I was out there to save people. Because no, you're out there to protect the elite people from the ordinary people, to keep the ordinary people in line while the elite do whatever they want. You can hear the anger come through when I tell that story. And that's important. It's better to leave a woman feeling angry than feeling apathy.
In a lot of my recent dates, I've been very hesitant to say anything that might make a woman angry. After enough times making my ex angry, I built a whole strategy to minimize making my wife angry. But when she first met me, she really liked that I made her angry. While most men felt like they weren't worthy of her and were scared to let their personality out, I made her feel something. I'd say "human trafficking isn't a big deal, and it's ridiculous that you think it is," and you can feel some of you reacting to that right now — that's the point. You want your woman to feel something. I was talking to a woman recently and I said, you know, germ theory is bullshit — that's my opinion, I'm not a doctor, I read the book Can You Catch a Cold and I personally don't believe it. And this woman got angry and started going off on tangents, and I got that old feeling back: oh, I got an emotional reaction out of her, good, she's feeling something with me. That's better than being boring. And God, I've been boring on so many of my dates. I'm not doing that anymore.
The idea is to get reactions. If you get a reaction, that's a good sign. If she's surprised, angry, or emotional — good. Because, in my experience, women want to feel, and men want to think. So connection is all about getting those emotions out: find the emotions within yourself and get them out, find what you're really passionate about. I'm passionate about holistic eating and taking care of my body, and I'll argue about it. A woman wants to tell me the carnivore diet is the best diet — I think that's stupid, and I'll say there's almost no evidence it's anything except destroying you. I naturally have an argumentative, triggering, emotional personality. How sad is it to picture me neutering that on a date and coming off boring? Can you imagine a woman saying she didn't feel the spark with me ever again? Forget that.
Here's how I rank it now. Top tier, the one thing I don't want: no accusations of crimes — which is easy, because I'm not doing anything criminal, though sometimes people make things up regardless of the truth. Second tier: do not tell me there's no spark. You might say "you pissed me off and I never want to see you again," and I'd rather get that than have another woman tell me she didn't feel the spark. At least if I pissed a woman off, maybe she learned something. But don't tell me there's no spark — because there are sparks, you just might not want to handle that much voltage in your life. And that's fine.
Intimacy is crossing the lines you wouldn't normally cross
So with intimacy: what you want to do there is innuendo, bringing up sex. Bobby Rio had an example — a story he had planned where he was cleaning and found a bag of her sex toys in the closet, knocked it over, and was picking it up right as she walked in. That's a way to start bringing intimacy up. Intimacy is about crossing lines you wouldn't normally cross. And it can be as simple as compliments, which I used to always lay on women: I love your hair, your lips, your eyes, that's a nice dress. I've been withholding that lately, which is crazy.
On a third date I went on recently with a 23-year-old, I did tell her she was beautiful — and she was doing it first. She said, "I love your eyes, they change colors in the sun, and you've got nice teeth." I said, shoot, I haven't heard that one before, I'm going to put that in the notepad — nice teeth, nice eyes, handsome, I'll take all of it. She was going there first with me, and I had the perfect chance to escalate and kiss her. Now, I'm actually glad I didn't, because in my opinion she's got crazy drama that would mess my life up, so I had no business kissing her. In fact, the crazier she is and the more you make her feel, the more she may come on to you. And I think sometimes I've been withholding this stuff on purpose from a woman I've detected is going to be a lot of drama — like this last girl. I didn't want to be fun, do connection, or go toward intimacy, because if I did, I'd have to deal with her, and I wouldn't be able to say no that easily.
So on some dates where there wasn't much chemistry on my end, I've intentionally been boring, intentionally tried not to connect, made no mention of any intimacy. It can help to forgive and understand yourself there — I wasn't interested, so I was a boring tool on the date on purpose. But the problem is, if you act like a boring tool on the dates where you're not into her, it's hard to switch it back on when you actually do really like a woman. So the ideal is to always be on this stuff, and then, if you're not into her, let her down gently at the end. If you've been a lot of fun, connecting, and hinting at intimacy, then it's: sorry, I'm not feeling the romantic chemistry, see ya.
Has there been any development since the 23-year-old? Yes — I got a match on Tuesday through Talkify with a woman who seems like she ought to be really interested in me. I won't give her specifics, but it seems like I'd be a really nice offer for her, and I could potentially have a better offer for myself, so to speak. That should set me up to really not care about the outcome and just test all of this perfectly. I look at my dates as experimenting and testing: how fun can I be without going over the top? How much intimacy can I bring? With that 23-year-old, I was in her car — which I don't know that I'd do again — and she was talking smack, and looking back, the perfect response would have been something like, "I'm going to have to fuck you if you keep talking like that." That's maybe not a first-date thing, but those are the kinds of lines that build intimacy. They're things you'd never say to your boss or a platonic friend — you say them to set up the context for intimacy. A less dangerous version is, "keep talking like that and I'm going to have to spank you," or "your last boyfriend didn't spank you enough, from the way you're talking." Those start to cross lines. Basically all the stuff that would be completely inappropriate at work is exactly what's wanted when you're out with someone who does want it. So do it — unless they tell you to stop, in which case stop.
But if they're on a date with you, in my experience they do want all that stuff that wouldn't be appropriate somewhere else. There was a woman I was flirting with a little bit last night, and I realized I need to do some more intimacy stuff. She seems interested in me and she was really flirty, but she doesn't necessarily know I have any interest in her, because I haven't done much of the intimacy thing. We've had fun, we've done connection, but I haven't done much intimacy. So next time I see her, I'll explore the intimacy more. Intimacy is that closeness, that sexual connection that keeps you out of the friend zone. To me, all of it together — fun, connection, and intimacy — is what creates spark and builds attraction, and I'm so excited to put it into practice on my next date. I've been going back through a lot of these lessons, and I've gathered the dating videos and these reflections into my Dating playlist if you want to follow the journey.
At the same time, I'm not looking to just be any woman's boyfriend or next husband. I want a woman I'm really excited about, and if she's not the one, I'll say so. So many women have told me they didn't feel the spark, and now I see why. I'm grateful for the experiences, because I see what I used to do — what I should do again — that built all this stuff before I got out of the habit of it while married. The fun slipped a lot, but the intimacy did too, and the connection slipped most of all. I should have kept much more of this going.
I'm really grateful for the humility to realize, after all the dating success I'd already had, that I forgot this, then learned it again — and that people can teach me, and I can teach it, and we can all help each other. So I'll keep you posted on exactly how this goes. And from now on, if I have an interest in a woman, I'll try to kiss her as soon as it seems right, because I've been holding back. One of the saddest things in my dating over the last year is that when I was really attracted to that single mom, and she seemed really attracted to me, I didn't try to kiss her. Come on, man. I'd rather try for a kiss and be told no, or try and have it not go well, than have a woman wish I'd kissed her and not go for it.
I really enjoyed sharing this. If you want the best experience with me, the place to go is jerrybanfield.com, where I run the Jerry Banfield Family — a community where you can DM me your exact questions any time. All my videos and books are being trained into my AI in there, so you can ask it in real time what I'd probably say, and then check it with me on a DM. And if you want to talk something through one-on-one — dating or anything else — you can book a 30-minute call with me directly. Thanks for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.