Books on dating and relationships

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Does anyone else use books to help them understand dating and relationships? I have recently got out of a 10 year relationship and found myself wanting to find a boyfriend again but realised that I always had difficulties working out the initial stages of relationships.

I currently have 4 books - one on how to flirt, one on how to get through the initial dating stage, and two that I have just aquired on keeping relationships going beyond the initial stages. They have helped me realise some of the mistakes that I have made in the past so that I do not repeat them.

My methods of finding blokes to date may be a little unconventional (World of Warcraft is an odd place to meet blokes I guess ) but I need to make relationships work in the conventional way.

Has anyone had any success using the knowledge found in books to attract members of the appropriate sex and actually get relationships working?

That's actually a very sensible strategy! You'll encounter about 50% of the western worlds eligable males that way! (and I expect your WP inbox will be full of PM's after you wrote that, too...)


Why? If you're AS, then you're unconventional by nature. Many of the problems of AS are not due directly to AS, but trying to operate in an NT way. From what I've read here, many of the succesful relationships are 'unconventional'.


Yes, I've read some books. They were initially useful but ultimately self-defeating as they just give you *so* much to learn, so many hundreds of pages of checklists, I ended up feeling that I could *never* learn all this stuff...let alone that much of it is highly debatable and contradictory anyway. e.g. "you have to change", "you have to be yourself". It results in 'paralysis thru analysis'. Unable to function naturally because the mind is tangled in all the pitfalls you've read about.

The one really useful piece of information I learned from books is that apart from a small percentage of ultra-attractive men, the male is expected to initiate at every stage of the relationship. Daft as it sounds, I really hadn't realised this at all until reading it in my mid-40's. And yes, things did start to get a little better on learning this from books.

Another problem is that the vast majority of books are written totally from an NT perspective. Useful AS relationships literature seems lacking at the moment.

Lol - yeh, I've just learned from cold hard rejection and failure But it's getting better all the time, and I think it's just about keeping on trying, being thick-skinned and being willing to learn from mistakes. Books are like formulas, but people aren't like formulas unfortunately (as we all know better than most). There's a lot of the element of chance in meeting someone you click with by being just the way you are.

I don't know if the books works.
But as for me, they seem don't work any way.

People are complicated.
Even if they match one of the characteristics written on the book, they may response differently.

And sometimes, your own actions will make thing even more complicated.
You can not always rely on the books.

But the books actually can give you some recommendations.

I'm not sure about some of the information either, but some things such as mirroring your date's body posture and how to get conversations to work (cause I know that my dates aren't going to share all my particular interrests however great I think they are) really help.

One of my biggest problems in the past has been seeming too clingy due to too much contact between dates and over-enthusiasm for the relationship before it is due. Reading stuff about how to avoid doing this has at least given me an idea of how to prevent that happening.

Meeting blokes who play World of Warcraft does tend to have one particular advantage - they like talking about it a lot too