I’ve got to admit …
I’ve got a brain that likes to do a whole lot of analyzing. Probably because it’s what school trains you to do. They hand you problems and you get an A if you can analyze and solve those problems. In that situation, analyzing helps.
But when it comes to dating?
It often hurts more than it helps.
Why?
Partially because we are always forgetting about our own biases. When we look back at an approach that didn’t go the way we wanted to …
We only see it from our point-of-view.
And that means we can come to wickedly wrong conclusions about what happened. I was reminded of this when I was out with my friend. She’d just had a horrible week. And the only reason we went out was so she could let off some steam.
She didn’t want to “meet” anyone.
And this dude approached her. And she was cold to him. Later on, I overheard him talking to his friends. His conclusion seemed to be that me and my friend must have been dating.
Oh how wrong he was.
From his point-of-view, that was the only “logical” conclusion. He had no way of knowing anything about my friend at all. He didn’t know she’d just had a hellish week. He didn’t know we were just friends. He didn’t know we did try dating. Way back when. And we figured out that it just didn’t work.
In short …
He didn’t know what he didn’t know.
And that caused him to come to the wrong conclusion.
Now is that going to help him get any better at approaching women?
Probably not.
If anything, it’ll probably make him get worse. Because he hasn’t learned a very important lesson.
And that lesson is:
She’s got her own shit going on.
Any woman you approach has been living life before you laid eyes on her. And while you might assume it’s been breezy and easy … chances are, it hasn’t been.
If you forget that?
Any analysis you try to do of the approach is going to be flawed and faulty.
So what’s the solution?
Most of the time, it’s better to leave analysis for the other things in life. Like crunching stats when it comes to Fantasy Football. Or if you have to at your job. Or if you are trying to get your budget on track.
When it comes to dating?
Unless you can give yourself an omniscient point-of-view?
Most analysis you do is going to be lacking. It’s far better to just be in the moment as much as you can and not overthink things. It’s better to just “let go” of the last approach and move onto the next one. Of course, maybe there are a few things you can notice that you might try differently.
So maybe some basic analysis ain’t all that bad.
But too much of it?
Is just too much of it.
And it usually hurts a lot more than it helps.
