You’ve been through a LOT when it comes to love.

You’ve dated guys with whom you felt the most incredible connection, only to find out that they weren’t serious about you.

You’ve dated guys with whom you didn’t feel much connection at all, and hung on for awhile hoping it would develop.

You’ve dated guys who seemed great on paper, but one or both of you just couldn’t find a way to make a commitment.

Everything you did, you did for a reason, and I’m not going to second-guess any of those decisions of the past.

I am, however, going to share three things I learned this weekend at my 20th High School Reunion – and illustrate how they may apply to you… Continue Reading »

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Author Tim Kreider wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times a couple of years ago. While it’s not the latest ground-breaking dating news, it’s worth a look if you’re making tough decisions about your dating life or relationship.

As the author sees it, “the Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.”

The author – 42 and never married – looks at his married friends’ lives of kids and houses and soccer games with wistfulness, meanwhile notes that the “obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.”

Read the article here. Do you ever spend any time looking at others’ lives with either envy or scorn? I’ll admit that I do – but a lot less now that I’m established in my career and in a happy relationship.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts below…

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If you saw a woman who was about to drive off a cliff, would you tell her?

You’re standing on the sidewalk. She’s plowing over orange cones and through the yellow police tape towards a towering precipice.

Yeah, you’d try to stop her.

And the faster she accelerates, the more frantic you get, watching her willingly (and confusingly) speed towards the chasm.

I’m even gonna bet that if you were witnessing something so damaging, you might even put yourself in harm’s way to protect the innocent drivers. Maybe you wouldn’t dive in front of the car, but you’d run and wave your hands and scream at the top of your lungs – anything to avert what is sure to be a serious accident.

This is what it felt like to be featured on my friend Rori Raye’s blog last week, in a post entitled “The Circular Dating Argument”. Continue Reading »

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Have you ever been treated like royalty by a romantic partner?

Have you ever had someone offer to give you a foot massage after you worked out?

Have you ever had someone make you breakfast while you were still sound asleep?

Have you ever gotten a card that made you cry? Or a gift that made you gasp? Continue Reading »

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My amazing intern forwarded me an article last week that she read on CNN with some not-so-surprising new statistics.

In 2007, 22% of couples showed the woman making more money than the man. That’s up from 4% in 1970.

In this recession, 4.7 million men lost their jobs, compared with 2 million women, thus leaving more women to be the primary breadwinners. Continue Reading »

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See? It’s not just your friendly neighborhood dating coach who says so. Continue Reading »

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There are two big problems in dating.

1) You don’t want the people who want you.
2) The people you want don’t want you in return.

Now, take a look at those two problems; which one do you think you can change? Continue Reading »

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It was 2001. I was at the W Hotel bar in Westwood. And from across the spacious, dimly lit room, I saw her:

My ex-girlfriend. Hottest woman I ever dated. Most tempestuous woman I ever dated. Yes, I held on to my perfect 10 for four months – four months of being left at restaurants, holiday parties, and weddings following an outrageous fight over virtually nothing.

Why do men date sexy troublemakers? Because we can’t help ourselves. It’s a drug – and, like all tales involving drugs – it never has a happy ending. Continue Reading »

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I love it when others confirm something that I already thought to be true. In this case, it’s the idea that people are often much nicer to their pets than they are to their romantic partners. PsychCentral explains how people account for their unconditional pet-love:

People often describe pets as undemanding and giving unconditional love, when the reality is that pets require a lot of time and attention, special foods and care. They throw up on rugs, pee in the house and steal food from countertops. Yet we accept their flaws because we love them so much. Continue Reading »

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Hi Evan,

I just finished reading “Why He Disappeared.” It was extremely insightful. I didn’t really fit EXACTLY into the female examples you gave but still got a lot out of the material. I tend to constantly overlook men’s flaws (to a fault,) so that’s where I didn’t fit in. BUT, I could relate to the clinginess in relationships. I tend to be the confident, self-assured woman in the dating process, but once I begin the courtship/relationship phase, I become unconfident and clingy. In my head I see what I’m doing, but I have been unable to change this flaw of mine, even though I know it’s happening. It’s extremely frustrating. Do you have any advice on how to overcome this? Continue Reading »

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