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Culture

What Does a Dating Coach Do?

By Lakshmi Sandhana
Updated May 17, 2024
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A dating coach helps a person facilitate success in dating. Someone who chooses this profession teaches various techniques to help a client meet and attract a compatible partner. They also identify the person's weaker areas and may offer specific guidance to help improve basic dating skills. Flirting skills, fashion sense and communication skills may all be taught by a dating coach in order to maximize a person's dating potential.

People hire dating coaches for a variety of reasons. Those who are unlucky in love may want to know what's holding them back, and need assistance in overcoming these obstacles. Others may find themselves dating the wrong type of partners consistently and require help in identifying a partner who is truly compatible with them.

Recently divorced people who may or may not have kids may find dating extremely challenging, and need help to get back into the game. Even people successful in dating may want more guidance on how to date online or how to enhance their pick up skills. A dating coach works closely with a person to help them identify exactly that they want and then help them find their lovers or dream date.

Using a variety of techniques such as role-playing experiments, behavior shaping and discussion, dating coaches help individuals to highlight qualities that are attractive to the opposite sex. Helping a person overcome self-limiting beliefs, enhancing appearance through makeovers and improving interpersonal skills are some areas of concentration. They may also give tips on body language, things that may put a date off and help identify red flags that the person should watch out for. A dating coach can take on numerous roles, being a personal cheerleader to motivate or push a person, acting as a mentor and critic giving guidance and also as a confidant that listens and cares.

In behavior shaping, a dating coach may help a person pick out what works and what doesn't work on dates through watching a set of DVD's of other people on dates. This helps the person understand undesirable behaviors, and add positive ones. The coach may set up mock dates for the client, or perform demonstrations themselves, video tape the person's approach and give them appropriate tips. In addition to helping out with techniques, the coach may also assist with specifics like how to build attraction, increase comfort levels and close the date. Mostly coaches focus a great deal on fieldwork and may require a person to spend a certain number of hours a week on their dating efforts.

Some coaches offer packages, individual skype sessions, group seminars, and immersion weekends in addition to one-to-one coaching. A few also accompany the person to special events. A dating coach may help out in drawing up a personalized action plan for meeting a romantic partner, giving a person feedback and helping them pick up a partner at venues they prefer, such as libraries or art galleries, instead of pubs and bars. Online dating coaches help a person create a really attractive online profile, with a well-written introduction that highlights a client's best qualities.

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Discussion Comments

By clintflint — On Feb 15, 2015

@Mor - It depends on what kind of dating coach you are talking about though. I think some of them are essentially counselors who specialize in dating, and that's a great thing, especially for nervous or socially awkward people who need a boost in confidence and to talk about their insecurities.

But there are also those awful people out there who attempt to teach men, in particular, how to "pick up" women for sex with as little effort as possible. Most of the time their techniques rely on the idea of lowering a woman's self esteem and figuring out how to trigger her emotionally so she can be manipulated.

That kind of behavior is disgusting and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Basically, if the dating coach is focusing on making you and making you feel datable, then they are doing the right thing. If they are focusing on the potential date and changing them to suit the client, then they are doing the wrong thing.

By Mor — On Feb 14, 2015

@pastanaga - It's not manipulation. It's a time honored tradition, in fact. People used to take it for granted that social skills would be taught in classes, particularly to people who might not have had the benefit of learning them by observation as they grew up.

A first date is a nerve wracking thing. And some people just don't know how to act.

A dating coach is just going to make things easier, they aren't going to change someone's entire approach to life.

By pastanaga — On Feb 14, 2015

I just don't like this idea. It feels like manipulation, rather than facilitating a genuine date. I mean, giving someone dating advice is one thing, but teaching someone how to act and dress and what to say in order to get another person to like them is basically lying to that person.

The whole point of dating is to get to know someone. If you aren't being yourself then what is the point? Eventually you will have to relax and do what comes naturally to you and at that point you will seem to change radically and scare off the other person anyway.

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