Steal the Science-Backed Advice I Give to My Clients.
I want to tell you a story about a former client of mine we’ll call Jane.
Jane was smart, successful, and on top of her game in most aspects of her life: She was a business owner, an avid tennis player, a mom, and had a vibrant social life in Washington, DC.
Jane was always telling me about how busy she was and how this made her search for love particularly taxing. She had little free time and certainly didn’t want to spend what little time she had going out on dates with strangers she would probably never see again and didn’t have much in common with.
As she told me again and again, she “just wanted to cut to the chase and find her person.”
One day, Jane informed me that she had met someone she liked online. This guy was just as smart and successful as Jane: he was handsome, tall, witty, charming, and he even ran a successful engineering firm.
They dated for a few weeks, until one day Jane came into our sessions feeling upset.
Jane let me know that this man who she liked so much had gone from texting her every day to not texting in a week. She said that when she had reached out to him to ask what was going on, he had made excuses and told her that he’d been busy with work, but when it was time to plan another date, he had dropped the ball. Then, finally, the night before our coaching session, he had reached out to let her know that, as much as he liked her, he just “couldn’t commit to a relationship right now,” and he had to call off the date they had planned for Friday night.
Understandably, this frustrated Jane to no end. During our appointment, she was visibly upset, and she lamented that this man, like so many others she’d met, was a “workaholic” and “emotionally unavailable,” and that it was so sad that men in general weren’t emotionally available these days. Whenever she found a guy she actually liked, she said, there would be SOME reason that he was emotionally unavailable.
I empathised with Jane’s predicament: after all, it’s hard to finally find someone we like, allow ourselves to get excited about them, and then feel disappointed when things don’t work out.
But, because I cared about Jane, and because it’s my job to tell Jane the truth, and not just what she wanted to hear, I also pointed out what Jane was unable to see:
I pointed out that, in a way, she and this man were the on the same wavelength: neither were willing to make the time to make love a priority.
What Jane couldn’t see is that it wasn’t that there weren’t any emotionally available men left in the dating pool (there were: my clients find them every day!): it was that her Achilles heel had found its match: because she was unwilling to make the time for love, she had attracted a man into her life who was unwilling to make the time to get to know her.
I told Jane that, if she wanted to meet emotionally available men, she was going to need to became more emotionally available herself first: by making time not just once she’s found a great guy, but also for looking for a great guy.
Now that I’ve told you Jane’s story, let me guess that you and Jane might share a few similarities:
Like Jane, your to-do list is probably overflowing with items, and lately dating may NOT have been making the cut.
Like Jane, your schedule is already jam packed. Between work, being a full-time parent, hobbies, the gym, and squeezing out a Friday night or two with friends: how are you supposed to find time to date, too?
Like Jane, you (understandably) don’t have time to waste on replying to “WYD” messages and wading through a swamp of lacklustre dating profiles — let alone going on one-off dates with strange men from the Internet who, in all likelihood, you’ll never see or hear from again.
It certainly doesn’t help that every time you DO try to date, you may feel like sighing and rolling your eyes and saying, “Here we go again!” You may feel unsure that there are even men who exist who actually want a loving, healthy, conscious relationship the way that you do.
Does any of this sound familiar?
If it does, that’s totally okay. I get it: Nobody wants to waste their time on dead-end dates.
And . . . I have something to share that I think may help you.
I’m going to warn you first: Like what I told Jane, what I have to say is going to feel a little bit like tough love. But please believe me when I say that I’m telling you this because I care about you SO MUCH that I just can’t hold back when I know, from my years of experience helping scores of smart, successful women find lasting love, that this will be the thing that makes a difference when it comes to getting more of what you want out of love.
So here’s the truth when it comes to having more time to date: It’s not so much about FINDING the time as it is about CREATING the time.
(Ooof — I know!)
Those of you who follow my work know what I like to say about love: Love won’t just happen to us when we least expect it. If we want love in our lives, we’re going to need to be intentional about creating it.
Time is the same. The time is never going to just magically show up. Time isn’t going to find us: we’re going to need to CREATE the time to go after what we want. Otherwise, what we want is never going to happen.
As my imaginary-BFF James Clear likes to say, "It's never the right time, but right now is usually the best time."
Sometimes we like to think (and I am as guilty of this as anyone!) that we’ll have more time than we do right now at some future, far off point — you know the drill:
You don’t have time to date right NOW, but If you can JUST get to 6 weeks from now . . . 2 months from now . . . 3 months from now . . . Everything will be better, right? And as the months roll by, you may even start thinking in terms of SEASONS . . . and then years. Maybe next fall, or next year, things will slow down, and you’ll finally have time to date.
Here’s the thing, though: Behavioural science has shown us that, for most adults, on average, a major life event happens about every 12-18 months.
12-18 months! And that doesn’t even account for all of the little life events that are happening in between all of the big ones — you know, the everyday events like work, and friends, and kids, and school, and staying healthy, and just trying to enjoy life while we fit everything in — that are keeping us so busy in the first place.
This means that, at any given time in our lives, we will ALWAYS be juggling multiple priorities at once. That’s just the nature of life. I wish this wasn’t true (I, for one, am a TERRIBLE multi-tasker!) but that’s the nature of living busy lives in an even busier modern world (and don’t even get me started on my gripes with the pace of modern life!).
What this means for you, unfortunately, is that you’re never going to have time until you MAKE time. There will never be a time when you have lots of space in your calendar — especially if, like most of my clients, you’re a busy, go-getter kind of woman.
For example: In my coaching business, I used to never want to write blog posts. I would always find a reason to procrastinate it or to put it off or to do it another time.
Funnily enough, writing is actually my favourite thing I do in my business, but it’s also the thing I tend to procrastinate the most, and that’s because it’s hard and uncomfortable to sit down and to put all of my brain power towards researching, outlining and stitching together a blog post.
So, because writing is hard, I used to procrastinate it so much that I would push off writing to be the last thing I would do every day — and consequently, I would rarely get around to actually doing it.
Then, I would complain and gripe that I “just never could find the time to write,” and that I’m a “really slow writer” (which is true!) — but really, my REAL problem was that I just wasn’t prioritising writing in my business.
These days, I make writing the FIRST thing I do every day: before I get sucked down any business rabbit holes like responding to email or checking my Facebook group notifications, I open my laptop and pull up whatever project I’m working on and get to writing.
The result? I’m MUCH more consistent with getting blog posts out regularly now. I’m still a slow writer, and I still have a lot of tasks on my plate, but I get a lot more blog posts out now than I used to when I wasn’t really prioritising writing.
Once I started to prioritise writing as a business task, the other pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
This means that if you’re constantly finding that you don’t have the time for dating right now, then you’re going to need to take a look at and reassess your priorities.
Like I didn’t just spontaneously “have time for writing,” you aren’t just going to spontaneously have time for dating. If you want to have time for dating, you’re going to need to prioritise it.
If you take a look at your priorities and you still aren’t finding the time to find love, than be honest with yourself and instead of saying that you “don’t have time” — own up to what’s REALLY going on and acknowledge that maybe love just isn’t a priority for you right now.
If you can’t create the time for love, then maybe love isn’t a priority for you right now — and that’s okay! You don’t have to prioritise love right now if you don’t want to. And far be it from me to attempt to force you into a mould that doesn’t fit.
As long as you’re happy with your life and the way that things are right now, nothing needs to change.
But . . . If you’re finding that you AREN’T happy with the way that things are right now, then something WILL need to change.
If we aren’t happy with our circumstances, then at some point we will need to take ownership of our choices and say, “Do I really not have time to date? Or does dating just feel hard and scary?”
If the answer is that dating feels hard and scary, but you want something to change in your circumstances — you’re going to need to find the time to change it.
If you feel like this is you, and love just isn’t a priority right now: I will say that for many, although not all, of the women I work with and I encounter who say that love ISN’T a priority for them right now, what’s really going on is one of the below common belief-action scenarios.
Common Reasons We Might Feel Like Love Isn’t a Priority:
Scenario One: Maybe we were taught that if we’re INTENTIONAL about love and if we prioritise creating it, that we’re being “desperate.”
I see women say all the time: “I’m happy to accept love if it finds me, but I’m not going to go out looking for it.”
When this happens, often what these women think they’re doing is making a statement that comes from their high self-worth.
Maybe they’ve found themselves in an unhappy place in love before — maybe they’ve found themselves chasing a partner, and they never want to do that again, or they’ve found themselves putting new partners on a pedestal, and they want to avoid doing that going forward — and so they’ve swung their pendulum allllll the way over to the other side and are now taking an overly passive approach to love.
Here’s the thing, though: Being intentional about prioritising creating love in our love lives, if that’s what we want, is not the same as being “desperate.”
How we ACTUALLY avoid being desperate is by setting boundaries, by knowing our self-worth, and by claiming what we want in love (healthy, happy relationships!). Desperation happens when we settle for poor treatment in love, not when we claim what we want and what we deserve and go after it.
Scenario Two: Maybe we feel like we’ll make time for the right guy once we meet him.
Remember what I told my client Jane? That, if she wanted to meet emotionally available men, she was going to need to make time to look for the right guy?
I know that this is a tough one, but it’s true.
If you say that you’ll “find time for the right person” once they’re in your life, then you start by finding the time to date.
As one of my favourite dating coaches Evan Mark Katz says, “You don’t ‘make time for the right guy,’ you make time to MEET the right guy!”
Just like we wouldn’t say that we’ll wait to go to the gym until we’re in shape, or we’ll go back to school once we’ve learned everything, we don’t benefit from waiting to make time for a relationship once we’ve found the right person. Instead, we open up time for love in our lives, and THEN we meet the right person.
Here’s the thing: If we don’t have the time to dedicate to love right now, we aren’t magically going to have more time once the right guy shows up: because if we don’t make time, the right guy ISN’T going to just “show up.”
I know that you’re an intentional, go-getter in most aspects of your life. I also know that you’re the kind of woman who wants a healthy, conscious, committed partnership that you’ve mindfully chosen.
These kinds of partnerships don’t just fall out of the sky. These kinds of partnerships are CULTIVATED and built — and that cultivation starts in the dating phase.
In order to meet the kinds of men who we want to meet: conscious, self-aware, emotionally available, partnership-ready men, we need to be dating intentionally and thoughtfully: not just hoping that we’ll happen across somebody who catches our eye while we’re at the supermarket one day.
The kinds of relationships that “just happen” to us are the same kinds of relationships that haven’t worked out well in our past: they’re based on wild chemistry and on circumstance, not on true, lasting compatibility, and they aren’t built to go the distance.
Healthy, fulfilling, lasting relationships (the kind that my self-aware, go-getter clients want!) don’t just “happen.” They’re built through effort and intentionality.
If what we want is healthy, conscious, intentional love, then what we’ll need to do is to claim what we want and then get intentional about seeking it out.
We’ll need to create the time to cultivate that love in our lives: and the way we do that is by starting NOW, with conscious and intentional dating.
Scenario Three: Maybe we’ve gotten really comfortable being on our own.
It’s a great thing to be happy on your own. I myself was single for a long time, and for a long time, I really loved my life.
And: There’s a difference between being comfortable on our own and being fulfilled on our own.
If you’re someone who is both comfortable and completely fulfilled on your own, without a partner — great! No need to read anything I’ve written in this article.
But if not, you might be like many of my coaching clients:
Many of my clients come to me feeling ambivalent about looking for love. They think that staying single isn’t so bad, because they’re pretty happy here. They’re avoiding the hamster wheel of dating apps, they’re avoiding heartbreak, and they’ve discovered that they are actually really starting to LIKE their alone time.
But they also aren’t totally happy and fulfilled. They want companionship, but they push that longing deep down and do their best to ignore it, because letting it out feels really scary. If they allow themselves to claim that they want love, they open themselves up to getting hurt again.
This brings us to . . .
Scenario Four: Maybe we’re scared of getting hurt again.
What I ultimately told Jane during our session was that underneath her fears of “not having enough time” to date was really her fear that dating was unsafe and intimidating: did she really want to put all of this time and energy into dating just to get hurt again?
Dating is really scary, especially if we’ve been hurt in the past. Sometimes, when we say that we’re “happy on our own,” what’s REALLY going on is that we’re afraid of getting hurt again.
If you think that any of these scenarios might be you, something that may be helpful here is to recognise what’s REALLY going on, and then to ease into the vulnerability of claiming what you want.
Claiming what we want can feel so, so vulnerable: when we allow ourselves to want something, we also open ourselves up to feeling disappointed if we don’t get it.
And disappointment is painful.
But here’s the tough-love truth:
Avoiding dating, while it FEELS “safe,” isn’t actually as safe as we think it is.
Avoiding dating, while it FEELS like it stops the pain in the moment, ultimately leads to MORE pain in the future: we stay lonely, we miss out on the special moments we could have shared with a partner, and, what’s more, we never give ourselves the opportunity to prove ourselves wrong and to connect with a partner with whom we feel even safer than we do on our own.
While our solitude FEELS safe, it also keeps us stuck: being alone carries no risk, but it also yields no reward.
I like to think of taking risks in dating like jumping into an icy pool on a hot summer day.
The hardest part of jumping in the pool is taking the leap.
Once we’re IN the pool, the cold water actually feels pretty good on our skin, and our bodies adjust. But taking the leap is the scary part.
If we’re avoiding dating because we're scared of making ourselves vulnerable again, the BEST thing we can do for ourselves is to jump in the water and get started. We can get used to cold pool water — and once we’re in it, we can have a lot of fun. But getting over our initial fear and taking the leap is the prerequisite to getting the thing we want: healthy, fulfilling, passionate relationships.
I KNOW dating feels vulnerable, and vulnerability feels really scary.
But the truth is that we can’t build meaningful relationships without risk: and that includes the risk of loss, vulnerability, and heartbreak.
Nothing important or meaningful in life was built without some risk. Just as in finance, high risk means high reward.
So get out there and jump in the pool! If you’re brave and take the leap, I think you’ll find that the water’s just fine.
PS. If you're TOTALLY ready to dive into dating, but you want support as you navigate the dating pool and tips on how to avoid the time-wasters and be efficient while you date . . .
I walk you through how to spot the sneaky red flags that are lurking in your Hinge queue and how to gain the CONFIDENCE to walk away from them inside of my FREE workshop, Confident & Clear Dating. Confident & Clear is my FREE workshop where I walk you through how to attract high quality matches, avoid hidden red flags and date with confidence — EVEN IF you hate dating and never want to use a dating app ever again. (I get it!)