When reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, I saw that the author had published this book as his only prior work. Having generally liked The Subtle Art and also being interested in dating advice, I was intrigued. I have read various articles on the internet about relationships before: the totally worthless nonsense that women write about relationships and the somewhat effective, but scummy pickup techniques that men write for other men. I’m sure it has existed out there, but I have never read anything that gets to the cold hard reality of dating from a man’s perspective without becoming a bunch of cheap psychological tricks to quickly bed women.
This book attempts to do just that. Models gets to the reality of dating while also giving a bit of hope. It’s slightly dated (originally published in 2011) as it mostly ignores online dating, which is now a huge thing. However, it does a nice job of helping people through basic issues of approach by trying to change your mindset around it. For example, expect to get rejected a lot, and it’s not your fault. Most other pickup techniques will pretend to be infallible.
There is plenty of advice within the book that makes sense to me and the overall concepts seem good. Having said that, I think some of the terminology could use some work. The author uses terms like Non-Neediness, Investment, and Vulnerability in ways that are similar to their well understood meanings, but seem to be a bit different. These concepts are core to his philosophy, so it would have been better if he just made up a word and then described it or used a better word for the concepts. For example, his concept of vulnerability sounds a lot more like confidence… that you can just open up and say/do whatever you want and not be afraid of being judged.
The book is useful and gives some very direct plans of attack to improving your dating life. However, it could use a re-write to explore the online dating scene better and be clearer on some of the main concepts and not try to shoehorn certain words into different meanings. Despite the downsides, I’d still recommend it to guys that are struggling to get dates and maintain relationships.