How brave are you?
Do you have what it takes to try one of the riskiest (and, ironically, most successful) dating strategies out there?
All it takes is being remarkable.
Take a Risk or Play It Safe
The safest dating advice is to find out what the average man finds attractive and play to that.
But in fact there’s no such thing as an “average” man.
The average man is a statistical concept, not a real human being.
He’s created by averaging out the broad range of tastes and preferences of many different men.
The sheer breadth and variety of male preferences gets condensed down to almost nothing, and this is sold as the “sure-fire way” to attract men.
But is it sure-fire?
After all, you don’t want to attract the “average man.”
You want to attract YOUR guy.
That extraordinary guy you’ve been dreaming of. The guy who fits you like a glove.
He wants what YOU have to offer. He loves everything that makes you unique.
If you play it safe, you might attract the average man, but you could just miss out truly connecting with him.
The Cost of Being Average
The cost of being average was first documented by OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder.
He crunched the data on OkCupid users and found that, yes, the most attractive singles on the dating site got more attention than everyone else.
But there were a lot of “averagely attractive” men and women who weren’t getting very many messages.
And there was one intriguing group of people who were getting 70% more messages than usual.
Rudder dug into the qualities that made this group unique, and he discovered that these people had polarizing profiles.
Polarizing profiles are profiles that people either love or hate.
Polarizing profiles aren’t bashful. They’re not designed to appeal to everyone’s tastes. They’re bold, unapologetic, and quirky.
As a result, they turn a lot of people off, but they turn the RIGHT people on.
That strategy worked better for them—70% better—than being averagely attractive.
Seth Godin would call this remarkable.
The Qualities of Being Remarkable
Seth Godin is a marketing guru.
He’s made his career urging creators and entrepreneurs to stop appealing to the masses and focus on delivering quality to true fans.
You can be successful without appealing to everyone, as long as you appeal to the right people, people who want what only you can deliver.
That’s counterintuitive to most of us.
We want everyone to like us. We don’t want to be a “specialized taste.”
But in a crowded marketplace, with everyone jostling for attention, it’s the specialized taste that stands out.
We notice the thing that’s different. We linger over it, trying to understand it. We talk about it with our friends.
Being remarkable gets attention in a way that just being good doesn’t.
So what does it take to be remarkable?
Seth offers these gems[1]:
- “If it’s in a manual, if it’s the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable.”
If everyone else is doing it, then maybe you should be doing something else. Take it with a grain of salt when someone tells you, “This is how it’s done.” Doing it that way makes you predictable; it doesn’t make you stand out.
- “Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me.”
Maybe you don’t think there’s anything remarkable about you. You feel pretty ordinary.
But you don’t get to decide that. OTHERpeople get to decide what’s remarkable about you.
What do people notice when they meet you? What makes you different? If the answer doesn’t come to mind, ask your friends.
- “Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable.”
There’s a shortcut to being remarkable: doing things just to get attention. We see this all the time in people who use shock value or sex appeal to get noticed. But being remarkable takes effort and commitment. There’s nothing easy about it.
- “Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don’t. So what?”
If you decide to be remarkable, you’ll have to give something up. The comfort of knowing that most people either won’t notice you or won’t have an opinion on you one way or the other.
Remarkable people invite rejection because of their refusal to play everyone else’s game.
That’s why it feels so risky. You’re putting your true self out there for comment and criticism.
But it’s also what attracts the attention of YOUR guy.
The guy looking for EXACTLY what you have to offer.
He doesn’t want an average woman, either.
He wants a partner who shares his quirks. Who likes the same stuff he likes. Who isn’t ashamed of who she is.
Help him find you.
[1] https://seths.blog/2007/01/how_to_be_remar/
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