Reader Question: “I am a professional, good looking guy in my late 30’s, living in Chicago area. I have been meeting quite a few girls lately, mostly through Tinder or Hinge.” Many of them are very nice and attractive. Many of my dates go well, during those dates I often feel like I really like the girl, but the next day I lose all desire to talk to the or see them again, and I would much rather go out on dates with the other women who I haven’t met yet. I feel like this prevent me from developing a meaningful relationship with any of those women and I am not sure what to do about this. What do you think of my situation and what can or should I do, if anything, to address it?”
PH Answers:
First of all, this is a very common situation for many guys (and women) who start online dating and who do well in that world, i.e. – they are attractive physically and they know how to write in a way that gets them plenty of responses and more dates than they can handle. There are at least three possible reasons at play here that make you not want to stop going out on dates with different women, and discourage you from focusing on any one of them:
1. It’s possible that you simply aren’t ready to settle or be in a serious relationship yet, and you enjoy meeting different women. The only reason you feel that you are doing something wrong and that you have to be involved with one woman is because you are being told by your friends, relatives or a society that you have to be in a relationship and that dating or sleeping around is a bad idea. This doesn’t mean that you should listen to them and follow what they say, and you should listen to yourself more than to others because what you need romantically and sexually is such a personal and subjective matter. Different things make different people happy, and no one is in a position to tell you what will and should make you happy. Perhaps this is the time for you to figure out through these short lived dating experiences what and who you want, and just as importantly – what you don’t want and what kind of women you want to avoid.
2. The other reason for this hopping from one date to another is that you may always be hoping that the next woman you meet is going to be better and more special than the previous one you met, especially when you have a “pipeline” of women lined up to go out on dates with. This can put you in a perpetual circle of constantly looking for and expecting to meet someone “better”. Finding yourself in that kind of circle is a typical and challenging problem today for those looking to settle, and there isn’t always an easy way out. Women seem to complain more than men about how exhausted they are from meeting and going out on dates with so many guys. Hopefully, at some point you will go out with a woman that’s so special to you, that she will overshadow any desire to continue seeing others, and you will want to just focus on her, but that doesn’t always happen. Meeting a woman who sweeps you off your feet and stands out from the rest that much happens much more often in movies than in real life.
3. Lastly, you might be addicted to the very process of just getting women attracted to you and interested in you. You don’t even have to sleep with them. All you need to know is that they like you and they want to see you again, and then at that point you are ready to move on. You really enjoy that process of going from a stage where a woman you met goes from being indifferent to being interested in you. This issue will only take care of itself once you have had enough attention from different women, you are basically tired of going through this process over and over, and you are ready for a more intense and meaningful connection.
