Well everyone, another Groundhog Day has come and gone. If you’re unfamiliar, this is a USA mini-holiday where tradition says that, if a groundhog in Pennsylvania sees his shadow we’re going to have 6 more weeks of winter. Otherwise, it’s going to be an early spring.
More importantly for this article, however, Groundhog Day is also an excellent movie starring Bill Murray, released in the early 1990s. Murray plays a bitter and unhappy weatherman who ends up mysteriously living Groundhog Day over and over again in a small American town. The same events, the same people, the same thing happens over and over again, and although he remembers everything that happened each time, obviously no one knows that he has all this information.
The movie makes for an excellent dating psychologist, in a way. He ends up falling in love with his producer boss and over the process of months (maybe years) worth of Groundhog Days, learns to love his life enough to become a man that she can fall in love with as well.
I highly recommend the movie, because I feel that Murray goes through very similar dating perspectives that I (and many other guys I know) went through when learning how to improve their life and get the women they like in their mind.
The first stage Murray goes through is mirroring. Each day he learns a little more about what his boss Anne likes, and so tries to win her over by telling her that he likes the same things. He finds out she likes rocky road ice cream, so the next day he has rocky road ice cream waiting for her. He finds out she likes snowy nights, so the next day he takes her on an evening walk. The result? He kisses her, she’s drawn to him, but she always feels something is a little off and so never fully commits to him (in the movie, she never sleeps with him, no matter how hard he tries). Sound familiar? I’ll bet every guy reading this went through that phase at some point when starting to get familiar with their dating culture, and never got things to work quite right. Something always felt off when trying to relate to women on surface level topics, and the movie very accurately portrays this.
The second stage Murray tries way too hard to win her over multiple times. Eventually he gets a little too crazy and loses the ability to even get a kiss out of her. Then he gets depressed. He decides that he cannot ever win her over, and in the movie actually kills himself (multiple times, though he always wakes up the next day again). Now hopefully you never get to that point, but I’ll bet that all of us have gone through that period of time when we feel like there’s no way we can ever win any girl over, we decide that we’re just not attractive, and give up to some extent. I went through that point, and as bad as it felt at the time, I had a suspicion that better things were on the way.
This is where things get good. Murray finally pulls himself out of his funk, and decides that if he can’t get the girl he wants, he’s at least going to start doing things he likes. He starts taking piano lessons (maintaining the knowledge from day to day, though from the teacher’s point of view he’s only had one lesson). He helps a homeless man. He catches a child who falls out of a tree. And then a funny thing happens. He begins to like himself. He starts feeling real affection for the people around him. He becomes a truly likable person. And in the process, ends up winning over the girl, almost as a side-effect of his personal revelation.
This process so closely mirrors the steps that I went through in learning how to improve my life that I was struck by the film. Most dating companies teach the first lesson, and simply allow men to attempt to learn the second and third steps themselves. For that matter, most dating companies only truly understand the first step. They pick up on the superficial idea that couples that are attracted to each other mirror each other, and they try to teach guys to force that mirroring.
Luckily, we at TDD know better. We realize that the best way to win over women is today’s dating society is to put effort into your own life, and actually become the kind of man that they want to date. This is far more natural, and because of that, it’s actually effective. It also gives you a real feeling of self-worth, as you are doing exactly what you want to be doing. This satisfaction is a much greater sensation than any manipulation of womens’ emotions ever will, and it will make you a much better human being in the process. And there’s nothing better in life than that.
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