6 Cheat Codes That Give Men An Unfair Advantage In Relationships
Get a leg up in your dating life.
Ridofranz | Canva Today, I’m a happily engaged, relatively well-adjusted thirty-something guy. But I wasn’t always so lucky, and it was a long (occasionally miserable) path to get to where I am now.
For starters, my love life in high school was non-existent. I never took a date to a single formal, including all of my homecomings and both of my proms. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. I simply got rejected, shot down, or otherwise told, in no uncertain circumstances, no. I mean, I was pudgy, awkward, and emotionally intense—I didn’t have crushes, no, no, I was in love.
Things got a little better when I went to college — women started paying attention to me! But my skills when it came to love and intimacy in my late teens and early twenties were abysmal. Sometimes I want to reach back in time and shake my former self: Get your act together. You need to know how to talk to and pick up women.
Here are 6 cheat codes that give men an unfair advantage in relationships:
1. When it comes to intimacy, slow is better
For me, intimacy got a lot better when I started to slow down and appreciate the moment. The sights, sounds, and smells (yes, smells) all contribute to a unique, unforgettable, experience.
2. Love shouldn’t (and doesn’t) feel like you’re settling
In a few of my early relationships, I made several emotional compromises because I simply had very little experience. I learned much later that there’s no room in a relationship for thoughts like, “This is as good as it gets” or questions like “Everybody’s relationship is similar to this, right?”
3. The word love should be used with great care
I should not have said it if I did not mean it. I remember saying it simply because we were both so desperate to feel something other than loneliness. We were both lying to ourselves and, even worse than that, we were heaping ridiculous expectations onto something we both knew would never work.
Vera Arsic / Pexels
4. Take the pressure off yourself
Dating in my early 20s was super stressful. I was putting all sorts of pressure and immediacy on something that should have been fun, casual, and slow. Instead, I was constantly swinging for emotional fences. I struck out — a lot. A lot of somewhat curious girls were immediately turned off, and rightfully so, by my regrettable intensity.
In one of my favorite movies, High Fidelity, John Cusack’s character says, “Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at the age of 26, and we were of that disposition.” I think about that, a lot.
5. Cut it out with the obsessive texting
Does anyone remember the scene in Swingers where Jon Favreau got that girl’s number and kept leaving her increasingly personal, misguided, and creepy voicemails until she finally picked up and told him never to call her again? I am pretty sure that scene was based on my early days of texting; I had women text me to say, “Don’t ever text me again.”
Mikhail Nilov / Pexels
6. Don’t stay with someone out of fear
I should have never stayed in my early relationships out of a misguided fear of being alone. According to an 'Ideal to Real' body image survey, 1 in 3 adults claimed they have a fear of being alone. It makes everyone, including your friends, family, and both partners involved absolutely miserable. And I sacrificed my happiness for, what, security? It wasn’t worth it, and ending things was always better than whatever it was I feared.
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