Dating Stage: How To Lose A Good Man
1. Leading With Self-Centeredness
There is important context for why many women arrive at dating with a “me first” orientation. Years of being disappointed, deprioritized, and emotionally abandoned by men who were not doing the work — that leaves a mark.
Protecting yourself makes sense. But here is the problem: a good man has also been doing work. He has spent time unlearning toxic masculinity, developing emotional intelligence, choosing to show up differently than the men who came before him.
He brings effort to the table, and he is looking, consciously or not, for reciprocity.
When the first energy he encounters is relentlessly self-focused — where every conversation loops back to her, where his experiences and feelings are consistently background noise, where there is no genuine curiosity about who he is — it registers as a mismatch. He is not looking for a woman who erases herself. He is looking for someone who can be present for two people, not just one.
Self-protection is valid. Self-centeredness, even when it comes from a wounded place, is still a red flag.
Dating State: How To Lose A Good Man
2. Punishing Him for Other Men’s Sins
Feminism, properly understood, is the political, social, and economic equality of the sexes.
A good man has done the reading. He understands the structural oppression of women. He has examined his own privilege, challenged his own conditioning, and chosen to show up as an ally rather than an adversary.
Coming to him with a generalized hatred of men (treating him as a representative of every man who has ever caused harm, requiring him to answer for behavior he did not engage in, filtering every interaction through a lens of presumed guilt) is not feminist praxis. It is misdirected pain.
He sees it for what it is. And while some good men will try to gently engage with where that anger comes from, many will simply recognize that they are being asked to pay a debt they did not incur, and they will decline, not because they cannot handle difficult conversations, but because they know the difference between accountability and punishment, and they are not interested in the latter.
Healing from past relationships is necessary and valid. Processing that healing on a new man who had nothing to do with it is a different thing entirely.
Dating Stage: How To Lose A Good Man
3. Centering Your Needs Before There Is Even a “We”
This is distinct from self-centredness, though they are related. It is specifically about timing.
There will absolutely come a time in a developing relationship to express your needs clearly and directly. That conversation is important and healthy. But there is a version of it that arrives too early — in the first few conversations, on the first date, before two people have even established whether they enjoy each other’s company — that reads less like honest communication and more like a job description being handed to someone who has not yet applied for the position.
“As a woman, I need consistency.”
“I need to be pursued.”
“I need a man who can handle my intensity.”
Delivered in the early stages, these statements do not read as vulnerability. They read as a checklist, and they shift the dynamic from mutual exploration to audition.
Good men are not afraid of a woman with needs. They are looking for a woman whose needs and theirs are compatible. But compatibility requires actually getting to know each other first. Let the conversation breathe. The needs will emerge naturally if the connection is real.
Dating Stage: How To Lose A Good Man
4. The Financial Requests That Come Too Soon
This one is a red flag regardless of the man involved, and many women who have been on the receiving end of it from men will recognize exactly what it communicates.
There is a version of financial entitlement in early dating that signals something specific: that the relationship is being approached as a resource extraction rather than a genuine connection.
When a woman mentions her rent situation, her car repairs, her outstanding bills, not as context in a deeper conversation but as an implicit or explicit request, it tells a good man something about how he is being seen.
A good man genuinely wants to care for the woman he is building with. That impulse is real and he will act on it — in time, organically, because he wants to, not because he was invoiced. The billing-before-bonding dynamic does not make him feel needed. It makes him feel like a wallet with legs.
It also, fairly or not, raises questions about financial responsibility and independence that a good man who has his own life together takes seriously as compatibility factors.
Dating Stage: How To Lose A Good Man
5. Suffocating Him With Urgency Before He Is Even Yours
Good men are genuinely rare, and women who have spent time in the dating pool know this. When one appears, the instinct to lock it down immediately is understandable. The fear of losing him before you have even had him is real.
But urgency is not attractive.
It is pressure.
And pressure, applied to someone who has not yet decided what he wants, almost always produces the opposite of the desired outcome.
Being too forward about how much you like him, too quick to establish possession, too eager to signal that you have already imagined a future — these behaviors communicate anxiety, not affection.
A good man who is genuinely interested is also interested in a woman who has her own sense of self, her own pace, her own life that does not immediately reorganize around him.
You can be warm without being clingy. You can show interest without broadcasting desperation. You can like him without needing to secure him before the second date. His interest, if it is real, does not require that level of effort to maintain.
Dating Stage: How To Lose A Good Man
Unruly Behaviour
I took a lady out on a date once. The security man was directing me as I was driving so that I could park properly. When I was done, the man “hailed” me. My date whispered to me “Don’t give the man a dime, he saw me alight from the car and ignored me. He didn’t greet me or hail me. That is how they behave. Thinking a woman is beneath them. See the way he is hailing you and greeting you, that is patriarchy right there.
“No it is not patriarchy”, I said. “It is hussling. It is typical of security men in Nigerian establishments to hail a big man driving a big car when he parks so that the man can tip them.
You won’t tip him, so he didn’t hail you.
There is no reason to attach that to patriarchy or blame it on gender profiling.”
Despite my explanation, the lady still went on to insult the security man. Asking him if he was blind when she alighted from the car and demanding that he greet her.
The security man insulted her back, and it became a shouting match.
I left the two of them and walked into the restaurant with a conviction that I could never be with this kind of woman.
Dating Stage: How To Lose A Good Man
Be Yourself
A good man is not a regular man with better PR. He is someone who has done genuine internal work, and he can read energy.
What he is looking for is not perfection; it is authenticity. He wants to meet you, not the version of you that is performing security, performing neediness, performing indifference, or performing any of the other scripts that bad dating experiences tend to produce.
The most effective thing you can do in early interactions with a good man is also the simplest: show up as yourself.
Your playful self, your intelligent self, your affectionate-but-grounded self — whatever that actually looks like. If it is a match, it will be a match. If it is not, you will find out early rather than late.
A good man is not automatically the right man for you. But you will never know if you never let him meet who you actually are.
Dating Stage: How To Lose A Good Man
Misreading The Room
You sit with a man who is looking for a wife, but you are treating him like a man who is looking to get laid.
You sit with a man who is interested in building a future with you, but you are treating him like a man who needs to be punished for asking you out by buying the most expensive things on the menu
You sit with a man who is sizing you up as the possible mother of his children, and you are treating him like a distraction
You act as if he is unworthy of your presence, and as if you were doing him a favour by being on the date
To you, it is playing hard to get, a way to drive up your value and show him you are not that available
You have misread the purpose of the date, the intention of the person you are dating, and priced yourself out of the market.
If you said yes to the date, be present and be authentic
A good man respects honesty and forthrightness
Dating Stage: How To Lose A Good Man
Showing up on a date with an extra wheel, be it your best friend, your sister, your driver, or your bodyguard, and expecting the person you are on a date with to be responsible for the bill for what the person eats, while the person prevents you from having a proper conversation with the person.
A good man knows when he is being taken seriously, and he also knows when he is being fleeced or ripped off by a hungry woman who wants to show him off as her mark.
Dating to prove a man can buy you a meal is immature.
If you are dating to get married, approach it with the right attitude and mindset.