Don't Delay Dating to "Build Yourself"

Gaining social skills and dating experience *is* working on yourself.

Don’t stop dating until you have the social skills of Mystery.

Although I don’t consider myself someone who gives dating advice, every now and then I see dating advice that I know is terrible, and I feel compelled to warn people about it. One offender in particular is the advice to young men or teenage boys to ignore girls and women altogether (or at least not bother with anything serious) and “work on themselves” since things won’t really matter until their late twenties or even thirties.

Sometimes, this is straightforward intrasexual competition from older men—the silverback gorillas trying to push the young blackbacks out of the troop so they can save the young females for themselves (yes, my “social dynamics” special interest goes beyond humans and into all primates.) Other times, this advice comes from a place of genuine caring. In the minds of the people discouraging young dating, none of their high school or college relationships mattered, they met their wives later, ergo, there was never any point in dating before that point. Instead of focusing on girls, teenage boys and young men should focus on “themselves,” so that they can improve the caliber of women to whom they have access later on, especially if they manage to build “resources.” (It’s giving prosperity gospel of pussy.) Obviously, I consider the former motivation more insidious. Who will date all the young women if the young men are too busy “building things?” Well, you know who.

As someone who dated a lot in high school, I completely get the argument that it was a waste of time. I wrote multiple weepy diary entries over boys whose names I now don’t remember, one of whom literally wore a fedora. What was the point of that? Surely, my life would have been better if I spent that time working on a novel, lifting weights, starting a business or learning another language. And certainly, if someone spends all their waking moments obsessing over relationships, and zero effort into school, work, or hobbies, that’s a bad plan.

But young men’s biggest deficit in the dating market in 2025 isn’t that they’ve failed to start a business and acquire resources. Most young women in college would be perfectly happy to date a fellow college student. And while fitness will always be an asset, it’s not something that has to take up so much time that you never socialize. Young women don’t complain to me about men failing to be business owners—they complain about men having no idea how to talk to women. And in an ideal world, you should be learning social skills (even just platonic ones) long before your early thirties (although I feel the need to point out, life isn’t over if you learn it later!)

Young men should be focusing on building social skills and social resilience, and you do that by dating and making friends—yes, even in high school. These things are important, not distractions from “working on yourself.” They are working on yourself.