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The Only Dating Goal That Makes Sense To Me

Conor Smyth
3 min readAug 2, 2019

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Photo by Edward Eyer from Pexels

What are your metrics for “success” in dating?

For many men, being “good” at dating is a binary deal: pulled/not pulled; kissed/not kissing; fucked/not fucked.

It’s a “yes”, or a “no”. Like I wrote before:

Setting aside the Red Pillers, for whom all romantic adventures are soul-shrivelling games of domination, most online dating advice for men is logistical, practical and goal-orientated. Open, close, escalate, Final Boss. GameFAQs for the horny.

After my fiancée hit the eject button, I became desperate for “yeses”. Yes, you’re still attractive. Yes, it’s not too late. Yes, it’s all going to work out.

This made me eager. (Not good.)

I’m trying to shift into metrics that are healthier in the long-term and don’t hand over self-esteem to external decisions.

In that spirit, here’s a taxonomy of a very good recent date, why I think it worked well, and where I fell short. This is mostly reminder to myself.

Sunday night, the weekend shifts done with and a Monday off ahead. I put a blanket on the grass and we ate pie and drank beer and gin by the river. We watched birds on the river and chatted about what was going on in our lives. I lay down and closed my eyes and listened to her talking about…

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