I Never Planned to Write a Dating Book

If you had told me a year ago that I would one day write a dating book for men, I would have laughed (and laughed, and laughed....) and then asked whether, in this future you were predicting, I’d actually managed to figure dating out. 😂

Then again, quite a few things in my life have been unpredictable, so perhaps I shouldn't be all that surprised.

The idea for Why Good Men Get Stuck in Dating didn't begin because I thought I was some kind of dating expert. Far from it. It came from something much simpler: being a woman who has dated, listening to other women talk about their experiences, and noticing how often men and women seem to be experiencing the exact same interaction very differently.

And the more I thought about it, the more interesting that became.

There is certainly no shortage of dating advice out there. Much of it seems to focus on what is wrong with the other side. Men are told what women are doing wrong. Women are told what men are doing wrong. Before long, everyone is suspicious of everyone else.

But that wasn't what I wanted to write.

I became much more interested in the good men - the men who genuinely want a relationship, who believe they're doing the right things, and yet keep finding themselves wondering why a woman they liked suddenly seemed to lose interest.

Because sometimes, I don't think the problem is that someone did something terribly wrong.

Sometimes, I think something simply got lost in translation.

A man may believe he's giving a woman space while she's wondering whether he's interested. He may think he's being respectful by letting her take the lead while she's quietly noticing that she's the one carrying the relationship forward. He may feel an immediate connection and want to move quickly, while she's learned through experience that trust isn't built through intensity. It's built through consistency.

Neither person necessarily has bad intentions. They're just standing on opposite sides of the same interaction.

That became the heart of the book.

I wanted to write the kind of dating book that felt less like a rule book and more like a candid conversation with a woman who was willing to tell you what you might not otherwise hear. (Basically, the conversation a lot of men probably wish they could have with the woman who stopped texting them. Awkward, perhaps. Useful? Hopefully. )

Not how to play games. Not how to "get" a woman. Not how to become someone you're not.

Just some insight into what a woman may be noticing, thinking and feeling in those early stages of getting to know someone - and why seemingly small things can sometimes matter more than you realize.

Writing it also reminded me of something that extends far beyond dating.

We all experience other people through the lens of our own history, expectations and assumptions. We know what we meant. We know what we were thinking. But we don't always know how it felt to the person on the other side.

Relationships become a little easier to understand when we're willing to get curious about that other side. And somehow, that thought turned into a book. (Because apparently this is what I do now. I have a thought and 150 pages later, Amazon gets involved.)

Why Good Men Get Stuck in Dating: What Women Feel and What Men Often Miss is now available on Amazon. Still a sentence I never expected to write.

But perhaps some of the best things we create are the ones we never planned on creating in the first place.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.ca/Why-Good-Men-Stuck-Dating/dp/B0HDKMWH4J