– by Wes Colton, Introvert Unbound

If you’re a relatively healthy man between the ages of 18-50, you should be dating. I’m not talking about daily threesomes with NFL cheerleaders, but at least one encounter every so often with a woman you find attractive and whose company you enjoy.

Dating and having sex is good for you physically, increasing your testosterone levels and boosting your immunity. It’s also good for you mentally, because sex isn’t just about getting off, it’s about connection, and if you’re not feeling connected to society, you’re going to be depressed.

Of course, it’s a cruel cycle where not getting dates over longer and longer lengths of time can make you feel progressively shittier, making it even harder to access dates. But if you’re reading this, that’s hardly news.

If you’re not getting regular dates, I can almost guarantee that at least one—and likely more than one—of the below reasons applies to you. Work on these aspects and you’ll be one step closer to a healthy dating life.

1. Bad Grooming/Hygiene

There’s only so much you can do about your looks besides eating right, exercising, and sleeping properly—pretty much everything else is genetics.

That being said, there are ways to maximize what you’ve got, including what clothes you wear and what you do with your hair and facial hair. More overlooked are details such as tending to uni-brows and/or plucking the occasional stray eyebrow hair, and trimming your nose and ear hair.

Yet the single most common thing guys neglect is their breath. If your breath literally repels women, no combination of looks and/or personality is going to get you very far.

If you’re not tending to your mouth three times a day—when you get up, before you go out, and when you go to sleep—you probably have bad breath. So stop being lazy and get with the program.

First of all, you must floss at least once a day, either before you go out or before bed. If you’re not flossing, it means you have food stuck between your teeth, which rots and smells. Over the long term, it causes tooth decay. Which is gross.

Now, if you haven’t been flossing regularly, your gums will probably bleed when you do. It’s no big deal, the more you floss, the less that will happen (unless you’re dealing with gum disease).

Brush your teeth for two to three minutes. Electric toothbrushes can help with receding gums, but an old-fashioned soft-bristled toothbrush works fine.

Use a tongue scraper. A lot of guys’ bad breath comes from buildup on their tongues, so be sure to use it after you brush.

Next, rinse and gargle with mouthwash. Natural stuff is best, as it doesn’t include harsh chemicals.

Go to the dentist every 6 months. They scrape off the extra plaque buildup on your teeth and can tell if you have any cavities. Cavities are tooth decay, which is literally your mouth rotting, which smells like shit.

2. Poor Conversation Skills

If your grooming and hygiene is passable, you’re in the door. But most guys lose it on the conversation piece. It’s tough enough holding an interesting and well-oiled conversation with someone you know, much harder striking it up with a complete stranger.

Obviously, extroverts have a much easier time at this than introverts. They generate their energy by babbling at people, so they’re usually well-practiced when it comes to talking. We introverts are fully capable of holding conversations, it’s just that because socializing is draining we don’t always enjoy it as much and likely haven’t put in the hours necessary to develop the skills.

The key—as with so much else in life—is practice, practice, practice. A lot of guys looking to meet women only talk to attractive women. The problem with that approach is there are only so many attractive women out there, and, if you’re not getting laid, you’re probably not having very long conversations. So, you’re not really practicing talking enough.

If your conversation skills aren’t as polished as they could be, you should be practicing conversation at every opportunity, be it with family, friends, the barista, your waiter, the person checking out your groceries.

3. Coming Across as Phony

Unfortunately, a lot of guys who become decent at making conversation still aren’t getting laid. One reason might be because they’re putting on some persona, pretending to be someone they’re not. Of course, when it comes to self-confidence, it’s OK to have some aspect of “fake it till you make it,” but if your entire personality is fabricated, women are probably catching on.

The tendency with an introvert is to try to mimic some blustery extrovert who goes around yelling “woo” like an idiot, but that’s not going to fool anyone for very long.

Chances are, who you are is good enough. But, as a man, you should also constantly be in a state of self-improvement. So the more you work on your sense of humor, read books, engage in hobbies, and seek out new experiences, the more entertaining, knowledgeable, and interesting you will become.

4. Taking, Not Giving

This is more of the vibe that you bring to the conversation. If you go into a conversation with a woman looking to extract something, she’ll notice. The last thing you should be doing is trying to get in on her thing. You’re there because you have something to bring to the table that will make her want to spend time with you.

This concept can be very difficult for a lot of guys, since in our society we’re taught that women have value for just being born while men are nothing until they prove themselves.

The truth is, if you’re pushing your limits as a man, you have something to offer a woman. Many women—especially attractive young women—have rarely challenged themselves in life, mostly because they never had to.

Although it can be tough being a man, that adversity is what gives us character and character is what attracts women.

5. Not Assertive Enough

I hate to break this to you, but you can become pretty adept at conversation, not be a phony, and give a lot to an interaction and still not attract women. That’s because you’re missing the final ingredient: assertiveness.

No, I’m not talking about being pushy or demanding, ignoring social cues or becoming a stalker.

Assertiveness has to do with feeling like you belong in a given situation and that it’s the most natural thing in the world to speak to a woman, because you know what you have to offer and if you’re just able to present yourself well enough, she’ll learn that soon enough.

Think about how you might talk to a friend of a younger sister or cousin. You’re not afraid to voice your opinion nor disagree with her. You speak your mind and don’t worry about the consequences.

Assertiveness can be hard for people who might be a bit socially awkward. But awkwardness is mostly not being sure of what to do. Assertiveness cures awkwardness because you’re making a decision to say something and then just doing it.

It may be that you say the wrong thing a lot in the beginning. As long as you’re paying attention to mistakes you may be making, how you say something is just as important as what you say. Speaking assertively fixes itself over time.

What that looks like technically is speaking in short, declarative bursts, and content-wise, it’s talking about things you want to talk about without editing yourself overmuch.

6. Wrong Venues

If you’ve got all of the above together and you’re still having a tough time, you might just be going to the wrong places. Clubs and bars are a great place to meet women because there is a high volume of sets, people are in party mode, and there is an element of anonymity.

But if genuinely don’t like those environments or you’re a bit older, you might be hanging out with the wrong crowd, limiting your potential to find women you click with.

Instead, look for outdoor concerts, mini-festivals, brew-fests, or social Meetups that might be a bit more low key. Depending on the size of your city, approaching women on the street and coffee shops is a good way to meet women you wouldn’t typically meet at the bars.

7. Lousy Text Game

Even if you’re meeting women, you might be ruining your chances with your texting game. Cleverness helps, but really, when it comes to texting, less is more. The purpose of texting isn’t to impress her, but to facilitate the next meetup. If that can’t happen right away, then you should be sparingly sending texts to keep the connection warm and her interest strong.

Here’s the gist of texting: If you meet a woman and get her number, send a text that night to make sure she has your name. Late the next morning, follow up with a simple funny meme (anything to do with hangovers or sleep deprivation) that doesn’t require a response. If she responds, great, if not, follow up with another text that evening, saying something like “back to my old self again, how are you feeling.”

If you hear nothing back, wait two days and try with another meme or “value” text, where you just mention something interesting you saw or did. If she doesn’t respond, it’s probably over.

If she responds, wait at least fifteen minutes to text back (longer if it’s been days since she’s texted you). If she doesn’t respond back right away, don’t sweat it. She might be unconsciously testing you to see how needy you are or genuinely distracted. Resist the temptation to follow up with “did you get my text?”

Once you’ve texted back and forth a few times, you should propose a meetup (ideally it’s something you’ve already seeded when you first met her).

8. Jerking Off Too Much

Obviously, if you’re not getting laid, you’re going to want to jerk off. NoFap might work for some people, but for others it just puts them on a sexual hair trigger, encourages bad decision making (i.e. desperation), and is nearly impossible to sustain.

That being said, you shouldn’t be jerking off all the time. Ejaculating depletes your energies, sexual or otherwise, and believe it or not, you want a bit of sexual hunger to motivate you. If you’re already sated, you’re less driven to go out and meet women. Never jerk off before you go out.

You can decide what works for you, but I recommend jerking off no more than every other day, longer intervals between if you can. Like food, jerking off should never become so taboo that you start obsessing over it. But you want to have some control over your urges, as well.

9. Unrealistic Expectations

Every guy wants to sleep with women who look like movie stars and models. But the truth is that not even movies stars and models look the way you think they do. Obviously, these women are attractive, but a lot of their appearance is simply the way they look on film, which can be chalked up to a combination of angle, lighting, filters, makeup, cosmetic surgery, and Photoshop.

Longing after women who don’t actually exist is stupid. And, even if they did, you’re not going to meet these women. And it has nothing to do with your value on the “sexual marketplace.”

I call it the green-haired woman phenomenon. An extremely attractive woman is like a green-haired woman, maybe 1 in 10,000. So if you go out at night looking for a green-haired woman, you probably won’t even find a single one.

If by sheer dumb luck you find a green-haired woman, the chance that she’s already taken is pretty high. Even if she’s single, she’s likely with friends who are protective of her, making it very difficult to approach.

If you do manage to approach, the chance that she’s in a mood to chat with a stranger is slim. If you can get in a few words, you probably won’t be able to extend the conversation very long. If you end up chatting for a bit, the likelihood of her being attracted to you, of all people in the world, is fairly slim.

Say she is attracted to you, though. The probability of lining up logistics and having everything go smoothly so she leaves the venue with you is astronomically low. And if you get her number, she probably won’t respond to your texts, even if she had every intention of doing so that evening.

This has nothing to do with having green hair. It’s just the mathematical limitations of selecting one specific type of woman on any given evening and expecting things to work out. The reason you’re not sleeping with very attractive women is as much about their scarcity as anything else.

This isn’t to say you should be sleeping with women you’re not attracted to and whose company you detest. But if your standards are purely physical, and you have expectations that a random woman will have sex with you within hours of having met her—or even days—you’re going to need to learn to appreciate a variety of women.

Was this article helpful to you? Think you’d benefit from some detailed advice tailored exclusively to you? Send an email to me, Wes Colton, at introvertunbound@gmail.com and let’s schedule a free ½ hour (no obligation) online consultation so you can get a better handle on the obstacles keeping you from the life you should be living.