High upon the list of common mistakes men make in dating, we find blunders like…
Giving the woman too much attention, too fast. Getting overly needy.
Oversharing. Emotional vomit.
Being stuck in your head. Not taking enough action.
Not setting strong boundaries, and letting low-quality women walk all over you.
Being clueless about women’s true feelings, needs, and desires. Maybe even your own too.
All of these are symptoms of the same root cause, the biggest mistake most men make in dating…
Over-intellectualization
We men like to think we’re rational thinkers who are too masculine and logical-minded to make decisions based on emotion.
Oh, how true that ISN’T.
After all, both men and women choose partners based on how they make us FEEL, not by evaluating them like a question on an exam. Logic matters less in dating than you may think.
Yes, our natural psychological inclination towards logic and problem-solving serves us well in work, in school, in sports and training, and wherever else, but…
This common blind spot frequently shows itself in our dating lives. It fucks things up with the women we want like a sleeper assassin that strikes when we least expect it.
We’re cold-blooded killers in our academic or professional lives. We’re hungry for the grind, hungry to solve the problems of the day, hungry for the sweet feelings of making money, pushing our bodies to their limits, and moving up in the world.
Then a pretty woman comes our way, and we freeze.
Her inner machinations are a mystery. We try to figure her out like she’s just another puzzle to be solved, but every question only leads to more questions and less answers.
“What do I say to her? What do I do..? When she says..? What does she mean when she..?”
Then when we’re on a date with her… “Should I say..? What if I..? How do I make her see me as..? Why is she..? Why does she like me? What did I do to make her want to see more of me?”
But what if she isn’t a puzzle to be solved?
What if she’s just a woman?
If you’re such a logical person, then why haven’t you already logiced your way into being with her?
This may be unnatural at first, but set the thinking aside and just FEEL her existence. FEEL what kind of woman she is. Smart. or not. Kind, generous, and giving, or not. Responsible, or not. Mature, or not. Interesting, or not. Because dating isn’t a logical, intellectual process where you say and do the right things to get a pre-ordained result.
Dating is a chaotic, emotional process. We don’t get to decide who we’re attracted to or why we’re attracted to them. We don’t get to decide exactly who we meet past the locations we put ourselves into. We don’t get to decide who’s attracted to us, and most variables there are entirely out of our control.
All we can do is work on ourselves and let our holistic selves attract who they do, then choose the best partners for us out of that pool.
The truth about dating is that our emotional worlds determine which women we naturally connect with. Ignoring this fact is SUICIDE in the dating world.
Confident, honest men date confident, honest women.
Insecure, manipulative men date insecure, manipulative women.
Mature, responsible men date mature, responsible women.
Immature, lazy men… Guess who they date.
Keep this in your mind: Why would a confident woman date an insecure man? Why would a responsible woman date a lazy victim of a man? Why would a woman who’s honest and generous date a man who’s dishonest and selfish?
High-quality people have natural access to other high-quality people. They know they can get confident, attractive, responsible, generous, kind, intelligent, interesting, dynamic, emotionally healthy partners. So why would they settle for someone beneath them in those metrics?
People who don’t take good care of themselves, who treat themselves and other people poorly, who don’t cultivate positive character traits… The only people who can tolerate them in dating are people who also don’t take good care of themselves, don’t treat themselves and other people well, and don’t cultivate positive character traits.
Does this explain some of your dating experiences so far?
If you’re a confident, strong man but the women in your life are all weak and insecure, that says more about you than it does about them. You’re not as strong and confident as you think. If you really were those things, you’d be drawing better women to you.
Even if you keep yourself in shape and present yourself well, you have a solid social life, decent income, and hobbies you love… You may still be dating women you feel are beneath you in those metrics. (that used to be my major issue in dating!)
That’s because on an emotional, mental, spiritual level, they’re not so beneath you.
If all the women you vibe with are low-quality and whenever you date a higher-quality woman, she loses interest in you pretty quickly, not all hope is lost.
If you let go of the need to always be rational and objective, and embrace your emotional side… Not only will you be more conscious of your emotional world and able to consciously make it healthier, but you’ll find that your ability to reason logically and think objectively ACTUALLY IMPROVES.
Over-intellectualization stagnates a man’s spirit.
Why men over-intellectualize
Part of us is rational. Part of us is emotional.
Most men rightfully embrace their rational side, but as for our emotions…
Some men overindulge them, and some men repress them.
In the former category, you find men with a weak connection to their masculine essence. These men lose themselves in their emotions, hate whoever and whatever the world tells them to hate, let life’s mundane malaises sink their spirit, and don’t have any real convictions beyond what superficially pleases the people around them.
These men have low levels of sexual energy, and unconsciously envy men who have more of it.
In the latter category, are men with a strong connection to their masculine essence, but they’re not conscious of all its dimensions. They thrive in life’s challenges and happily take them on. They think for themselves and stand for what they believe in. They live by a code. They value being masculine, strong, responsible, capable, and honest. Then sometimes, they just BREAK.
These men have moderate to high levels of sexual energy, but a tough time controlling it.
They fight against their emotions, like to think they come off as strong, masculine men, but they actually have a ton of emotional baggage to work through before they can step into the full potential of their manhood.
Many of these men become addicted to alcohol or other vices and escapes. It’s their way of (unsuccessfully) balancing their strong masculine energy with some feminine energy.
That used to be me. I valued my masculinity, I embraced life’s challenges, I worked hard in school, in the gym, in martial arts, and was very much a go-getter. But put a pretty girl in front of me, and I’d have no clue what to do with her, even if having a girlfriend was one of the things I’d crave the most. And I could only face my emotional baggage when I was drunk as a skunk, which lead to some pretty ugly moments.
I’d claim I was a “logical, rational thinker” who was too manly to make decisions based on emotion, but a lot of the things I did back then, especially under the influence, weren’t very logical or rational, to say the least.
Plenty of men over-intellectualize as an AVOIDANCE pattern. They wrongfully see emotions and feelings as purely feminine, which is absolutely not true. It’s easier for them to hide behind raw information than to face certain emotional realities that’ll actually make them BETTER MEN in the long run.
It’s easier to read up on how to avoid rejection than to face real rejection.
It’s easier to have a one-dimensional, stoic view on masculinity than to accept you haven’t gotten in touch with the full spectrum of yours and aren’t actually the super manly man you think you are.
These avoidant men may crush it in their life pursuits, but once they date a woman or start getting intimate with her, the dam breaks. They flood her with years of repressed emotions. They treat her like their therapist and vent all their baggage onto her. When something in life goes wrong, they cry on her shoulder.
Being more emotionally aware as a man DOESN’T MEAN BECOMING MORE FEMININE. It simply means becoming more vulnerable and transparent.
How to be vulnerable LIKE A MAN
You know who’s got emotional wounds and baggage from past things that have gone wrong?
LITERALLY EVERYONE. So let go of any feelings of superiority or inferiority your wounds give you.
The only way you can overcome them is by letting them flow through you and receiving the lessons they’re meant to bring you.
You have to own up to feeling hurt. You have to own up to being imperfect and making bad choices because you didn’t know better, or maybe you did and your values sucked. You have to own up to feeling incomplete, unsatisfied, ignored, wasted, like part of you is forever gone, like you’ll never be good enough for whatever or whoever. You have to own up about the things in your past that you wish you could go back and change.
You’re not any less of a man for feeling these feelings. Nothing feminine about it. Pain, c’est la vie.
(bread is life)
Only by leaning into these feelings, can we alchemize them into personal growth. Otherwise we stay stuck in destructive, anxious, avoidant, stagnant patterns for YEARS, maybe even decades.
This doesn’t mean telling anyone who’ll listen about all the horrible ways you’re lacking as a man. This doesn’t mean venting on public social media. This doesn’t mean wallowing in your misery all “woe is me” like.
It just means awareness. Start by admitting your weak spots, your insecurities, your unfulfilled desires and needs to yourself. Figure out WHY your emotional world has all those knots in it. Write a journal, do it on camera, or just speak it aloud to yourself. If you need to tell someone, tell a close bro.
When you do this, it’ll hurt. You’ll be reminded of all the ways you don’t measure up to your ideals or other people’s. You’ll be reminded of all the good things you could have done but didn’t, all the bad things you could have prevented…
Then once you let these things flow through you, face them, surrender to them, and let them teach your heart a few things, they won’t hurt as bad, they won’t hold you back as much. You’ll have alchemized them into personal growth.
You’ll find connecting with healthy women on an emotional level becomes so, SO MUCH EASIER. Women who take better care of their emotional worlds will magically become available to you as the less emotionally responsible women magically become repelled by you.
You won’t be overthinking things with the women you really want. You’ll JUST GO FOR IT when one comes around.
Your capacity for logical reasoning will improve, now that it’s not so clouded by your emotional baggage. You’ll be quicker to identify the real reasons behind why you think and behave in certain ways, and why other people think and behave in certain ways.
Real, attractive vulnerability also means being aware of the great parts of yourself you’ve forgotten. Not just acknowledging that horrible thing that happened to you, but remembering how despite it, you still found things to love about your life. You still got up every day, stayed strong, and pursued your goals like a man. Also, remembering and embracing the things that make you happy just because they exist. When you’re vulnerable with other people, this is just as important as sharing your rough edges.
The more you accept and let yourself feel your negative feelings, the more open you’ll be to the positive ones. No more feeling guilty about feeling happy or excited, like you don’t deserve those good things.
Because that’s the real reason men who over-intellectualize fail with women. They’re not scared of being rejected, as much as they’re scared of FEELING LOVE, whether or not it’s reciprocated. They’re not scared of feeling bad. Loads of things in life are uncomfortable, depressing, and painful in whatever way.
They’re scared of feeling good. They’re scared of getting what they REALLY want and losing power over their lives to it.
They’re scared of finally getting a woman they REALLY want, then having her later discover the ugly parts of them that they’d rather keep hidden from the world. So they self-sabotage with those women to protect their ego rather than confidently move things forward.
You can’t have it both ways, gents.
You can’t make yourself perfectly stoic, logical, and invulnerable, AND get beautiful women in your life who adore you and are super excited by you. Dating is an emotional process, after all. That means sharing both the highs and the lows of your emotional world with women.
You can’t ignore the full extent of your emotional world AND resonate with the entirety of a woman’s, unless she’s ignoring hers too.
No matter your physique and image, status and lifestyle… Not optimizing yourself on an emotional, spiritual, psychological level will ensure you always shoot beneath the women who’ll actually make you a happier man. You’ll self-sabotage with the quality women who are interested in you until you get this part of yourself in order, and it’ll all be unconsciously driven.
Learn to accept every great and not-so-great thing about yourself, share them freely, and dating will get so much more fun.
– Ben
For more guidance on optimizing your masculine emotional world, and also on optimizing your body, lifestyle, and game…
Read The Three Fundamentals of Attraction.
Or go straight to one-on-one coaching.
Enjoy!
