Think You Keep Picking the Wrong Men? Listen Up!

“I don’t know how to pick them.”

I hear some version of this fairly often when I talk with women during Dating Clarity Appointments.

It came up again recently when a woman said those exact words to me.

“I don’t know how to pick them.”

They’re pretty normal words to string together and believe when your dating and relationship history hasn’t turned out the way you hoped it would.

This particular woman had evidence.

She had been married twice. And divorced twice.

So, of course, her brain had done what brains do. It looked at those circumstances and came up with a conclusion:

“I don’t know how to pick them.”

But you don’t have to be married and divorced twice to come to that conclusion.

You can go out with a couple of men you really like and have neither relationship go anywhere.

You can swipe right, start talking to someone, get excited about him—and then get ghosted.

And pretty soon your brain says, “See? I don’t know how to pick them.”

Once you start believing that, it changes the way you date.

You may rush.

You want to figure him out quickly. Is this going somewhere? Is he someone I could marry? Am I wasting my time? You want to know now because you don’t trust yourself to figure it out along the way.

Or you second-guess.

Do I really like him? Was that a red flag? Should I go out with him again? What do my friends think? What does my sister think?

You don’t quite trust your own answer.

Or you quit.

You decide, “Why bother? I’ve already proven I’m not very good at this.”

Rush. Second-guess. Quit.

None of those is going to help you create the dating life—or ultimately the relationship—you want.

So if you catch yourself rushing, second-guessing, or wanting to quit because you believe you don’t know how to pick them, here are three things to consider.

1. Is It True?

That’s the question I asked this woman when she told me, “I don’t know how to pick them.”

Is it true that you don’t know how to pick them?

And then I told her she could only answer yes or no.

She wanted to explain.

Of course she did.

Our brains love to explain. They love to gather evidence and build a case for what we already believe.

But I didn’t want the evidence.

I wanted a yes or a no.

Eventually, she said no.

And nothing about her circumstances changed when she said that.

She was still a woman who had been married twice and divorced twice.

Those were the circumstances.

“I don’t know how to pick them” was what she had decided those circumstances meant.

Those are two very different things.

The question “Is it true?” comes from Byron Katie and something she calls The Work. It’s the first of four questions she teaches, and it is a useful question all by itself.

Our brains have a negative bias.

Your brain is constantly evaluating what is happening around you, and it is very good at finding what went wrong, what could go wrong, and what all of it might mean about you.

Then it hands you a thought as if it were simply reporting the news:

“I picked the wrong guy.”

“I did it again.”

“I can’t trust myself.”

“I don’t know how to pick them.”

And because the thought came from your own brain, you believe it.

But you don’t have to.

You can challenge your brain.

Is it true?

If “I don’t know how to pick them” isn’t a fact, then you don’t have to keep using your past as evidence against yourself.

You can think something different:

I’m not a bad picker.

My past relationships don’t define my ability to choose.

I can learn from what I’ve experienced.

Your brain gets to offer thoughts.

You get to decide which ones you want to believe.

2. Choosing Well Requires Skills—and Skills Can Be Learned

When I tell you to challenge the thought “I don’t know how to pick them,” I am not suggesting there is nothing for you to learn.

There may be.

Maybe you have rushed into relationships in the past.

Maybe you ignored things that, looking back, you wish you had paid more attention to.

Maybe you weren’t very clear about what you wanted.

Maybe you were so focused on whether he liked you that you didn’t spend enough time figuring out whether you liked him.

Those are things you can learn from.

Choosing someone you want to build a relationship with requires skills.

It requires discernment.

It requires self-confidence.

It requires a willingness to slow down.

It requires time.

And it requires being willing to experience who the other person really is—not who you hope he is, not who you think he could become, but who he is.

Sometimes we expect relationships to come more easily than they do.

We think we’re going to meet someone, feel that spark, know he’s the one, and then everything will fall into place.

But getting to know another human being takes some work.

And choosing someone you want to marry deserves some time.

If there are things you didn’t know how to do in a past relationship, or things you would do differently today, that does not make you a bad picker.

It means there are skills you can learn.

Think about how different these two thoughts feel:

“I’m a bad picker.”

Versus:

“There are some things I want to get better at.”

One shuts the door.

The other opens it.

And this applies to more than dating.

You can learn how to communicate more clearly.

You can learn how to set a boundary.

You can learn how to say what you want.

You can learn how to disagree with someone without making the disagreement mean the relationship is in trouble.

You can learn how to trust yourself.

Healthy relationships require skills.

You weren’t born knowing all of them. Neither was I.

Not knowing how to do something yet is not a character flaw.

It’s an opportunity to learn.

Instead of using your past to declare, “I don’t know how to pick them,” you can use your past to ask:

What do I want to learn?

What do I want to do differently?

What skill would help me here?

You can learn.

3. What Will I Do? Who Will I Be?

These are two questions I come back to again and again in my own life:

What will I do?

Who will I be?

I know what it is like to have a brain that automatically goes negative.

For a long time, when something happened that I didn’t like, my brain was very good at finding a way to make me the problem.

What did I do wrong?

Why did I do that?

What’s wrong with me?

I’ve done enough of this work now that I don’t automatically go there anymore.

Not because my brain never offers me negative thoughts. It does.

But I’ve learned that I don’t have to follow it there.

I can decide where I want to go next.

These two questions bring me back to what I actually have power over.

What Will I Do?

Not, “Why did I pick the wrong guy again?”

Not, “Why am I so bad at this?”

What will I do now?

What can I do?

What is mine to do?

What is one thing I could do today that would move me toward the goal I have set?

Maybe today that means going on the date.

Maybe it means slowing down and going on one more date before you decide what you think about him.

Maybe it means saying no to another date.

Maybe it means getting back on the dating app after you’ve been avoiding it for three months.

Maybe it means learning a relationship skill you realize you don’t have yet.

You decide.

Who Will I Be?

How do I want to show up?

What feeling would be most useful to me as I do the thing I’ve decided to do?

Curious?

Confident?

Open?

Then ask:

What would I need to be thinking to create that feeling?

Notice how different all of this is from:

“I don’t know how to pick them.”

That thought leaves you looking backward, collecting evidence against yourself.

These questions bring you right back to the present.

What will I do?

Who will I be?

That is where your power is.

You cannot go back and change a marriage that ended.

You cannot go back and choose differently on a date you went on three years ago.

You cannot control whether the man you’re dating likes you, chooses you, changes his mind, disappoints you, or turns out to be someone you don’t want to continue dating.

But right now, in this moment, you still get to choose.

You get to choose what you will do.

You get to choose who you will be as you do it.

Your brain may have plenty to say about all of that.

Let it talk.

Your brain gets to offer thoughts.

You get to decide what you’re going to believe.

You are not a bad picker.

You are a woman who has had experiences. You have made choices. Some of those choices may have turned out exactly the way you hoped. Some may not have.

You can learn from all of them.

You do not have to use your past as evidence against yourself.

You get to decide what you want to believe about yourself today.

You get to decide what you will do next.

And you get to decide who you will be as you do it.

You are in charge of your brain. Your brain is not in charge of you.

You have more power in your life than you think.