They had good pedigree. They were successful and age appropriate. They were good-looking. They followed up with phone calls. Then all of a sudden—poof—they just vanished.

You’re in shock. You can’t believe that this one went away. You felt like it was the perfect kind of a relationship. You really felt like you were ready for it. You really needed this relationship because you were so tired of dating. You were tired of putting yourself online and having nothing happen. You were tired of going to the parties and heading out to the same bars and restaurants. You felt like this was the one.

Here’s the deal: everything that you’ve ever known about dating is wrong. During those three weeks you never kept a dating journal. See, Mr. and Mrs. Perfect do not exist. What we do when we date is we get caught up in what I call the oxytocin moment. We get caught up in this wave of emotion, like a drug is released in our bodies.

It feels so good to be rescued from being single. But in reality, the warning signs are there from the beginning. I tell everybody in my very new book, Naked, to keep a dating journal, and write down how you feel at the end of each date. How does this person make you feel? Do you feel desired? Do you feel excited? Take it even deeper. Do you keep a journal where you know exactly the way you need to feel in a relationship?

My new book Naked goes really deep into dating. It gets you to fall in love with the most important person in your life: you. Because when it comes down to dating, most of us date based on needs. I need to have a relationship. I need to no longer be single. I need to find somebody different because the last person didn’t treat me well.

What Naked does is it takes everything down to the root and allows you to forgive everything that’s gone on in your life and allows you to embrace all the lessons you’ve learned. But more importantly, it gets you to fall in love with who you are as a person. It allows you to realize that you’re an amazing catch.

Naked is almost 200 pages of daily exercises that help you no longer date out of need, out of frustration, or out of desperation. When it comes to love, in order to find someone to love you the way you need to be loved, you need to love yourself first. You need to take yourself out on dates. You need to do things for yourself. You need to feel amazing and wonderful and you need to strip yourself down of all your fears and become naked. You need to forget about past failures and learn from them.

But more importantly, you need to know exactly what you want going into that date, emotionally. Because when it comes down to dating, all it is is based on feelings. How did you feel at the end of a date? Most of us have never asked that question, because we always date based on wants, needs, and desires.

It’s time to change the way you date. It’s time to get naked.

Earlier, I asked all the awesome people on my newsletter subscriber list to come to the blog today and post their goals for 2012. Many of the guys I speak with want a girlfriend this year. And if you’re a woman, you might want a boyfriend this year. (I know a lot of women still post here and then they post on the women’s site as well also.)

What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to experience? What do you want to feel? How many women do you want to meet? Do you want a relationship? Do you want to meet a wife? Do you want…what exactly?

I’ve asked everybody on my newsletter subscriber list to come back to the blog today and state what they want to accomplish this year because this is what I want to do for 2012: I want every single person on this blog to be held accountable by each other. I want everybody to really look at each other and support one another this year. I think it’s a great way to start. No back-stabbing. No arguments on the blog. We all lay on the line today what we want to accomplish in 2012. And we make it the theme this year to support one another.

When anybody has a question, I want everybody to reach out and support that person and help them overcome whatever fear or barrier they might have.

So this year, my goal for the blog is to make everybody support one another. I’d love to see 100 comments a day of people helping each other. And if one person has a problem one day, let’s all dive in and help that person. Even if it takes 30 comments to help them out. Let’s do it. Think about how you can change someone’s life just by doing that. Also by helping other people, you learn so much about yourself. You learn about who you are and what you’re about. You learn about how to really work on your own stuff, too.

So 2012 on the blog, we’re going to support and help one another. Post away, friends.

It takes understanding each other’s communication style and the way you each express yourself. It takes understanding each other’s needs and desires. It takes really being able to listen to someone without judgment, ego and commentary. It takes being able to work on yourself on a daily basis.

Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is hard. It takes dedication and work by both partners.

I had an interesting lunch with a friend of mine the other day. He told me that his parents have been together for fifty years, and that there were times in their relationship — maybe years — in which they really didn’t like each other. He said that the one thing they always did that kept them together, though, was to stand up for each other.

No one is asking you to change. You are just being asked to grow.

Growing is what life is all about. The person who probably frustrates you and drives you crazy the most is the person with whom you have do the most growing.

So if you’re in love, drop the ego and think to yourself “How does my partner communicate? How can I understand them better? How can we find the peace again in the relationship?”

Relationships are always going to be a challenge, but if you’ve got a great one then you had better figure out how to keep it. Keeping the great ones are a battle, but think about the battle you went through to find it and this person with whom you fell in love.

They always say that everything is great as long as you are in control. It’s when you stop being in control, though, that all the work needs to be done.

I don’t spend much time with my mother, nor do I even know what habits I acquired from her. Sitting there watching my girlfriend and her mother together, though, made me realize from where a lot of my girlfriend’s habits come.

For example, she has a habit of eating lemons. You know, she’ll squeeze some lemon juice over her vegetables, then eat the lemon from the rind. So as we’re having dinner last night I sat there watching the two of them do this, and it was so interesting to see from where that habit comes.

After dinner I decided to take Daphne for a walk to give my girlfriend and her mother a chance to bond. My girlfriend asks me every day about whether Daphne has eaten and about when I fed her. It’s the same thing every day. When I thought about this, I realized that we get so many habits from our parents.

I haven’t spent much time with my parents as an adult at all. I’m kind of wondering now, though, which habits of mine I picked up from my mom and which ones I picked up from my dad.

It’s going to be a very fascinating couple of weeks…

Now on to today’s topic, Spend a night at home, grab a glass of wine, drink a beer – whatever you want to do – and delete numbers from your cell phone contacts list.

Your phone book is full of people that you don’t give a shit about. It’s so cluttered with people that you couldn’t care less about that by the time you are able to find someone in your contacts list, it’s too late to call them.

Maybe you’re driving from New York City to North Carolina, and you remember that you have two friends in D.C. that you want to catch up with. By the time you find their numbers in your phone book, you’re already in North Carolina!

It’s time to really clear your life – starting with your cell phone. If you clear your phone of extraneous numbers, you can start to savor the real friendships that you’ve made. You can get closer to the people that really matter.

When you really learn how to communicate, you can read someone’s energy. Keep this in mind as I relay this story about something that happened the other day to my girlfriend.

So the other night my girlfriend went to pick up dinner from a little health food place. She was sitting outside, relaxing while she waited for her order to be ready when “he” appeared. “He” is the guy I don’t ever want any of you guys to be.

Just so there’s no misunderstanding, this has nothing to do with this guy hitting on my girlfriend. I couldn’t care less about that, because whenever guys do she always comes home and tells me all about it (so that I can see if all you guys are paying attention to what I teach).

Here’s my message to all you guys: Wake up! It’s all about reading energy when it comes to communicating with women. Let me tell you more of the story to show you what I mean.

So this guy walked over to my girlfriend while she was waiting for her dinner takeout to be ready. First he lingered by the menu. Okay, no problem here yet. Then he opened her with an observation “Hows the food here.” That’s fine too. He’s doing alright so far.

What he didn’t pay attention to, though, was that she responded to his observation with a one word answer and she didn’t give him any positive body language. She even got up and went back inside the restaurant to check and see if her food was ready yet. He stayed outside because all he was thinking about was how he could ask her out on a date.

He didn’t pay attention to anything that was going on in that interaction. First of all, she was not answering his questions. When a woman gives you one word answers to your questions, she is not interested. You don’t keep re-engaging her, because all that you achieve by doing that is to become annoying. He in fact did become annoying, which is why she went inside to wait for her food.

As she comes out with her food ready to leave, he was still out there staring at the menu. What he was really doing is so obvious here. She knew exactly why he was still standing out there. He wasn’t really looking at the menu at all and he wasn’t there to actually buy any food. He was still standing there solely because he was waiting for her to come back out of the restaurant.

What he was really doing was waiting for someone to come out of that restaurant who wasn’t interested in him. He did this because men are objective minded, i.e., he had one objective in his mind that he focused on without listening or paying attention to what was going on around him. By being solely objective minded, he becomes the annoying guy women have to avoid when they are leaving a restaurant with their takeout dinner.

So what happened next? When she exited the restaurant with her dinner in hand, he comes up with another pickup line and uses it on her. He says “You know, you look really familiar to me.” What does he figure? If at first you don’t succeed, try try again?

Guys, you need to read a woman’s energy. This is something I’ve talked about over and over again. Read her energy. If it didn’t work the first time, it certainly isn’t going to work with an even worse pickup line.

So in response to this guy’s “You know, you look really familiar to me” line, she says “Well, maybe.” Then they started talking a little bit. Then he says “I’ve seen you in yoga class. I teach yoga. My name is Fish Kadabubababadabuba.” It’s so funny, by the way, how when guys named Bill and Tom become yoga teachers they always seem to change their name to things like Odawanda Dickawanda Masatuba (and become “scary yoga guy”).

After he makes his introduction, she said “Okay, well it was nice meeting you. I’ve got to go.” So what does he do? After having no conversation with her and totally failing to read her energy, he decides to act like a typical guy and ask her out (all because he had thrown out two pickup lines at her).

He looks at her and says “Why don’t we get together and go out for some soy mocha lattes.” At that point she said, laughing really hard, “Okay, I’ve really got to go. I’m in a relationship.” He responded to that by saying “Well maybe we’ll see each other in the universe sometime.”

Guys, you really need to read women’s energy. Stop being so obsessed by the way a woman looks, and stop trying to claim her. Women will tell you if you they are interested by not running away like she did in this story.

If a woman’s body language is not facing you or if they are giving you one word answers, they are not doing it to encourage you to work harder. If a woman is interested, they will talk to you.

Believe me, if my girlfriend was interested in that guy she would have talked to him. She would have asked him what he was having for dinner. She knew he was lingering there. She knew he wasn’t going to eat there.

It is time you guys really started paying attention to women. Stop thinking about what to say all the time. Stop trying to pick them up and start reading their energy.

So what was my solution to this situation with my girlfriend? I put 1,000 of my business cards in her car. So, the next time a guy named Fish Kadabubababadabuba comes over, she can pass along the my business card and he can start reading the blog and realizing what he has been doing wrong the whole time.
And if he is really serious about meeting women he would buy my mens mastery series.

Hint hint to all of you that think you are going to learn this without investing in yourself.

Let me tell you something. Three of the best relationships I’ve had in my life have been with women who had a boyfriend when I first met them. Now when I met them, I wasn’t trying to seduce them or make them my girlfriend. I just looked at meeting them as meeting an interesting person.

That is the way I look at life. When I meet someone very interesting, I am going to try to get to know them as a person regardless of whether they’re male or female.

What a lot of people (both men and women) do when they meet someone of the opposite sex and find out that person has a boyfriend or girlfriend, is immediately dismiss that person. They do it because of their own frustrations in dating. They say to themselves “Well, I don’t want to get to know this person because I might like them once I get to know them, and this person won’t like me because they’re not available.”

When you meet someone who is interesting, get to know that person on a friendship basis. Stop having so many expectations, and stop projecting your expectations onto others. It’s just not worth it to have all those expectations.

My current girlfriend had a boyfriend when I first met her. The first time I met her, I was interested in her and we exchanged numbers. Then she called me to say that she had a boyfriend but was interested in getting to know me as a person. We then got to know each other just as friends and it was nice.

She ended up breaking up with her boyfriend, and called me months afterwards just to catch up and reconnect . . . but with no expectations. Now here we are dating. So you never know what’s going to happen in life.

The fact is, though, that it’s very hard to find someone who is really amazing. So you need to be open to it every day. There are a lot of great people who are in not-so-great relationships. They may not be ready to get involved with you right now, but get to know them now on a friendship basis. You never know where things might lead in the future.

Stop being so much about instant gratification. I wanted to go deeper into this subject because a lot of you make the mistake of dismissing people you want but can’t immediately have. So it’s really important to explore this issue more deeply.

Todays video is going to show you that observation is the key to meeting women and men as well.

But there’s something interesting that I want to bring up to everyone on the blog. As many of you know, I’m not really in to New Year’s resolutions – I think that they are a crock of shit. They are just a complete waste of time.

Everyone always makes 10 or 11 New Year’s resolutions – and of course they are going to be broken! You’re trying to do too many things. I bet most of you have already broke most of the resolutions and we are only 12 DAYS into the year!!

I was talking to some clients the other night and I told them that what I like to do is to choose a theme for the year. I know if I concentrate on a theme, I’ll make things happen. I’m going to start believing in that theme.

I remember one year – I think it was 2004 – my theme was patience and trusting the universe. I wanted to put my trust in the universe in everything I did. I wanted to allow things to happen on their own terms. I didn’t want to force anything.

When I was in the business world, when I would lose a client I would be totally bummed out. If I didn’t have a good month, I’d start stressing out, wondering if things would get better.

A wise friend of mine, told me I needed to start trusting the universe. If you trust the universe, everything that you want will manifest. Things will start to happen because you are no longer suffocating the energy. You aren’t putting too much pressure on things and you are allowing them to unfold in their own time.

Trusting the universe means having the abundance principle. If you embody the abundance principle, people will start becoming attracted to you and they will want to meet you or do business with you.

So in 2004 I worked on trusting the universe and being patient. Then, in 2005, after I learned how to be patient, I started working with the theme of abundance. I started working with the theme of abundance in every facet of my life.

And by the end of 2005, everything was abundant for me. Business was great, the people in my life were great – I had no complaints.

So what did I want to work on in 2006? In 2006, my theme of the year was living in the moment. I wanted to embrace and be present in every moment. I didn’t want to think about the future of everything; I just wanted to embrace every little moment of life.

I wanted to learn about the gift of life. I wanted to embrace it. I wanted to be present every moment and I didn’t want to have to think about what I had to do tomorrow or what tomorrow would bring. I didn’t want to think about the past either. I just wanted to be in that moment.

And by doing that, each moment that I was truly present helped create another moment that I could embrace. It’s all about living in the moment. It’s all about staying focused, positive and having abundance.

All of these themes work really well together as well. This is what you need to do: you need to choose themes for your life.

What was the theme I chose for 2007 and 2008? To continue to live the life that I love. I’m really living the life that I love every day. I want to thank myself every day for this amazing life. I want to thank the people that I work with every day for the amazing job that they’ve done. I want to thank all of the people in my life for what they offer.

It’s about being 100% in tune with what is going on in the world so that you are able to put all of these principles and themes together.

By now, the 12th of January 2009, you all know that you’ve totally screwed up your New Year’s resolutions because you chose too many things.

Start concentrating on one thing. Life is a marathon – it’s not a sprint. It is about being able to go the distance. If you can go the distance in life, you’ll be able to accomplish everything you hope to.

The problem is that many people try to master too many things at one time. Rather than concentrating on one thing, they try to learn too many small things at once.

If you are a fast learner, you could concentrate on having a new theme every month or every three months. But you need to do this work in order to have an amazing life and attract great people into it.

What is your them for the year?

Do you know what mine is?

I have a theme just for the day.

I want to break the record we set last week with 300 responses to last Mondays blog.

So start typing folks!!!