Most of us know intellectually that the love of our lives isn’t going to somehow happen upon us in our own living room as we rewatch Jane the Virgin in our pajamas — we have to go out and date to find them. But that’s sometimes easier said than done. Especially if you haven’t dated much or are in a new life circumstance, like a recent divorce or having just recently come out, it may feel excruciatingly vulnerable and scary to put yourself out there. What you need is a boost of dating self-confidence; here’s my prescription.
1. Date a lot
This may sound counterintuitive — after all, if you felt up to dating a lot, why would you need to build your dating self-confidence? However, hear me out. Dating is at both a mindset and an actual skill set, and your confidence and ease will increase by addressing both of these things.
From a mindset perspective, a crisis of confidence in dating often flows from how significant or scary dating feels to us. Especially if we don’t have much experience dating (or with a specific kind of dating, like dating women after coming out or dating after a divorce), it’s easy to let the idea balloon in your mind into something overwhelming and unmanageable. Just the idea of going on a date might feel like a referendum on your desirability, your social skills, your worth as a person and a partner, maybe your age or gender presentation or your weight.
Like anything else that has taken on extreme proportions in your mind, direct exposure is often the best way to deflate these exaggerated anxieties around dating. Going on a coffee date once or twice a week, even if they don’t go anywhere, helps provide a constructive counternarrative: dating is often pretty boring and unremarkable! While bad dates definitely happen, most people are not significantly cooler, hotter or more experienced than you, and are often at least as nervous as you are. Dating early and often, including going on dates with people you’re lukewarm about, helps keep dating in perspective.
This approach is also helpful to the degree that dating is a learnable skill set. If you’ve never played guitar before, you probably aren’t very confident when you pick one up, either. You’d feel a lot more confident if you were more sure of what you were doing. Going on as many dates as you realistically can, even if it feels uncomfortable at first, helps you practice a lot of the actual skills of dating: sending the first message on dating apps, asking someone out, making small talk, listening actively, being present, describing yourself and what you want, flirting, asking good questions, and deciding for yourself how you feel about someone.
2. Focus on your own experience and dating priorities
A really good way to tank your own confidence and overall experience dating is to obsess over whether you’re successfully winning over the other person: whether they’re attracted to you, whether they like you, how you compare to past or present partners of theirs, whether they were bored by the story you told about your boss, and so on. Some amount of concern about this is normal and unavoidable — especially if it’s someone you’re interested in, of course you’re going to care how you come across to them.
However, it’s easy to lose sight of everything but how you come across to someone else on a date, and get trapped in a spiral of anxiety and critical thoughts about yourself. One way to notice when this is happening is that you’ve completely skipped over any thinking about how this other person is landing on you. Redirecting your thoughts to assessing whether this person is a good fit for you, if they have any of the green flags you’re looking for, and whether they’ve been able to impress you or not can be a helpful way to recenter your confidence — not because you’re knocking them down a peg, but because you’re reorienting yourself back to your own agency in the dynamic, and to the fact that your regard is also something worth earning.
3. Lean on your friends & loved ones
In a 2008 study on psychosocial resources, scientists had their study participants face the prospect of a steep hill ahead of them. The study participants who faced the hill with a supportive friend by their side estimated the hill to be less steep than those who faced it alone — in fact, those who even thought about supportive friend of theirs reported finding the hill less intense and intimidating than those who didn’t. What is dating — or navigating the complexities and challenges of human connection broadly — but a steep hill we’re all facing at one point or another?
Basically any and all of life’s challenges are demonstrably more navigable when we have a robust and reliable support network of loved ones, friends and family who we feel psychologically safe with and can be consistently vulnerable with. Dating in particular is a space you may not imagine as a team sport, but where you can benefit from more social support than you may imagine. Dating is tricky and confusing, and can also change rapidly, as anyone who last dated before dating apps were in vogue can tell you. Friends who are also single and/or dating who can swap war stories with you, hype up your outfits, and commiserate when something goes badly are an invaluable resource.
Recommended Books:
How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety
The New Rules: The ultimate guide to being her. Confidence. Dating. Relationships.
How to Talk to Anyone About Anything: Improve Your Social Skills, Master Small Talk, Connect Effortlessly, and Make Real Friends (Communication Skills Training)
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