Adventures In Dating

I've been posting all over this blog this week. The wedding story has a few more parts to reveal, but I figure I'll take a little break from that. It was such an epic day that it requires a long time to properly tell the story. So I had something else I intended to post about today, but now I can't remember what that was. Maybe it will come back to me over the weekend or something. Right now I am thinking about Dating.

Dating is a really, really horrible and confusing game that adults play. If I ever have children I will strongly advise them to wait until they are at least 24 to get into that. At least my experience would seem to advise such a strategy. My dating life was nothing to brag about for sure. And everyone knew it. I was always the butt end of many a dating joke among my peers. I was the guy that made all the other guys feel better about their own horrors. I was the tale that you told around a campfire that ended with something like, "and if you aren't careful, the curse of Brandon may befall you too."

I spent a lot of years in the friend zone. I also spent a lot of years being the 'cool guy'. When a girl says you are a 'cool guy', it's not a good thing. Take my word for it. They never date the cool guy. They just wear you like an accessory because you go well with their outfit. Another thing I heard a lot from women is, "Your wife is going to be so lucky." I don't know what that means, but it isn't good. A girl never says that to you if she thinks she's going to be the one. So I became sort of a professional at making friends with girls. I can make friends with a girl just by walking into the room and saying nothing. It happens all the time. But when it comes to dating them I am just as clueless as the next guy, quite possibly even more so. I was always that guy that the other guys took pity on and tried to tell me what I was doing wrong.

Now that I am married, however, it seems that the roles have been reversed. Now other guys actually sometimes ask me for advice on their dating situations, and I'm at a loss to help them. I don't know anything.

"But you are married?" They desperately implore. "You must know something?"

Many honest married men I know have admitted to a certain cluelessness that I can now attest to. Even if you once thought you knew what women were all about, as soon as you get married you just realize that there are a lot more things you never even knew you didn't know. You ask yourself, "How did I get here?" And your mind seems to know even less than it did before. Every answer provides a new question.

There are a lot of serial daters who will give you all sorts of advice on dating. I know a few of those. And I learned nothing from them. I broke all of their rules, and somehow ended up happily married in the end.

Then there are women. If you are friends with them then they too will give you lots of advice on how it's done. I had a few of those womanly friends, and I found that their advice can give you lots of insights into what women are thinking, but it doesn't really help in the practical way of actually getting them to like you. Women are better at telling you what not to do, than what to do.

So the rules of dating seem to be highly open to personal interpretation. They are merely guidelines to keep you away from hornets nests, and other obvious pitfalls. These are the rules as I know them:

#1 - Be direct: If you want to go on a date with a girl, you absolutely have to ask her using these words, "Would you like to go out on a date?" Or something very close to that. While you are busy trying to decide whether they like you and you should ask them out, they are busy wondering when you are going to get around to asking them out. They are always 2 steps ahead. And girls are very literal. If you don't ask them out literally they think you just want to be their friend, and you will end up in the friend zone. The friend zone is actually under rated. It's not a bad place to be. Unless you don't want to be in the friend zone. And if you are a single guy, you definitely don't want to be there:

#2 - Don't be a douche: Seriously dudes, walking up to a strange girl and saying something like, "You lookin' hot tonight. Let's go to my car and tear off a piece!" Never actually works. Ever. I know because I know those guys. If you want a girl to respect you, then you have to respect her. It's as simple as that. I find that most girls get into the dating situation expecting you to be a jerk, precisely because every single one of them has dated one, or two, or twenty, jerks already. If you get away with it it's because they have stopped expecting any different. It's much better to surprise them by not being a jerk.

#3 - Don't be weird: Ok, you can get away with a lot of weirdness if you meet the right girl. But it's a very fine line. Weirdness is a dangerous game. Leave it to the professionals like me.

#4 - Aim High In Dating - I know a lot of dudes who try to date every girl who crosses their path. Don't be desperate. This also falls under the Don't be weird rule. Save it for the ones you are really interested in. If you don't want to seriously date someone, you probably shouldn't be worried about getting them into bed within 7 days either. If you want women to date you, you have to respect yourself as well. Don't be afraid to just be friends once in a while.

#5 - Space: Once you find yourself in a dating situation don't move super fast, or act super desperate. Don't call them several times a day, and leave creepy messages on their phone. You don't have to be with them all the time. They won't forget about you if you wait for half a day to send them a text message. Every girl I know absolutely hates when she's out with her friends and you're blowing up her phone asking her what she's doing. They hate it so bad that their rage propelled Lady Gaga's song "Telephone" to #3 on the billboard charts. (Lady Gaga can actually give you a lot of insight in how to deal with Women.)

#6 - Act confident/Fake it if you have to: You will make mistakes. You will sometimes be a jerk. You will often act weird. Don't let it get to you. Just be yourself, and don't get obsessed with a whole bunch of rules. Even when you think you have totally struck out, call her back. A great girl is always worth totally humiliating yourself for.

So there you go. That's how you date a girl. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it just doesn't. It only worked once for me. But that's all I got. It probably doesn't help you at all.