One of the most common pieces of dating advice for men is something you’ve probably heard before: “Just be yourself.” While doubtlessly told with the best of intentions, it has a fatal flaw. What if “yourself” is someone who spends all of his time playing video games, scrolling Instagram reels, reading alone, or engaging in some other activity that doesn’t involve meeting new people?
It’s from there that the question arises: Should you do new things for the express purpose of meeting women? That question has been the subject of a good deal of debate online. For example, a “tier list” by popular dating coach Blaine Anderson that ranked hobbies for single men recently sparked discussion on X. Activities such as “social dancing” and “volunteering” ranked highly, while “video games” was placed at the bottom. Some of the responses cannot be repeated in polite company, but a representative one said, “This narcissist thinks men’s hobbies exist to make her happy.”
As a former student of Blaine’s, I can’t plead complete impartiality. But in my view, she’s a good deal closer to the truth than her critics.
Consider the old riddle: If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? On its face the answer is clearly “yes” since the physical mechanics of sound work the same regardless of whether anyone is nearby. However, a more interesting way of framing the question is this: “If tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it matter if it makes a sound or not?”
If you’re the best person in the world who’d be the most wonderful partner to someone, does that actually matter if you’re never putting yourself in a position to meet someone? Unfortunately, the answer to that is “no.” Just as in marketing, you can have the best product in the world, but it won’t sell if nobody knows about it.
Of course, doing things just to meet women isn’t going to go any better. A man who takes a feminist knitting class is almost certainly not going to get what he wants out of it. To give a less extreme example, if you’re doing Pilates primarily to meet women, you likely won’t be much good at Pilates because you don’t actually care about it that much. Women will pick up on that and read you as inauthentic, and then you’re done. The reason for that is a lack of integrity — not in the sense of a moral failing, but because you’re not being forthright about your intentions and that activity isn’t being done for itself.
So that’s the conundrum: If you do things you enjoy that don’t allow you to meet women, you won’t. If you do things you don’t enjoy for the sake of meeting women, you probably won’t go anywhere unless you’ve been successful with women elsewhere, in which case, why bother with the new activity? What’s a man to do?
There’s been a lot of discourse around how Americans are increasingly isolated and less likely to have friends, be dating, or have sex. An underrated reason for this is that it’s become much easier to have hobbies that don’t put you around other people. The path of least resistance, increasingly, is to be alone.
But people can have more than one hobby, and you don’t need all of the ones on the list to maximize your social potential. In fact, having hobbies that make you happy and fulfilled is one of the most attractive things there is — as long as you’re still getting in front of the right people.
The key, then, is to find something that you enjoy that also makes you interact with other people. So you can do Pilates or knitting … if you genuinely enjoy those things enough that you would do them absent the potential of meeting someone. Now, that may mean getting out of your comfort zone and trying something new.
Pilates was several bridges too far for me, so I decided to try picking up pickleball and social dancing. Pickleball I found to be boring and a poor imitation of tennis. I found myself resenting the time it was taking out of my day, and so I stopped.
Dancing, on the other hand, was a different story. It gave me something to do with my nights, forced me to get comfortable with talking to and interacting with women in a low-stakes environment, and was genuine fun once I got out of my shell. If it doesn’t deserve to be at the top of the tier list, it should be close — notwithstanding some of the criticism its placement received. “If your man has listed ‘dancing’ as a hobby, he is gay,” said one critic. If only; my love life would be so much easier if I were! That being said, I can think of a good many things that are less heterosexual than dancing with the opposite sex.
So, here’s the nuanced take: Having some hobbies that are just for you is fine. But if you care about meeting people, some of your hobbies need to get you in front of people. And maybe you don’t want to! That’s fine, but if you do, you should be realistic about the trade-off you’re making. Dancing may not be your thing, but there are so many other good options. The reason that hobbies are one of the best ways to make connections is that you have at least one thing in common with everyone there, and you’re able to see them repeatedly and regularly. You’re likely to be leaving a lot of good matches on the proverbial table by not taking advantage of that.
By all means, do what makes you happy. But if you’re trying to find your person and it hasn’t happened yet, what makes you happy might just be a new hobby that makes it easier, even if it means taking a step outside your comfort zone.
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Stephan Kapustka is a writer at the American Spectator. Follow him on X @SteveKapustka.
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