How to get a good woman: Cultivating Friendships (Part 3)
Looking for the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with? Tired of being alone? Obviously, I can’t guarantee or promise anything… but I can tell you what mindsets you need to adjust in order to find a good woman.
Too often, our relationships are doomed with the wrong goal. We start pursuing relationships with women from the perspective that they will want to date us, marry us, sleep with us. We start with romance in mind.
If you want to “get a good woman,” what you are chasing is a long term committed relationship with the right woman. Not to oversimplify or sound too judgmental, but let’s call it that marriage. (It seems strange that we have to offer a disclaimer about marriage in this day and age. I know I’m old-fashioned, but I fear our culture is abandoning some very important values when it comes to long term relationships in regards to marriage. That is another topic for another day.)
If all of your energies are focused on building that romance from the start, what you build is a relationship built on attraction and emotion – and those are pretty weak foundation blocks for a lifelong commitment.
Don’t start by asking her out. Start by getting to know her. Invite a group of friends, coupled and un-coupled out for dinner, or a hike, or over to play board games. Be friends first. Build that friendship, and the rest may follow. If it doesn’t, you can keep trying, or you can move on! Moving on is tricky though – if you’ve already walked down the aisle with her in your heart. Take it slower. Don’t try to inject that into your friendship, and keep those emotions and imaginations under control.
Take it slow may look different from case to case. When I met my wife, our collective groups of friends hung out at college all the time for about a month or so, and then I just knew that I should pursue taking that friendship to a romantic level. We were married nine months later. For some, it may appear “fast” or “quick” and I’m not averse to a quick relationship….
But it does need to start out with friendship. We spent a lot of time with friends talking, laughing, goofing off, eating meals, going to concerts, watching movies together. We had conversations, and grew to trust each other, and knew each other quite well, surprisingly, before progressing to romance.
Too often, this step is skipped.
And if a friendship is not built well and carefully, it might not survive the “Hey, you want to go on a date?” question.
It doesn’t have to be awkward afterward. It only is awkward if you’re all puppy-dogged and weepy about it. Keep those emotions in check, and if she isn’t interested in you, then keep the friendship and work toward building another romance with someone else – unless you think you can try again later.
The problems come when we gunk all this up with sexual tension, unrealistic attachments, and unbridled emotion.
Keep your wits about you, young man.
