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Want to get better at dating? While there’s no universal agreement about what it means to be good or bad at dating, there are some generally agreed upon guidelines to help you level up your dating game.
“If you are mindless, manipulative, and bad at communicating, you are bad at dating,” says Tara Suwinyattichaiporn, associate professor of human communication studies at California State University, Fullerton, and sex and relationship expert. “Meanwhile, if you’re mindful, communicative, and authentic, you’re pretty good at dating.”
So how do you bring your most communicative, authentic self to the dating world? These expert-backed tips can help:
- Figure out what you want - Whether you’re just looking for someone to spend time with or you’re hoping to meet someone to marry, it’s important to be honest with yourself about what you want, otherwise you won’t get it, according to relationship expert Jor-El Caraballo.
- Get realistic - Once you know what you want, you need to decide how much effort you’re willing to put into it. Carabello points out that there are only so many hours in a day, so you may have to give something else up in order to have time for dating.
- Listen more - People often focus on being interesting but miss the mark on being interested in the person they’re on a date with.
- Do activities that you actually like - Doing things on dates that you actually enjoy will make it better for you when you don’t feel a spark or click with your date.
- Actually meet up - “Chemistry is different face-to-face than it is via text, so the sooner you know, the better,” explains Tara.
- Ditch the old-school rules - Ignore preconceived notions about how long you should wait to have sex or who pays for the first date and do what feels natural to you.
- Take a break when you need to - Dating isn’t always going to be super exciting, but it shouldn’t weigh you down or stress you out either. So if it starts to feel like it is, take a break for however long you need until you’re ready to put yourself back out there again.
Check out the article at Well and Good