In order to impress the ladies, you have to have confidence….yada, yada, blah, blah….

How many of you undesirable or otherwise unattractive guys have heard this shit a million times already? Let’s see a show of hands :). Yeah, that advice works if you actually have something to be confident about that pertains to dating. If you are good looking, you know it, because your looks give you lots of female attention. If you’re rich, you know you can at the very least attract a gold digger or two even if you’re ugly as hell. If you have a very fun and exciting personality, you know that plenty of women will feel attraction for you even if you are not filthy rich or insanely good looking.

What is a man supposed to do if he isn’t good looking, wealthy or gifted with a high level of social skills? What does he really have to offer women? If all he has to offer is the fact that he is “nice” or “smart”, he is in dire straits indeed because that just isn’t enough. He can’t satisfy her sexually (not good looking enough), emotionally (dry personality) or materially (working class wages). He knows he has NOTHING to be confident about. All the positive thinking crap and self-induced hypnotic states of pseudo-confidence in the world will not make up for lack of desirablility in at least one of those 3 key areas. Telling an undesirable male that he just needs “confidence” is absolutely, bar none, the most piss poor advice a person could give! Confidence, real confidence– the kind that women can just smell on a man– comes from having had prior S-U-C-C-E-S-S. If a man has no success in finding love and is constantly rejected over and over again, he knows– and damn well, I might add– that something is seriously wrong.

The best advice to give these people is to just be straight up and honest with them. If they are grossly fat, try suggesting diet and exercise instead. If he’s too skinny, why not mention weight training in lieu of telling him to just pull “confidence” out of his ass? Or if he’s actually good looking, tell him how his neediness is turning people off, or that his social skills are in need of a bit of tweaking. The first step to building confidence is knowing which areas you need to FIX first, and then DOING something about it. In this age of hypersensitivity and PC bullshit, it can be very hard sometimes to give these lovelorn folks the real advice they so desparately need. If we really care about the person’s welfare and happiness in life, we must be willing to take the chance that our advice might offend him. Sure, he may sulk about it for a while, but if he takes that advice, you can bet he will either thank you for your honesty later, or wish he had the opportunity to do so.

I speak from experience. Confidence is something earned, not pulled out of thin air. Here is an example: I have been told that I was “attractive”, “good looking” or “cute” more times than I care to count over the course of my life. Well….if any of that is true, then why has my love live been nothing more than a long, drawn out dry spell? Why did those same women that made those comments end up turning me down after asking them out on a date? Do we see a pattern of doubt emerging here? A cycle of….(drum roll, please)….decreasing confidence? I had to finally sit back and put two and two together. Two and two was not equaling four, because my success with women was the same as your typical ugly guy. It got to the point that I was convinced that I was, perhaps, heaven forbid, a little hard on the eyes. Well, rather than sit and cry in my beer over it, I decided to DO SOMETHING :). Adopting the worst-case scenario and assuming that there might be a little truth to that, I decided to work on losing fat and adding muscle. Over the last year, I have managed to lose 40 pounds and am now starting to see muscle definition in areas I never had before.

Guess what, folks? The old adage is false…looks DO matter! I am noticing quite a change nowadays in how women interact with me– mostly perfect strangers. I went from being treated like I don’t even exist, to getting borderline preferential treatment when I am out running errands. The scowls on the other side of the counter have been replaced largely with genuine smiles. As a result of this, I am confident that I am more desirable now than I was earlier. I did not just wave a wand and tell myself feel-good bullshit about what a “great catch” I was. This was hard earned confidence, bought about by seeing a problem that needed to be fixed and taking action.

If people were more honest with me about my shortcomings in that area, I could have been spared more years of hurt and frustration instead of waiting until I was 29 years of age to wake up on my own and realize I’ve been fed line after line of feel-good bullshit. The takeaway message for the readers is this: Give the undesirable males in your lives some ideas on how they can improve themselves, preferably while they are still young, and his confidence can’t help but improve. By opting to give him the warm and fuzzy stuff instead, we unwittingly perpetuate a vicious cycle of confusion and even less confidence. Think about it. How many guys out there think they are good looking when they are really not? It is a good chance that he really believes it because girls tell him so all the time– usually just after rejecting his interest in her to attempt to soften yet another blow to his already fragile ego. Then we wonder why he is so confused about his lack of dating success.