If you want to meet someone IRL, but the “how” feels like a total mystery…. This episode tells you exactly why it hasn’t happened yet and what to do about it.

Inside episode 270:

→ The two things that determine whether you meet people IRL: proximity to opportunity and courageous behavior in the face of it

→ What joy building is and why it works

→What shooting your shot looks like when you’re shy, anxious, or starting from zero

→ The self-assessment and action steps to take this week

Work with Lily

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Show transcript:

Lily @ Date Brazen (00:00)
Hey gorgeous friends, welcome to another episode of the Feminist Dating Show. I’m so glad that you’re here. Today, I wanna talk about why you haven’t met a date IRL and exactly what to do to fix that. Because this is about to be the juiciest IRL dating summer of your life if you follow this podcast. I am about to share with you for the next few weeks action-packed episodes. I’m gonna start with some mindset shifts that you need and some tactical strategy that you need to

increase the effectiveness of your dating efforts and to make dating more freaking joyful. Because you want something, it’s not here yet, and let’s fucking go. That’s the conceit of this entire podcast that your dating life matters to your well-being. Why? Because it’s every hope, joy, dream, fear, insecurity, desire that we have as humans. Your dating life matters to your well-being and you get to pursue a joyful as fuck dating life.

that feels just as brilliant as the rest of your life, because dating represents this desire and desire, in the words of Dr. Julianna Hauser, is your birthright. It’s not like you should want this less because wanting it makes you seem desperate. No, no, no. It’s not that it happens when you least expect it, my least favorite piece of dating advice, it’s that you desire something and…

your desire gets to be evidence that what you want exists, like the Wright brothers didn’t know that a plane could exist. And dating can be an opportunity for you to finally like trust yourself and your desires. And IRL dating has to be a part of that puzzle. If you want a joyful dating life, if you want to make dating apps optional, if you want to have more fun this summer.

because dating is ultimately about connection, connection with yourself, connection with the right people, and connection with your main character energy. Main character energy is how you set boundaries, how you own what you want, how you live a bolder, bigger life. So when I talk about dating, we’re not just talking about like going on a date. I’m talking about the life-changing practice of trusting your own desires and going after them with courageous, bold action. And I’m talking about becoming

the version of yourself who tries new things, who is bold as hell, and who continues to become and come home to yourself as you do dating more courageously. I hope that makes sense. Like, I really do feel like this is life-changing work that we’re doing together. You listening to this podcast and retraining your brain away from the patriarchal BS that says you should be

less picky, that says you should be, you know, less or more in your divine feminine, whatever the fuck that means, that you should perform and play this game of attractiveness to the right people to hook their attention. No, no, no. The right person is A, looking for you two, B, ⁓ out there, you haven’t met everybody yet, and C, this…

pursuit of your love life is a pursuit of your desires and that is a wholehearted worthy use of your time and energy. And I’m here to help you do it in a more unbothered way so that dating doesn’t feel like such a I wanna get into why you haven’t met a date IRL and exactly how to fix that. Let’s get into it.

I gotta tell you before we get into this episode, this episode is brought to you by my upcoming live free training called, attract the right partner, zero experience required. I’m gonna teach you how to create a joyful dating life without the shame, without the burnout, and without settling. And you’re gonna make the right relationship inevitable just by learning these skills. So in this live free training, I am unpacking why you’re not too late.

how patriarchal dating BS has been sabotaging your dating life and exactly how to become magnetic to the right people online and in person with a feminist dating strategy. So you’re definitely gonna wanna be there live. You can sign up right now at datebrazen.com slash let’s dash go, or you can go to the description of this episode to get yourself RSVP. You’re definitely going to want to be there live.

because I’m not only sharing these three strategies with you that have helped over 400 people, feminists, humans, who have either never been in a romantic relationship or never been in the right one, make the right relationship inevitable with a joyful dating life. I also am opening Main Character Dating. We open a few times a year, so this is a big old party and celebration of you, your desires, your best next steps, and it’s an invitation to join us in Main Character Dating.

and you’ll learn all about what it’s like to be inside. This is my signature 12 month high touch group coaching program in which you plus a coven of cheerleaders is going to build the most joyful dating life that makes the right relationship inevitable with a step-by-step curriculum that is bingeable and feminist as hell that’ll have you owning everything that you want.

claiming it without apology and building a rock solid dating strategy that we vet with you. And you’re gonna heal your picker with our date feedback system where you get one-on-one ⁓ feedback and coaching after every single date that you go on. So every date is better than the last. You’re going to date joyfully, maybe for the first time. You’re going to have coaching support every single day to…

become the most main character energy version of yourself in your dating life and everywhere. It’s gonna be such a good time,

I can’t wait to show you what’s inside so you can see whether or not it’s right for you. And if you register for the live free training, you are gonna be eligible for a super special bonus called unstuck, which is 10 days of one-on-one coaching with me where I personally am going to take you through creating your essence based preferences, creating your qualifying, disqualifying questions, matchmaker strategy to vet people within three questions or less.

I’m gonna take you through building your dating profile with the most joyful magnetic

and your IRL plan. I’m gonna do all of that with you in just 10 days so you can hit the ground running in the program and go on the best dates of your life as soon as freaking possible. And that bonus is one-on-one voice memo coaching with me for 10 days to get all of that shit done in the shortest amount of time so you can just hit the ground fucking running in the program.

And it’s only available if you register for the live training and you join us within 24 hours of that live training. So go to datebrason.com slash let’s dash go to get your name on the list. I cannot wait to see you there live. And ⁓ yeah, let’s get back to the episode.

Okay, so IRL dating is joyful courageous connection. I use the same definition for flirting and IRL dating, have three steps in it. Today we’re talking about one of those steps, joy building. This is about the joyful IRL dating approach after all. But the other two in addition to joy building are eye contact slash flirting, right? How do you increase your capacity?

for flirting and doing it imperfectly and doing it your way. There’s no such thing as a perfect flirting plan or whatever. It’s like, how can you build the courage to try to connect joyfully with people? And then the final IRL dating step is co-conspirators, which is how to help your coupled friends help you. I have so many episodes on these topics, but today I wanna later focus in on joy building and how it can actually lead to you meeting the love of your life. This is how I met

My husband, Chris, we’ve almost been together 10 years. This is our ninth year together. We just celebrated our third wedding anniversary. ⁓ This relationship is just feeling like more joyful every year that passes, this is how I know that what you want is possible too.

⁓ because not only because of my story, but because of the hundreds of people that I’ve helped find the best relationships of their lives. But I digress. One more thing, if you don’t believe it yet, you can borrow my belief. I’m over here in Brooklyn believing it for you until you can believe it for yourself. But I want to talk about like how I met Chris. You may have heard it if you’ve listened to the podcast for any number of years, but ⁓ I did it through this concept of joy building. I was ⁓ feeling really…

lonely in a new city, I was in San Francisco, and I went to an improv class. I was really nervous, I was like shaking like a leaf beforehand, and I had not done improv before. I had like performed on stage before, but I had never done improv. It was so fucking scary. And I went and I realized that everybody else was scared right alongside me, that none of us had really done it before.

And it became so joyful to be in this room, to gather with these people, to make in-person connections, and to do it and be awkward. Like, I still have massive moments of awkwardness, have for many years. I have a lot of social anxiety, a lot of, like, overthinking interactions after they happened. Like, this was no exception. Joy building was…

massively vulnerable and difficult for me, even as an extrovert, but I did it because it was, my joy was worth the discomfort. I’m gonna repeat that for you. My joy was worth the discomfort. I could live through that discomfort in order to have joy. So I did this improv class and there was this woman there who I, like, I was so drawn to as a friend.

and she was drawn to me as a friend and we ended up hanging out. She like, think she asked me out first, which was new for but this was also going into my fear and feeling of being a late bloomer is that like, not only romantically did I have very little experience, but friendship wise, I maybe had like one or two friends.

and I feel grateful for those friendships, but whereas I saw other people with these friend groups and this like friendship experience, I just felt like I didn’t have it. And I felt like whenever I, my perception was whenever I wanted to build a friend, it was on me to do it. And so it was really cool to receive this new friend’s interest. And receiving interest is a part of joy building too, like really.

just showing up and co-creating with potential new friends or potential new dates. So this woman kind of asked me out on a friend date. We went out, we loved each other’s company. we’re still very close. And she became this lighthouse for me in this.

⁓ New city we became each other’s really close friends all because of joy building and all because she was Courageous enough to shoot her shot with me by saying hey Do you maybe you want to go grab coffee sometime? This is what’s so important about IRL dating and joy building in general friendship building in general is that it takes not only proximity to opportunity But courageous behavior in the face of that opportunity now. I’ll talk about in a minute how I have

shot my shot more often in person, right? Like I don’t think that it’s just on the other person. I think that in feminist dating and in life, my goal is to shoot my shot 100 % of the time. And that doesn’t preclude the other person from shooting their shot first. It just means I am in the mindset of shooting my shot. So anyway, my friend shot her shot first. We went out, we became friends. Wonderful, life-changing. Then I moved to New York and she had a lot of friends from ⁓ college in New York.

and she introduced me to some of her friends. They invited me to a party, I think. And then we just started like hanging out, partying together in New York. It was a great ass time. And I started hearing later on a few years later after that about their roommate, Chris, and how he was this amazing actor and how he was a hilarious guy. And I thought, ⁓ like, great, Chris. I didn’t think anything of it, especially at the time because I was in a toxic.

relationship with somebody that I was in love with, who meant none of my emotional needs. So Chris was not on my radar, but my friend from San Francisco had introduced me to all of her New York friends because of Joy Building. And then that evolved into me hanging out in rooms with Chris, who would become my future husband. And when we first met, we pretty quickly connected. ⁓ Anyway, all that being said, Joy Building has this impact of spider webbing.

you are expanding your social circle, which is effectively the only thing that a dating app does well. It’s like maybe expanding your social circle. A dating app’s job is not to actually show you the best people for you. A dating app’s job is not actually to, that’s what they’ll say their job is. That’s what the marketing department will pitch as the reason you should download their app and not the other person’s app. But I digress. The real…

of like why the dating app is just like, it’ll expand your social circle. Same, same with joy building. It’s not about going to an event where there are only cuties who you’re attracted to romantically and then dating immediately. It’s not about every joy building activity being a place where you even meet somebody you connect with. It is not about the individual effort. It’s about the sum of its parts. And it’s about you becoming the version of yourself

who not only pursues their joy, like proximity to opportunity, but who has courageous behavior in the face of that opportunity. Like my friend had with me when she shot her shot and we changed phone numbers. Like the other day when, now I’m not dating anymore, but I practice these things myself just because I want new friends and I wanna live a more wholehearted, courageous life. I’m always doing this work alongside you in…

different ways, but like, this is life work that even your coupled friends will need to do. This work of proximity to opportunity and courageous behavior in the face of that opportunity is by the way, a practice that you will need in the right relationship. Because what does it take to bring up your needs, right? It takes courageous behavior. It takes that 10 seconds of courage to say, I, you know, for an example, you could start falling in love with somebody and

⁓ you know, they are a cuddler and maybe at night you don’t want to be touched and you are just lying awake for hours worried about telling them that you don’t want to be touched at night because of the fear of them leaving you or being upset or whatever because of the lingering practice of self-silencing that you might have had to keep yourself safe in the past. Courageous behavior in the face of opportunity is about knowing

claiming what you want and asking for it. In a joyful IRL dating scenario, it’s meeting somebody, a friend or somebody you’re attracted to and saying, hey, ⁓ wanna exchange numbers? Ooh, courageous. You’re gonna wanna vomit. You’re gonna, I want you to do it anyway with 10 seconds of courage. Takes 10 seconds. In a new relationship scenario, it is asking that question of, so by the way, what are you hoping to find in your dating life? Ooh!

You want to vomit, but you’re going to do it anyway because you are becoming the version of yourself who is courageous in the face of opportunity. It’s going to lead to you getting more of what you want versus like being a passive participant in your dating life ⁓ in order to try to hook somebody in because you are dating from a place of scarcity, right? I want you to be an active participant in getting what you want everywhere in life, dating especially. So, ⁓

flirting, IRL dating, it’s all about courageous connection. It’s about that proximity to opportunity and courageous behavior in the face of that opportunity. So, you know, my story is not unique. Going to the improv class, making a friend, being introduced to their friends, and then their friends introduced me to my husband. This is not unique. It happens every day. And here’s what I want you to do after listening to this episode. I want you to write down

In your notes app, finding love is about two things, proximity to opportunity and courageous behavior in the face of that opportunity. I want you to do a little self-assessment. Are you doing those two things? if you feel that you wanna find the right relationship, maybe you’re taking a dating break after a rejection or a heartbreak, totally understandable, both and if you feel available for trying something new, if you want,

to find the right partnership, then let’s fucking go. Take a little self-assessment. How am I doing with proximity to opportunity? Am I going to things that bring me joy ⁓ regularly and am I asking new friends or potential romantic partners for their number? Am I going to the place, right? Proximity to opportunity is going to the place.

then am I being courageous in the face of that opportunity? That is asking for somebody’s number. That is starting up a conversation to begin with. I’ll give you another example. When I shot my shot really recently, I moved to a new neighborhood recently. I’m in a new space ⁓ and it’s very joyful. It’s been a long time coming ⁓ and we’re loving this new neighborhood. We’re still in Brooklyn, Anyway, I digress.

How many times can I say that in this episode? Apparently many, many times. But I wanted to join a new community garden, because I’m in a new space. ⁓ If you had listened to the podcast in the last couple, like in the last year, I had joined another community garden. It changed my freaking whole life. Gardening has become such a passion of mine. And so in this new space, I joined a new community garden. I met all of the new members. There were a lot of new members that came to the first meeting.

And there was one member in particular who I, you know, I connected with a couple people and that was my intention, right? I had this in my mind. This is important. When you go joy building, which is anytime you’re going to a place that would bring you joy and with other human beings, My intention was just to like be there, be kind, be myself, strike up conversations when it felt right.

⁓ So like I wasn’t gonna like muscle and try to like fix everything and get a friend out of it. I was like, I’m going to allow it to happen and I’m going to show up proactively. That means I’m gonna be like on time. I’m going to ask what brought you to the garden? I’m going to start conversations when it feels right for me to do so, which has been a practice by the way. ⁓ And then when people ask me questions, I’m gonna be honest. I’m gonna take deep breaths.

it’s just stressful sometimes for me to do joy building and try to make new friends. So this time I was trying to regulate my nervous system in the moment. I was finding my feet when I got nervous, because I still get nervous meeting new people and making new friends.

⁓ And my goal was like to ask questions, to take deep breaths, and then to receive other people’s questions. I also set the goal for myself of allowing awkward silences if they were to happen. So my job would not be to fill every silence to prove to other people, this was an old mindset of mine, prove to other people that I was interesting, that I was very friendly, that I was a safe place for people to talk to, right? I don’t need to prove anything. I just need to be.

and to connect. And I think that this is part of the courageous connection is like finding your feet, not needing to fill every silence, not needing to do all of the work of connecting, but co-creating. So I ended up meeting a couple of people who I thought were really cool. And it just so happened that two of us were walking out at the same time. We were walking in a similar direction. And so I asked,

Hey, so do you wanna exchange numbers, maybe do a work session together in the garden sometime? And she said, cool, yeah. And we exchanged numbers. Who knows if we will meet up again, but I am in the practice of shooting my shot. I am in the practice of courageous connection. I am in the practice of proximity to opportunity and courageous connection. And you can be too. You can be too, even if you’re shy, even if you’re an introvert.

even if you’ve never done this before, even if you’re paralyzed with fear. Deep breath, find your feet. You can do this. You are becoming. One of my teachers said to me long ago, like, you are who you are becoming. I am who I am becoming. You are becoming the version of yourself who does IRL dating, who does joy building, and who shoots their shot, right?

So another time, I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast, I asked another person if they wanted to hang out and be friends and they said no. Like they said it indirectly, but the indirect communication was like, ⁓ you don’t wanna hang out outside of this, not, ew. I totally had this moment of like blood draining from my face, fear filling my body, like cold sweat, right? And I had a day of being in my feelings about it and then I processed it with self-compassion and I moved on.

And I thought, can’t say the wrong thing to the right person and the right people want to be my friends. The right people want to be your friends. The right people are looking for you romantically too. And so you owe it to yourself and your desires to start trying new things. Right? So action steps for you after listening to this episode. Take a little self-assessment of, I getting in proximity to opportunity? And am I in that opportunity being courageous in the face of that opportunity?

receiving connection, asking questions. Maybe courageous behavior like me would be taking a deep breath and allowing an awkward silence, Maybe it would be courageous meaning asking someone else a question if you’re not somebody who usually does that. Or maybe even after a conversation asking for somebody’s number. What does courageous behavior look like for you? What does shooting your shot look like for you? And go identify where you’re feeling a gap and…

do something courageous this week to start filling that gap and celebrate yourself in this process. Celebrate yourself for doing it, for learning how to do IRL dating effectively, learning how to connect with people IRL effectively. It is a skillset. It is not a one and done. It is not something that you’re just born with. Let my story be an example, right? As nervous and as scared and as socially anxious as I can be, ⁓ I’m out here doing it.

And you can too. My clients who utilize this strategy, they’re out there doing it. They’re learning, they’re growing, they’re bragging about their progress, no matter how small. Their celebrations are worthy and enormous, even if it’s just a little baby step forward, because as my friend Gina Knox likes to say, raindrops make oceans. Raindrops make oceans. It doesn’t matter how small the actions you’re taking, they are building an ocean.

Okay, so then the other thing I want you to do is make a list of five to 10 things that you can do outside of your house this month that would bring you some joy. If it’s a garden meeting, if it’s a botanical garden, I’m very garden happy right now, but if it’s a class at your local botanical garden or if it’s, know, anything. One of my clients is really into puzzling. And she was like, but that’s not a social thing.

And I just said, want a bit? And I Googled this client’s location and puzzling, and a puzzling event came up. Google your interests, friends. You never know. One of my clients is going to a knitting circle. Again, it doesn’t matter if cuties are there who you’re attracted to. What matters is that you’re expanding your social circle with proximity to opportunity and courageous behavior in the face of that opportunity. And that will lead to connections that you can’t expect. So make that list of five to 10 things after you do your little self-assessment.

And if you want the full step-by-step plan to making the right relationship inevitable, if you’ve never been in a relationship or never been in the right one, then get your butt RSVP’d for my upcoming live training called, attract the right partner, zero experience needed.

slash let’s dash go to sign up or just go to the description and sign up with the link in the description of this episode. You’ve got this and I’ve got your back.

You want something? The right relationship? It’s not here yet. So let’s fucking go. Talk to you all next week.