Don’t.

Okay, that could easily be misinterpreted. What I mean is don’t look for one. Live your life. Get to know yourself. Find some hobbies, start some projects, do some cool shit. Not as a resume for a relationship, just to do it and be fulfilled. You don’t need to find someone right this moment.

The worst relationship I ever had was because I was young and lonely and bored and I ended up dating someone who nearly destroyed my life and dominated everything about it. Took 5 years to get away from it. Subsequent relationships suffered, though not because my partners were awful, I just wasn’t worth dating.

At some point, I just got tired of it and “retired” from dating. I took care of myself, did things that interested me, and relaxed for a few years. Just me. I got really happy just being with myself. Then, my best friend of nearly 20 years and I ended up starting a thing nearly on accident, and now (a few years later) we’re very happily married. Absolutely would not have been possible unless I’d spent the time to figure myself out.

Like others said, focus on living your life and be social. It is likely to happen organically. Focus on social things where you are bound to meet people either way. Do not pressure yourself or it will take away from the fun aspects of the hobby/sport/events.

And for god’s sake, do not use online dating sites/apps. They are bad in so many different ways. The endless dating is tiring and can twist your perception of dating and people in general, especially if you run into bad luck. Albeit this did not happen to me, I had friends from both sexes that hated how people got turned into commodities, and treated others like things to be discarded. A couple to girls I knew were on dates on a weekly or biweekly basis and it really warped their perception of men in general because they tended to picked incorrectly or got tired of the repetitive cycle akin to job interviews for all parties they ended up pausing all dating for ages. As it took the fun out of it. Online dating these days is more for hooking up and bad experiences. Despite that I am sure that many people have met significant others online, dating online is not like 10 years ago.

I’ve had my best luck when I didn’t try/wasn’t actively searching.

I hated hearing that when I was single but it seems true.

I think sometimes the smell of desperation comes off even if you don’t feel desperate and it scares people off. Whereas if you’re not looking and happen to meet someone, it’s natural and there is no desperation because you’re doing you.

Not to say you can’t still swipe on Tinder, etc.; just put more effort into doing things you enjoy and the rest comes naturally. Take pictures of yourself doing those things you enjoy to share on your dating profiles which helps in this search too. Since you want something long term, you need some common ground and hobbies/common interests are perfect for that.

If you’re into reading and post about books you’ve read, you’ll meet someone who strikes up a conversation about reading the same book. Sort of like that, is what I’m getting at.

Good luck!

Spend your time doing what you like and talk to women you meet while doing that. It has several advantages for dating. :)

Dating apps are at best a crapshoot. They’re more interested in prying money out of you than anything else.

Like others have said, doing things you enjoy is a good way to meet people who enjoy the same things. Maybe you won’t meet your next bf/gf/etc directly, but perhaps someone you’ll meet has a cute single friend.

Being in a positive and healthy relationship is better than being single, but single-hood is better than being in an unhealthy and dysfunctional relationship.

Dating seems a bit like working on your mental health, in that both imply working on self-improvement (which ultimately should be done for intrinsic reasons, not just because it may get you laid).

Like the quote from the Bojack season 2 finale: “It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.”

Dating apps are useless for any man who isn’t stupidly handsome or parasitically wealthy. The bottom 90% of men on dating apps are routinely completely ignored. For every swipe an average woman makes that gets a response from a man, the average man has to swipe right somewhere between 500 and 1,000 times to get an equivalent response from a woman, depending on how he presents himself on that platform.

Your best bet is social events IRL, and networking through friends. Aim for connections and friendships over relationships, with at least ⅔ of all new connections being other male friends, as you cannot be seen as “thirsty” under any circumstances. If you come across as desperate, you will be either ignored or manipulated and taken advantage of as a “useful idiot” with nothing to show for it.

Another good tactic is to become intrinsically motivated. When you focus on yourself, cultivate your own personality to benefit only yourself, and adopt a stoic mindset, companionship of any kind shifts from a requirement to a value-added proposition. You need to be completely happy and satisfied with your own solitude and existence apart from others in order to be a good judge of how others are best suited for you.

And many men are abandoning relationships altogether because the juice is just no longer worth the squeeze. After all, why be with someone who hates you for the gender you are? Down that path lies pain and suffering, and it is better for your mental, physical, and financial health to go your own way.

You’re overthinking it.

As the other person said with the quote about the ship and the birds.

Throwing my personal story out there: I’ve only dated a few people ‘on purpose.’ I’ve only had one relationship that emerged from a dating app. But I’ve dated folks because I went to local geek conventions. I sparked up something casual with someone I met via a Pokémon Go-like game, who later invited me to the house of a guy she was trying to bang at the time, and I wound up dating one of his girlfriends (open relationships, no drama). Met a burlesque performer while I was helping out at a show and we dated. Met a woman through a board game night. I met this chick through an online chat, where I was actually trying not to meet anyone - I was intentionally avoiding her because she was beautiful. Apparently she dug that I was funny and didn’t try to chat her up, so she asked for photos of my butt, then sold her house and moved 800 miles to marry me. (Some details have been simplified.)

The point is, you just go out, do what you enjoy. Don’t tromp through the forest looking for wildlife. Go sing in a meadow and let the rabbits, birds and deer come to you, you magnificent Disney princess.

This book contains the latest research of what makes a man attractive to a woman:

https://annas-archive.org/md5/d7b5ceb2699ed79b4b4db586ef435eb0

It’s pretty high-level, but important knowledge nonetheless. All of it is true in my experience.

I mean, I guess it’ll come to me.

However, this is an incredibly important mindset, if it means what I think it means. You have to truly be ok with being alone for the rest of your life. Just do whatever gives you most pleasure/fulfillment and talk to girls wherever you see them incidentally. Just go about your life, put yourself in situations that you like where other people exist, and strike up conversations.

It’s completely ok to talk to someone at the supermarket, on the street, wherever. Many women fantasize about it in a romantic way. Many women obviously want to be left alone. You have to calibrate your empathy and figure out who is interested or not. But you are allowed to approach and state your interest. Just "dont be creepy"™

Hit the Lawyer, delete the Gym, Facebook up.

No wait

I just got ghosted by the girl I was talking to

I am sorry, but are you sure it isn’t accidental?

I might have accidentally done something like that in the past myself to someone. I have 0 social skills and I am terrible at understanding relationships between people and picking up social cues correctly.
I feel like I just completely misunderstood the situation so I entirely stopped talking with that person (if that’s what “ghosting” refers to).

The things that always works for me is stop trying and just working towards being a person I would want to have in my life.

At some point you will find yourself in a relationship without really knowing how it happened.

The bar and Tinder are not the exclusive domain of hookups. I met my partner of 5 years on bumble, my friend met his wife on Tinder.

I think the advice others are giving is true to some extent, work on yourself and good things will come, but for most people you also have to go the extra mile and put yourself out there.

Put yourself on the apps. Go to clubs, leagues, meetups, socials, events, parties etc. In general, say yes instead of no and talk to people instead of not. If something starts to develop you can give out those vibes that you’re looking for something more serious, and people will self-select.

If you know you’ll be in a confusing area, there’s location sharing on cell phones. Most of em are good about giving you the opportunity to turn it off. What’s better for if they’re not always gonna have a working phone or might forget it is some kind of tags. No matter how you feel about em, airtags work best for this in the United States because they use apple stuff as a mesh network and there’s more Apple stuff than anything else.

May I ask how old you are? And what do you mean by a real relationship?

It is harder for guys especially when young. Most of my girl kids found guys on Tinder/Hinge, the boys met their girlfriends and wives more organically, out in the world.

But as an older person, I think that it’s better not to have a relationship goal, certainly not at first. If you have friends who are girls, they have friends who are girls. Hang out and see where it goes without expectations or goals. Maybe you hit it off with one of them but in any event you talk with girls, and get more comfortable.

Some great advice here already! So I’m going to suggest something novel:

Consider “settling,” just a tiny bit. What I mean is, don’t be so quick to assess someone new as A Partner…potential or otherwise. Try letting gals in who are attractive enough and carry themselves well, seem sane, easy going, smart, etc. Shared values, that sort of thing. A female friend with potential, if you will. See where it goes; be open to being surprised, pleasantly or otherwise.

I’ve seen so many younger men “auditioning” mates with unrealistic expectations about “clicking” or “just knowing” — and winding up as older bachelors who have never even had a chance to practice being in a relationship.

Yes, like literally anything else worth doing/having, it takes practice!