Dating Advice Can Be Depressing
Published on February 12, 2010
There is a lot of dating advice out there and much of it tries to make your dating problems sound as if they are the easiest thing to solve in the world. Recently I was shown a video of a very handsome man giving dating advice on how everyone should just “get over” rejection. By looking at him it became clear that he had done most of the rejecting in his dating life (he made comments that further strengthened this suspicion). It was also clear that he believed what he was saying. However, if he doesn’t understand rejection nearly as well as the people he’s speaking to, this puts him at a serious disadvantage for offering valuable advice on the subject.
To put it another way, if I go to the gym to lose weight, I would prefer that my trainer be someone who was at one time overweight. I want someone who understands both the struggle and the success. It’s far too easy for somebody with the metabolism of a hummingbird to tell people how easy it is to lose weight and that they’re just not trying hard enough.
photo by hart_curt
In the past, I’ve taken dating advice that tried to make my situation sound like a simple talking-point when it really wasn’t. I’m a very shy man. Any date I’ve ever been on has involved either me or someone who cares about me putting in some real effort. I struggled with rejection for many, many years and avoided putting myself in any type of situation where I might be rejected by a woman. I also took plenty of advice from plenty of people who thought my problems were oh-so-easy to fix (those people were wrong).
I overcame my fear of rejection but advice that says “just get over it” provided zero value in helping me accomplish that. In fact, this type of advice only made me feel depressed, as if something was wrong with me. Some of this advice almost drove me away from online dating entirely. I was convinced that I was failing when in retrospect the advice was just bad, at least for my situation.
What I’ve found with my own experience and while searching for valuable content for my readers is that so much of the advice out there is given in such a way that it has the possibility to hurt peoples chances as much as it helps. If I offer advice that convinces a single person that something is wrong with them causing them to stop dating, I’ve had the opposite affect I should be having. With that in mind, in my next article in this series I’d like to offer some of my thoughts on taking advice and recognizing the good from the bad.
Read Part 2: 10 Tips on Taking Dating Advice
Author: Brad
Brad initially struggled with online dating but over time became quite successful using it. He met his wife using online dating and has been giving advice and helping people improve their results since 2007. He has written a Free Online Dating Guide to help others find success with online dating. You can learn more about his personal experience using online dating and running this website here.
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