Is Every Person You Meet Horrible…or Something Else Going On?
Published on December 18, 2014
There have been times in my life, often at work, where someone has pointed out a way that I could improve how I’m doing things. I’m almost always surprised when I receive this advice: mostly because I can’t believe I didn’t see that what I was doing was a bad way of doing things.
I think that most of us, from time to time at least, lose a little bit of our self-awareness. When a celebrity says something absolutely crazy, something that shows just how disconnected they are from “everyday people”, we tend to be hard on them. But I think each of us is guilty of the same thing in our own way.
With the desire to be more self-aware in mind, I wanted to address a type of online dating question I receive. It’s actually not one question, but more of a mindset that is shown in the question. Here’s an example:
And on these dates, every woman I meet is a horrible communicator. I go through the questions and I have to drag answers out of them. It’s so frustrating. I feel like giving an interview where the person across from me just answers my question and then waits for the next one instead of participating in the conversation.
Every Woman I Date is a Horrible Communicator
Again, I want to emphasize that I don’t receive a lot of emails about women being horrible communicators. Instead, I receive emails about some “thing” that keeps going wrong on every single man or woman the person meets. It might be the men don’t call after the first date or that women stop responding to emails after two days or whatever.
Here’s the thing: it’s unlikely that every person you meet is going to act the same way or stop talking to you at the same email. Or be a horrible communicator. In the example above, is it possible that this guy met 10 women who were all horrible communicators? Sure, it’s possible. But I think it’s more possible that something he is doing is causing the women to not engage.
I don’t mean to point fingers, but instead I want to recommend this to everyone reading this: if you’re having the same problem with every person you meet, take a moment and look at yourself. Before you take the reflex response of “it’s not me”, really try to see the situation from the other person’s shoes. If you are asking the same questions on every first date and working through them as if it’s a chore, is it possible that your date acts like they are on a job interview because you’ve put them in that position?
Another way to look at this comes from a quote from the TV show Justified (I’m modifying the language a bit):
If you run into a jerk in the morning, you ran into a jerk. If you run into jerks all day, you’re the jerk.
Be open to the idea that it’s very unlikely that you’re going to find dozens of people who do the same exact thing to you without cause. Again, there will be times where you go on a string of dates and they are all jerks. But there comes a point where the healthiest thing to do (for your dating life) is to ask if you could do anything better.
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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