Dr. Ali Binazir, Happiness Engineer

• How to not fall for the wrong guy and floating trashcans (bonus: Dr Ali vs the Dr Ali-bot)

  Recently, a reader posed one of the all-time classic dating questions:

  Hi Dr. Ali,

  I listened to your book, The Tao of Dating for Women. I’m successful, I love myself, I’m all about the Tao and being happy in the world as it is. I can channel the “O Brother Where Art Thou” scene.  Here’s my problem: I get infatuated with men too quickly, before I have a chance to actually get to know them. I beckon to men who in retrospect weren’t worth beckoning to. My imagination makes a version of them in my head that I fall in love with, then I end up disappointed with the actual guy when I learn he’s a human like everyone else and doesn’t offer that fulfillment his imaginary counterpart offers.

  Any tips?

  I’m grateful for the time and research you put into your books and endeavors, you’ve helped me and I’m sure many others. Dating is pretty damn exciting. Thank you! Cheers, Sarah

  This is such a great question because it addresses a root challenge everyone has. It really does affect everyone, because it’s about a key feature of the human brain. And it touches upon the most mind-boggling thing I learned this year.

  Are you ready for it? Here it is: according to the latest understanding of neuroscience, we don’t really perceive the world through our senses. Say what?!

  Apparently, the brain, based on scant information, generates a quick model of what it thinks is happening. Then it refines that model by taking into account the “prediction error” provided by sensory input coming in from our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, etc. Prof Andy Clark elaborates on this in his engrossingly thought-provoking book The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. 

  The technical term for this is top-down processing, meaning that the Boss (aka your brain) takes in a little bit of information, then confidently proclaims, “Hey, I think we’re looking at a floating trash can.” Then your eyes chime in and say, “Um, I think the shadow thing is actually a puddle. And, by the way, trash cans don’t float.” After this prediction error goes to the brain’s higher processing centers, the model gets updated and you see a regular non-floating trash can.

  

  Why does your brain make deficient models of reality based on scant information? To save energy, that’s why. Your brain is the most energy-hungry organ in your body, using up 20% of your oxygen and glucose even though it’s only 2% of your weight. Before the advent of Whole Foods market and hot dog carts, food was scarce for the first 3 million years of hominin evolution. So it made sense to have a brain that was super-efficient at generating a good-enough model of reality. Good enough to survive—but not necessarily to thrive.

  What does this have to do with getting infatuated with potential partners before getting to know them well? Everything, it turns out. 

  When you meet a new hottie, your brain rapidly goes off to make a model based on scant information: “Oh yeah this one’s great!” Based on some sketchy heuristics and very few real data points (age, height, profession, looks, proclivity for Radiohead and bad puns), it makes a snap judgment. 

  Unfortunately, the track record of this snap judgment is not very good. Next thing you know, you think this guy’s a mashup of Adonis, Apollo, and Clooney. Your brain starts to make stories about how great he is, even though you hardly know anything about him. 

  This is problematic for many reasons. First, it can result in bad matches. Less obviously, the disappointment hangover of the real version of guy colliding with the fantasy in your head can derail a potentially decent match! Fantasies don’t come free, apparently.

  So how do we change this lose-lose situation? Some ideas, straight out of my essential new book, The 5 Hidden Love Questions: Radically Simple Strategies to Date Smarter, Own Your Power, and Flourish (now available in ebook, print and audiobook formats): 

  1) Extend the length of courtship. For most of human history, when people were nomadic or lived in small villages, people had a lot of time but not a lot of choice in mates. Now that we live in big, busy cities, we have a lot of choice but not a lot of time. So to make better matches, you want to extend the length of courtship so it better resembles the environment our brains are adapted to: more time, less choice. Per The Tao of Dating, if someone has any potential, resolve to go on at least 3 dates before consigning them to Friendzone oblivion.

  2) Limit choice. This is the second half of the “more time, less choice” protocol. You want to get off the dating apps, because they expose you to thousands of potential partners. This creates too much choice for our paleolithic brains and puts it in maximizer mode, where you get super-picky and try to go for Mr Perfect instead of Mr Good Enough for You. I call this “Fancy Feast syndrome,” since it’s like turning you into a feline that won’t eat regular food after tasting high-end Fancy Feast. Chapter 3.5 of the book is all about this, as is this here article on the 10 supremely compelling reasons you should delete your dating apps right now.

  3) Take your imagination less seriously. Having an active imagination is a powerful advantage in creative endeavors; less so when choosing a partner. So take a step back from your own thoughts to see them as the patterns of electrical activity that they are, and not necessarily absolute reality. And hey, the brain’s making inaccurate maps all the time anyway (see levitating trashcan)—you sure you want to take it so seriously? 

  Meditation helps create that essential distance between you and your thoughts. Eastern wisdom traditions call this witness consciousness. If you already have a meditative practice, good on you and please continue forever. If not, it’s a little bit like that old saying about planting a tree. Best time to do it? Twenty years ago. Second best time? Today. Start meditating, like, now. 

  4) Have a definite outcome in mind. A remarkable fact about the 5000 or so letters I’ve received from my readers: none of them contained a real question with an outcome in mind. For example: “What’s your take, doc?”, or “Any tips?”, as in the current letter.

  Considering how your choice of partner is the biggest decision you’ll ever make, you absolutely positively want to have a well-defined outcome in mind when it comes to courtship. Would this person make a good partner, spouse, or parent? Do they demonstrate the Katz Criteria—character, consistency, communication, kindness, and commitment? Or my five ASKOR qualities: accountability, self-awareness, kindness, optimism, and resilience? 

  What’s more important than which framework you use is to have some values-based framework by which to evaluate potential partners. This not only keeps you from just rolling the dice and hoping for the best, but also sharpens your vision to spot great matches that may be less obvious.

  And now, things get interesting. Enter the Dr Ali-bot. (You may now stop reading if I’ve satisfactorily answered the original question. But if you’ve read this far, clearly you’re the curious type, so keep going.)

  I went to Microsoft Copilot, and gave the prompt to read my blog articles, then to answer this question in my voice: ‘How can I prevent getting infatuated with men who are not a good match for me?’ Voilà Dr Ali-bot’s response:

  “Ah, my dear seeker of love and wisdom, you’ve come to the right place. Buckle up, because we’re about to embark on a journey through the tangled jungle of infatuation, armed with the machete of neuroscience, the compass of psychology, and the ancient scrolls of Eastern wisdom. Dr. Ali Binazir, at your service.

  Step 1: Know Thy Brain. Our brains are like overeager puppies, sniffing out novelty and chasing after shiny objects. When you meet a new man, your brain lights up like a Christmas tree. It’s a dopamine fiesta! But here’s the kicker: dopamine doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care if the guy is a Nobel laureate or a professional couch surfer. So, my dear, before you start composing sonnets about his jawline, take a deep breath and remind yourself: “This is just my brain on dopamine. It’s not a sign from the universe.”

  Step 2: The ‘Not-So-Subtle’ Art of Self-Delusion. Ah, the human mind! It’s like a magician’s hat, pulling rabbits out of thin air. You meet a guy, and suddenly he’s the reincarnation of Prince Charming. He’s kind, he’s witty, and he even recycles! But wait, did you notice that he also leaves his socks on the floor and thinks “Game of Thrones” is a documentary? Yep, that’s your brain doing somersaults to fit him into the “perfect partner” box. So, my dear, put on your skeptic glasses and see him for who he truly is: a fellow human with quirks and idiosyncrasies. No magic spells required.

  Step 3: The Tao of Compatibility. Now, let’s consult the ancient scrolls. Buddhism teaches us impermanence, my friend. Everything changes, including our infatuations. So, instead of asking, “Is he my soulmate?” ask, “Is he my now mate?” Compatibility isn’t about finding someone who checks all the boxes; it’s about finding someone whose weirdness complements your weirdness. Like yin and yang, but with more laughter and fewer fortune cookies.

  Step 4: The Art of Detachment.  Picture this: you’re floating down a river on an inflatable unicorn. The current is strong, and you’re clutching onto a branch for dear life. That branch? Yep, that’s your infatuation. Now, my dear, loosen your grip. Detach. Let the river carry you. Because when you cling too tightly, you suffocate the magic. Breathe. Enjoy the ride. And if the unicorn turns out to be a rubber ducky, well, at least you had a good float.

  Step 5: The ‘No-BS’ Zone. Psychology time! Set your boundaries like a boss. If he’s flaky, inconsistent, or allergic to commitment, wave your red flag. Remember, you’re not auditioning for the role of “Woman Who Puts Up with Nonsense.” You’re the star of your own rom-com, and you deserve a co-star who knows their lines and shows up for rehearsals. So, my dear, when in doubt, channel your inner Buddha and say, “Namaste, drama. I’m out.”

  In summary, my intrepid seeker, infatuation is like a summer thunderstorm—intense, electrifying, and fleeting. Embrace it, dance in the rain, but don’t forget your umbrella of wisdom. And when the lightning strikes, ask yourself: “Is this a passing shower or a Category 5 hurricane?” Choose wisely, my friend. The Tao of Dating salutes you.

  P.S. If all else fails, remember that chocolate and good friends are excellent antidotes to infatuation”

  —End of AI response to question

  Okay, so how crazy was that?! The AI convincingly mimicked my tone and style. It cracked a bunch of jokes, some of them better than mine. It came up with a list of stuff, just like I did—and a pretty good list at that! You could argue that 3 of the 5 were in my own response above, albeit with less scientific detail. And the masterstroke of putting a chocolate emoji in the answer? Hard to argue with that kind of genius.

  Still, us humans have a persistent advantage over software: we know what it’s like to be human. My new book, The 5 Hidden Love Questions, is about just that. Think of it as a reference manual for recognizing and stopping the patterns that give our power away and make us less happy (e.g. infatuation with wrong person). Down with self-sabotage; up with thriving! Time to change the game.

  So if you’ve ever felt:

  • not enough
  • powerless in a relationship
  • physically or psychologically unsafe
  • unsure of what you want or who you really are

  then a) you’re in the same boat as the rest of the planet and b) the book’s for you! It’s the best of Western science and Eastern wisdom to help you thrive and flourish, and I hope you get a lot out of it.

  To your continued growth, Dr Ali (aka Dr Victor)

   

   

• Dating App-ocalypse: 10 Reasons to Delete Your Dating Apps Right Now

  

  Lately, several trends have gotten me thinking about the end of the world: military escalation, global warming, nascent pandemics. And more pernicious than them all, dating apps. Y’know, like Hinder, Stumble and Cringe. If you think I’m kidding, you’d be only partially right. Because those innocent-looking swipey apps are far more destructive than you’d imagine. So I’m going give you 10 reasons to delete those apps right now. Your choice: save yourself from a world of pain, or it’s app-ocalypse now. Let’s see what we can do to save your corner of the world.

  1. Apps are designed to make them profit, not make you happy

  There’s just enough variety amongst the dating apps to distinguish themselves from each other. But in the end, they all have one thing in common: they are businesses. Number of dating apps that are a saintly charity devoted to finding you a perfect match: exactly zero.

  And you don’t need an MBA to know that dating apps don’t make money when you leave their app. Let’s say you to come on our hypothetical app, Hinder. On day one, you get matched with a studmuffin who’s 100% absolutely perfect for you, with whom you proceed to trot off into the sunset and off the app. That would be great for you — but a disaster for Hinder. Why? Because they can’t make any more money off you (and Mr Perfect) when you’re both happy and gone! Their entire business model depends on keeping you on the platform for as long as possible.

  This means that your goals and their goals are at odds with each other. Economists call this perverse incentives. It’s like hiring a lawyer to work on your case by the hour. While you want the case to end as quickly as possible, he gets paid more the longer the case goes. Will he have your best interests in mind, or his own?

  In the case of the dating apps, it’s pretty clear: they have their own best interests in mind. So it only makes sense for Hinder and Stumble to show you the profiles of people who are okay-but-not-great matches for you. Basically, they’re in the business of hindering your ability to find a long-term partner.

  Now if you’re looking for fling but not ring, then no problem — your incentives and Hinder’s are aligned. Go to town! Otherwise, know that their matching algorithms are optimized for making them a profit, not making you happy.

  2. Ordering humans on an app just doesn’t seem right

  Have you ordered anything online in the past month? Food? Books? Clothes? Shoes? The idea of searching for exactly what you want, finding it, ordering it, and having it magically appear at your doorstep is far too seductive to pass up. And unless you live under a rock, you have ordered something online in recent memory.

  How about people? Have you ever ordered people online? Before you rail at me — omigod that’s like human trafficking SO wrong — isn’t that exactly what you’re doing when you’re on a dating app? Granted, you don’t always get what you thought you had ordered, like when people’s profile pics are from 10 years or 50 pounds ago. And sometimes the same-day delivery isn’t so reliable (except for Grindr, which I hear has same-minute delivery). But the process? Pretty much the same.

  On the dating apps, the people are the products you’re selecting from. Now, I don’t know how romantic it sounds to you to turn the potential love of your life into a commodity like sneakers or spare phone chargers. But commoditizing people sounds like a terrible idea. Moreover, by being on the apps, you’re agreeing to turn yourself into a commodity, too. You, the supreme goddess of love, beauty, and joy, reduced to the status of compression socks and charging cables.

  Consider this instead: refuse to commoditize other humans or let yourself be commoditized. Give yourself and others the dignity they deserve as the unprecedented miracles they are, and get off the damn apps. That way you can meet one another in natural human habitats — dinner parties, cafés, Zumba classes — and connect in a way that doesn’t turn you into glorified widgets.

  3. Apps addict you with slot machine psychology

  I recently read that users of Tinder, the original swipey app, spend 90 minutes a day swiping on it. 90 minutes! That’s enough time to read War and Peace, learn French, or take paddleboarding lessons. Apps can hook you for hours on end because they are designed like slot machines. As Prof Natasha Dow Schüll explains in her engaging book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, these gizmos use a technique called intermittent variable reinforcement to keep you addicted.

  It basically works like this. For those of you reading this in a glorious future in which these apps have reached their well-deserved eternal demise and therefore have no idea what I’m talking about: you express your interest in someone by swiping right. You don’t match with everyone you swipe right on. But every once in a while, bing bing bing JACKPOT you get a match! Hallelujah! That’s when your brain gets a little hit of happy juice called dopamine, which is the same reward chemical you get when you do cocaine or heroin. Which keeps you going for the next fix. Which is why most of us get literally addicted to these apps, swiping on them for hours at a time. No wonder why drug addicts and app customers are both called users.

  As your friendly neighborhood Happiness Doctor, I believe that the opposite of happiness is not depression. It’s compulsion, because it robs you of your will, depriving you of the freedom to spend your life as you choose. It’s like imprisonment, just without the chic orange jumpsuit.

  I don’t want you to be captive to some app designed to make you its miserable slave. I want you to be happy. So delete the damn apps and get out there instead. That French paddleboarding instructor just might want to cuddle up and read War and Peace with you.

  4. Apps kill civility

  Ever noticed how people are just ruder online — including yourself? No need to feel guilty — it’s a universal issue. Online, a host of factors, including absence of face-to-face contact or accountability, bring out our worst selves (same is true when driving, incidentally).

  And so people will easily dismiss someone online who could be a great match in person. Or match with you on the app, but not respond when you message. Or say something unbelievably crude. Or not call when they say they will. Or not show up to a date.

  It’s one thing to deal with a single instance of incivility. But collectively, these little indignities add up and gradually age your soul. They could even make some people lose their faith in basic human decency. How much more of any of that do you need in your life?

  The good news is that people tend to be much more civil in person. They say “hi” back. They will give you the time of day. If you look desperate enough, they may even point you to the bathroom. So instead of wading neck-deep into the swamp of disappointing behavior that is dating apps, you may want to go meet much nicer people in real life through friends and family.

  Don’t get me wrong — the humans will still be disappointing. After all, it’s all the same earthlings. But at least this swamp will be just ankle-deep.

  5. Apps hijack your drive state, turning you in to a zombie couch potato

  Let me tell you a little more about this crazy little multitalented molecule called dopamine. One of dopamine’s duties is to serve as our main mental fuel driving us to seek survival goods, like food, shelter, and sex. Drive states are essential to our survival, both as an individual and a species. Any kind of addiction — drugs, video games, porn — can hijack these drive states. So now instead of going out foraging for food and seeking a suitable mate, you just stay home and play video games, smoke meth — or swipe on an app. Not good for you; not good for the species.

  This is particularly pernicious because using the apps messes up your neurology to prevent the one thing you need to do to alleviate your singlehood: to get off the damn couch and go meet some eligible humans. So if after an hour of swiping on an app, you feel strangely depleted and unmotivated to go out, now you know why. Delete the app, and go get some sunshine (or moonshine) so someone has a chance to take a shine to you. Don’t do it for you; do it for the species.

  6. Winners take all on the apps, leaving most people in the cold

  When I was a kid, we once took in a stray cat, which we imaginatively called Kitty. Initially, we fed Kitty dry kibble, and he loved it. “This is great! So much better than being a hungry stray!” he would have said, if cats could talk. One day, I saw some TV ads for a cat food so fancy as to have the word in its name: Fancy Feast. The next day, I bought some Fancy Feast on my way back from school. Kitty devoured it with the glee of a child encountering brownies for the first time. Hell, Fancy Feast works!

  Except for one problem: after we ran out of the Fancy Feast, Kitty refused to go back to the regular kibble. It wasn’t so much disdain as it was a complete refusal to acknowledge the kibble’s existence. “What, you want me to go back to that dry, flavorless stuff that comes out of a bag? What do you take me for, some kind of stray? Feh.”

  Something similar happens when people get on dating apps. The app shows her Chad, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed 6’3″ former college athlete who’s making bank at an investment bank, and she thinks, “That’s what I’m talking about! Swipe right for Mr Right.”

  This is fine, except for one problem: once you’ve seen Chad, normal Joes who are just 5’10” sub-zillionaires just ain’t going to cut it anymore. They have been reduced to the status of dry kibble, and you couldn’t possibly stoop that low. You ain’t no stray.

  Congratulations — now you and Kitty have something in common. You both have Fancy Feast Syndrome (FFS). A core feature of human (and cat) neurology is that once you’ve seen a delectable dish like Chad, it’s hard to go back to sloppy Joe. This isn’t evil or wrong; it’s normal. But it does have a series of far-reaching consequences, none of which are good for your happiness or society.

  First, because the likes of Chad are getting all the attention, all the regular guys are not. By some accounts, 90% of all matches are going to less than 10% of the guys. And according to studies, the match rate for guys on apps hovers somewhere around 0.5%. That’s 1 in 200. While normal Joe can barely score one date, Chad has to hire Scooter, a personal booty-call scheduler, just to service his 300 matches. This winner-take-all situation leaves most of the guys on apps frustrated and lonely (and Chad very tired).

  Second, because it’s not just you who’s trying to match with Chad but also every other woman on the platform, he just may not have time for you. In fact, with his excess of choice, he’s got even worse Fancy Feast Syndrome than you. Anyone less than a supermodel just might not capture his attention. You and Chad could be a perfect match, destined to make beautiful genius babies together. But if you’re not his idea of Fancy Feast, you’ll never get the call from Scooter (Chad’s too busy to call, remember). So now most of the women on the platform are frustrated and lonely, too.

  And third, because of the winner-take-all setup, you have prioritized inaccessible fantasy men while devaluing and neglecting all the normal Joes who could actually be a great match for you. If frustration and neglect isn’t your idea of fun, may I suggest that you delete the apps and instead meet real men in real contexts. They may just surprise you with character, kindness, consistency, reliability, resilience — qualities that may not always come through a shirtless Hinder thumbnail photo.

  7. Apps prioritize bullshit criteria

  The other day, I was at a party and this girl came up to me and asked, “Hey! How tall are you? How old are you? And what do you do for a living? And how long is your left pinkie?” Pretty jarring, if you ask me. I mean, who does that? The answer is nobody, because I just made that up. I mean, how weird would it be if those were the first questions someone asked?

  And yet, that’s exactly the kind of information that the dating apps put up for everyone to see first: height, age, job. And so, whether we like it or not, those are the first criteria by which we judge potential app matches — even though we never do it in real life.

  What happens as a result is what I call optimization for bullshit criteria. Even though things like height, age and job have no correlation with relationship satisfaction, we end up optimizing for them because, well, that’s what the apps show us. If they showed us left pinkie length, shoe size and kidney shape (I can just see the Cosmo article: “Boomerang or a bean? Know your type!”), then we’d end up optimizing for those. Which would be just as useless as the current data the apps choose to display.

  But you don’t have to take my word for it. Prof Samantha Joel and co studied a very large data set of couples (11,196 to be precise), looking for correlates of long-term relationship satisfaction. You know what didn’t end up mattering? Basically all the things people try to optimize for on apps:

  • Race/ethnicity
  • Religious affiliation
  • Height
  • Occupation
  • Physical attractiveness
  • Previous marital status
  • Sexual tastes
  • Similarity to oneself

  What did matter, you ask? Intangibles that are hard to discern via an app, like kindness, resilience, and self-awareness. So if you don’t want to get waylaid by bullshit criteria, do this: delete the apps. Then meet people through friends and family, and select for the stuff that actually matters, like how well they treat you. Otherwise you just might end up with a guy with freakishly long pinkies and a boomerang kidney.

  8. Apps dangerously shorten courtship time

  Here’s an unusual fact about how my mom and dad got together. Before they ever met in person, they talked on the phone — for a whole freakin’ year. Totally not kidding here. After hundreds of phone calls often stretching into the wee hours of the morn, they finally made a real date, met, and found each other attractive enough to start going out, fall in love, and produce glorious offspring like yours truly. As of this writing, they’ve been married for three and a half centuries.

  Contrast this with the current courtship paradigm on dating apps. Instead of getting a year to really get to know someone, people are dismissing or accepting mates in less time it takes to wipe a nose. Too short. Too poor. Too hairy. No sense of style. Hot, but the shirtless pics are too cheesy. Job’s too boring. Job’s too exciting. Has a cat. Actor. Drives a Camaro. Pass, pass, pass, pass, hard pass.

  My point: it’s difficult to fully assess another human in the 500 milliseconds we’re giving them on the swipey apps. And how would you feel if someone only took half a second to evaluate your whole amazing, unprecedented existence? Would that be doing you justice — you, the complex, multidimensional, utterly magnificent creature? Hell no! Would take millennia if not eons to get to fully know you.

  So why would you assume that everyone else on the app isn’t equally worth getting to know? Hmmm.

  The best solution is to opt out of this shallow, low-attention span environment altogether and delete the damn apps. Slow the courtship process down. Behind the bullshit criteria that dating apps display may just be a person worth not just half a second of your time, but maybe even a whole lifetime.

  9. Apps increase danger

  One of the consequences of meeting guys off the internet is that most (if not all) of them will be total randos. They will have little to no connection to your network of friends and family. This is problematic because for the last few hundred thousand years, that’s exactly not how things worked. You met boys from your own tribe or the neighboring tribe — someone who was already embedded within some network of social trust.

  Right up until the advent of online dating at the turn of the 20th century, that’s mostly how things worked. You met guys through a friend, work, school or family. As such, they had some kind of back-connection to your extended social network. Although this didn’t always guarantee impeccable behavior, it was a decent deterrent to guys being total jerks. Violating social norms carried heavy penalties.

  You still could have met a rando at a bar or nightclub then, but that was the exception, not the rule — and one that carried a stigma. Couples who had met at a bar would only admit to it sheepishly, or change their origin story altogether.

  Funnily enough, that’s initially how people treated online dating when it arose in the 1990s. I remember couples who met online inventing all kinds of stories to circumvent admitting it — “Umm, we met through a mutual friend.” Sure you did. First name Intern, last name Ett.

  Now in the 2020s, meeting someone via a dating app seems to be superseding the in-person encounter. Which means meeting a lot more randos. Which means meeting a lot more potentially toxic randos with zero accountability for their behavior.

  The problem is widespread. I don’t believe I’ve met a single woman who hasn’t had some kind of regrettable experience from online dating. It’s so bad that a whole new set of terminology around it has entered the vernacular: catfishing (misrepresenting yourself online to take advantage of people); doxxing (making private information public without permission); and revenge porn (making very private information public). Hell, they even made a (fictional) movie about it called Catfish in 2010, and a (real!) documentary called The Tinder Swindler in 2022.

  If that’s not enough to scare you, then I encourage you to read Carrie Goldberg’s book Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Stalkers, Psychos, Pervs and Trolls. She’s a lawyer whose firm defends women who have had harmful dating experiences. Her book is a gripping (and harrowing) memoir as well as a safety guide. Goldberg tells tales of terrible things that toxic randos have done so they don’t happen to you. Nearly all of the stories have one thing in common: the ladies met these douchebags online.

  If you think I’m being a little alarmist, you’re right. Because a little alarmist is not nearly enough! Ladies — your long-term well-being is at stake here. Some wise woman once said that the worst thing that can happen to a guy on a date is he gets laughed at. The worst thing that can happen to a woman is she gets killed. Truth! All it takes to ruin your life is one toxic, determined dickhead. Dating apps are the dark alleyway where these dickheads lurk, awaiting their next unwitting victim.

  My suggestion: avoid the potential stalkers, psychos, pervs and trolls entirely by choosing not to walk in virtual dark alleyways (i.e. dating apps). Only meet people within your extended social network of friends, family, work, and school. Although things may still not work out, the experience is far less likely to endanger you. And at the very least, you’re not willfully walking into a dark alley where you’re liable to get mugged, literally and figuratively.

  10. Apps make users miserable with an excess of false choice

  When I moved to the US at age 13, one thing completely blew me away: American supermarkets. Such an avalanche of products on display! I was a huge cereal fan then, and just couldn’t believe the bounty on display before me: Cap’n Crunch! Count Chocula! Froot Loops! Trix! Lucky Charms! Cheerios! Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs!* I could have a different cereal every day of the month and not run out. It made me dizzy just standing in the aisle looking at the vast selection.

  Not only has that not changed, but it has gotten much worse. And not just for cereals, but for almost everything (including dating). There is so much choice right now that it’s not unusual to see people standing in the supermarket aisle, too dazed to decide on a jam, kombucha or toilet paper because there’s umpteen zillion choices. Psychologists call this decision paralysis. Like most forms of paralysis, it’s not fun, and it’s one of the byproducts of having too many options.

  But wait — it gets worse. In his outstanding 2009 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Prof Barry Schwartz tells us that when we try to pick the best possible choice (i.e. maximize) in a regime of excessive options, it makes every phase of decision-making unpleasant:

  • Sorting through the choices is annoying and hard, especially when the choices (e.g. dating profiles) are similar.

  • Picking one from amongst the multitude of choices is hard because you’re committing to one and forgoing the rest. How do you pick just one of your matches and leave the other 121 behind? So painful and wrong.

  • Committing to one of the choices is tricky and annoying because how can you ever be sure you made the best choice? Surely #42 of the 121 you neglected must have been better than #44. You will live in the Land of Perpetual Buyer’s Remorse, which I hear has the slowest wi-fi, ever.

  That sounds like a whole lot of self-inflicted terribleness. So how do we overcome our maximizing tendencies and the paradox of choice so we can have an outside chance at happiness? Three ideas:

  • Voluntarily limit choice. The data is clear: less choice equals more happiness. So limit yourself to the people you can meet from your immediate social circle, instead of the thousands on the apps.
  • Practice satisficing instead of maximizing. The great multidisciplinary super-genius Herbert Simon coined the term satisfice as a mashup of satisfy and suffice. It means, for example, that instead of reading the entire 1000-page Cheesecake Factory menu before deciding, you pick the first thing that sounds good enough, close the menu, and go with it: “I’ll have the grilled salmon, please.” Studies show that people who satisfice are much happier with their choices than those who maximize.
  • Use the 37% criterion. If picking the first good-enough choice feels too much like settling to you, then you can go with this procedure borrowed from computer science. A true maximizer would go on a date with every single guy on an app before deciding on one. Instead of that self-imposed hell, you pre-decide the upper limit of dates you’re going to go on — say, 100. Then, you go on 37 dates without making a decision (that’s the 37% part), while making a mental note of the best guy you met in that batch (let’s call him Napoleon). After that, the first guy you meet who is as good as or better than Napoleon is your man. You pick him, close the menu and you’re done.

  Taking up the satisficing habit may take a minute, especially if you’re a lifelong maximizer. But once you start doing it, this new way of dealing with the world opens up so much time and energy that you’ll never go back. Give it a try and delete your dating apps. And thanks for doing your part in preventing the appocalypse.

  You did it! You just finished reading a 4000-word article! You ROCK! This was an excerpt from my upcoming book, The Five (Hidden) Love Questions. It’s a complement to my earlier book, The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible (paperback, ebook and audiobook), which was the highest-rated dating book on Amazon for 7 years and has been highlighted over a million times. 

  Would love to hear your thoughts about this excerpt! If you’d like to help me make the book better, click here to join my Editorial Board. You’ll get early access to the manuscript, an acknowledgment in the book, and other goodies you can help me dream up.

• How can I best serve you? (+ My podcast interview on raising your spirits)

  Greetings from sunny Los Angeles! Hope you’re doing exceptionally well wherever you are.

  So I had a little bit of a motivational slump myself these past few weeks, and now feel like I’m on an upward trend. Of course, of all the challenges one could have, this is a pretty high-quality one — vs say “can’t get a ventilator in the ICU.” To paraphrase the old Buddhist story: Thanks for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.

  One of the ways I raise my own energies is by making myself useful to the world. So my very important question to you is this:

  How can I best serve you?

  Here are some potential options:

  • More articles on dating and relationships. Have been putting these on the backburner because the topic seems to have dropped in priority, but valid topic nonetheless. And I do have some new stuff for you, e.g. The Pipeline System.
  • More seminars and workshops on happiness and well-being. Did 10 of those and happy to do more.
  • Brain Yoga sessions. Exactly what it sounds like: a yoga class for your brain to make it stronger and more flexible.
  • Drop-in video office hours on Facebook or Zoom. These can be fun and interactive.
  • One-on-one coaching sessions, or long-term coaching programs. If you feel like this is what you need to get you to the next level, I’m all for it.
  • Tune Up Your Life Happiness Engineering group course. 3 months with a bunch of your peers to slowly, radically redesign your life.
  • Write the update to The Tao of Dating. Not sure if that’s what the world needs right now, but if you tell me otherwise, I could be convinced. Working title: Grown-Ass Dating: The Modern Woman’s Guide to Love & Romance

  So please drop me a line, and let your presence and thoughts be known! There are a lot of directions I could go in, so it’s crucial that I find out what YOU find the most beneficial.

  In the meantime, I just did an interview with my old friend & colleague Rebecca Whitman on her Balanced, Beautiful and Abundant show for smart accomplished women like yourself. And you know what? It came out purty good! For once, I listened to it myself (at 2x speed, of course), and I’m happy to report it did not bore me silly. It’s about the 5 Pillars of Human Thriving (Robust Relationships, Meaningful Work, Sound Sleep, Mental Fitness, Physical Fitness), how to apply them now and in the future, and what’s love got to do with it all. 22min at 2x speed, 44min if you’re the more patient type. Listen to it and let me know what you think!

  And if you’re wondering what I have been doing: reading even more than before. All nonfiction as usual. Some terrific ones of the 87 books of 2020 so far:

  Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, by Michael T Osterholm PhD MPH (and Mark Olshaker). Osterholm is one of the world’s foremost public health professionals, having served for 40 years on the frontlines of such diseases as Ebola, SARS, MERS, Zika and everything else. This book will rapidly bring you up to speed on epidemiology and pandemic management. He also devotes a whole chapter to a “tabletop scenario” that’s basically a play-by-play description of the unfolding of the coronavirus epidemic. Insanely prescient, exceptionally timely.

  The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, by Mark Arax. Just came out. A deeply reported look from a native son into the history of water, irrigation, and farming in California, that desert turned into the world’s breadbasket and the US’s most populous state. How? And how sustainable is it? This elegiac, poetic, and unflinching book will tell you. Longish and totally worth it.

  Talk to me,

  Dr Ali

• Staying Sane in Trying Times Seminars, Apr 22-25

  By popular request, I’m holding another series of Staying Sane Seminars this week.

  Now, attendance at the seminars has been robust, but not exactly internet-breaking. I myself just took an online seminar on marketing, and my instructor would tell me that I need to do a better job of letting you know what these seminars are and who they’re for.

  To that end, I will be sharing with you today a little bit more about my background and thinking:

  • Why these seminars are necessary
  • What qualifies me to teach you this stuff
  • Why this stuff is worthwhile
  • Who it’s for
  • What’s in these seminars anyway

  1. WHY THESE SEMINARS ARE NECESSARY, PANDEMIC OR NOT

  Here’s the deal: the universe was kind enough to drop the most complex machine in the entire cosmos into your cranium. It’s called your brain.

  Unfortunately, the universe forgot to include an owner’s manual. So most people — and by “most” I mean 99.964% — are running around feeling feelings and thinking thoughts that don’t necessarily serve them all the time. Stuff like fear, doubt, worry, self-loathing, shame, loneliness, and various flavors of self-inflicted misery.

  What makes things worse is that evolution designed our magnificent brains for survival on the African savanna 300,000 years ago. This is before the era of gridlock traffic, report deadlines, “Real Housewives”, and competitive kindergarten admissions. So there’s a lot of evolutionary mismatch between what our brains are optimized for and the challenges we encounter in 2020 C.E.

  That means all of us have these ancient brains that aren’t adapted to modern environments. So we don’t necessarily feel so good all the time. That’s where I come in.

  2. WHAT I HAVE TO TEACH YOU (a.k.a. who the hell is this guy anyway)

  Hi there! Dr Ali here. I have been studying how the mind works for over 20 years now. As an undergraduate physics and biology major at Harvard, I performed research in neuroscience. After that, I studied medicine and workings of the body-mind at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

  One day I sat in on a class on clinical hypnotherapy to heckle it. I found that hypnotherapy was effective beyond all reason for many conditions — and massively underused. Subsequently I got certified in it not once but twice, and have been practicing clinical hypnotherapy since.

  I also got twice certified in another mind-healing modality called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Like an antibiotic, it was very effective for treating specific things. And when it worked, it was mind-bendingly effective. It could do in 20 minutes what 3 months of therapy couldn’t accomplish. Like magic.

  Since 1999, I have been studying and practicing yoga. Yoga is a supremely powerful way to train the mind, and fortunately, it has become more popular in recent years. These days, people think of yoga as mostly just aerobics in Sanskrit. Although doing yoga booty ballet is still better than not doing it, it’s a far cry from what the likes of Paramahansa Yogananda taught. The truly transformative aspects of yoga are in meditation and breathwork.

  I’ve also attended dozens of personal development workshops and lectures, from the mainstream (e.g. Tony Robbins), to the offbeat (e.g. Wim Hof ice baths), to the esoteric (inner fire Tibetan tummo tantra taught by a reincarnated lama). And I read 160 nonfiction books a year, mostly on psychology and personal development.

  I’m telling you all this because you need to know that these Staying Sane Seminars aren’t just any old seminar. They’re a collection of THE best, most effective practices I’ve gathered over the past 20-some years. Stuff that works astonishingly well to transform the way you feel and think.

  I call it Creative Repatterning: you’re using the creativity of your own mind to change its patterns. Think of it as personal training for your brain.

  You know how you feel after watching a Cirque du Soleil performance? How you say “wooow” a few times, and feel like a different person? Senses elevated. Mind expanded. Think of this as the Cirque du Soleil of personal development seminars.

  Definitely not ordinary.

  And for the time being, they’re free. Come on down.

  3. WHO THESE SEMINARS ARE FOR

  Who is this for? Anyone with a mind. Especially one that experiences occasional disquietude and suffering.

  Access greater equanimity. Diminish stress, anxiety & worry. Build a happier you no matter what’s happening. Join me, Dr Ali Binazir, as I share with you Creative Repatterning techniques for altering your body-mind that are quite literally life-changing.

  Click on the link to register via Zoom:
  Wednesday, 22 April 2020, 1pm PT/4pm ET/9pm London/6am Sydney(+1)
  Thursday, 23 April 2020, 1pm PT/4pm ET/9pm London/6am Sydney(+1)
  Friday, 24 April 2020, 5pm PT/8pm ET/1am London/10am Sydney(+1)
  Saturday, 25 April 2020, 11am PT/2pm ET/7pm London/stay sleeping Sydney

  4. WHAT’S IN THESE SEMINARS

  So far some of the topics we have covered:

  Meditation:

  • Focus and calm the mind and clear it of thoughts (hum-sau)
  • Becoming more compassionate towards others and self (metta or loving-kindness meditation)
  • Re-processing and transforming uncomfortable emotions (Tibetan tonglen)
  • Practicing integration of the full self (Dr Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness)

  Emotional self-regulation:

  • Byron Katie’s “The Work”: a crazy-effective process for dealing with challenging people and situations
  • Whack-the-Ball: diminish painful emotions instantly
  • The Volume Dial: diminish suffering or physical pain on demand
  • Breathing techniques
  • Re-framing with modal operators

  Useful concepts and stories to shift your energy:

  • Spanda: the technique from Kashmiri Shaivic tantra to feel the vibration of the universe
  • Embodied cognition and the pen technique: the body leading the mind in feeling
  • Name it to tame it: Naming emotions as a way to make them more manageable
  • Meta-cognition: how to have thoughts about your thoughts  
  • How to generate and move energy through your body to change how you feel
  • Create your own happiness playlist on Spotify, or just use Dr Ali’s Moodlifter

  5. INTEGRATING THIS STUFF INTO YOUR LIFE

  If you’d like to get better at regulating your own feelings and developing an unshakable foundation of happiness, I’ve been working on a course that I’ll be starting soon for 20 people. If you’d like to be part of this first cohort, fill out the application here.

  I have time slots for 3-4 one-on-one coaching sessions per week. They are $200/hr, or $100 for 30min. If you’d like to book one of those, click here.

  Additionally, I have for you recordings of the first 6 seminars. Each one is different, with at least 80% new material:

  Happiness Engineering in Trying Times 1

  Staying Sane in Trying Times 2

  Staying Sane in Trying Times 3

  Staying Sane in Trying Times 4

  Staying Sane in Trying Times 5

  Staying Sane in Trying Times 6

  That’s all for now! Let me know:

  1. How this material is helpful to you,
  2. How you’re putting the material to use.
  3. The specific challenges you’re experiencing, and how I could help solve them.

  Email: ali (at) happinessengineering.com

• The 5 Magic Questions recap & replay

  Ladies –

  Thanks for your enthusiastic response to the “5 Magic Questions” workshop! An unusually large number of you signed up (and paid!) for the livestream, so if that was you, I hope you’ve had a chance to listen/watch in the last week.

  The response of the live audience was very enthusiastic. I’ve already done 2 podcast interviews as a result, so I’ll take that as a vote of confidence.

  I went through a lot of material in the 90min. Some highlights:

  1) Am I enough?
  Wrong question, yo. Might as well ask “Am I a horrible person?” Questions direct the function of your brain, so ask good ones. Some better options: How can I make others feel like a million bucks? How can I serve? How can I be someone’s answered prayer today? THAT’s the kind of power that cannot be taken away from you.

  2) Am I buying or selling?
  Who has more power in a job interview, the interviewer or the interviewee? Then be the interviewer. Since a date is basically an evening-length job interview that costs you money, I find this analogy particularly apt.

  3) What do you really want?
  This is complicated. We went through an exercise that will really clarify this for you, using the 5Ks framework and another neat hack involving looking back on all your breakups (fun!).

  4) Do I feel safe?
  There’s faux safety, which basically duplicates the environment you grew up in. And there’s real psychological safety, which allows your full flourishing and the giving of your gift to the world. Know the difference.

  5) Who am I really?
  I did 3 visualizations and meditations to radically reconfigure your mind around this one, so yeah, you just may have to listen to it :)

  You can download the workshop for free, then decide how much you want to pay. In an election year, this is about as democratic as it gets. And I get to receive some extremely honest feedback from you, in the form of how much you’re willing to plunk down (recommended minimum: $5; maximum: none :-) Fair enough? You can zap the dough via Venmo (@abinazir) or Paypal (payments@taoofdating.com).

  Audio download (65.3Mb, 90min)

  Video download (1.21 Gb)

  Go forth and conquer, AB

• WED FEB 19: The 5 Magic Questions – What 5000 Women’s Letters Reveal About Love & Dating

  Are you enough?
  Are you buying or selling?
  What do you want?
  Do you feel safe?
  Who are you, really?

  Here’s a quick story for you:

  On this day about 11 years ago, I published The Tao of Dating for women.

  I had already written the version for men, which took me 3 months to write. The book for women, on the other hand, took me over 3 years. Partly because at the time I didn’t really believe I was qualified to comment on the topic. What could a guy possibly know about such things?

  But since then, I’ve gotten over 5000 letters from my readers about their love lives. And certain patterns have revealed themselves from those letters, from which emerge The 5 Magic Questions.

  How you answer these questions determines not just the quality of your love life, but the quality of your whole existence.

  I’m not totally exaggerating here, m’dear. Questions like “Am I enough?” are always operating in the background, whether you’re dealing with a boss, a lover, a family member, a classroom of people, or just friends. It affects your salary, your health, your happiness.

  Science shows that the answer to the question “Do I feel safe?” determines the range of your existence: how far you’re willing to go beyond your comfort zone, how much risk you’re willing to take, and thus how much you can flourish as a human being.

  And, what DO you want? Ain’t that the perennial dilemma.

  Next Wednesday, Feb 19, 7.15pm-8.45pm PT/10.15pm-11.45pm ET via live workshop in LA and via Zoom livestream elsewhere, I will go through The 5 Magic Questions and their vast implications on your love life and beyond.

  For those of you who are in LA, the live workshop is $25. If you’re far away (like in Paris, Moscow, or Glendale), you can attend via livestream (or get the video and audio recording later) for just $10.

  Your time is the most precious commodity you have — the one thing that is completely irreplaceable.

  My job is to change people’s lives for the better in the time I have with them, whether through lecture, coaching or therapy. So when you choose to spend your time with me, I’ll do my darndest to deliver information that can transform you.

  I hope you can join us next Wednesday so you can stand taller, grow faster, and feel better in your life. Prepare to be moved. Sign up here. Full Eventbrite description below.

  All the best, Dr Ali

  THE 5 MAGIC QUESTIONS: WHAT 5000 WOMEN’S LETTERS REVEAL ABOUT LOVE & DATING

  Since I published The Tao of Dating 11 years ago, it has been the #1-rated dating book on Amazon for 7 years, as well as its most-highlighted title (what? seriously?). Tens of thousands of smart, strong professional women like yourself have enriched their love lives with its precepts.

  Over those 10 years, I’ve noticed a pattern from the 5000+ readers’ letters I’ve received: they all seem to contain the same 5 questions!

  I call these The 5 Magic Questions. Answer them right, and your love life will go spectacularly well. Get them wrong, and fulfillment will prove elusive.

  In this 75min workshop, we will examine who you really are, what truly fulfills you, how to find it, and how to keep it in your life. Some topics we’ll cover:

  • The perils and opportunities of online dating. Used incorrectly, tools like Tinder, Bumble, Match and OKcupid can make you miserable. Find out how to use them right.
  • The one question to ask to make sure a guy’s not a sociopath/psychopath
  • Lance, Biff and Victor: the three archetypes of men and how to spot them
  • How to tell the difference between Good Guys and Bad Boys, and avoid the latter like the plague
  • Subtle ways you may be sabotaging your own love life right now
  • Insights on how men think, from an actual guy :)

  I’ll be giving you tools from both the scientific and spiritual perspectives that my readers found useful for finding and keeping love in their lives. Are you ready to graduate from app swiping and superficial interactions to deep fulfillment and happiness? Then this workshop’s for you. Regardless of your age and whatever your dating situation is, these are the tools that can give you power that cannot be taken away. Sign up now and join the tens of thousands of women who have found more warmth and joy in their lives with The Tao of Dating.

  PS: I’ll talk for about 60min and take questions for the last 15min. There will be signed copies of The Tao of Dating paperback available for purchase for $20.

• Dating Danger in the Digital Age: “Nobody’s Victim” by Carrie Goldberg

  ***Reminder: Webinar CHARISMA KILLERS: THE 7 DEADLY SINS OF PUBLIC SPEAKING is TOMORROW 13 DEC, 12pm PT/3pm ET/5pm São Paulo/8pm London. Sign up here.***

  A couple of months ago, I was wandering in one of my favorite spots in the world, The Strand Bookstore in New York City, when a book with an unusual cover caught my eye: Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls by Carrie Goldberg (ebook & print).

  What is this all about? I requested the ebook from my local library via the insanely great Libby app (which you should all get, by the way). A few weeks later, I had the book in my paws for freeeee, wheeee. Aren’t libraries incredible? For a man with a 160 book-a-year habit, yes they are. 

  Halfway through the book, which I read in two sittings, I bought the book anyway because it’s scary good. As in both scary and good. So scary that I don’t think I ever want to have a daughter, jeebus.

  Carrie Goldberg is a lawyer whose law firm helps people who have been targeted by “psychos, assholes, trolls, and pervs.” These are terms of art that I’ll let Carrie herself describe:

  My staff and I have even developed a shorthand to describe the shitheads we see most often: psychos, who obsessively stalk, threaten, and intimidate their prey; assholes, who exploit or mistreat victims out of willful ignorance or arrogance or for their own financial gain; trolls, who terrorize victims under the cloak of internet anonymity; and pervs, who get off on overpowering victims into sex acts against their will.

  The stories of Carrie’s clients are harrowing to read. It’s remarkable how awful humans can be to each other. Well, actually, in this book, it’s men being awful to women, and sometimes to other men. (more…)

• Featured Post

  9 Reasons Why Men Lose Interest — and What You Can Do About It

  Here’s a most excellent letter about a question that every woman has asked at some point in her life:

  “Why is it that a guy fiercely pursues a woman at first, and then when he finds out she is actually interested he is not so sure if he is interested anymore? And then his interest wanes and he starts treating her like an option instead of a priority? When can you let a guy know you are interested! At what stage? Is dating just one big game? How do you get a guy to treat you like priority instead of an option? For background, I’m 29, live in Australia, and I’ve been on 5 dates with this guy so far but we haven’t kissed yet.” — Sheila

  Well well. An excellent question that has been posed by women since time immemorial. There he was, totally interested, looking dapper in his buffalo skin while nonchalantly swinging his club at the cave entrance, offering you some freshly killed mastodon meat. There he was, showing up outside your castle window every day in his mostly shiny but frankly also a little rusty armor, strumming his lute and warbling his troubadour songs. There he was at the opera house, his head low and eyes up giving him that simultaneously worshipful and conspiratorial look, passing you a note saying, “Meet me at the fountain when the clock tower strikes nine.” There he was, texting you right back when you texted him, even asking you out on actual grown-up dates to actual grown-up places like concerts and lectures, and then… poof.

  What is up with that?! Why do men lose interest? What, if anything, could you have done differently? (more…)

• How to Get Guys: The 6.5 Dating Phases of Men

  Have you ever played poker?

  If so, one of the first things you learn is that the strength of your own hand depends on the strength of your adversary’s hand. In other words, it’s not enough to know what your hand is. You also need to know what kind of hand your adversary is holding.

  Now let’s say you’re thinking about dating a guy. What’s his hand, metaphorically speaking? This would entail asking yourself questions like: How many relationships has he had? How long did they last? Is he any good in the sack? Is he any good with women, or is he a 40-year old virgin? Is he needy or independent? Player or homebody?

  It’s important to know how much skill and experience a man has in the dating arena so you can know how the two of you match up. If he’s coming off a divorce and has not been out on his own in 20 years, your Mata Hari seductress routine might scare him off. And if he’s a youngish guy who goes on 15 app-enabled dates a week, you may want to bring your A-game. 

  That’s why you need to do some Dude Diligence (sic) and figure out what dating phase your guy is in. Beginner? Intermediate? Advanced? Burned? To that end, I present to you the 6.5 Dating Phases of Men, informed by how I went through most of them myself. 

  Phase 1: Blissful Cluelessness

  UNCLE ED: What do you think about girls, Ali?
  ME, AGE 7: I don’t really care about girls, Uncle Ed. They’re kinda icky.
  UNCLE: Yeah, that’s gonna change, buddy. 

  In this phase, corresponding roughly to early boyhood, the guy — okay, the kid — is mostly unaware of the existence of a separate gender known as female. Everyone, boy or girl, is a potential playmate. If anything, sometimes there’s even an aversion to the other sex (see dialog above). In the learning trade, you would call this the phase of unconscious incompetence. You’re bad at something (e.g. girls), you don’t even know you’re bad at that something (e.g. girls), and frankly you don’t give a damn, because it’s not even on the radar (girls?). Yet.

  Alas, this phase of blissful cluelessness does not last. Although this was definitely me up to age 7, in that year I developed a raging crush on an impossibly cute classmate named Leila (as chronicled in the last chapter of The Tao of Dating and my second TEDx talk, “Love and the Empowered Woman”). There went my peace eternal. She sporadically stayed on my mind for years. 

  Even that “crush”, though, was entirely (more…)

• The 3 Big Questions to Turn Your Dating Life Around (10th Anniversary Post)

  It’s been about 10 years since I published The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible (ebook, print, audiobook). Although most of the stuff I wrote that long ago has become too cringeworthy for me to read, this book is mostly okay. And thanks to the support of readers like you, it’s once again Amazon’s highest-rated dating book for women (4.5/5 stars). So I’m starting to think it’s useful to people.

  In the meantime, I’ve had a decade’s worth of personal experience, 5000 letters from readers, and countless talks and seminars to reshape my thinking about dating and love for the modern woman. From that mass of data, three big principles have emerged that I’d like to share with you today.

  1. Are you buying or selling?

  When I was in Helsinki last summer, going to the farmer’s market was one of the most enjoyable things I did. Finland is big on berries, and has an abundance of wild blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, cloudberries, lingonberries, hinkleberries and floinkenberries. Okay, so maybe I made up the last two, but the rest are real and tasty. And at the farmer’s market, you’ve got all these vendors with acres of the stuff selling it for cheap.

  So there I was, armed with my all-powerful berry-buying euros, thinking, “Hmm, which vendor should I buy from?” Here, let’s make it a multiple-choice quiz so you can help me out:

  Vendor A: pretty solid berries but starting to look a little tired, 4 euros
  Vendor B: big juicy bright superfresh berries, 3 euros
  Vendor C: big juicy bright superfresh berries, 5 euros

  So—which one should Dr Ali choose? If you said “B, duh”, then you understand the idea of being a buyer with money in your pocket and options to choose from. You know what you want, and you pick the best option.

  Now, let’s switch the scenario around a little bit and pretend this is what happens instead:

  You arrive at Vendor A. Hey, look, berries! They look a little worse for wear, but overall not bad. Oh, you’re willing to sell to me? No way! It must be my lucky day! I’ll take ‘em all. Will you pleeeez take my money?

  What, you won’t even look at the other vendors, even though you’ve got money in your pocket? Do you see how much nonsense that makes? And yet, that is exactly how most people approach the relationship market. They act like they’re selling when they should be buying.

  You’re selling whenever you try to persuade people how wonderful you are. I’m a great cook! I make mad money! I give body-melting massages with hot chestnut oil! I’m great in the sack! I’m pretty! Choose meeee!

  And it’s possible that you’re all of those things and an excellent salesperson, and thus get all kinds of attention.

  But in the end, the best salesperson in the world has less power than even the least skilled buyer. The science of game theory guarantees it. Because the buyer has choice. And choice in the marketplace is power.

  How do you practice being the buyer in the dating world? By being playfully discriminating. The attitude is something like, “Hey, you seem pretty interesting. Let’s find out what you have going for you and whether there’s a potential match here.”

  This would be in contradistinction to “Omigod you are so amazing and beautiful and great please give me a smidgen of attention pretty please I promise I’ll make it worth your while even though deep down inside I’m not worthy but give me a chance anyway? Pretty pleez?”

  Yeah, that may not work so well.

  And yet, in spite of the inherent weakness of the seller stance, it’s the one most people in the relationship marketplace assume by default. So if you are that rare person who has the presence of mind to adopt the subtle shift in perspective to become the buyer, you will win more often.

  It does not cost anything to assume the buyer stance. You don’t have to lose weight, get a new hairdo, go to the gym, go on a diet, or get cosmetic treatments to assume it. And yet, it will make you more attractive than all of those external interventions.

  In The Tao of Dating, I call this the picky buyer stance. And while I want you to be picky, I also want you to remain compassionate and kind. It’s very easy to lapse from picky to hardass to jerk. But you will never do that, because you will remain your playful, fun, kind self. Right? Right. The point is to keep your heart and mind open while conveying that you have standards.

  The picky buyer stance is especially important to remember when meeting people online. This is because an online profile is basically an advertisement, which is by definition what people utilize to sell things. So when you go online, there’s no way around going into sell mode initially. Once you receive some messages from interested parties, then you can go back to being the picky buyer.

  Being the buyer vs the seller feeds directly into the next principle, which may not only be the most important principle for dating, but also for lifelong happiness and fulfillment.

  2. Are you enough?

  One of the two things that struck me about the 5000 or so readers’ letters I’ve received in the past 10 years is that they all basically contained the same question even though on the surface, they looked different:

  • “I’m a 37yr old divorced mother of two. Will any guy want to go out with a woman with young children?”

  • “We had a great first date, and I texted him the next day to thank him. It’s been two days and he hasn’t responded yet. Has he lost interest?”

  • “We’ve been dating for three years and I thought we were headed towards marriage. But now he’s saying he wants some space. What should I do?”

  • “Does my butt look good in these pants?”

  But deep down, they were all variations on the same question:

  “Am I enough?”

  The problem: it’s the wrong question. Merely attempting to answer it puts you in a seller position that’s impossible to escape from. Also: Enough for what? The changing whims of culture and fashion? The unfathomable desires of millions of different potential partners, most of whom don’t even consciously know what they want? Your own pointlessly harsh standards?

  Some of you reading this right now are probably thinking, “Omigod, he’s right! I’ve been am-I-enoughing myself forever! How terrible!”

  And that would be funny, ‘cause there you go doing it again. But it’s okay: everybody does it. There are multi-billion dollar industries arrayed to make us feel terrible about ourselves: TV, movies, cosmetics, advertising, exercise, diet. Making us feel bad about ourselves is how people sell us stuff.

  Luckily, there are remedies. You can re-read The Tao of Dating and Marianne Williamson’s A Woman’s Worth. Then, for a permanent solution, do these three things:

  (a) Instead of asking “Am I enough?,” ask “How can I be of service?”

  Even if you do happen to think you’re enough for one brief shining moment, that moment will pass. The hair will have a bad day. The outfit will go out of style. The culture’s ideal butt will go from Reubens to Marilyn to Twiggy and back, while yours stays attached to you mostly unchanged. And there’s no escaping self-criticism (except for the solution in (c) below).

  Trying to be enough is a game you cannot win. It is temporary power at best, because it can be taken away from you.

  The good news is that on any given day, wherever you are, you have the opportunity to be someone’s answered prayer. You have the power to elevate those around you, appreciate them genuinely, and make them feel like a billion bucks:

  “Love how you’ve put together that outfit!”

  “Really enjoyed your presentation. So uplifting!”

  “Thank you for a fantastic dinner! So wonderful of you to bring us together!”

  The power to elevate others is power that cannot be taken away from you. You can do it anytime, anywhere. And because of the hypersocial human brain, when you make other people feel good, you feel good. And when you feel good, you glow, and people want to be around you. You’ll feel great, and you won’t ever be lonely again.

  To implement this into your life, start by setting a goal of giving one more compliment per day than you were before. For most of us, that adds up to one compliment per day. The bus driver, the receptionist, an old friend, your partner—everyone is eligible. Let’s make a habit out of this.

  Another interesting thing happens when you make being of service a part of your identity. Potential partners will go from wondering if you’re good enough for them to thinking if they’re good enough for you. Your mere presence will want them to be a better man! How’s that for a shift from “Am I enough?”

  (b) Practice self-compassion

  Self-compassion would be the opposite of the voice inside your head saying stuff like “I can’t believe I left the food on the stove overnight again what a bonehead just shoot me now.” Prof Kristin Neff of the University of Texas suggests three things you can do to replace the habitual self-harshness with some self-compassion:

  1. Self-kindness. Imagine your 7-year old nephew breaks a plate. Would you crash down on him like a titanium anvil, or say something like, “Oh, careful now but don’t worry about it too much”? Self-kindness means being as nice to yourself as you would be to the 7yr old nephew.

  2. Recognize our common humanity. Everyone screws up. Everyone has issues like Kleenex has tissues, and they’re all the same issues, no matter how exotic and unique you think yours are. As the recipient of all of your letters, I have proof that whatever problem you’re having, hundreds of others have it, too.

  3. Mindfulness. According to Prof Neff, “Mindfulness is a non-judgmental, receptive mind state in which one observes thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to suppress or deny them. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.” This is about allowing yourself to feel whatever emotion you’re experiencing without over-identifying with it. Acknowledge it, feel it, and let it pass.

  (c) Get rid of your small self.

  One of the foundational tenets of Buddhist philosophy (and all mystical traditions) is to get rid of your sense of self entirely. If there is no you, then nobody can belittle you, insult you, betray you, or break your heart. No self, no problem!

  The problem is that getting to no-self ain’t so simple. One path is to meditate. A lot. And while you meditate, you take one step back from your own thoughts and feelings so you can stop identifying with them. Instead, you identify with the pure consciousness behind those thoughts or feelings. Think of your consciousness as the TV screen, with your thoughts the programs showing on it. You are the TV screen, not the programs.

  Eventually, the state of dis-identifying from your thoughts goes from being a state to becoming a trait. That’s what the sages call samadhi, or satori, or awakening.

  As a regular meditator, I’ve come to appreciate the slight impracticality of telling folks to solve their relationship problems by practicing no-self (anatta). It’s like telling an out-of-shape person to take up ultramarathons. That said, you can begin the practice of dis-identification by meditating.

  Meditation is by far the single most beneficial practice I’ve taken up. And you can begin with just 2 minutes a day. Who doesn’t have time to sit and do nothing for 2 minutes? Apps like Calm, Headspace, and Waking Up are excellent ways to ease yourself into it.

  3. What do you want?

  The second thing that struck me about the 5000 letters was that they almost never contained a real question. I’d get a novella about how they met, the minute-by-minute unfolding of the first three dates, his lingering attachment to his ex, and then: “What do you think I should do, Doc?”

  And that’s when I would say with total certainty, “Buy Tesla stock! It’s, like, totally undervalued.”

  Well, actually, I don’t really know about that. I also don’t know about what you want. And until you tell me what you want—some kind of desirable outcome—I have no basis to dispense advice, dubious or sage.

  There are some general guidelines, of course. Hang out with people who bring out your best self and catalyze your growth. Don’t chase bright, shiny objects without regard for whether there’s an actual fit between you. Only date people who are actually single and available. “Separated”, “divorcing”, and “like totally separated but ex still lives in the house” are not the same as single and available.

  So. You need to ask yourself, “If I could wave a magic wand here and get exactly what I want, what would that look like?” You’d be shocked and amazed how much clarity this simple mental exercise will give you.

  For example, sometimes what you really want is not a relationship with a hotshot who has repeatedly signaled his unavailability with poor communication and a busy schedule, but something simple and more reliable. Sometimes you just want a fun fling, not something serious. Sometimes you don’t actually want the long-distance relationship to work out, but rather to handle your latent tendency to avoid real intimacy. Sometimes you want the bad boy you’re dating to propose to you, and you know he’ll never do that, which means you’re free to look elsewhere.

  Sometimes it’s okay not to know exactly what you want. Last thing you want is to spend lots of time and effort attaining a lofty but ultimately wrong goal. On the other hand, things like growth and fulfillment are directional goals. So long as you’re on the path to greater growth and fulfillment, you know you’re going in the right direction.

  And sometimes, it’s okay to just go into the silence and practice solitude. Work on yourself. If you can’t stand your own company, how can you expect anyone else to stand you? Learning to be alone without being lonely is one of the cornerstone skills of relationship.

  Conclusion

  The principles I just described are simple to grasp. They may not be trivial to implement them into your life, especially if you’ve been practicing their opposites for years. But it’s certainly possible to change. One of the most hopeful aspects of human existence is neuroplasticity. The brain can change and grow no matter how long you’ve been alive. You can learn new ways of doing things.

  So if you’ve been playing the seller your entire life, go ahead and try playing the buyer for a while and see what happens. Experiment! Make a game out of it. If you’ve been acting as if you’re not enough, shift to practicing self-compassion and being of service, and notice the results. If you haven’t been a meditator, start with 2 min a day. And if you’re having a difficult time figuring out what you really want, start with a list of things you really don’t want. That should help clarify the values you hold dear, which is a signpost to what you want in your life.

  I hope you find a way to implement these principles into your life. I’m interested in hearing about your thoughts and experiences. There are thousands of you and only one of me, so there’s a lot more collective wisdom in your midst than in my noggin. Either comment on the article below, or write to me directly at DrAliB (at) TaoOfDating.com. If you have a question, keep it under 250 words and make sure you include a question :) And if you’d like me to do more consultations and office hours, let me know so I can make time for it in the schedule.

  All the best, Dr Ali

  Additional resources

  To further explore some of the principles I discuss in the article, here are some useful resources:

  • Prof Kristen Neff’s Self-Compassion website

  • Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach (ebook & print). One of the best books ever written on meditation and living at peace with oneself. Just might be the best $11 you’ll ever spend.

  • A Woman’s Worth by Marianne Williamson. Great antidote to feelings of not-enoughness.

  • Meditation apps: Calm, Headspace, and Waking Up.

  • The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Norman Doidge, M.D. (ebook & print). Neuroplasticity is real and applies to everyone, including you right now. Some tremendously inspiring stories in here. Probably the most hopeful book I’ve ever read.

  • The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible by Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil. (ebook, print, potentially free audiobook). Just in case you haven’t read it yet.

• Tao of Dating 2018 Workshop, Helsinki Edition (audio)

  Over the weekend of 3-5 August 2018, I presented some workshops at the Magnesia Festival in Helsinki. One of them was entitled “The Tao of Dating: The Modern Woman’s Guide to Loving and Being Loved.” Some things have changed to modern romance since I first published The Tao of Dating book (ebook and print). I’ve also learned a lot from the 5000+ letters readers like you have sent me, so think of this talk as an update and supplement to the book that incorporates the new stuff.

  The talk has 5 themes:

  1. How to get better at selecting men: Avoiding psychopaths and sociopaths. The heart-spine selection criteria. Avoiding Bad Boys in favor of selecting Good Guys.
  2. How to present the best possible version of you.
  3. How to find him at his best: the importance of venue and context.
  4. Set up dating so you win.
  5. How to avoid unforced errors: on communication habits, giving love a chance, overdependence on devices, and the cure for negative self-talk.

  Download link for The Tao of Dating: The Modern Woman’s Guide to Loving and Being Loved (Sun 5 Aug)
  Download link for Saturday version of same talk (Sunday one was better)

  If you are a fan of yoga, meditation and dance and can free your schedule for the first week of August, I highly recommend the Magnesia Festival. It’s set on a beautiful island in Helsinki harbor, with healthy food, fun classes, and serious sauna. Many thanks to Mari Rasimus, Kaisa Kärkkäinen, Asaf Peled and Oded Peled for inviting me and taking such good care of the speakers!

• Tao of Dating 2018 Workshop recap + recording + Mindful Living

  

  Thanks to all of you who made it to the “Tao of Dating 2018” workshop last week in Santa Monica! When you spend months on end like me staring at a computer screen, it’s a real treat to see some of you face-to-face and answer your questions in real time.

  We covered a lot of ground during the workshop. More specifically, I talked about six themes:

  1) The fallacy of the Western Romantic Narrative and how it can cause more pain than joy
  2) Guy selection.
  3) How to present the best possible version of you, and how online dating apps can hinder that.
  4) How to find him at his best
  5) Benefits of prolonging the courtship: patience pays!
  6) How stop inadvertently shooting yourself in the foot in the dating arena.

  It’s this last one that I want to touch upon briefly. Dating can be plenty challenging as it is without committing unforced errors. Here are some simple ways you can get out of the way of your own success:

  • Minimize negative self-talk: Do you ever find yourself saying things to yourself like, “Omigod you’re such an idiot!” Or “You screwed that one up again because you don’t really deserve to be happy anyway.” Or worse?

  Everyone has a little negative soundtrack running in their heads, and scientists have noticed that it’s particularly prevalent amongst women. Nobody knows exactly why, but I’m pretty sure that all the advertising imagery emphasizing women’s inadequacy is probably not helping.

  What’s the solution? Two ideas: First, limit the amount of (more…)

• Women’s Top 7 Dating Challenges in 2017: Survey Results

  Hey there, ladies! Your reactions to the “Bad Boys & Addictions” article was swift and enthusiastic. Turns out that almost every woman has had some kind of experience with bad boys, not all of them healthy. Most gratifying were the responses from some of you saying, “Omigod, this is happening to me right now! Thanks for opening my eyes. Time to take out the trash!”

  Here’s one from Theresa:

  This post really hit me. I’m in a similar situation; however, I believe he’s the first man I’ve ever truly loved. He has commitment issues and will never really settle down with me. I’ve come to realize that he is not good for me and have left twice but he has come back every time without promising me a future.

  Your advice is apt. I am addicted and need to figure out what I want and move on. Thank you. I’ve told myself I can do this.

  And here’s one from Susan, who had a similar experience but is in a much better spot now:

  What a classic post, Dr. Ali! And I’m so glad you’re back. Everything you wrote is so true. Ladies: definitely follow Dr. Ali’s excellent advice.

  I spent 9 months with a “bad boy,” who managed to break up with me 4 times in just 9 months. After the 4th time I finally smartened up and focused on moving on. I’ve now been dating a really great guy for over 2.5 years.

  In the beginning I was still hung up on Bad Boy, but distraction and detox (no contact with Bad Boy) really worked. When Bad Boy reached out to me 16 months later, the addiction was genuinely dead, and I could authentically say f*** off.

  So ladies, read Dr. A’s excellent advice, detox from your Bad Boy, and if you can, find something or someone that can pull you forward into the present or the future — rather than some wistful past that you’ve idealized.

  As I work on my current project, Happiness Engineering, I’m reminded over and over again how our relationships form our experience of life. You could even go so far as to say our relationships are our life. As such, your choice of life partner is the most important decision you make. Nothing else comes close. Make it a good one.

  Which brings us to the results of the survey I did last week. Some of you were kind enough to answer my 60-second survey question:

  What is the single biggest challenge you’re dealing with in dating and relationships these days?

  If you wanted to answer but didn’t get around to it, you can do it now here. I’d be thrilled to hear your thoughts, since it will not only help me create better material for you, but also get to know you better.

  As a gesture of thanks for participating in the survey, I’ve put The Tao of Dating ebook on sale for 67% off in all territories for the next 72 hours only (sale ends at midnight Sunday Sept 24). So in the US, that’s $2.99 (regular price $9.97).

  To put that in perspective, a mocha or latte at Starbucks costs $4.15, and an hour of parking in San Francisco or New York City costs $6. And they are both gone in an hour. On the other hand, you get to keep this book (which, incidentally, has helped tens of thousands of women) forever for under 3 beans. If you already have the book, thank you thank you thank you and please tell a friend.

  In the meantime, here are the preliminary results of the survey.

  1. Meeting quality men.

  By far, the biggest challenge the respondents encountered was meeting quality men. How do you find a guy who’s compatible, age-appropriate, and interested in a long-term committed relationship? The phrase “finding a man who wants to be a grown-up” came up several times. This response summarized the challenge nicely:

  “Meeting a man who I feel compatible with, feeling attracted to that same man AND having him treat me well.”

  This is what all the online dating methods call the matching problem, and what I cover in The Tao of Dating as the Find phase. It turns out to be a source of considerable concern for a lot of ladies, as this poignant response shows:

  “Where is he? He really likes me. We are best friends. We have immersive conversations. We care about each other’s experiences in life. We have a deep and abiding connection. He understands I am a product of (more…)

• Tainted Love: How to Deal with the Addictive Appeal & Dangers of Bad Boys

  This post has three parts to it:
  1) An excellent letter from a reader, asking about what she should do about a friends with benefits situation that has gone on for 10 years.
  2) My survey question to you: What is your biggest challenge in dating and relationships these days?
  3) A treat from me to you, relating to the new project I’m working on.

  First, the letter from reader Lainie:

  I have read your book, The Tao of Dating, several times and it is awesome! It has helped me in many ways.

  I am in an unusual situation. I met a man nearly a decade ago and we started out as friends. We were next-door neighbors. We quickly turned into friends with benefits [for non-English speakers: that means they had sex without making any explicit commitment to each other – AB].

  We spent a lot of time together. I watched him go out with woman after woman. I finally got to the point where I said I wasn’t going to watch him be with other women and broke it off.

  Several months later he came back and said he wanted a relationship with me. That was 4 years ago. Since then we have broken up and gotten back together at least 6 times. He goes away for a few months and then comes right back into my life. He tries to be my “friend” for a month or so and then we’re right back in a relationship.

  Every time he breaks it off it’s because he says he cannot picture himself married with a family and can never give me what I truly want, even though I have not tried to pressure him. He also says he doesn’t think about me all day (so he doesn’t obsess about me like people do when they FIRST meet someone). I have explained to him that I do not think about him all the time either, and I am not head over heels for him.

  It’s a deeper love now, after nearly 10 years. We are best friends and the sex is always good. I know he loves me. He has admitted he has never done more for a woman in his entire life and that he really loves me. We were together for an entire year this time with out him freaking out, and now he has broken up with me again. Same reason as always. I know he’ll come back again, and although I love him, I don’t know if he’ll ever get past this Walt Disney fantasy about what love really is. What should I do?
  — Lainie, getting a little tired of it all

  Thanks for the note, Lainie! The answer to “What should I do” is simple:

  You should take up needlepoint.

  So soothing. Increases your dexterity. And you’ll have pretty presents to give to friends every time you finish a project. Perfect!

  Just kidding. And I jest because every woman who asks me a question does the same thing: they ask “what should I do, doc” without making clear what they WANT. How am I supposed to steer you towards an outcome without knowing what it is?

  So – what’s your ideal outcome, Lainie? If this man did not exist in the world and you could design a perfect relationship with one of the remaining 3 billion men, what would that look like? Would it be intermittent commitment, with some good sex and regular yearly breakups? Think about that and get back to me :)

  If I could wave a magic wand and have the relationship I always wanted, I’d be with a guy who has the same loyalty and love that I do. Someone who didn’t question everything, someone who was affectionate and kind. Definitely not what I’ve been going through with this guy. Someone who was fun and outgoing, and enjoyed going on adventures with me. He’d be my dream guy. 

  Great! Now we’re getting somewhere. So, next question: does this guy fit that description? If yes, please proceed full steam ahead. If not, you need to stop sleeping with him (preferably forever) because with the emotional and physical connection and multiple breakups, you’ve already created an addictive circuit in your brain around this relationship.

  What happens with an on-again, off-again relationship is that you’re activating what neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky calls the power of maybe. He goes into that in some depth in his new tome Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (ebook and paperback), which may be the greatest work of nonfiction I’ve ever read. I’ve talked about this maybe thing before, but it’s worth repeating.

  The way you get neurologically hooked on something is when there’s an irregular reinforcement. For example, the nice guy is always nice. He’s highly predictable in the sense that you know he will always do the kind, decent thing.

  The jerk is also predictable: he’s always mean. Not very interesting or pleasant.

  The bad boy troublemaker, on the other hand, is unpredictable. Some days he’s nice. Some days he’ll do what he says. Other days, who knows. Some days he feels like smacking you around, physically or emotionally. Others, he treats you like the queen of the universe. You just never know.

  The problem is that dopamine is the neurotransmitter that mediates addiction. And the more uncertain an event is, the more dopamine your brain produces. Maximum uncertainty happens at 50% — half good, half bad. Withdrawal just means that the next dopamine spike is going to be that much larger when you finally get it.

  So Mr FWB (short for “friends with benefits”) can’t commit. He strings you along for a month, a season, a year. Then – boom! Cuts you off. You’re adrift again. But something in the back of your head still craves him back.

  Moreover, you’re having sex with him, and you say it’s good. I’ll interpret it as meaning “I’m having orgasms with this fella.” If that’s the case, two more things are happening that make the situation even trickier.

  First off, orgasms cause additional dopamine secretion. To be clear, that’s what an orgasm is – one giant wallop of dopamine to the noggin. So there’s your nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center of your brain, getting another hit from the presence of FWB, and getting you more addicted to him.

  Second, orgasms cause secretion of oxytocin. It’s a bonding chemical well-known for its effect on increasing trust. Trust applied to the wrong person has a name: bad judgment. So it’s helping you make poor decisions. Like keeping this guy around for a whole decade after 6 breakups.

  Now I don’t know how old you are, Lainie, but this much I know. You’re behaving as if you have an infinite amount of time. You do not. We’re all gonna die. (I know, I’m a hoot at parties.)

  Moreover, as a woman who’s interested in having children, you will not be fertile forever. And if you had let this guy go 8 years ago and instead found someone else who was interested in commitment, you could have had a kid in 3^rd grade by now.

  Think about that.

  So what we have here is a sunk cost of 10 years. You’re never going to get those back. But you can do this: take corrective action immediately so you don’t lose out on another millisecond. Remember: we’re not going to live forever.

  Now you may have noticed that I used the language of drugs and addiction when describing your situation here, Lainie. That is intentional, because the neural circuitry of sexual love mimics that of drug addiction. That’s why the parallels between the two are so striking: The failed attempts at quitting. The ecstatic highs and the soul-crushing lows. The resolve that “this time it’s going to be different.” The craving, the draw, the seductive ease of slipping back into the same routine.

  Gambling works the exact same way. If gamblers won every time, or lost every time, it wouldn’t be so interesting. Gamblers would get bored and quit. But it’s the uncertainty around winning or losing, its sheer haphazardness, that keeps us hooked. As a one-time semi-pro poker player, I can tell you that’s true.

  So you need to treat it like any other addiction. The first step is complete cessation of the drug – in this case, contact with FWB. You may feel it’s too drastic to stop talking to him, but it would actually be the most effective path since you both have a pattern of falling back in bed with each other.

  You must allow time for your brain to heal. Technically, that means spending enough time without him such that your brain downregulates all the extra dopamine receptors it has created over the last 10 years. In the parlance of rehab, this is known as “detox”, and it takes a while. My preference is that you break off contact with him permanently. Like alcohol for an alcoholic or crack for a crackhead, the only acceptable dose is zero.

  Then, you must find healthy substitutes for the stimulus you were receiving. That makes the cravings easier. Ideally, this would be a commitment-minded guy you really like who likes you back. Quality time spent with friends and family is also good. Spend as much time in community as possible. Mindless sex with strangers would mostly perpetuate the problem you’re already having, so I do not recommend it as a healing modality.

  I refer you to this 5000-word piece I wrote some time ago about getting over breakups:
  How to Get Over a Breakup: Professional Edition

  Ladies: every minute you’re spending with the wrong guy is a minute not spent with a much better match. The bad news is that the design of our brains has made the hot-cold, on again-off again treatment of bad boys inherently addictive.

  However, if you’re after a long-term relationship and maybe a family, this is not a legitimate excuse for giving in to the charms of the bad boy and wrecking your life.

  Because the good news is that we also have discipline, wisdom and willpower. How many of you say, “Omigod, I mean the crack pipe was there, and I just couldn’t help myself.” Or, “Well, I was at the party, and the heroin syringe just came around and I HAD to inject myself.”

  No? You wouldn’t do crack or heroin? Ever? Not even because come on, they’re so much fun!

  Why? Because you know they’d wreck your life. All of it.

  So please treat bad boys exactly the same way. Like the human equivalent of heroin or crack, only worse. Lies, infidelity, divorce, financial instability, custody battles, a world of pain. Those are things that wreck lives. Lainie’s pretty lucky – all she’s lost are 10 years of the best dating years of her life. Still irretrievable though.

  Sometimes it’s tough to spot bad boys, but if you’re interested in having a long-term committed relationship, I’ll boil it down to one thing: inability to commit. If commitment is what you want and he can’t offer it, then that’s all you need to know. To you, he’s a bad boy. Done and done.

  So write down what you want in a relationship on a piece of paper, and stick it in your purse. Now you have a basis of comparison for every guy who comes along. Have standards for the character of the kind of guy you want to have a relationship with, and stick with those standards. Ten bucks says that “flaky” and “wavering” are not on that list.

  I would also encourage you to do “Exercise 12: The Ideal Man” on page 154 of The Tao of Dating (ebook and paperback) to get you started, and to take a look at The Prospective Spouse Checklist: Evaluating Your Potential Partner (ebook and paperback) by Isabelle Fox.

  A Big Question for You

  As I sit here in front of a computer screen with nary a reader of mine in sight, I often ask myself: “Am I doing any good? Is this useful to anyone? Am I just repeating myself myself?”

  So in the interest of better serving you, I would like to ask you a single very important question:

  What is the biggest challenge you’re experiencing in dating and relationships these days?

  The idea is that if you had a magic wand that you could wave to solve the single biggest problem in your love life, what would that be? The answer to that question is hugely important to me, because it will tell me what things I can create for you to solve the problem!

  So please do us both a medium-sized favor and take 60 seconds to answer the question via Google Forms. I’ll also have survey results for you to share what other readers said.

  In the Meantime: A Sleepy Treat for You

  I’ve been working on a project called Happiness Engineering. It’s a manual for educated folks who want to design happiness into their lives instead of merely leaving it to chance. I’ve already given a TEDx talk about it which some of you have already seen.

  One of the five pillars of Happiness Engineering is good sleep. Statistics say that a large portion of the population is getting mediocre sleep (like, 1 out of 5 people). So if you’re one of those who has difficulty falling asleep, I’ve made this recording for you. It works best when you listen to it through headphones. Note from Captain Obvious: Please don’t listen to this when driving :)

  Dr Ali’s Sleep Script

  You can listen to it for free right here. Length is 15:48min, but most people conk out after 7min. If you’d like to download it to your devices, click here to pay whatever you consider reasonable.

  That’s all for now, lovelies! If you have a question for me, please send it to my new address: DrAliB (at) TaoOfDating.com. Make sure it’s under 200 words and it contains a question, preferably addressing what you WANT :)

  Go forth and conquer, Dr Ali

  PS: In the interest of getting to know more of you, please join me on Facebook if you have not already! In addition to my articles, I post travelogues, photos and random observations, usually of the silly variety.

   

• “Does he like me?”: Five principles for telling if a guy is into you

  Dear Dr Ali – There’s a guy I like who’s in my social circle. He’s my friend’s boyfriend’s best friend, so we spend a lot of time around each other. He’s always attentive to me, and has even given me shoulder rubs a few times – something I have not seen him do for other women. We’ve even spent one-on-one time together lying down on a blanket watching stars. But he has yet to make a move. Why hasn’t he kissed me yet? Does he even like me? What should I do? Should I even bother? – Perplexed in Paris

  Well there’s a perennial question if there ever was one. How do you know if a guy likes you? I mean, yeah, he does like you, as in he clearly wouldn’t let you get run over by a bus. But does he like like you? As in smooches and snuggles?

  That shouldn’t be hard to figure out. But additional challenges present themselves when you see a guy frequently as part of your social circle, whether at work or in a group of friends. How do you broach the subject of “Do you like me?” when the negative response means having to hang out with someone who snubbed you? Or, even worse, what if you hook up and it doesn’t work out? Now you have willingly planted an ex in the midst of formerly friendly territory. Surely there is a way to finesse this tricky social situation.

  The best way is to take me along to a party to hang out with both of you. And by turning on the super-sensitive Dr Ali-dar and observing your interactions, I will give you a read of the situation.

  But, alas, the best way is often not the most practical way, and I’m usually far away (greetings from Barcelona and Lisbon!) and would probably end up eating all your hors d’oeuvres (unless they’re supermarket crudité platters – who likes that stuff?).

  So I don’t get to observe whether he looks directly into your eyes and how often, how often and where he touches you, how he talks to you, how he reacts to the other women around you, and a zillion other things.

  All I get to see is your world through this tiny keyhole of an email. From that I must deduce your character, the nature and intensity of his interest, and your suitability as a match. Piece o’ cake!

  What might be wiser, however, is to give you some general principles for spotting interest from another party, so you can apply those to your own situation and figure out what’s going on.

  1. Active vs passive interest.

  When trying to gauge interest, this is the overarching theme. Is he actively pursuing your company, or just settling for casual bump-ins and group events? The more deliberate effort a man puts into spending time with you, the more interested he is. Doing something that risks rejection, such as asking you out on a date, raises the stakes and is an even stronger sign of romantic interest.

  Now I heartily recommend that folks initially get to know people through group events. They’re far less threatening settings than one-on-one dates which are contrived situations that fail to bring out the best in us (unless your best happens to be anxiety, self-consciousness and phoniness). But if a guy only invites you to group things, he’s either not that interested, or too much of a wuss to step up and ask for your company solo. Either way, that’s not someone you should be signing up for.

  2. How is he looking at you? 

  A few years ago I was sitting at this deathly boring talk at a conference in Los Angeles when I spotted this dazzlingly beautiful woman across the room. Before the talk was over, I must have involuntarily turned to look at her 50 times. Why? Because we tend to seek out more information about things we’re interested in. That’s kinda the definition of interest. And lord knows I made a beeline to talk to her afterwards.

  The quality and quantity of a guy’s gaze says a lot about the degree and nature of his interest. Does he keep looking at you even when you’re not looking at him? Interested. Does he look at your face when he’s talking to you? Interested. Straight into your eyes, seriously trying to plumb its depths of mystery and passion? Seriously interested.

  The pro-level tip here is that you want to arrange the environment such that you’re a) getting useful information and b) letting him be at his best. For example, if you’re with him on a date at a topless beach, chances are his eyes will not be glued to you the whole time no matter how interested he is. Same goes for sitting in a restaurant: if he’s facing the crowd and bustle of the outside world, his eyes will wander, and you’ll get inaccurate data. Do yourself a favor and you take the banquette seat so he’s looking at just you and the wall.

  3. Touch.

  Most Western societies are pretty touch-free, so if a guy touches you, that’s a big deal and a sign of major interest.

  Or is it? Touching behavior varies culturally, which changes the salience of the act. A classic study done by Sidney Jourard showed that during an hourlong conversation between friends, in England they touched each other zero times. In the US, twice, during bursts of enthusiasm. In France, 110 times, and in Puerto Rico, 180 times! Watching people here in Barcelona I’d say they would touch 200 times at least. So this means that a touch from a shy English guy counts for a lot more than one from the gregarious Spaniard.

  The second level information is the quality of the touch. Is he giving you a high-five or a shoulder rub? The more prolonged and deliberate the touch, the greater the interest.

  In Love Signals: A Practical Field Guide to the Body Language of Courtship, Prof David Givens enumerates five phases of courtship: attention, recognition, speech, touch, and lovemaking. Touch is the final phase before getting in the sack. So if he’s touching you, it’s safe to say his interest is not entirely platonic. That’s a nice start, but there’s an essential bit of meta-information that you need to know, too.

  4. Is he interested in you specifically, or just women in general?

  You meet a guy. He’s utterly charming, listening to you with rapt attention, gazing deep into your eyes to plumb the mystery/passion, and touching you early and often. And you’re loving it.

  The question that most women don’t ask themselves: is he doing this because he’s into me, or because he’s into women in general? Because to an observer the two behaviors look exactly the same.

  Now, if you’re just looking for a RLD (relationship of limited duration), then – who cares! Run with it, girl. But if you’re looking for something lasting longer than a Scaramucci (i.e. a temporal unit equivalent to 10 days), you need to get more data.

  ‘Cause if he’s a shy guy who hardly approaches women, the nature of his attention is much more salient than if he’s a player who collects 20 phone numbers a week. The shy guy is putting everything on the line. The player, on the other hand, has this routine rehearsed so well that he can do it after 7 margaritas, in microgravity, while tied up in a burlap sack.

  The distinction between specific and nonspecific attraction is important because they’re mediated by different brain circuits and hormones. Nonspecific attraction (i.e. lust) is fueled by testosterone. The guy is just generally horny. Specific attraction runs on dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter of goal-directed activity. He is horny for you, and therefore seeks you out. This is the difference between RLD and long-term love.

  So take some time to find out what this guy’s really like. What’s his reputation? How does he behave around other women when you’re with him? Does he flirt shamelessly with the cute waitress, or does he focus his attention fully on you? What do his friends say about him? These are all important bits of information for establishing what kind of person you’re dealing with, and how to interpret his attention.

  5. Actions vs words.

  The most accurate information you can get about a guy is his long-term behavior – the stuff he actually does, over and over again. The least accurate information you can get about him are his words, especially when they are about himself.

  This isn’t necessarily because men brag or that all humans are evil liars. Rather, it illustrates a central principle of human behavior. Science shows that we have cognitive biases that blind us to our own shortcomings, and as a therapist I can tell you that people are horrendous at self-reportage. Like, totally inaccurate, all the time.

  Why? Because well over 99% of your brain’s functioning happens outside of your consciousness. This means that by definition, you don’t have conscious access to what’s really happening in your brain. It’s all about the unconscious.

  Oh, and then there are the guys who will say anything to get into your good graces – or your pants. But you already knew that.

  Now I’m going to overemphasize this point until it gets burned into your consciousness forever, because it is unbelievably important. In fact, the main reason I wrote The Tao of Dating was because I had a darling friend who believed the phrase “I promise I’ll never give you another black eye” more than the actual black eye the guy had given her. And who kept on taking him back and financially supporting him even though he continued to physically abuse her.

  Oh nononononono we can’t let that be you. So you will pay very close attention to what a guy does, and take anything he says with a boulder of salt. Look for actions, not words. Actions, not words. Actions, not words. A thousand times: actions, not words.

  So what are some actions that show he’s truly interested? Having been that interested guy often, here are some things that come to mind:

  1) He calls you and asks you out to spend real, grown-up time together. He’s risking rejection, which means he’s investing ego. He’s agreeing to spend money and time on you, which is more investment.

  2) He does what he says, when he says he’ll do it. Whether it’s to call you, have coffee with you, do you a favor or send you something, watch how he handles his promises. If he handles them poorly during courtship when he’s supposedly putting his best foot forward, he’ll be far worse when he’s in a relationship with you.

  3) He treats you as if your company is a worthy goal in itself, and not just a means to some other end. Guys will request your company for any number of reasons – avoid being lonely, try to get you in bed, or just to hang out. As we already discussed, the question to ask yourself: is he just asking for company, or my company specifically?

  In the early phases of courtship, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two. Generally speaking, the more planning and risk it involves for the guy, the more serious he is about you. It’s one thing when I ask a woman two weeks in advance to come with me to the sold-out SF Symphony Beethoven extravaganza. It’s another when I ask her if she can join me for a show tomorrow ‘cause I got two comp tickets.

  Mind you, we’re not saying spontaneity is bad; heck, it’s something sorely lacking from most overplanned modern lives. However, if all you’re getting from a guy is spontaneity, that’s a pattern worth noting. You need to figure out if he’s really interested but bad at planning, or just casually interested.

  Once again, the quality of attention during the date tends to be a good indicator of his interest level. If he’s focused on you the whole time, he’s into you. If he’s flirting with the waitress and getting other women’s numbers, he’s probably just there for a good time.

  You are not a potted plant: tiger power vs. flower power

  Now we get to the fun part: the things you can do to get accurate information about where you stand.

  First, I’d like to make a distinction between flower power and tiger power. Flowers don’t have a lot of power. Sometimes they have fancy colors and aromas to attract pollinators, but for the most part they just sit there and look pretty.

  Tigers, on the other hand, are the apex land predators. They roam the range of their vast territory and go for whatever they want, without apology or hesitation.

  Both flower and tiger power are effective in their own way, and everyone has both kinds of power. You just want to make sure that you’re using the right kind of power to get the result that you want.

  Now, if there’s one overarching principle to the Tao of Dating, it’s that you are not a potted plant. Women run families, corporations, states and entire countries. So it does not make sense to be a passive bystander to your own love life. Right now is always a great time to take control.

  But here’s the thing: too much tiger power tends to scare off men. And guys like to hunt, so you must let them be the hunter. They’re just not used to being chased.

  So you will get a little clever. Asking a question like “So why haven’t you kissed me yet?” is tiger power, because you’re taking action. At the same time, you’re stepping back and allowing him to step into his own tiger power.

  Perhaps even more important than asking the question to make sure you get the frame right. So keep it light. If you get all serious on the boy and go “Umm, I’ve been pining for you since the dawn of time and don’t think I can breathe much longer without you” and proceed to faint, you may qualify for a job re-enacting romance novels, but you will scare off the boy. Permanently.

  On the other hand, if you do it all in the name of banter and fun, and you playfully ask him, “Are you shy or something? ‘Cause I know you’re into me, but you haven’t made a move yet. Or if you’re feeling feisty: “Dude, what the hell is wrong with you? You were lying down next to me on a blanket for two hours and didn’t even try to kiss me! Am I ugly? Are you secretly gay? I mean, it’s totally fine if you want to be my GBF, but I just need to know.”

  Why is this powerful? Humor opens up the conversational field, allowing all parties to share their feelings in a safer context. But even more important, you are subtly taking control of the situation instead of just waiting around. At the same time, you are passing the baton to him to take action.

  Create the environment that favors your outcome

  People’s behavior is context-dependent. So if the guy’s interested but shy, or on the fence for whatever reason, here are some ideas for creating an environment conducive to a more romantic interaction.

  How do I know these work? Because wily women have used them on me, that’s how. Pick one depending on your level of interest and boldness:

  • Propose to watch a movie at your place or his. Snuggling on the couch during a movie is completely natural, and a well-known way to not watch the movie at all. (Not that you asked, but the movie in question was L.A. Confidential, and I still haven’t seen it.)

  • Invite him over to your place for dinner. Most guys understand this as a sign of definite interest. If he accepts the invitation, you’re 95% of the way there. Wine helps.

  • Grab your shoulder or your back, and with a pained look on your face say, “I’ve got this terrible knot in my back – could you be kind enough to work on it for a minute?” You probably know what to do from there.

  • Invite him to the beach. Relaxing and frolicking in the sun with minimal clothing is one of the best ways of getting out of your heads and into your bodies. Playing in the water and applying sunscreen to one another are time-honored ways of getting physical.

  • Take a yoga class together. For a zillion reasons, exercising together is generally a good idea. But especially after a yoga class, everyone’s inside their bodies and super chilled out, making physical interaction much easier.

  • Take an acroyoga class together. Acroyoga has taken off all over the world, so you should be able to find a class where you are. It’s basically a full-body contact sport in which you periodically collapse into each other’s arms. It’s also fun. If this doesn’t work in getting romance going, you can safely give up, ’cause nothing will.

  What’s worked for you?

  Awright then! That should give you a few tools for figuring out if a guy has romantic interest in you. Now here’s the thing: I’m just one guy here, but there are thousands of you reading this. And you have the advantage of being actual women! So do you have a tool or technique that you have used successfully to suss out a guy’s interest in you? Then please share it in the comments ASAP! Let’s make this as useful a resource for other women as possible.

  One more thing: I have a little favor to ask you. Are you on Goodreads? If so, could you be kind enough to put The Tao of Dating on your bookshelf and give it a rating once it’s there? For those who aren’t on Goodreads, it’s a fantastic site for book lovers, where you can discover new books and share libraries, reading lists and reviews with friends. It’s also a great tool for authors to reach their audience. It’s particularly important for a book to be on readers’ shelves, because that’s how Goodreads determines whether a book can get promoted on there. This is how I pay the bills, so I would be immensely grateful for your help. Let’s see if we can put the book on a few thousand shelves!

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