Fear of Dating: Conquer Your Dating Fears

More than anything else, fear when dating will get you off to a bad start. Your date can sense that you are scared a mile away. It shows, it comes across and it is hard to disguise. Fear makes the person on the receiving end feel unattractive and unsteady. It makes them not want to be in this situation with you and you will find that rejection comes quickly. It is a viscous circle because the reason often why you will feel fear is because you fear rejection.

Fear of rejection is debilitating. It prevents you from functioning properly. It affects your movements and speech and most certainly prevents you from displaying the glorious aspects of your relaxed character. You are uptight so you can't talk fluently, your words come out all wrong, you don't come across properly. In some circumstances I have seen people come across as aggressive merely because they were frightened of being rejected.

We want to be loved, we want to be liked, we want to attract, we want to be popular and we want to succeed in the things we try. But something inside us tells us in advance of our actions that we are going to fail. The girl we approach won't like us and she will reject our advances so we are not sure why we will try, but we will. The problem with this approach is that your fear shows through already, so its not you who is allowing you to be rejected, but that your fear of rejection is in itself causing the rejection to happen.

What is lacking here my friends is confidence. If your confidence levels are up - you are on form. You are interesting as well as interested. You are smiling and you can take a joke. You can approach and have fun and make light of any situation. In turn this makes the person you have approached feel relaxed in your company and able to judge how your character truly comes across. If you make someone laugh, you have them interested already. If you are frightened you will cease up.

Now I know how fear of rejection can be because I have felt this way. I see a beautiful girl and she is waiting to be approached. She has caught my eye and she appears receptive. However, I would either not approach or if I did it would take me so long that the moment had passed and she could already tell that I was scared. In a previous article I spelled it out for guys, one of the most attractive qualities in a man is confidence. You cannot become confident overnight and using drugs and alcohol to assist is a huge mistake. What you can do is look at how you can change things you don't like about yourself to increase your confidence levels.

You may fear rejection because you have been rejected so many times already. In which case you are already scared. Well it is true that dating is a numbers game and that eventually someone will say yes, but then perhaps you are introducing yourself to the wrong type of girls in the wrong way. If you use chat-up lines, stop instantly and start being more natural.

Interestingly there is a recent report in the London Times* relating to a study by the Social Issues Research center in Oxford as to why men get their approach wrong so often and mistake the signals women give out which may assist in dealing with the fear of rejection. Men often mistake the signs of friendliness from a  woman as an overture for something else when this is not what is actually happening. If you are scared of being rejected yet again after making a pass at a woman there may be a very good reason. Women appear to be sending out very subtle but misleading flirtatious signals known as "proteans".

The man will read this "proteans" as flirtatious signals giving him the green light to act. However the woman is in fact assessing and working out whether you are a suitable mate or not. All potential suitors are interrogated through these signals in the same way. When you first meet a prospective date she will bombard you for the first few minutes with many confusing protean signals (named after the Greek river god Proteus who was able to change his form to evade enemies !). These ambiguous signals confuse the man allowing women to gain the upper hand by finding out what the man is truly like very quickly. Because of this, it is hardly surprising therefore that men become confused and consequently face rejection.

The most surprising outcome from the study was that in two-thirds of cases, the opening flirtatious gambit was initiated by the woman , most likely through a flirtatious gaze, repeated to attract your attention. It goes to prove therefore what I always believed, in that when you enter the room the woman has already decided whether you area good candidate or not, even if you are led to believe it was all your idea. Men appear to make the approach but it is in fact the woman using very very subtle techniques.

This survey and general information on this subject is significant because it helps us understand and combat our fear of rejection. Women in modern society are able and willing to make the move for partners they like. Women are not wallflowers. If we are to readily accept findings like those above then we should consider that we are being tested in our initial approach and that it is clear fear will make us fail from the outset. So its critical that you deal with your confidence levels in advance of an approach.

What is also important to add is that we have heard it said that women hate to be ignored and can find a man more attractive initially if men are not fawning all over them. This must be highly linked to these protean signals. The woman is checking you out as a potential mate but you are not reciprocating. If you are not displaying fear, but nonchalance or disinterest, this may confuse the woman and increase her interest in you. We can categorize this behavior as a game, and it most certainly is a game of courtship yes.

Fear in dating has to be dealt with, it will not assist you in meeting the person of your dreams. It is almost always linked to how you view yourself in terms of looks and skills and almost all of these issues can be dealt with. If you increase your confidence levels and then combine this with a sensible approach to who you approach then your success rate in the initial approach will soar. If you combine this with pre-armed knowledge that you will be bombarded with confusing signals you can decide that rejection is all part of the natural dating game and isn't so serious after all. Have fun and don't fear.

* Secondary Sources - The Sunday Times 16th March 2003