A gentleman trying to bring himself up to be a good man in the Catholic faith is presented with a litany of don'ts regarding relationships: Don't have sex before marriage, don't pressure women for sex, don't hit on women at the gym (they're just trying to work out), don't bother girls who are studying at the library or LaFun, don't use alcohol as an excuse for unbecoming behavior, don't be too forward with a woman, don't disrespect a woman, don't date a friend's ex, don't try to date her before showing what a sensitive guy you are, don't risk ruining a friendship with a woman by dating her. Some of these don'ts are reasonable, some are a little neurotic, but in either case a good Catholic boy doesn't come across a single Do until he's discerned a vocation to marriage with a good Catholic girl.
As a Computer Engineering student, I was an angel when it concerned all of the Don'ts. I was led not into temptation by my choice of major. But this perfect record came at a cost of debilitating loneliness: What was the point of studying hard to make a nice living if current trends showed I wouldn't be building a family to share it with?
I looked everywhere for Dos from the Church regarding dating in a modern context and came up short. The closest I could find was the Theology of the Body, which saves its Dos for once you have a wife. Unless it's time to experiment by going up to LaFortune and asking young women if they would like to discern a vocation to marriage with me, there wasn't a lot there.
What about "do have confidence," "do be yourself"? That advice is 100% true. It's also 100% useless to the guys who need it most. What about "do have patience, the right person will come along when you least expect it"? That one is worse than useless. If every guy on the planet followed that advice we'd have an extinction of the species.
Frustrated to the point of jealousy of cultures with arranged marriages, I had to seek my Dos outside of the Church. I scoured the askmen.com dating advice column and bought an e-book called "The Art of Approaching Women" and received the first useful advice of my dating life. That was over four years ago. Today I'm a confident guy. I present the best version of myself to the world. I'm not afraid to take a risk to go after what I want. I now have what might be considered a "normal" dating life in 2011. Do I wish I had found the girl of my dreams and we agreed to marry at Notre Dame? Of course. Is that what I have now? No. Is what I have better than the crippling chronic loneliness of my college years? Infinitely so. Would I be in the same mess I was in if I had waited to get some Dos from the Church? Almost certainly.
Here are my Dos for good guys who can't get the girls (especially if they know they only need one woman):
- Do decide how you want to present yourself to the world
- Do present yourself to the world not only verbally, but with a strong posture, deep tone of voice and open body language
- Do pick out a cool hobby. Tons of cash and no love in your life? Nothing's sexier or cooler than flying airplanes, and getting your license only costs several thousand dollars!
- Do learn how to kiss a girl. Watch Hitch or something.
- Do expand your comfort zone by taking risks. Do realize that even the worst you're imagining really isn't that bad and that you're better at inventing ways for things to go terribly wrong than the Universe is at executing those tragedies.
- Do make sure your cell phone plan includes unlimited texting.
- Do have a plan for a date. Better yet, have a plan for this fun thing you're doing anyway but you'd really like it if this girl came too.
- Do learn to interpret ambiguous data in your favor. If you don't, who will? The fact that an interpretation is in your favor doesn't make it a false interpretation. This was a big one for me: I basically needed a girl to sign forms in triplicate before I would put her through the "inconvenience" of having me try to date her.
- Do get used to rejection. I know, it'll hurt the same every time, but getting rejected a lot will at least show you there are plenty of girls out there you would like to date.
- Do make decisions. The only wrong decision about where to eat for a dinner date is "I don't know, where do you want to go?" She doesn't want to go eat food. She wants to spend time with a man, and part of being a man is not getting hung up on trivial decisions.
- Do recognize that there are far more profound sexual differences than genitalia. Don't you wish that women could ask men out? Guess what? They can but they won't. Why? Because they're women, you're a man and it's your job to put yourself out there and risk that pain of rejection. Sexual equality is awesome. Pretensions to sexual sameness lead to travesties.
- Do learn to flirt. It's kind of similar to teasing. Think of her as a bratty little sister for a bit, see how that goes. We're all brothers and sisters in Christ, right?
- Do draw attention to sexual differences. This is why Barney Stinson wears suits. There's precious little in this world today that says "I'm a man, you're a woman" without being so base as whipping it out. And that's animalistic behavior unbecoming of higher beings such as ourselves. Animalistic whipping it out is for later.
- Do move your focus from attracting a specific woman to becoming more attractive to women generally. Then maybe you'll get the one you're after, maybe you won't, but how is that single-focus thing working for you now? Not so well? Thought so.
- Do experiment. You can't just sit back in an armchair and deduce what is going to attract women. You need to try stuff, see if it works, maybe try a few times but then ditch what isn't working and keep what is working. Start with that "would you like to discern a vocation to marriage with me?" line at LaFun. Maybe it works at Notre Dame, who knows? You'll know, after you try.
- Do realize that how you say things, especially on first meeting, is way more important than what you're actually saying. Do a thought experiment: Think of all the ways you can say, "Hi, I'm
, how are you?" starting with the most awkward, botched deliveries and moving up to the most engaging, cool-as-a-cucumber stud-like deliveries. When people say the best pick-up line is "Hi," this is what they mean. For fun, try this experiment with cheesy pick-up lines, too ("Would you like to discern a vocation to marriage with me?"). - Do put on a clean shirt and stop farting. This is actually all you really need in order to get started, along with the willingness to experiment one. All else flows from this.
- Women have five basic senses. Do see that you can make yourself a delight to as many of them as you can. Bath, groom, learn to salsa and swing dance, invest in some timeless fashions and select and apply subtly a suitable cologne.
- Do have everything together in your life: grades/job, decent health, interests, a good character. This actually isn't a prerequisite for attracting women (I'm sure you can name many counterexamples), but it's a prerequisite for me to be interested in helping you. Those gorgeous girls with those loser guys who don't have it together, you want to rescue them, don't you? Get them with some guy who can take care of them and appreciate them like, say, you, right? Then you need to be that kind of guy.
- Do realize that even if you're getting advice on attracting women from sleazy PUAs, you don't have to be a sleazy PUA. Do look at what works for jerks and adopt what works without becoming a jerk. You're a smart guy, you can figure that out. By the way, sleazy PUAs will often tell you exactly the same thing and they have awesome advice because they've made experimenting with ways of attracting women their job.
- Do realize that in this day and age (outside of the Notre Dame campus), you *AS THE MAN* might have to put out. Boo-hoo, I know you're really upset that in order to find the woman of your dreams you might have to have sex. Do I wish I had met and married the woman of my dreams in school, that we saved ourselves for each other and that we lived happily ever after? Of course. Did that happen? No. Do I have friends who waited only get a nasty surprise in the bedroom post-nuptuals? Yes. Do I have friends who did it the night they met who went on to marry each other? Yes.
- Do realize that some of those Catholic Don'ts are good and valid, some are useless but benign, some are crippling.
- Don't become a scumbag now that you can all of a sudden attract women. First, you're capable of it, not super-awesome at it, so don't take any of them for granted. Second, being a scumbag to women makes it harder on decent, honest guys like who I thought you were, or at least who you used to be.
