The Central Premise Behind Dating Guides (Which Makes Them Useless)

How-to guides are great, and they’re the reason websites like eHow and InfoBarrel get the traffic they do. People are always trying to figure out how to grow riper tomatoes, change the oil in their cars, and to get that special girl to sleep with you.

If that last one seems out-of-place, that’s because it is. After all, women are not tomatoes (who all react in pretty much the same way when exposed to the same stimulus), and they aren’t cars (which require a different tool box based on the make and model). They’re people who are each unique, and who have thoughts, feelings, and desires based on their life experiences. Yet despite that, there’s this bizarre idea that getting a one-night stand is something you can only do if you know the secret technique to beating the boss in a video game (or you have the cheat codes – money and good looks).

Dating Is Organic, Dating Guides Aren’t

The central mistake so many people make in dating (this applies to everyone), is to see potential partners as part of some vast sea of other. That’s why you’ll hear things like men love cars or women love to shop. There’s also the ever-popular men just want sex, and women just want committed relationships.

Here’s a real key, and it’s one that will make your dating life significantly easier if you take it to heart and remember it. Are you ready? Any time you start operating off generalizations about someone’s sex/gender, and not about what that person has told you, you’re heading for a crash. If you really want to be able to date someone then you have to know that person as an individual, and to communicate your desires to them like an adult.

It won’t work out 100 percent of the time, but you’ve got significantly better odds than pushing up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right – on every potential partner you meet until finding someone this combination works on.

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