Advice for people who haven't had relationship success

What would you tell someone who was trying to understand why they had never had a romantic relationship? I was going to limit this to advice for guys, but there are plenty of women who have never had a relationship, so there’s no reason to exclude them and assume this is a gender difference.

  1. If you go around talking about how badly you want a relationship, and how you feel like your life isn’t complete because you don’t have an SO, and you never really show the person you are courting that what you want is a relationship with them, not just a relationship, it’s creepy and frankly insulting.

  2. Be interested in something - something other than playing video games, watching movies, smoking dope, reading comics, etc. Specifically, find something active, constructive, and/or creative. And actually spend time doing it.

  3. A romantic partner is not something you can win, if love is what you want. Enough gifts might net you someone who likes receiving gifts. Enough stalking (and yes, trying to find out everything possible about a person so you can ‘prove’ that you ‘really know them’ and are really interested in them counts as stalking here) will get you someone who may eventually become too scared of you to leave. But love is something you get from spending time with someone, going out and doing things, being essentially a friend but with kisses (if that’s what you’re into).

  4. But don’t worry. The things you can’t change don’t matter as much as you might think they do. You can be depressed and find love. You can be not conventionally attractive and find love - what’s attractive is different for everyone. You can be socially awkward and find love. It’s just all about how you deal with these things.

but I impress girls with my massive library of knowledge about Back to the Future and Jurassic Park. I am not creative

My advice is pretty simple (but not easy), though it only applies to some people in this situation:

If you don’t like yourself, chances are good others are going to pick up on that and maybe not like you either. Find and nurture the things about yourself that you can and do admire. Be someone you would want to know.

It’s easy to get lonely and depressed and then to fall into a trap of self-absorption that basically prevents anyone from knowing and liking you. Generally, other people can only see what we show them.

It would depend on their behavior. Boilerplate advice is only so valuable.

If some is good, more is not necessarily better. Potential mates (of either sex) are generally not turned on by things in proportion to their quantity.

Girls like guys with cars. That doesn’t mean they’ll like guys with Bentleys. Guys like boobs. That doesn’t mean they’re attracted to women who look like they’re smuggling footballs*. Girls like gifts. That doesn’t mean they want you to buy them a car. Guys like girls who are sexually uninhibited. That doesn’t mean you should bring over the football team.

*well, maybe once, just to say you did.

Of course guys don’t want you to bring over the football team. You should bring over the cheerleading squad. Duh.

I’m gonna expand on the OP’s advice about being interest in something a bit. You should be interested in multiple things. People would get sick of listening to Neil Armstrong talk about the summer of '69 all the time, and he walked on the goddamn moon–I promise that nobody wants to hear about your hiking/quilting/service project/concert schedule constantly.

Another bit of advice, based on someone I went to school with–dinner is not the rest of your life. If you enjoy talking to someone and they ask you out, there’s no reason not to go on one date even if they don’t fit the exact criteria you have for your perfect mate. It’s not like the person doing the asking is already planning the wedding, ya know?

And while we’re on the subject, you might want to evaluate your criteria and make sure they’re realistic. I’m all for standards, mind you, but the longer and more detailed your list is, the smaller your pool of candidates is and the harder it’s going to be to find someone who ticks off all the boxes on your little checklist who also is into someone who throws her cat a birthday party every year.

Figure out why you are ruling out people and decide if those reasons are really valid. A lot of people set up an image of the kind of person they date when they are like 15, and never really revisit that image. Some of those rules may not really even matter to them anymore, but they are still in the automatic sorting checklist, the one that winnows down a room full of people into 1 or 2 possibilities.

Make sure you’re actually interacting with people your age. If you’re not, join a club, group, church, meetup, whatever you’re interested in to get “out there.” Doesn’t have to be something you’re awesome at, just something you’re interested in or would like to know more about. Haven’t hiked in years but think you might like to? Give it a shot. Most groups like bringing new meat I mean people into the fold.

Once you’re there and hanging out and making friends, think to yourself “I don’t want to be in a relationship at this point in my life.” I guarantee within a year you’ll find yourself with a girl(boy)friend. :slight_smile:

What age group are you referring to?

What are you defining as “lack of success”? Unmarried? Virgin at some particular age? Never been on a date? Unable to maintain a relationship for longer than a week?
Painting in broad strokes, I would say the most common reason people lack relationship or social success is that they allow themselves to sort of blend into the background noise. It’s pretty simple really. If you are not particularly physically attractive, don’t have much of a personality, aren’t particularly involved in any activities or interests, and dress sort of bland in generic unflattering clothes, you are going to have a hard time attracting people to you.

And even if you are attractive, if you are boring, crazy, annoying, prone to fits of anger or sobbing or otherwise have a bad personality, people are not likely to stick around.

For guys, particularly the nerdy, shy type of guys who tend to hang out on message boards:

  1. Ask girls out.

After you’ve talked to them enough to know you might both enjoy talking some more, of course. You won’t die if she says no. And it’s a nice thing to do. Most of the time, she’ll be pleased even if she’s not interested – getting asked out is a major ego boost.

  1. Don’t come on too strong.

Don’t bring a dozen roses to your first date, don’t read her that poem you wrote after you saw her for the first time, don’t talk about what you’ll name your kids if, ha ha, you guys get married some day. Save any and all grand romantic gestures for your one year dating anniversary, at which point they’ll look sweet and thoughtful and be fully appreciated. Just be calm and interesting and funny, if possible.

  1. Self-improvement is your friend.

A big part of male dating success is confidence. And while you may think your identity rests on not washing your hair and wearing a “Han Shot First” t-shirt everywhere you go, you won’t collapse into a singularity of conformity if you buy some stylish clothes to wear out in public. (You can still sleep in the t-shirt.) Get a cool haircut, go to the gym, get involved in a sport or physical endeavor (e.g. running, biking, swimming). You might feel uncomfortable at first, but it gets a lot better.

Okay, this is me. I am not painfully shy, but I am introverted. Meeting people takes effort, and after a long day at work I want to go home and relax, not work more. Of course I realize that’s fulfilling my short-term goal at the expense of what I DO want in the long term, but it’s hard to say, “Today’s the day I make the effort.”

So years go by, and I’m busy with other stuff, and it gets harder and harder to try. Some years ago I attempted an internet dating site, and the guy was nice enough but he had all kinds of questions for me. I’m a private person, and I hate answering questions. Also, he thought it was weird that I hadn’t been involved with anyone in so long and wanted to know what that was all about. I just wanted to run away.

Another thing, I am freaked out by the idea of a guy wanting anything sexual from me. I don’t know why – I have nothing against sex if it doesn’t involve me, and I’ve never experienced any major sexual trauma. If some guy was patient, maybe it would be fine, but what guy would want to put up with my weird issues? Guys expect experience and open-mindedness, right?

I’m otherwise a normal, successful, well-adjusted professional woman, I promise.

Anyway, if you live in New York City and I sound like the person for you, let me know! Ha ha ha. :slight_smile:

Relationships are like any other system, you must constantly be adding energy to them or they will run down and die out. Each partner should “feed” and nurture the other emotionally, it can’t last if it’s one-sided.

Once you get to a certain age (23 maybe?) and you haven’t had a serious relationship, I think it’s time to do some serious soul-searching, because in my opinion you haven’t had one because you don’t really want one. The idea of having someone may sound nice, but deep down you think it would be too much work, or too much disruption to your freedom and routine, or too scary, or too stifling, or just not convenient at your current place in life. There is something in you that is making you, consciously or unconsciously, decide you don’t want a relationship.

Guys who also haven’t had much sex would want to. Sex is best done with someone of roughly equal ability. People liked watching Mike Tyson knock people out in thirty seconds, but pretty soon they wanted their money back.

It is probably a good idea to consider the possibility, but I disagree with this statement. A lot of people are going through difficult life stuff even up to their mid-twenties that it takes them a very long time to get out of and get to the point where they can start having meaningful relationships with people. Issues of self-worth for instance is one of these things.

My suggestion would be to join a club or group on a subject that interest you, and has a good ratio of male to female, doesn’t have to be 50:50 but try to have a good mix of both.

Put aside the desire for a mate in this group, and set it for the love of the activity. Let your passion for that activity show and shine. It may take a while for that to happen, it may take several groups, or even different types of groups. Don’t get stuck if you feel a group has outlived it’s usefulness move on. This may be a path of self discovery, finding out where your passion is, where you feel you should be.

Through discovering your passion in this world you will discover more of yourself and that will be attractive to a mate.

There’s lots of good advice in this thread, but I have to disagree with this one. I’ve not looked plenty in my life, and I’m really not looking right now; no relationship has just come out of left field and found me.

A corollary to that is that bitterness and anger towards the preferred sex in general or exes in particular is a big, instant turn-off for most people. When I was online dating, I was talking with one guy who ended up angrily telling me that I was just like all other women, just looking for an excuse to reject him. My response (in my head) was that he just gave me one. I think my out-loud response was something like, “Uh, yeah, I have to go now,” and never called him again. See also: Self-fulfilling Prophecy. :slight_smile:

Hell yes to this. A friend of mine, after telling a guy she went out on a date with that she wasn’t interested in a relationship, was subject to a tirade about how women are just using their bodies to manipulate men. Sure, you’re real attractive now, dude.

(PS, did I just agree with kanicbird? o_o)

These are all good, but I particularly like number 2. I had a date last year with a guy who came on so strong that within two minutes of the date I wanted to leave. The strangest thing he did was to find my picture on the Internet, print it out on an 11x17 piece of paper, bring it with him to the date, and whip it out right after about one minute. We had met before in a bar, so he knew what I looked like, but he proceeded to tell me that not only had he printed out this giant photo for his “records,” but he was also now using it as his computer desktop. Also, he and a friend apparently got together before the date to come up with questions to ask me, and he had written them on back of the paper.

Don’t do that.