Most men reading this have one date every few weeks, sometimes one a month. Told that the target is 2-3 dates each week, the first reaction is usually that it sounds like too many, or like it could not possibly be sustained.
That reaction is worth taking seriously, because it is measuring the wrong thing. The change is not the number. The change is what happens to you when the next one is already on the calendar.
What one date a month does to you
When a date is rare, it has to work. You know that before you sit down, and she can tell within about ten minutes.
It shows up in small ways. You agree with things you do not agree with. You laugh at the line that was not funny. You ask questions in the order you planned rather than the order the conversation wants. You stay for the third drink when the evening finished at the second, because leaving means going back to an empty calendar.
None of that is a technique problem. It is what a man does when the thing in front of him is the only thing there is. It also reads, from her side, as a man trying to be liked, which is the one impression that closes the evening down.
The over-investing you cannot see while you are doing it
The same thing happens two weeks earlier, in the texting.
A match that is going nowhere gets nine messages instead of three, because it is the only live thread you have. A woman who takes two days to reply gets treated as promising, because there is nothing to compare her to. You check the app after you send something. Not once. Several times.
Men do not experience that as neediness. They experience it as interest. The difference between the two is entirely a matter of what else is going on, and when nothing else is going on there is no difference at all.
What actually changes when dates are normal
Put three evenings a week on a man's calendar and the behaviour changes on its own, without any advice being given.
He stops rescuing a thread that has clearly stopped. He leaves at nine when the evening is not working, politely, and the leaving costs him nothing. He says the mildly disagreeable true thing instead of the agreeable false one, which is the single biggest difference between a good first date and a forgettable one.
And he stops running the calculation where every woman is either the one or a waste of an evening. She is a drink on Thursday. Some of those turn into something and most do not, and knowing that in advance is what lets him be relaxed enough for the good ones to turn into something.
Your standards stop being theoretical
This is the part men do not predict.
When dates are scarce, standards are a thing you hold in your head and abandon in practice, because the cost of holding them is another empty month. So you go out with women you already know are not right, and you spend an evening being pleasant about it.
When there is a steady flow, the standards start doing real work. You can say no to the woman who lives two hours away, or who wants something different from what you want, without that no leaving a hole in your week. That is the point at which what you said you wanted starts to matter more than what happened to be in front of you.
What it is not
It is not a social life made of strangers, and it is not every evening booked.
A steady 2-3 dates each week is an average across months, not a promise about any particular week. Some weeks have one. Some have four because two women were free on the same two days. Women cancel, go quiet, and meet somebody else on a Tuesday, which happens to everyone and is the whole reason several conversations run at once instead of one.
It is also not permanent. The point of a volume like that is not to keep it forever. It is that it is the fastest way to end up with one person worth stopping for, and men who get there usually get there in a handful of months rather than a handful of years.
Where the volume actually comes from
Not from swiping harder. A man with a demanding job cannot swipe his way to three evenings a week, and the ones who try burn out inside a month.
It comes from the apps running every single day rather than in Sunday bursts, from interest being read against what you actually want before anybody replies, from several conversations being carried at once instead of one, and from somebody proposing an actual evening at the point where proposing it is natural.
That is the daily work, and it is the exact work a busy man cannot do. Our team does it for you. Your photos and your whole profile get redone first, then your apps get run every day, on every app you want to be on, the selective ones included, on the accounts you already have.
Your first date within a week, or we keep working. If that week passes without one, the work carries on until it happens.
What is still yours
Everything that happens after she sits down.
You are not being handed a script, and nobody is teaching you to be charming. You are being handed the one thing that makes a man relaxed on a first date, which is a second one already on the calendar.
If you want to find out what that is like
Online Dating Concierge is our done for you service. We run the photos, the profile, the swiping, the texting, and the asking, and we keep running them so the flow does not stop the week your work gets heavy.
See if you qualify and we will go through what a normal week would look like for you.
Written by Matthew Stevens, Co-Founder & Head Coach. More than half a decade coaching men across the US and worldwide.
Everything here comes out of real coaching work: the approaches, dates, texts and profiles we go through with the men we coach.
More from the library6 related articles
- 01Signs It Is Time to Stop Running Your Own Dating Apps5m
- 02What You See Each Week When a Team Runs Your Dating Apps5m
- 03Why a Date From the Apps Feels Easier When You Did Not Do the Chasing5m
- 04What Changes in Your Head Before You Finally Hand Over the Apps5m
- 05Why the First Date From the Apps Comes Faster Than the Right One5m
- 06Can a Woman Tell When a Man Is Not Running His Own Dating Apps5m