Even If You're Terrible at Dating, You Can Still Find Love
I have a friend who is arguably worse at dating than I am. This guy has been single most of his adult life and has really struggled there, and he just recently found love. The message I take from that is that even though dating can be difficult, and even though I've felt a lot of pressure with dating lately where I'm constantly trying to get better and play the game better and learn and date as best I possibly can, I've got great news based on what I'm seeing. Even if you are terrible at dating, even if you have done nothing but basically get it wrong for most of your life and it feels like everything you've done has been a waste of time, you can still find an amazing relationship.
This friend is so dysfunctional in lots of different ways. He is a good looking guy, but he has had almost no results at all from online dating in his whole life, despite a lot of time trying and a lot of money put into online dating apps. And he literally just ran into this woman, and they didn't even date. They were just friends. It was so ridiculous. To me, I never would have tolerated something like that, where he actually had her move in and they lived together and she wanted to be with him, but he didn't want to be with her. Then she moved back out, and then he wakes up and realizes, oh man, I think she's actually the one. And then they end up dating after that and seeing that, oh, there is a lot of chemistry here.
What's inspiring to me is that sometimes dating feels really difficult because I feel like I have to do it just right or I'm not going to get any results. Or if things didn't work with something in the past, it's like, oh man, that should have been it, but I just played it wrong. And what I'm seeing with people is that if you're really open to love and connection, if you really want a relationship and you keep making an effort, even if it's sloppy, even if it doesn't go well, there's always hope.
I have a family member who was married for quite a while. Then her husband had a kid with somebody else and they got divorced. And she was just trying to do online dating in her late fifties and early sixties. She had one date with one guy that didn't go well, and she was like, oh, this doesn't work, it's awful. And I told her, no, you just have to keep trying. It's ridiculous to think you should just go out one time with one person. And then she ended up getting a relationship of more than a decade out of online dating, with a guy who ended up being the love of her life. That's another example of, well, even if things look like they're a mess and it's never worked out and you just feel destroyed, if you'll just keep trying, if you'll just keep showing up and being open, it can happen.
The Biggest Mistake I See People Make
The biggest mistake I see people making is that they're closed off to dating, that they won't make time to date, that they won't even give people a chance. Take this single mom. I have a friend who connected me with a single mom, a mutual friend. We're both good friends with her, so the single mom got a great recommendation that I was a guy worth dating. But the single mom is just in this mode of, I don't have time to date, I'm too busy hustling and grinding for my business and raising my kids.
I sent her a text and she didn't respond for a few days. I sent her another text. She sends one reply, then doesn't respond for a few more days. I send one more text, and she doesn't respond. So I sent her a voice memo. It's like, I know what your life is like from my friend. You aren't even dating anybody. You've got some dysfunctional ex you broke up with and got back together with a bunch of times. You've been divorced. Your dating life is in utter ruin. And you're just taking all this time to grind at a business. And then it's, oh, I don't know what I want with dating, I don't have time. Here's an opportunity right in front of you that she said yes to. She told her friend she would go out with me, so there's clearly some interest there.
I keep seeing people do this all over the place. I don't have time for dating. Dating's not worth it. It's not worth trying. If you have that attitude, in my experience you are shutting off some of the most joy and the most potential you can have in your entire life. And you don't have to be good at dating. It doesn't matter if everything you've ever done has failed before. If you'll just show up and try, something awesome might happen. And if you don't show up and try, usually nothing's going to happen. It's amazing how many opportunities will come and pass right by you if you're closed off to them, and then you wake up when you're 50, 60, 70, wondering what the hell happened to my life, why have I been single for 20 years now.
I see so many women in this position especially, because a lot of times men who are in their 60s or 70s are already married or have passed on. I know some men in this position as well, but I know a bunch of women who have been single forever, and you can't even mention dating or sex or anything like that to them because they're so sensitive about it. They feel so bad about it that even just bringing it up and getting them to think about it is so painful that they avoid the subject. They get hostile. They get defensive. They get critical. And what happened, when you ask them about it? Well, they prioritized their career, or they prioritized raising kids.
Making Time for Dating When Life Is Already Full
Yes, raising my kids is a priority. But here's what I said in that voice memo to the single mom. I have two kids and I have a content creator business I'm working on growing. I get my sleep. I take care of my body, which means I do an hour of yoga and vigorous exercise every day. I go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings several times a week. I have a podcast. I have friends. I have family. And yet I still make time where I can go out with one to four women, or one woman four times, every week, because it's important to me.
It's less likely for a man to end up in that isolated position, because again, the older you get, the more men pass away. But I'm not interested in being one of these guys who is in his seventies living by himself, and it's unlikely to happen to me because I'm putting in the effort now. Especially for women, you tend to get the best results getting with a man as early as possible and having a long term relationship, whereas often women like older men. So it's actually easier as a man. I can essentially date 10 to 20 years younger than me the rest of my life. Even if I was 70, I could still date down to 60 and 50 if I wanted to, easily, maybe even 40. Therefore I'm in a position where, for most of the rest of my life, I will be in a relationship.
What My Own Dating Numbers Look Like
I know I just need to relax a little bit about doing it perfect, and end up being patient. Some days I'm like, come on, this has got to happen. And then I have to catch myself and realize I was in a relationship from 2011 to 2025. That's almost all of both of those years, so almost 15 years I was in a relationship. Now I've been single for less than a year. In that time I've gone out with at least 20 women, had at least 40 dates scheduled, and had at least 10 dates canceled by the women.
In a number of those cases, they certainly weren't interested enough. In others, they're self sabotaging. The single moms especially seem to be awful at self sabotaging, where they're just too busy, they're overwhelmed, they don't have time, they're into some other addiction. And from the ones I know, it's not usually that they found somebody else. It's that they're straight up self sabotaging, getting in their own head and blowing it up. Maybe occasionally, or sometimes, they did find someone else. But with a lot of the narratives we watch on YouTube, you think that everybody is just winning out there. That if a woman cancels, she's got all these other dates and all these other guys interested. I don't know about that. I know a number of women who are having a hard time dating too, because they hardly give anybody a chance. They'll go on dating apps and not even have one date. They'll spend months on dating apps and not even have one date scheduled, because they don't put enough time into it, they don't give any guys a chance there, and they get overwhelmed.
To me, men need to be out there trying, and women need to be open. At least try going out with the guy. It can be really easy to get into this negative space where, well, it didn't work this one time before, so it's never going to work. And that is so self sabotaging, because life is happier in relationships. From what I've seen in almost all the data, people who are in relationships do so much better in life. The dating relationship has been one of the most important things in my life. And you don't have to get it all right. You just need to be open to love and connection with other people.
Treating My Dating Life Like My Business
I'm kind of in this spot right now where I'm trying to decide whether I want to give one woman I went out with a week and a half ago a chance, because she has a lot of fantastic qualities. She's very intelligent. She's beautiful. And at the same time, I'm thinking I want to look at my dating like a business. In my business, that means hardcore super fans, subscribers on my YouTube channels, followers on other platforms, people joining me, people joining the community on Skool. Somebody just joined on Skool today for the annual membership. One person scheduled a Zoom call today, and one person bought the talk-to-me-now thirty minutes twice today. So I'm grateful I made almost $400 today from my business.
What I know about my business is that I need to get the most views and then the deepest connections from those views. If I give the most value and show up in the most places and make the effort in a way that's done very efficiently, then I'm going to get the money in the door like I did today. My frustration with dating lately has been that I need more exposure. I need more leads. I need more women who are interested in me. And it's been difficult without online dating to get the quantity of potential matches. The pace of dating seems so slow to me compared to my business, where I just come up with something, I create it, and I execute it.
Playing Dating Apps Like a Game
The videos are out there and the sales are coming in immediately a lot of times, or within a week at least. And with dating, my God, it all takes so long. But I'm thinking I might want to get back into dating apps and go super optimized. Look at dating apps like a game, where I'm going to play to win. I'm going to do whatever I need to do to get the absolute best, perfect dating profile pictures. I'd hide that I want kids on there. I'd basically just have a profile that turns women on, that is sweet and a little mysterious. According to one of the guys in my Skool community, that's the best formula. So I'm interested to see which direction I go.
What's funny is that last night I thought, if I actually stay single longer, my dating channel will become much more interesting, because I'm going to have a lot more stories. And a lot of the time this is what's challenging with dating, because we have these conflicting priorities. We want to grow our business, but we need time to date. We want to raise our kids, but we need time to date and have to get a babysitter or something in order to go out. I don't usually have to do that, well, I do if my mom is available, but I usually don't go out on nights I have my kids, because I have Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday to go out. So I'm relieved about that part.
Dating Is Part Game and Part Magic
I do feel a lot of pressure with dating, though. Like I've got to do it perfect. Like if I don't play the game right, I have to review what happened and figure out how to do it right next time. But the thing with dating is that it's not always going to be the same approach with each different person either. The way I acted with the queen, for example, might have worked really well with a different woman. Maybe not with most women, but people are all so unique and special. And then there's the timing of all of it. So there are aspects of a game, but there are aspects of magic.
Dating is deep, and it can be complicated and challenging, but I don't see anything more worth doing than dating. My friend inspires me because everything could look like it's not working out and failing and I could just be single, and then someday something could happen, and it might even take me by surprise in how it happens. Maybe somebody watching these dating videos will go to jerrybanfield.com and say, oh, I fell in love with you watching your videos. How cool would that be? Or my friends are saying, come over to Thailand or Romania, come over here, you'll easily find a woman over here compared to where you're dating now.
Dating Is Worth It, Take It on Faith From Me
If I have one clear message, it's that I hope you're open to possibilities, that no matter what's happened in your life, no matter how bad it's been so far, dating is worth it. It is worth it. I promise you it's worth it. I had 15 years, most of them awesome, with an amazing woman. I've got two kids from that today. I know dating's worth it. Even if you don't know that, I know it's worth it. So take it on faith that, hey, I've had an amazing experience from dating. We had so much fun, did so many things together, made so many memories. And even though we're divorced and it's over now, it still was so worth it, and it is one of the best parts of my adult life.
Whenever things don't work out with dating, that's fine, because there are more opportunities. But if they do work out, it's all worth it. So if you don't have that experience yourself, take it on faith from me that I do know dating is worth your time and effort.
Dating Will Force You to Grow
The best part is that dating is worth your time and effort because it'll force you to be a better person and grow. What I've noticed with people who are single so often is that they get sloppy and lazy and self centered in their lives, because they don't have anybody at home keeping them accountable. They can afford to just be this single person. You can't afford to be that sloppy, lazy, inconsiderate person and get away with it in a relationship, whereas in business, often being selfish and doing anything you can to make money is rewarded. When you act that way in a relationship, it's often punished.
Dating will make you a person who is a great human being. It helps you have a purpose and be a part of something bigger than yourself. And I've come to believe that's why so much of our system today is trying to sabotage dating, because dating is one of the most important things in life. That's why there's all this junk information out there about how bad dating is. You should just give up. Men are withdrawing. Women aren't even interested in men anymore, they don't need them. Women only want to date the top percentage of guys. A lot of this stuff you're hearing may not even be true, or may only be true in a limited context.
Do They Love Me, or the Persona?
The way I look at it, it's my job to get ready to have the relationship that I want. That means taking care of myself and doing my work. Some people have said, just keep getting more famous and more famous and you'll easily get the relationship you want. Well, maybe. At the same time, I'd love to find somebody who really loved me, who really loves me as I am now. I look at Mr. Beast and his girlfriend, and it's like, would she be with him if he was some regular dude? Probably not.
The more famous I get, and the more my videos go out on all these platforms I'm putting them out on now, the harder it is, if a woman's interested in me, to see whether she really likes me or whether she likes Jerry Banfield. Because Jerry Banfield is almost like an avatar, a persona. And I don't know, maybe I would love a woman who loved the Jerry Banfield persona. I haven't got to experience that yet. My ex wife fell in love with me before I started YouTube, and nobody will ever be able to do that again. I knew she just loved me for the man I was. But ironically, she didn't like the Jerry Banfield public persona that much.
Come Talk With Me About It
I hope this is helpful for you. If you want to talk with me, go to jerrybanfield.com and grab a Zoom call with me. It could change your life.
You could tell me all about what you're going through. My perspective is unique. My perspective is so much more open and possible and complex and deep than a lot of the other shallow stuff you're getting out there.
Just thirty minutes with me could totally change your dating life. You can bring me whatever situation you're stuck in and we'll look at it together, whether you've been out of the game for twenty years or you're going out every week and it keeps falling apart.
Right now I'm asking in my community whether I should do dating profiles again or not. There's a poll running on it, and I want to hear what people think.
You can also chat with me on my website with lifetime access. If I'm online, you can pop right in and have a call from me almost immediately too.
And if you just want more of these conversations, they're all sitting in my Dating playlist, where I keep talking through what's working, what isn't, and what I'm learning as I go.
Join the Skool community if you want to be able to talk to me.
So I hope you can go out there and trust that no matter what you've been through, you have the chance to have an amazing dating life. It's still there for you, no matter who you are.