Being Friends First Is a Terrible Dating Strategy
In this post, I am doing something I have never done before: answering a relationship question from a Twitter acquaintance.
The question comes from a young man who wants to find a girlfriend, but who has had limited success, especially in pursuing women online.
His question is this: “How I can pursue a friendship where I have some level of romantic interest without becoming too emotionally attached?”
This question has a short an answer and a long answer. Here’s the short answer: “You don't. This is fundamentally the wrong question if you want to increase your success rate at getting dates. If you have a level of romantic interest in a woman, you absolutely should not be pursuing a friendship with her.”
Here’s the long answer: the question assumes a misunderstanding of the relationship between the sexes and a failure to grasp how the feminine heart works.
The dating strategy wherein a man presents himself to a woman as a friend hoping the relationship grows into something romantic is common. I tried it a few times myself when I was young, always to poor effect.
This strategy appeals to certain men because it seems easy. These men imagine romantic relationships are a kind of plant that grows a little at a time. They imagine their overtures of friendship are like a seed they plant that, when grown to full stature, will blossom into an adoring and fulfilling romantic and sexual relationship.
What never seems to have occurred to them is that the fruit you end up with depends on the seed you plant. Guys who pursue the “friends first” strategy are like gardeners who plant carrot seeds and expect tomatoes to sprout.
Men indulge this delusion because in addition to seeming easy, this approach also seems safe. A man who presents himself to a woman as “friend” while harboring an ulterior motive wants to avoid the vulnerability that declaring his true intentions would entail. The “friends first” strategy is largely the domain of cowards.
This is one reason it doesn’t work. A man who presents himself to a woman as wanting to be her friend must at some point reveal his true intentions. When he does this, he also reveals the cowardice that motivated his dishonesty, and cowardice is not generally an attractive quality to women.
At the moment the "friends first" man reveals to the woman he is interested in that he has been hoping to win her, he loses. He loses because he has revealed himself not only to lack confidence, but also as being dishonest. He declares that she cannot trust him to present himself and his intentions directly. She can sense that he finds his true desires shameful, or that he sees himself as deserving her rejection and this virtually guarantees she will reject him.
So, if the guy asking this question should not try to pursue friendships with women he likes, what should he do?
He should do the opposite. He should remain polite acquaintances with women he has no interest in and where he does have interest, he should try to drive the relationship to a decision point for her relatively quickly.
Sure, he should allow some time to elapse between meeting the woman and declaring his interest. During this time, he should interact with her in ways that display his good qualities and that have the best chance of generating attraction in her. He should give her some time to feel that she is safe enough with him to say yes to an offer.
Then, he should simply ask her for her company in a way that makes it unmistakable that he has something other than friendship on his mind. Guys who default to the "friends first" strategy would live with more integrity if they simply said to women they like, “You’re pretty cute, let’s get coffee”. Even if she turned him down, he would know he had conducted himself honestly and been true to his own desires.
In addition to these benefits to his own character, his success with women would probably increase. At the very least, he would move from revealing himself to be a guy lacking in confidence to one whose supply of it is ample. This alone would start him down the path to where he really wants to go.