How To Date - New Dating Rules 2023

If you believe the adage ‘Treat them mean to keep them keen’ or you believe that playing hard to get will only make them want you more, there is a reason you are single, and to put it bluntly, it is because your attitude to love, romance and respect is fundamentally non-existent!

You are a drama-infused dating disaster that should be avoided at all costs by everyone. You are not a healthy individual who is open to being loved and loving unconditionally. You are nothing more than a collection of all your past hurt, trauma, and baggage. Instead of dealing with that baggage and working on yourself and your issues, learning from your mistakes and changing your approach, you chose to deny all responsibility and culpability and project your deepest, darkest fear of rejection and abandonment onto everyone else and make them guilty of your flaws. Congratulations, buddy, you are going to be single for the rest of your life until you sort your crap out once and for all!

So that was brutal. The truth hurts and can cut deep, but someone has to give it to you without the sugar coating, and I don’t need your validation or approval in life! You are only hurting yourself by refusing to accept the truth and start working on your bag of trauma. Some of you will need a qualified therapist to identify and undo the childhood trauma forced upon you by your parents and past relationships gone horribly wrong. Others need to take a long hard look into their soul via the mirror and be equally as brutally honest with themselves. If you are ready to leave the baggage of 2022 in the past and move on, to learn how to love yourself so that you can be open to loving others and being vulnerable, then this is the article for the new you.

How To Date In 2023

How to date changes from time to time and with each generation. Does speed dating work? Yes! The last major shift in the dating world saw the birth of Digital Apps designed with algorithms that supposedly matched you to other people that ticked the same combination of boxes you did. You likely have at least two dating Apps on your mobile phone and have deleted the accounts of more than you care to admit to. All of them started with the greatest of hopes that, this time, true love would find you and that you could be one of the rare few who meet your soulmate online. Like most people, you discovered that one of the few pros of dating Apps is that you get to see what kind of a jerk the person is long before you get around to meeting them face-to-face. In fact, thank God you never had to sit opposite them in real life! That was a total waste of time! Sound familiar?

Swiping left or right did not build a solid foundation on which to establish a healthy long-term relationship, just the opposite. It guaranteed you set yourself up for a hook-up between the sheets but failed when it came to sticking it out for the duration of a relationship. Why? Because you based your liking of the person solely on their aesthetics and appearance. The shallowest of all the flaws in a human being who claims to be looking for true love. True love is not beauty, for we all age. Aging is a cruel process that robs the vain of their beauty and muscles over time and reduces them to a bag of wrinkled old fat covered bones. A ripped six-pack can quickly transition into a beer keg belly, and a model thin bikini body at twenty-eight is never the same after carrying a child to term and birthing them.

The most significant piece of dating advice I will ever give anyone who listens is to date as though you are both blind and will never see the other person. When you are looking for true love, you seek a person’s true soul, kindness, generosity, unlimited love and patience. You seek to find someone who shares your likes and dislikes and has a similar life philosophy to yours with a few differences to keep things interesting. If you only date beautiful people who have a certain physique, bust size, waist, or hips size, are a set height, and it has to be taller or shorter than you, with a specific hair and eye colour combination, then you are setting yourself up to fail every time. You tell yourself you seek love, but you really seek a sexual partner who does not want to love you or have you given them your time, love, and respect. You really seek a booty call and nothing more. And that brings us to the topic of this article.

Let’s Define The Term ‘Dating‘

Dating is the initial stage of any relationship in which two individuals engage in an activity together with the intention of evaluating each other’s suitability as a partner in a future intimate and sexual relationship.

How to date in 2022 is undergoing a transformation as we move into 2023. Women are no longer interested in dealing with men who only view them as a sex toy to sate their lust and vanish like a magician into thin air once they drop a load into a receptive love chalice. Women are driving the shift to the point of forcing a long overdue change in the way the patriarchy treats them, and here is a list of their demands if you are a man seeking true love.

• Respect: They love themselves enough to know you don’t love or respect them and cannot see their true value or worth as a long-term partner if you won’t commit quickly and put in the time and effort every day!

• Honesty: This is a two-way street. Lies eventually rise to the surface to catch up with and expose the culprit. When honesty is swapped out for lies, the trust is broken, and the relationship has no chance of survival after that. If they cannot trust you to be good for your word, honour your promises and deliver honesty, then they can not trust you, period. 

• Abstinence over sex toy: The days of the ‘I wannabe porn star’ have ended. Women can do it for themselves faster, cleaner and without the grief and extra housework that a bad partner brings. So long as they have hands, they don’t need a guy to do them badly or leave them sexually unsatisfied and without climax in the bedroom while they get their rocks off.

• Love: of self and others equally and without limitations.

• Commitment: Quickly once the relationship terms have been established and agreed upon and with fidelity from both parties without exception.
• Kindness and generosity: with time, energy and where it is in excess, finances to those who have less and are in need.

There is also a new list of highly toxic behaviours that create unnecessary trauma and turmoil in the dater’s life. These traits are common to both genders equally and are being kicked to the curb with a brutal dispatch for the unlucky practitioner.

• Ghosting
• Love bombing
• Gaslighting
• Polyamorous relationships
• Infidelity
• Internet stalking
• Emoji pics instead of words because you are too lazy to type the word or too illiterate to spell it correctly
• Disrespect 
• Eschewing/deleting all dating apps 
• Sugar daddies/Cougar mommies
• Fake people and personalities
• Narcissists and egomaniacs 
• Gold diggers/Sugar babies
• Third-party situations

So, if that is all how to date the wrong way, then how do you date the right way in 2023? The answer is far simpler than you might believe. There is a push to return to the ways of the past but with modifications that, this time around, demand and enforce equality in the relationships and the terms of engagement. Respect, honesty, and dignity are the three biggest demands in how to date in 2023.

The First Step

Identify exactly what type of relationship you are looking for and be honest about it upfront. If you are young, or divorced, you should test drive all the car brands before you settle on a specific one to take home. There is nothing wrong with that option, so long as you are crystal clear from the very get-go that your objective is not seeking a long-term commitment with emotional ties, strictly a sexual relationship.

Not every woman wants to be in a relationship, or get married, or take on a long-term partner. Female players out there are even more cutthroat than their male counterparts, who will chew up a man and spit him back out, burp, fart, and then move on to the next one and repeat. If you want to play with a player, then you both know the score, and there can be no confusion over the rules of engagement. 

What you can’t do is play a good girl/guy who seeks the exact opposite of you for your own amusement and sexual benefit at the cost of disrespecting them with your lies and self-obsession. Selling them a dream you do not intend to deliver will have a major karmic impact on your future relationships and life in general. If you look at your dating life and wonder why it is such a massive black hole of emptiness, it is likely because you are an equally massive black hole and deserve it!

Remember: The way they come is the way they go!

If you are in a third-party relationship with a married person, then you are delusional if you think for a moment they won’t cheat on you, even if they did leave their current spouse to marry you, they would be cheating on you with someone else in time. The way they come is the way they go. Choose wisely and avoid third-party situations.

Step Two

Having a list of the traits you desire and the ones you do not want in a future partner is a good thing. You have to establish your deal breakers and be prepared to call time at the first sign of a red flag. But if you believe that you can find a partner with everything on your tick list and that they will arrive in the perfectly gift-packaged form of the ultimate Adonis or Venus, you will never find true love. Sadly, that isn’t how it works. If you believe in the ability to manifest exactly what you want, when you want it, the way you want it, luck to you. If you are reading this, you can’t manifest bupkis anymore than the rest of humanity. 

There is a difference between being selective for certain traits and being delusional. If something wanted is given with one hand, it is usually counterbalanced with something unwanted. Humans have flaws, habits, and ways of thinking or doing things that can drive us to distraction, if not crazy. Learning to tolerate and work with others’ flaws takes time and emotional investment. In 2023, there is a return to not giving up the first time you have a fight or disagreement and heading back to the internet for another swipe that ends the same way a few weeks later. Learning to establish boundaries is another necessity for you to establish with them and for them to establish with you. People have different boundaries. Work out quickly if your boundaries are compatible. If they are not, then the rest is redundant. Move on to the next date.

Lastly, date yourself for a while, literally! Take yourself out to places you want to go, eat where you want to eat, and spoil yourself as you would your date. Play both roles and see if dating yourself is something you would want to do, or if you need work and where that work is required. If you are the type who says they don’t like flowers or chocolates, or wine or soppy poems and love notes, then do something totally different and force yourself to send yourself those things. Establish what it is like to be on the receiving end of a gift as well as the giving end. Ladies, that includes you. The gift of flowers, chocolates, and cologne is not solely the domain of men. If you want equality, you have to give it in all areas, not pick and choose the ones you want to be equal in and ditch the rest. Equality doesn’t work like that! If you can afford to woo and gift your beau with watches and bling, then so long as he reciprocates the gesture, show him your love in the form of a gift occasionally and randomly. If you are short on funds, think outside the box. Romance isn’t about money; it certainly helps to buy the things that can make a scene romantic, but the time and energy you invest in planning and executing the date will win a heart. A beach picnic with a bottle of good wine and finger food can win more hearts than a five-star Michelin restaurant, and you know that the date wants you for you, not your money. Win-win all around.