If you’re reading this, chances are you want to have more success in your dating life, and it all starts with setting the right type of goals. You’d be surprised how often people set goals around dating that just never pan out.
While these may seem like totally normal dating goals, there’s actually one glaring problem that’s holding you back from ever accomplishing them. Let me tell you what it is.
If you’re someone with little to no dating experience, chances are the biggest mistake that you’re making is setting a goal that is way too big.
You might tell yourself something like “I want to have a girlfriend by the end of the year,” which seems kind of reasonable, but you’re skipping all the small steps that it actually takes to get there. Instead of hyper-fixating on what you want, take it a few steps back and ask yourself:
- Do I have the social skills to interact with girls the way that I want to?
- Do I know how to kiss them?
- Do I know how to ask them out?
- Do I feel confident sharing more about myself with any girl that I like?
If you don’t have these basic skills mastered yet, then getting a girlfriend is going to be miles away. How can you be in a relationship with someone when you don’t feel confident in your own ability to talk to them, to go on dates with them, to learn about them, to really just be yourself whenever you’re around them?
Plus, think about that goal for a second: you want to have a girlfriend. Seems pretty innocent, but what you’re actually doing is putting your energy and effort into the hope that someone else is going to come into your life and fill that role.
Instead, let’s flip it upside down, flip that script so that you can be proactive in that goal. Instead of wanting to have a girlfriend, tell yourself: “I want to be a good boyfriend for someone that I meet.”
That way, you are in charge of what you do, you know what you’re bringing to the table, and you know you’re going to find someone that’s worth what you have. And part of minimizing the steps that it takes to accomplish that goal really is just backtracking, asking yourself:
If being with someone is the highest step, what do the other previous steps look like?
Maybe that’s putting yourself out there and meeting more people. Maybe that’s starting more conversations. Instead of setting a goal of “I want to find a girlfriend,” tell yourself:
“I want to have a conversation with three new people every single day.”
That’s something that you can actively do right now, you can measure and hold yourself up to, and it’s not this big lofty thing that’s going to take you a while to get there.
And if you don’t really know what your first step should be, starting conversations with people is a great entry point. You may also want to practice your flirting skills with people. Try to flirt with someone new every single day. Or you may even want to try to start asking people out. It could be on a friend date, it could be on a romantic date. The whole point is to get more comfortable asking people to spend one-on-one time with you. There’s a lot of ways to approach this, but taking some kind of action step is going to help you get closer to that goal.
Another thing I would encourage you to do when it comes to setting a dating goal is to go deeper into the “why”. If you want to just be in a relationship with someone, if you want to just get laid, if you want to just have someone that you can talk to and open up to, why is that important to you?
Don’t just leave it as something that you want. Don’t leave it at a desire. Really dive into it. Find out what that’s going to change in your life if you were to accomplish it. How are your perspective and how you see things on dating and relationships and interactions be different? Why is it important for you to have someone to meet up with every day after school or to spend romantic holidays with or to talk to for hours into the night every single night?
Yeah, the answer might seem pretty obvious — to avoid loneliness or unhappiness — but when you start to really reflect on why that goal is important to you, you realize that not just anyone can fill that slot.
Sure, anyone can be your girlfriend. You don’t just want anyone. You want someone that brings meaning and value into your life, just like you will be there. And when you really reflect on that, you realize you’re not just looking for a girlfriend, a first kiss, a first time having sex.
You’re looking for a quality girlfriend, a quality first kiss, a quality first time that’s going to allow you to really shift your gears, to really prioritize this part of your life, and to prioritize that goal by really meeting new people and not settling for someone that’s “good enough”, but to stepping up your own game because you have high standards for yourself.
And another important thing to remember about setting those dating goals is that you will be met with rejection and failure. That might come in the form of people not giving you the time of day or just struggling a lot on dating websites or just freezing up and getting put into the friend zone whenever you actually try to pursue someone. These things are bound to happen, but there’s a way out of that.
There’s no magic formula where you could snap your fingers and it never happens to you. You will be met with these challenges, but it all comes down to how you choose to reframe and learn from them. If you’re someone that has constantly met with rejection over and over and over, it’s easy to feel like you’re undateable, like you’re never gonna succeed in this part of your life, which I totally get.
But if you still maintain that goal, if it’s something you want to accomplish, it really comes down to finding a different way to get there. That might mean tweaking a little thing in your approach, how you talk to people, how you present yourself, what you do that is going to be different the next time you pursue someone because really, that’s all you can do.
It’s easy sometimes to blame other people, to blame external factors, and I’m not here to give you some kind of blue pill perspective of like “just showcase your personality and the right person will come your way”.
No, it’s a lot of hard work and there are challenges on your plate. But just because there are challenges doesn’t mean you are not up for the challenge. That’s a choice that you have to make for yourself.
And if you feel like you’re up for the challenge and just need someone in your corner, I’m here. I offer confidence coaching over on Patreon, and I’d love to work with you and help you figure out your goals and help you work toward them.
On that note, I’ll catch you next time.
As always, love and peace.
