How to Have a GREAT First Date

Are you sick of going on dating apps, swiping right, texting a million guys, and having horrible coffee dates? If so, you have the power to have a completely different dating experience and go on great first dates. In this Love U Podcast, you will learn to do the opposite of whatever you’re doing now and ensure that your first dates involve dinner, drinks and romance.

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Hi, I’m Evan Marc Katz, Dating Coach for Smart, Strong, Successful Woman, your personal trainer for love. Welcome to Love U Podcast.

Have you been on a lot of bad dates? Have you discovered that bad dates are both life draining and soul-sucking? Have you considered that the reason you’re going on bad dates is actually your fault? Probably not.

In today’s Love U Podcast, I am going to show you how to have a great first date and expect better treatment from men overall.

So this is going to be a longer podcast today because this is something I’m really passionate about; something I’ve been thinking about for a really long time. My view of dates is informed by 17 years of coaching. Ten years of dating. And it doesn’t mean that I’m right and you’re wrong. Anything you’re about to hear that sounds like I’m disagreeing with you is certainly not a personal attack. But yours is probably informed by years of terrible dates, which is obviously going to impact the way you view dating overall.

The problem and this is a Love U principle that we teach in week one, it’s not about right or wrong. It’s about effective and ineffective rants. I never anytime I say anything that pushes your buttons or challenges you, I’m not trying to suggest that I’m right and you’re inherently wrong for feeling differently.

The goal is to have success.

And there are better ways of doing things than others. I think we can all recognize that.

So if you’ve ever gone on a bunch of dates where the guy’s a half-hour late, then reach for the check, tried too hard to get laid, bitched about his ex for two hours, you have very valid reasons for being wary of dating.

And so what I’m about to propose today is sort of radical. I don’t know anybody else who gives the exact advice that I give. And I like that for a very specific reason. Most people stick with the surface. We’re going a level deeper not to just figure out why, but what to do differently, to get a different result. So my proposal is that your solution to bad dates is actually the problem of creating more bad dates, which is hard to digest. Right?

But if you’re using a dating app, you’re swiping right and you’re texting and meeting guys as quickly as possible for coffee A.S.A.P.. Very specifically to avoid wasting time, that’s the primary reason that dating sucks so much. And the only way to get a different result is to do something different instead of complaining, “wow, this sucks.” So that’s what I hear. I hear a lot of dating sucks. Dating apps suck. Texting sucks. But I don’t see anybody trying to get away from their way of doing things.

I have a maximalist view of dating.

So understand, as a dating coach for smart, strong, successful women who have everything but the guy, I have a maximalist view of dating. A maximalist view for our purposes is something that results in a best-case scenario. Minimalist approaches usually are in fear of the worst-case scenario.

So consider me. I’ll pretend to be a guy. My best-case scenario is I go for dinner and drinks on a Saturday night to a great spot near her home atmospheric. Not too expensive. And we talk for three hours until the restaurant kicks us out. There’s another bar we could walk to within a couple of feet that I already scoped out. We go there afterward for drinks on a Saturday night. Closed down that place. It’s 1:00 in the morning. I drive home, walk her to the door. She invites me inside.

That’s great. The first date for me. Not saying it is for you. For me, that’s a great first date.

So how do I make that happen? That’s going to be my question. How do I make that happen?

I’m certainly not going to be by swiping right and going to Starbucks for a 20-minute interview. We’ll get back to that.

So it’s my worst-case scenario. I guess to go on that same date where the conversation is like pulling teeth and it’s two hours of brushing up against each other’s sensitivities and just talking past each other and not wanting to be there. And then, you know, picking up the check at the end of the night for someone that I decidedly don’t like. I guess that’s the worst-case scenario for a guy.

So imagine a guy who might be the male equivalent of you. He has a different experience. And we talked about your experience with the flakes and the guys trying to get laid and the negative guys. So imagine a guy who feels the same way you do about dating. So he’s burned out. He’s been doing this for a long time. A lot of volume, a lack of quality. His experiences, women who are really attractive have a million options and they’re going to flake out on you. Or if they’ve got something to hide, they’re going to wait a long time until meeting and then you’re gonna meet them in person. They’re not going to look like their photo or he’s got a crazy ex who’s sucked up all of his energy and his experience post X has been really negative and dating because, in his perception, women go out with you. Even if they don’t like you, they’re not attracted to you. They go for some taller, richer guy. They just want free dinners.

A very negative cast on Dating. And that’s his experience. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. We can say what we want about that guy. But in his logical mind, what’s the point of trying to plan a nice date for a woman when 90 percent of the women don’t turn out the way he expects them to? Making a phone call. Planning a date. Spending money with a 50 to 75 percent chance that she’s not going to like him.

Which, what percentage of guys do you like? So if that’s accurate, it’s a disincentive for a guy to plan a great day. And yet I would still recommend that a guy do it.

But men aren’t listening to me. They’re not listening to me at all. So what do you see? Selfishly, guy swipes right. Texts, “hey, you want to hang out? What are you doing tonight? Want to come over?” It’s a minimalist dating method and it’s based on low expectations. He’s expecting nothing from you. It’s a volume approach. He’s trying to minimize the amount of time he spends, the amount of energy, thought, emotional investment, money. It’s a minimalist dating approach. And that’s where everybody’s at right now, is this minimalist dating approach. And you can understand his feelings. You can understand how Tinder is ideal for men. It’s not for women who want to be seen and want to be courted and want to be treated well. But if we just look at this like some sort of game theory, you swipe right. As a guy on a thousand women. She’s reasonably attractive. You text a hundred of them and you put in a little effort and you see who’s willing to meet as quickly as possible and hook up as quickly as possible.

He might be a sincere guy who wants to find a wife. But it’s really hard to resist the pull of this, putting in as little effort as possible for the most possible reward. So there’s very little incentive for a guy to engage in courtship. That’s why you have to differentiate yourself. That’s why you have to sort of flip the script around and listen. This is what I see every day. I’m not in the interest of blaming women if they had bad experiences with men or men who’ve had bad experiences with women.

But this is what my client’s do over the course of six months. This is what they’re complaining about. Men put in no effort. They’re so lazy.

And so the solution is to reward them more for being lazy, for a lack of effort? The solution is to continue to swipe right and text and meet strangers for coffee? No, it’s literally the opposite.

So here’s how we’re gonna do this. Let’s work backward just the way I told you about my ideal first date. Let’s work backward from the best date you’ve ever had. How could we recreate that every single time? And having done this for a pretty long period of time. Believe it or not, a lot of people’s idea of their ideal first date doesn’t begin with a half-hour in a plastic chair at two-thirty in the afternoon at Starbucks. It doesn’t. It’s what we’re doing to avoid wasting time, to avoid getting hurt, to avoid making an investment, to avoid it, to avoid, to avoid. But again, it’s a minimalist approach. How little can we do?

So if you go with the minimalist approach, he goes with the minimalist approach. We just perpetuate more of this problem. There’s no screening mechanism. There’s no courtship. We’re assuming the worst. And I like to assume the best. That might sound crazy because 90 percent of guys are not useful to us. But we want to screen those men out before the date.

So close your eyes and imagine you’re in a happy place. What’s an amazing date? Think back to the most amazing date you ever had. What steps can you take to reverse engineer such a situation so something like that could happen again? And how do you nudge a guy into treating you that way?

So if I were giving advice to men and I did for the four, five years of my career, I would tell them to do this. Now I’m telling you to do this exact thing.

Because if every other guy is doing this and you got one guy who’s like, hey, you want to talk on the phone? And I call you. And we talk on Zoom for an hour and a half and it goes really well. And I said it was a lot of fun. I’ll call you later this week. And we do that. We start to build up trust and report excitement and anticipation. And now there’s this one guy who’s pulled ahead of all the other guys who are just doing this. This is one guy who’s doing it just by putting in a little bit of time upfront to ensure that if we go on a date. If I take you out, you’re going to have fun and I’m going to have fun.

So they will say that’s time wasted. No, it’s time invested to screen people and to avoid a bad date. So if your ground in the idea that dating minimalism is the way to go, guess what? You’re just feeding into the things that men are already doing that you don’t like, putting a little time, little effort, little ability to differentiate themselves all because we’re afraid of wasting time and getting hurt.

And in order to turn that ship around, you have to nudge men into courtship to avoid texting, to avoid coffee dates.

Why? And how does this work? Because they want to please you. You’re the goal. If he wants to get anywhere with you, he has to follow your rules. That’s the central premise of Love U. You’re the CEO and men are the interns. So how do you get the intern to follow your application process so that you get the kind of date that feels great? That closes down the bar at 1:00 in the morning if that’s your thing? That ends in a good night kiss instead of a handshake or a hug goodbye. You have the power to make that happen.

And I go deep on this. I mean, this is just a podcast, but I go deep on this. The entire Love U course, month two is called Meeting Men. And we go through consecutive weeks, flirting, online dating, first dates, courtship. This entire week of material with coaching on how to make sure that if you have a first date, it’s going to be a good one. So check that out.

Go below this page, read the description, learn more about Love U and I will talk to you there.

My name is Evan Marc Katz.

I want to thank you for tuning into another episode of Love U Podcast.

If you enjoyed it and you learned something valuable, please subscribe, share an honest review on Apple Podcasts, and if you’re ready to find love now look for the link in that description below. Fill out an application to enroll in Love U.

Thank you so much.

Are you the woman who has everything except your man? You can have the relationship of your dreams and you don’t have to change to get it.

In love U, you will gain confidence, let go of unhealthy relationship patterns, learn to trust your judgment, understand and attract quality men, assess long term compatibility and create a passionate, unconditionally loving relationship with a partner who puts you first, never lets you down, and always makes you feel safe, heard, and understood.

Go to www.evanmarckatz.com and click on the ‘apply for coaching’ button to get started.

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