A reader asks:
As of late I have had some struggles with women that revolve around the same thing: being too needy.
I have been engaged twice and growing up I didn’t have many relationships for experience or a father in the household to teach me about women and about the dangers of being needy with them. After my last breakup, I recently have been approaching women with a lot of success. However, I will come on too hard to them (e.g. sending graduation pictures to women I just met, rushing to go out with them on dates, sending a “did you get my call” message to a girl within hours of calling her, trying to arrange a meet-up with someone immediately over e-mail who does not even know me that well and who I haven’t “connected with” yet, telling girls “I like you” way too early, etc.) It’s really hard for me to resist the urge to do all of the above things despite seeing with my own eyes who it pushes one woman after another. What advice do you have for someone like me on how to stop being needy with women who I am interested in?
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Practical Happiness answers:
The above is a great reflection on the ramifications of being needy and moving too fast with the girls you meet. The most common reason guys do this is because they forget that women don’t operate like guys do. They don’t just look at the guy that they have never seen before and want to have sex with him after checking him out for a few seconds. Generally, it takes them longer to develop attraction and interest in a guy. Too much attention from a guy too soon, and she will likely conclude that you are just another smooth talker, who just wants to have sex with her and move on, especially if that girl has had a few experiences like that with guys (and most women have, at least in the Western world). Rushing girls into going out with you before they formed any kind of positive impression of you and trying to figure out how much they like you way too soon makes girls feel uncomfortable and “cornered’.
But, back to your question – how do you deal with this issue of being too needy with girls?
Ideally, the best way to eliminate your needy behavior is to actually observe with your own eyes how bad it looks when other guys do that to girls. I was once hanging out with a female friend and she started telling me about this guy who wouldn’t leave her alone. She would show me his e-mails, Facebook postings and text messages. Only at that point I realized how terrible it looks when a guy sends three, four or more text messages/Facebook messages in a row begging for her attention without any response from her and then “Hello? Are you there?” on top of that. Only until I saw her online dating exchanges with guys I realized how terrible the pictures that most guys post on the online dating sites are, and what a turn-off it is for a girl to receive one “Hi, sexy, how is ur day?” after the another. If you have a single female friend who is decent looking or above, she surely has something like that going on in her life right now. Just ask her and I am sure she will be very willing to share with you an actual example of at least one needy guys who is pursuing her now. She will be able to show you a few specific examples of what you should not be doing when talking to girls.
It is also very important that you don’t make the very common mistake that so many guys make these days – going to the other extreme and being too much of a challenge and making yourself way more unavailable than you really are.
