Fun with #OkCupid: A dude in the OKC corral (Are you connected to yourself?)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Kenny. We e-met through OKC and although we've never gone out on a date, he was inspired by the documentation of my online search for love, that he wanted to come on board and provide male insight into OKC. So here you go ... and now we're here ... HIT IT KENNY!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @casetines
To say that I was a late bloomer when it came to girls and dating, would be like saying that Angelica was kind of mean to Tommy on Rugrats. It’s an understatement.
Growing up, I wasn’t shy but I definitely feared rejection. A lot. I mean, I still fear rejection and the fear of failure is my biggest fear of all right now, but I’ve also learned a lot about how fear can be a good thing. Still, for the vast majority of my life, I simply wasn’t a part of the dating scene. I made attempts but they were pretty feeble.
One resource I would constantly ask for advice from was my half-brother Tony. He’s a lot older than me, and frankly he’s the biggest ladies man that I know. He never has had any problems with women and that was my biggest issue that I had to overcome. But we weren’t just built the same way.
Besides having different moms, Tony and I didn’t grow up together and our upbringings and interests couldn’t be more different. He liked cars and weed and motorcycles. I liked Step by Step and Ace of Base and Push Pops. My friend and I call him “Rod Belding,” naming him after the blonde-haired, Mr. Cool brother of Principal Belding on Saved by the Bell. It fits perfectly.
We did share two things in common though: An interest in the opposite sex and the belief that family is the most important thing.
It didn’t matter that Tony was much older than me, or that we didn’t grow up together or see each other very often, or that we shared almost nothing in common; we were and are brothers. And so when I ask Tony for advice on women, and other things, he’s always been there for me.
Now, there’s always the normal advice that you’d expect: Ask questions, listen, be confident. No surprises there. But the one piece of advice that I’ll never forget, and the piece of advice that I really couldn’t understand until I had put it into practice with 100% effort was this: Don’t focus on finding women, focus on finding yourself.
If I asked my brother for relationship or dating advice, he’d tell me the normal stuff, but he’d also ask what I was doing with my life. What goals did I have in my career, financially, with becoming the man that I wanted to be and how could I possibly find another person to share a part of my life with when I hadn’t even entirely figured out where I was going?
He had a point, but I didn’t really listen hard enough. I didn’t think that could possibly be it. “No way bro, that can’t really be the solution. It has be something more like ‘Peacocking’ right?” But he just kept insisting that the less focused I was on finding a girl, the more successful I would become.
It’s a pretty common cliché that you never find love when you’re looking for it, but is it as simple as that? That seems to imply that you should never even try and that you should never talk to a person of the opposite sex unless they talk to you first. Another common belief is that for guys, you’ll always be more attractive to females when you’re in a relationship than when you aren’t.
What is it about “not caring” that is so attractive to the opposite sex?
Well, nobody likes a desperate dude or dudette. You’re giving off that vibe that you are going to melt from the inside-out if you don’t make something happen and that vibe can be felt in person and I’ve found, also over the internet.
Believe it or not, pheromones and desperation seem to seep through your computer screen, through the internet tubes, and onto your online profile. Whether that’s Facebook, OkCupid, Twitter, whatever. You’re always saying something about yourself, and sometimes that something is “Love me! Want me! I need it!” In which case, people are like “I don’t want to deal with this.”
Everything I’ve ever done to improve myself over the last five years, I’ve only done for myself. I knew that if I did it for anyone else, I would fail. The only person that holds me accountable for myself is myself, because honestly, nobody else cares. I mean, your family wants the best for you, but even in failure they’re going to be there for you and tell you that it’s okay. Fuck that. If I failed, it wasn’t going to be okay.
I started to work not on finding somebody else, but on making myself who I wanted to be. The person that I would be proud of, not the person who I thought other people would like.
I had to stop being a viewer, and start being a doer.
After college, I lost 150 lbs. That’s not easy for me to say, even now. I’m happy with how far I’ve come from that, but it’s still something that’s hard for me to admit in public. But more than anything else I’ve ever done, I had to hold myself accountable to losing weight and I did it on my own.
I was proud of myself. Really proud of myself. And that shined through when I talked to people.
What I was able to learn from that experience, I was able to apply to other areas of my life. The fact that you can’t make any major changes to yourself, permanent changes, just because someone else wants you to. The people that you disappoint in life that will honestly make you feel the most terrible in doing so are your parents and yourself.
I didn’t want to disappoint myself anymore.
I started to do some work in my career that I was really proud of.
After a tough breakup, I did something that I always wanted to do: drop everything and move to Los Angeles because I had to find out what else was out there.
I paid better attention to how I dressed and how I portrayed myself to other people, because I wanted to be proud of how I was perceived.
After all that, I was still not complete, and I still think that when I tried online dating I was failing because I wasn’t portraying the person I wanted to be. Sometimes I think we get pigeon-holed into creating an online profile based on what we think others want to see, instead of who we actually are.
Will they judge me? Is this a dealbreaker ladies? Should I make a white lie here or there?
I have had a few different dating profiles and I can honestly say that the one I created after I dedicated myself to being a full-time professional writer was the one that has gotten the most positive response and it’s not even close.
It’s not even that I changed the content of what I said about myself, but I think it shined through that I was working hard on something, that I had goals, that I was more happy within myself than I ever was before. That kind of stuff you can’t white lie your way through. The more honest you are, the more it shows. Honesty is attractive to people, and you can’t just fake it. Abraham Lincoln was a p-i-m-p.
Over the last nine months I have gotten exponentially closer to achieving my long-time dream of becoming a professional writer and when I came back to OkCupid after feeling great about the work I’ve done, feeling not-desperate-at-all because of how dedicated I am to my work, things have been much smoother.
I love having sex with girls, but having sex with words and making article babies is also very satisfying.
I recently watched the Japanese film Noriko’s Dinner Table. The movie is rife with metaphor, but one of its famous lines that’s pretty much straightforward is: “Are you connected to yourself?”
That’s a pretty important question to ask, and even more important to find the answer. Focusing inward has helped me move further forward than I ever have before. I cannot stress enough how important it is to find yourself and connect to yourself before you start worrying about finding someone else to connect to. Best advice I’ve ever gotten and best feeling I’ve ever had.
Thanks Rod.