“Where can I meet quality men?”

I’ve probably been asked this question every day for the last 15 years.

In today’s video, I get to the bottom of these questions and reveal how you can dramatically increase your chances of meeting someone amazing without having to venture too far out of your comfort zone.

What did you think of this week’s video? Please leave me a comment; I’d love to know if you found it helpful.

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Matthew:

Where can you meet good men? This is an age-old question, but I suppose it’s one that in an era of online dating, where we feel like we are sick and tired, some of us even burning out, meeting people through apps, we’re ready to meet someone in real life. And when returning to that question of how do I meet someone in real life? What do I need to do? People so often ask me, “Where do I go?”

Matthew:

Before I even get into the video, I just want to encourage everybody to subscribe to this channel if you haven’t already, hit the notification bell so that you don’t miss any future videos. And we have a brand new website, HowToGetTheGuy.com. If you haven’t been over there in a minute, it looks gorgeous. We’ve put a ton of work into it. And on the homepage, there’s this really cool tool now where you can put in the issue you are having in your love life, and it will recommend the best program I have for where you are at right now. So go check that out. That’s been really popular. That is over at HowToGetTheGuy.com.

Matthew:

So is there an ideal place to meet someone that we would be attracted to? It’s really seductive, isn’t it? The idea that there is such a place that we could go to this one fountain of wonderful people that are like us. And in a sense, I suppose you can engineer it that way. You could start by say, going to places where people who would have similar interests to you would go. If you are a very active person, you might join a running club because you’re going to find people who also value health and fitness. Now, that’s an oversimplification, just because someone has the same interest as us, it doesn’t mean they have the same values as us, but it’s still a progress, isn’t it? From going to a bar where, what are the chances that the random person you meet in a bar is going to share your values, your worldview?

Matthew:

Or we could not go down the values and interest-based approach, and simply say, “Where would there be a lot of attractive people?” You could go to a Tough Mudder, Jameson, where there’ll be a lot of strapping men who are all deciding to do something rigorous and challenging and you might find some attractive people there. You could go to… What’s another place that there would be a lot of attractive men? Stephen, where would there be a lot of men?

Stephen:

Kickboxing.

Matthew:

Kickboxing.

Stephen:

Jujitsu.

Matthew:

Jujitsu. You could go and do jujitsu. Now, you might argue, “But that’s going to involve a lot of doing a thing I don’t actually want to do.” You could go to a tech conference and you know that you are guaranteed to get a lot of men there. The problem is that we can, A, get into a kind of caricatured, cartoonish idea of where there will be great viable people. Many of you will have been to tech conferences and you’ll say “It was full of people that are not my type or are the worst.” There’ll be other people that say, “I’ve been to a Tough Mudder or I’ve done those physical things and there’s a lot of douche bags there.” Everyone’s got their story about why somewhere is bad. And we can stereotype these places as if they’re wonderful places to meet really quality people.

Matthew:

You can never guarantee meeting really quality people. And in some sense, we have to get out of this idea that there is going to be this amazing place to go to meet quality men. What we can do is zoom out and take an approach that increases the likelihood that we are going to create more opportunities with quality people. And it starts by looking at our life right now. How much of my life brings me into contact with other people? That’s the first simple question we can ask ourselves because we might be sitting at home, swiping on apps, looking for people, but we’re never actually getting out into environments where those kind of random encounters could actually happen in the real world. One of the ways to start to get out of the house if we find that our life has contracted, especially over the last couple of years, is by doing the more sociable version of the things we already do.

Matthew:

Like I said, one of the problems of just trying to see where people would be, and then going there is that you might end up doing a lot of things you really don’t want to do, things you’re not interested in at all. But if you look at the things you already are interested in, it’s very likely that there is a more sociable version of that thing than the way you’re doing it right now. So for example, you could be someone who likes listening to audiobooks, but could be going to a lecture. You could be enjoying doing home workouts, but you could actually go and join a class at a gym, or you could join a running club.

Matthew:

You could do your shopping at home, your grocery shopping, and instead, just go to a grocery store. Or if you want to go to an even more sociable version, because we know that a grocery store isn’t a place you socialize, but it’s still a place you’re more likely to bump into someone than shopping at home on Amazon, you could go to a farmer’s market and there, it might be even more likely that you might end up having an interaction than if you go to a grocery store.

Matthew:

So there’s layers to this and it might sound a bit silly. But at the end of the day, we have to be really simple about this and say, “Of all the things I enjoy doing, is there a way of me still indulging this passion, this interest, this thing I like to do, but in a way that brings me into contact with other people?” And by the way, you might even lean into, if you know that there are certain activities you enjoy doing, but they are really female-centric, then you might say to yourself, “If I go to a pole dancing class all the time, and it’s literally 95% women, then I’m going to do a form of physical exercise that might actually bring me into contact with more guys. I’m going to throw in a boxing class once a week.”

Matthew:

I’m not saying you have to do that, but ask yourself the question, “Am I doing sociable versions of activities that I like to do, and in the things that I do that are sociable, are they ever bringing me into contact with the sex that I am trying to attract?” And if the answer is no, then we might actually start leaning into activities where the sex we’re trying to attract actually are. And by the way, that’s not to say that the only win to be had is going and doing something where we meet someone we want to attract. It’s also entirely possible that we meet someone that Megan Jay in her TED Talk refers to as a weak tie, a new acquaintance, a new friend who becomes part of our circle either intimately or loosely, but becomes a person that invites us places. That person may not be the love of your life. They may just be a friend, but they may invite you to the dinner party or the event where you meet the love of your life.

Matthew:

Number two, frequent places. So sometimes we get sucked into the movie version of meeting the love of our life, the meet-cute. We’re in a place and on that particular day, we happen to bump into someone that by random encounter turns out to be the love of our life. Now, the hard part about that is that it’s a bit of a one-shot-one-kill approach to our love lives. We have to go out and the stars have to just align in that moment. Not only for the love of my life to happen to be in that room at that exact moment in time that I’m there, but one or both of us is actually brave enough to make something happen or the universe conspires to make us bump into each other and our books go everywhere. That moment has to happen.

Matthew:

But how many times have you been in the room with the love of your life and one of those moments and just neither of you said anything? When you frequent somewhere, for example, you join a gym class and you go there two or three times a week. And a lot of the same people rotate in that class. So you get to see the same faces. What it means is today we can give each other a nod, a week from now we might end up graduating from a nod to a hello, a week from now we might end up graduating from a hello to, “What’s your name by the way? I see you in here, you’re a regular.” And now you start a conversation, a conversation that might lead to a coffee, a coffee that may lead to a date and so on.

Matthew:

When we frequent places, we increase the chances that someone is going to be brave. You know when someone says, “You come here often,” that cliche line, well, go somewhere often, and it will be more likely that someone will actually speak to you or that you will be brave enough to say something to the same familiar face you keep seeing. And that doesn’t just extend to classes, that can even extend to just venues you’d like to hang out, the same working space, the same coffee shop. You start to see certain regulars. You find a certain comfort with that place. And there is something to be said for finding a comfort with a place. When we get comfortable, we are more likely to actually say something to someone because it feels like home for us in that territory.

Matthew:

Number three, and in contrast to the point I just made, say yes to new people and new places. One of the big issues is that we go out to dinner with the same married friends or the same friends who are in relationships all the time. There is a kind of stereotypical person that anytime they leave the house is to go and have another dinner with the people that they catch up with every week. And those people have already found their person. So they’re not looking and they might find it strange if you get up from the table and just start talking to someone out of nowhere, or you might feel embarrassed or awkward in doing that around people who have already found love, who are… You know that confidence and that relaxed I-don’t-care indifference that comes from people who have already found love. They always seem so confident, don’t they? They always seem like they’ve got it all together.

Matthew:

That’s because they found their person. They don’t understand anymore the nerves of having to go over to someone that you’re attracted to and try to make something happen. You know when someone who’s been married for 25 years sees you look at someone and they’re like, “Go over there.” And you’re like, “You haven’t been in the game for years, you have no idea the awkwardness or the fear of having to go over to someone.” It’s so easy to say to your single friend, when you’re in a relationship, “You should go talk to them.” I wonder how brave they were when they were single. But the point is, when we keep going out with the same friends who are already taken, we end up in the same conversations, in the same bubble, and it gets hard to break out of it. That’s not just true if you go to dinner with your same friends all the time, it’s true even if they invited you to their dinner party, where you are going to know everyone already, and you’re going to end up being with the same people.

Matthew:

Saying yes to a new friend or someone that is an acquaintance, someone that you wouldn’t normally say yes to when they invite you to their dinner party, when they invite you to their event, means meeting a whole new set of people. It’s one of the benefits of the weak ties that we were talking about a minute ago, is that when you say yes to an invitation from a weak tie, you are not just saying yes to them. You are exposing yourself to a whole new potential community and that will have untapped people in it, literally, Jameson, people you haven’t tapped.

Jameson:

You know I’m cutting that.

Matthew:

The same can be said for venues. It’s almost like we want the contrast of places we normally go to that we could meet new people in because we’re comfortable. But we also want to sprinkle in going to some places we don’t normally go to, just to get a different crowd, just to put ourselves around a different kind of person. Say yes to the kind of event you wouldn’t normally say yes to. We complain a lot, don’t we? That, “I just always meet the same kinds of people. They’re always this kind of guy. I need to try something different.” Well, try something different. Go to a different place, go to a jazz night if you never go to jazz nights, go to something outdoorsy if you never do that. If you are like, “Oh, I just keep meeting these guys who… They take themselves really seriously or they think they’re the shit and they always end up using me or whatever.”

Matthew:

But you know that you keep going to that same sceney hangout all the time, then go somewhere that’s not a sceney hangout, go somewhere where people don’t go to be seen, go somewhere completely different altogether, go somewhere understated, go somewhere where people aren’t trying to look cool, they’re trying to have fun. Go somewhere where you’re going to meet a different kind of person, at the very least, where you’re going to meet a new crowd. I feel like so much of this can be boiled down to, put yourself where other people are. And an important point that we haven’t actually made yet in this video is, be 10% more proactive than you would normally be when you’re in those places.

Matthew:

I say 10% because firstly, if I told you to race up to everyone you were attracted to all the time and go and seduce them, that would be incredibly intimidating and you probably wouldn’t do it. It would be too daunting. But we can all manage to be 10% more proactive. 10% more proactive can mean looking at someone several times instead of for a brief fleeting moment and then looking away and assuming that they know you’re interested. Being 10% more proactive can be asking someone what they just ordered because it looked good. Being 10% more proactive can be smiling at someone or it can even be just putting yourself in close proximity to that person, so it’s easier for them to turn and talk to you than to walk across the room to approach you, which is really scary for somebody, especially if it goes wrong. Being 10% more proactive is totally achievable.

Matthew:

Most people go through their lives expecting somebody else to do the 20% required to get a conversation off the ground. If we take half of that burden, if we take 10% and they take 10%, then we’re going to have many opportunities to talk to people for things to happen. It’s so often the case that the people we meet in life are the loudest person in the room. They’re the person who’s running up to us to tell us that we’re really attractive and starting a conversation.

Matthew:

Now, that person might be confident. We might also say that that person is used to doing that because they do it with everybody or it’s what they’re doing every night. And that might not be an indication of the best partner or the person who’s taking the process ultra seriously. It might be, but it might also be the narcissist. It might also be someone who’s just trying to get laid. That person who might actually require us to do 10% so that they feel brave enough to do 10% might be a lot more interesting, might be an equally attractive, but different kind of person than the one we normally meet.

Matthew:

But the only way we’ll meet those people who don’t feel the need to be in the spotlight, who don’t feel the need to race over to everybody, who are comfortable enough to hang back or frankly, might just be slightly more shy or might be a little more introverted or might not be in the habit of constantly approaching women. Those people might be encouraged by that 10% that makes them feel like, “Oh, I have permission to talk to you.” We should get off of the language of where, “Where do I meet great guys?” And focus on the language of who. Because trying to find the perfect place, who’s to say what the perfect place is? But recognizing that if we put ourselves in environments where there are lots of people, will there be some places that are better than others? Yeah, of course. You’re probably more likely to find someone who’s serious about a relationship in a running club than a rave.

Matthew:

It’s more important to recognize that in any room where there’s people, the who is really important. Who do we typically end up meeting in that room? Do we meet the person who’s really big and bold and brash and runs over to us? Or do we meet the people that are in all sorts of areas of the room that we don’t normally interact with? The kinds of people who require just a little more proactivity. If we do that, we will exponentially increase our chances of meeting someone. If you like this video, don’t forget to hit the like button, hit subscribe if you want to subscribe to these videos, I really hope you do. Leave me a comment, let me know what you thought of this. And don’t forget to check out the website, HowToGetTheGuy.com. At the top of that homepage is a really cool quiz tool where you can put in your love life challenge, and it will recommend to you my best content solution for what you are going through. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you next time.