Does anyone have experience evaluating, selecting, and using a “dating coach”?
Stranger
What is a “dating coach”? Do they help you write a personal ad or something? Help with groooming, table manners or making sure your internal dialogue stays internal?
I’m picturing Mike Ditka for this.
A dating coach sounds like a great idea - I think the sad truth is that if someone is doing something wrong, they’re not likely to find out what it is and how to fix it. The feedback they’ll get is, “Don’t call me anymore. Not interested.” When I was online dating, I went on a meet-and-greet with a nice enough guy, but his teeth looked like they had mittens on them - I’m not telling some guy that he needs to brush his freakin’ teeth.
So… the idea here is to get honest feedback from someone on why you’re being rejected? Aren’t these people called friends?
No. They’re called *real *friends, and they are very hard to come by. (shout out to my best friend, Xin! I love you, girl!)
ETA: Cat, swear to me that you made teeth mittens up. That is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week.
So does this mean I’m special? I have a friend who from time to time will ask me why I don’t suppose So-and-So boy called her back, I say, “Um, because you do weird shit.” And she does. Man, I ought to write a thread about her some day. Cute girl, totally crazy.
Edit: The mittens on the teeth cracked me up, too. I imagined teeth wearing little knitted, yellowish mittens on them.
I watched The Pickup Artist on VH-1. Does that count?
Before you shell out for a dating coach, I recommend trying a public speaking course, or an organization like Toastmasters. That is, if you just get nervous about talking to women.
If your problem is something else…
What’s that old saying…“those who can’t…teach (or coach).”
I actually have experience as a dating coach.
One of the guys I work with started dating a woman and had no idea what to do. So I started giving him tips. It became quite a joke at work. People would talk about the fact that his girlfriend was dating me not him but didn’t know it.
Here is the kind of stuff I did:
He asked for a restaurant to take her to. I suggested taking her to three different places in the city. Each of them has one really good dish and they are within walking distance. Kind of do it yourself tapas.
When she invited him around to her place for dinner and he asked what to do I bought him two different coloured chef’s scarves from a kitchen supply place. I told him to turn up, offer her the choice of scarves and then get cooking together.
The relationship was cruising along until he stopped listening to me. I said that he should establish a bit of distance or he would seem needy and desperate. I thought a couple of weeks of unavailability would make it seem that he had a life apart from her (in reality he didn’t, thus the necessity to give the appearance) but he insisted he knew better. I told him that he was on his own with his 100% availability approach.
He did the usual creepy, too attentive guy stuff and she dumped him.
Well if he doesn’t have a life outside of her, she would have found out eventually, right? If having too much free time was a bad thing for her, he should have a) realized they may not be a good fit, or b) found interests other than her. Where does giving the appearance of something that is not so come from?
Probably true. This is a guy in his mid 20s who was living with mummy and daddy and doesn’t go out or do much but if you attach yourself to someone, like a limpet, what happens in their head is different to what happens if you don’t.
I only wanted him to show that he had a life apart from her, doesn’t matter how boring that life is. They weren’t contemplating marriage just going out.
I know that I wouldn’t want to be going out with anyone whose whole life revolved around going out with me.
I think your right, but the cynic in me says that the goal here is to “fake it until you make it”. Esentially, you keep the facade up long enough for her to become emotionally invested in the relationship. Then you can slowly start lounging around in sweatpants, playing X-Box all day, or whatever.
You want me to take dating advice from those retards?
I think it’s sometimes useful to get third-party feedback from someone not emotionally involved with either party. I suppose they can also help you formulate a strategy and manage the logistcs for dating too. I was talking to a friend of a buddy of mine and he was saying that dating sometimes feels like a second full-time job.
The problem, IMHO, is that advice from dating coaches can turn into what is essentially a variation on professional interviewing advice. Basically, everyone trying to “stand out” by all wearing the same suit, same haircut, same resume, same mannarism, same restaurants and so on.
That seems weird to me. I can’t imagine many girls would enjoy going on a restuarant crawl as a date.
And you may be right. But in my experience the walking around, arm-in-arm on a warm summer night with a breeze off the harbor… Maybe you just live in a shit city.
msmith and I both live in the shit city of New York. We have a lot of restaurants here. Neither I nor, to my knowledge, any of my friends have ever done this as a date. A bar crawl? Absolutely. But we go to one restaurant.
Were you two the ones giving advice to my ex-boyfriend?
Aren’t they all?
My friends either can’t find or won’t reveal anything manifestly undate-able about me. (By this I mean my female friends; my guy friends assume by default that it is all the problem of women-at-large, and that I need to date “a better class of bitch” or somesuch, and thus, you can imagine why I don’t solicit counsel on the topic from them.) Regardless, I get stood up most of the time on dates made from online contacts, and almost invariably when a woman does show she seems to be forcibly uninterested and sometimes confrontational before I even have a chance to actively screw up the conversation. I had one meetup late last year that seemed to go well, and she responded positively to having dinner when I e-mailed her a couple days later, and thereafter seems to have dropped off the grid. The only “successful” second date I’ve had in several years was with a woman whose personality was as dry as a martini that won’t even acknowledge vermouth under torture, and couldn’t even pretend to find any of the comments I made at least as amusing as Charmin commercial. After listening to her go on about traffic for at least twenty minutes, undeterred by any effort on my part to steer the conversation onto some topic that might be of vaguely mutual interest, I got the check and forced the event to rapid termination.
I know that I’m doing something badly wrong, but I don’t really know what. It’s not hygiene, I don’t think it is appearance, can figure out how it would be not meeting expectations, I don’t even seem to have a chance to bore a woman with some discourse on an arcane technical topic, so I’m at a loss. I do my best not to be a “nice guy” (i.e. passive-aggressive whiner, overly familiar or clingy, self-obsessed, et cetera). I don’t have a high squeeky voice or teeth that protrude sideways. I try to engage in interesting conversation (not work, origins, family, et cetera unless she seems especially enthused about that) and as questions rather than bluster on about myself. I’m at a loss as to what I could do differently or better.
Yeah, this is what I’m concerned about; shelling out several hundred dollars or more to get essentially the same advice I can get for free that ultimately doesn’t fix the fundamental problem(s). I’m not interested in “dating hundreds of beautiful women” or being some kind of robotic follower of a personality cult that reads like some multi-level marketing scheme crossed with with a consumer electronics manual written in an aggressive dialect of Engrish. I just want to be able to have a normal-type dating life and stop having my utter lack of success in this venue continue to screw up other aspects of my life.
Stranger
The problem is that you really want a girlfriend who enjoys lounging around in sweatpants and playing an Xbox too. You’re going to lose her on the first date: she’ll say, “This guy is too neat for me, and how do I ever tell a guy like this that I love RPGs?”
Maybe you should have a friend (or a couple of friends) quietly shadow you on your next date, and let them help you determine if you need professional help.
checks portrait gallery
You seem like a decent looking guy, although I’m probably not the best judge since I generally seek penis-free mates. Are you short?
She may be faking it until she’s making it, too. That’s the best situation of all.
Then you can both lounge around in sweatpants and play XBox with each other. Nerdvana!
JOE: Lloyd man, no babe is worth it, you know. Listen, hang with us man, we’ll teach you.
GUY #1: Right. Lloyd man, you can’t even trust them man, because you know what it’s about? They spend your money, and they tell their friends everything man, it’s economics.
GUY #2: Man, all you gotta do is find a girl who looks just like her, nail her, and then dump her man, get her off your mind.
MARK: Your only mistake is that you didn’t dump her first. Diane Court is a showpony. You need a stallion, my friend. Walk with us and you walk tall.
LUKE: Bitches, man! Hey dude, I’d better bail. See you later.
MARK: Later for you, Luke.
LLOYD: I got a question. If you guys know so much about women, how come you’re here at like the Gas 'n Sip on a Saturday night completely alone, drinking beers, no women anywhere?
(There is silence.)
JOE: By choice, man!
GUY #2: Yeah man, conscious choice.[right]– Say Anything…[/right]
Stranger