Being single is great – but only if you want to be. It’s not so much fun when you’re fed up with dinner for one and can’t understand why no-one wants to go out with you. What’s keeping you unattached while everyone else gets loved up? Here are 10 habits that could be to blame.
1. Lechery
It’s fine to think about sex a lot. It’s just about workable to think about sex all the time. But it’s neither fine nor workable to talk about sex all the time. The more that you let those naughty thoughts form themselves into words, the less luck you’re going to have with women.
Just to complicate things, you don’t even have to think or talk about sex to come across as lecherous. You just need to flirt too much. The least attractive men at a party are the ones who flirt with every woman there, in the hope of getting off with one of them. To make a woman fall for you, make her feel like the only woman in the room.
However, do it carefully: paying the wrong kind of compliment can make you sound like a proper sleazebag. “The wrong kind of compliment means” anything unimaginative that’s purely to do with her appearance. If you walk up to a woman you’ve never met before and tell her she’s the most gorgeous creature in the room, you sound like a lech. Tell her she’s got lovely elbows, and you’ve scored. I know, life is weird and unfair.
By the way, your fart jokes are the opposite of sexy. Just so you know.
2. Signal blindness
If a woman is giving you the right signals, she assumes that you’re reading loud and clear. If you dither, you’ve lost her. When a woman you’ve never met before asks if you’d like a drink, she is actually saying: “I’m looking for a man-sized hot water bottle, and I wondered if you’d volunteer?” Do NOT lose your opportunity.
Brush up your body language fluency, too. If she meets your eye for a heartbeat longer than necessary, she’s telling you that she’s interested – and if you don’t send back a corresponding signal, she’ll assume that you don’t want to know. So get out there and meet a woman’s eye for a second or two. If you look away, look back and catch her looking again, you’re in.
3. Shallowness
Are you the kind of man who notices when a woman has gained five pounds over Christmas, and is put off by a solitary jawbone zit? Get over yourself. No wonder you haven’t got a girlfriend, you shallow toad.
4. Commitment-phobia
You are a cliché made flesh, and you are a man made of a thousand bad excuses. So you don’t want to get into a relationship because you’re scared of getting hurt. You don’t want to get married because your parents had a nasty divorce. You don’t want to move in together because the magic will be gone.
Look, we all have those fears – women as well as men. But you can’t cling onto them and then go round moaning that you’re still single. If you want a relationship, be a man and eat your fears.
5. Desperation
Giving a woman your attention will pay dividends, but don’t invade her personal space. If a woman you’re talking to turns to talk to her friend, or goes off to the loo or the bar without saying “I’ll be back,” she’s trying to shake you off. Do not, for the love of God, wait for her outside the loo.
Ringing her on the way home from your first date is a way of invading her personal space with your voice alone. Creepy.
6. Slobbiness
Clothes maketh the man. What you’re wearing reveals a lot about you to the women in the room, such as whether you can operate a washing machine.
Being able to read a clock is another handy skill. It’s fine to run five minutes late for a date, as long as you text to let her know. It’s almost more polite than being on time, because it gives her a chance to catch her breath. However, turning up 10 or more minutes late without explanation makes you look rude before you’ve even uttered a word. You’re strangling all your relationships at birth.
7. Bragging
No woman will be impressed if you brag about your job, your travels or whatever. The way to impress a woman is to let her brag about herself, and to be fascinated.
8. Pack hunting
Men who go sharking with their mates are men who come home again with their mates, only drunker. If you want to come home with a woman, you need to hunt alone.
On a similar note, when you’re dating a woman, don’t take her on a date to the place where you’re likely to be accosted by friends who are shouting and smelling of beer.
9. Mobile phone addiction
Answering your mobile is one of the rudest things you can do on a first date. Your companion will sit there feeling less and less important with every word you bark into your phone. Switch the thing off when you arrive.
10. Kisslexia
You may be achingly gorgeous and possessed of brilliant conversational wit, but if you’re a bad kisser you won’t be attractive to women. Slobbering over her face, licking her chin, sucking her lips, deep-throating with your tongue… women hate being kissed this way, and most men over the age of 13 know this. Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to go and think about something less icky.
