For a great many single people, whether they care to admit it or not, Valentine’s Day is one of the worst days of the year. The supermarket is full of chocolate and heart candy, the radio plays endless advertisements for jewelry, and single people walk around saying “I don’t care.” If you’re lucky, you’ll get to endure a love song marathon while stuck in traffic; when you change the station you’ll probably land on another love song.

When you’re alone, Valentine’s Day is an omnipresent irritant. Unlike most other holidays, not everyone can participate; its about as fun as mother’s day when you’re an orphan. It is very easy to be worn down by the relentless, if well-intentioned, drumbeat of commercials and store displays. Even if you start out unconcerned, the constant reminders, the thousands of little signs you see every day, are like paper cuts. Enough little cuts endured day after day, and week after week can wear on a person.

There is no reason to despair. Even if you feel worn down, or you do not care, it does not mean that many people, especially women, are more available for dating during the holidays. When Thanksgiving rolls around, the prospect of office parties looms: women like to have dates for those. With Christmas comes New Years and women definitely like to have someone to kiss at midnight. With the new year comes resolutions and the six-week sprint to Valentine’s and a lot of women do not want to be home on Valentine’s Day. Even the ones who have gotten a bit bitter from the dating scene, no matter what they say, would rather be out than at home watching television.

Valentine’s day, and the entire holiday period that begins with office parties before Christmas, is the single easiest time of the year to get dates and, if you can handle those, a relationship. Instead of despair, you should embrace the opportunity and bring your very best to the dating game at this time of year. That’s why I created this article as man’s guide to being single on Valentine’s Day. 

When You Have Run Out of Time: Get Out of Your House This Instant!

If you want to stay home on Valentines and sulk, then by all means, do that. Really get into it and watch some romantic comedies while eating a big box of Valentine’s candy by yourself; double down on the hurt with a bucket of chicken. Everyone should sit home on Valentine’s at least once so they have some appreciation for what a profound waste of time that is. Even if you did not realize the ease with which you could have dates over the holidays in time to benefit this year, you still have Valentine’s Day itself.

Look around, use your computer, Valentine’s Day is full of events for people without dates. There will be women at those events; single women who have decided to go out and have a good time in spite of what the calendar says. Your mission is to clean yourself up, put on your dating clothes, fake a happy face, and get yourself to one of those events. If you have to, go out to a local club or a bar. Any popular place is going to be full of women who did not have dates for the holiday, who are dressed in their most appealing outfits, and who just might be willing to talk to you.

While it is definitely a lot easier, and may feel a lot more comfortable to you, to only approach women by swiping on their picture, there is still a value to just putting on a brave front and walking up to women. A club on Valentine’s day is the absolute best day of the year to do it. This is also a great chance to head out with any of your friends who remain single and childless. Cultivating a solid wingman can provide you with someone to go out with who bolsters your confidence to approach women even when it is not the single easiest night of the year. Although many a woman is “just there to have fun,” they’re more likely to respond positively on that night than on any other. If you get shot down? Just dust yourself off and move on to one of the other women there. It is Valentine’s Day and every woman there knows it. Consider the alternative of staying home; being rejected a few times will probably feel better than sitting at home and watching Hugh Grant smirk at the camera. Incidentally, that is also motivation for going to the dentist, the gym, or having a friendly sit-down with the IRS.

When You Have Time

Unfortunately, if you are reading this a week or so before Valentine’s Day, or afterwards, then you are not going to benefit directly from the bounty of the holiday season. Still, even if you missed the holiday period this year, there is no excuse for not preparing for next year. When you recover from Halloween, it is time to prepare yourself with a personal tune-up and a little fall cleaning of your online dating profiles.

Have you had the same pictures up for a year? Do you even look like your year-or-two-old photographs? Have you gotten a bit out of shape or have you neglected your wardrobe? You have time if you start at the end of October or beginning of November to remedy all of these things and you should; the coming holiday season is your chance to play out of your league. Many women are going to be casting a wider net, looking at profiles they might otherwise give a big swipe to left, and looking for dates for special events. You want to put together a set of profiles that says “take me to your office party,”I am a great date for New Years,” “I am romantic enough for Valentine’s Day,” and maybe even “I’m sufficiently civilized to be brought to family gatherings.”

In order to accomplish this, you need to get back into the gym, get your hair cut, and put together a dating wardrobe that will also work for photographs. This is not the time of the year to reduce your workouts or to indulge in all-you-can-eat feats of endurance. If you have really let yourself go and lack the discipline to do it yourself, then this may be the time where a personal trainer makes the most sense.

This is the time of the year to take everything out of your closet and ask yourself “when was the last time I wore this and do I really want women to see me wearing it?” Just a hint but if you are anything like most guys who start to date seriously, the wardrobe answer is usually “no.” Anything that does not scream attractive and confident needs to be retired. If your beloved, slightly musty-smelling, Anthrax concert t-shirt has sentimental value, then at least give it a rest for a while. This is just a good idea in general because whether you know it or not, the people where you work need to see you renewed from time to time as well.

This is the time to walk right past the ten-dollar haircut place on the corner and go to an actual salon. Get your hair cut and styled by someone with true artistic style and a book of work they can show you; think three digits, not two, on the receipt. Note that if you go with a really wild haircut then you will be restricting the group of women that respond to you. While we can all agree that a mohawk is pretty cool in concept, in execution it means she is probably not taking you to her holiday party at the buttoned down law firm she works for.

If you are hopelessly rusty, then now is one of the most productive times of the year to start polishing your approach; the results might be artificially inflated due to the increased receptivity of the female population but that also builds valuable confidence.

This is the time of the year when it makes sense to pay for the premium increases on dating sites. If you have been cruising along with your ten free swipes or five free messages, be aware that December, January, and February are the months where it makes a lot of sense to pay for the premium memberships. Since women are going to be more receptive to approaches, you want to logically approach more of them and you cannot do that if you are limited by the free accounts. This is the period where you want to leave nothing on the table.

The message here is that you will never have more predictable success in meeting women than you will at this time of the year. It is incumbent upon you to put forward the best product that you possibly can, as often as you can, and to as many women as possible. Definitely that applies to the rest of the year but during the holidays, your return on investment will be magnified.

Getting Ready for Winter

Ironically, if you started your dating quest in November, then you may have a wildly inflated sense of your own skills and presentation. It may have already happened or it soon will but it is a near certainty that the number of responses you receive to online dating inquiries is about to plummet. From the bounty of the holidays you are about to enter the desert. We have even heard from a few dating clients that all of their weakness in the dating arena have been fixed after only a couple of coaching sessions. While a lot of work can get done and you can achieve some results quickly with a good dating coach, never assume that what works during the holidays is anywhere near the degree of effort required for the rest of the year. Right now you’re standing in the aquarium; it does not make you a great fisherman.

The first step is to not get too large of an ego and let your presentation and approach skills atrophy. A great deal of your success during the holiday period has been amplified by the calendar. Come the first week of February, a significant chunk of your magnetic charm is going to evaporate. If you have been getting three or four conversations started each week, then expect that you will be lucky to get one a week in the coming months. This has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the calendar. You are fatigued from dating, women are fatigued from dating, and you need to adapt your approach to the changed circumstances. You know why the dinosaurs died out? They couldn’t adapt as quickly as the little furry mouse-looking guys in the underbrush; be a mammal, adapt.

Re-Evaluate Your Approach After Valentines Day

First of all, those premium dating memberships you splurged on in December need to be re-evaluated. There is not a great deal of benefit to renewing a dating site that performed poorly during the holidays. If you did not get dates from a site during the holidays then it is only going to be worse in the spring.

If you have gotten into the habit of relentlessly and actively messaging every online match you find even slightly interesting then this is the time for a more strategic approach. During the holidays it can be very time consuming to specifically message every woman you’re interested in. You should still do it but it can be easy to fall into a pattern of just going through all of your matches every day and sending “likes.” During the holidays you can get away with that lazy tactic because there are so many receptive women; you’re being inefficient but bounty does not punish inefficiency. If you continue that approach after the holidays you are going to be staring at a very quiet phone. Now is the time put into practice what you should have been doing all along. After the holidays, actually read profiles and where possible send messages that make intelligent responses to those profiles.

The period after the holidays is also a good time to focus on longer-term goals; work longer strategies. If you did not get in shape before, you know have a period of time where you can cut weight and do some sculpting without the interference from holiday parties full of cookies and delicious, amazing, cheese. Summer is not too far away and if you want your guns to fill those shirt sleeves then you need to be at the gym in February, not June.

The period after the holidays is a good time to explore less immediately rewarding dating strategies. While there is a rapid cycle of new women coming and going on dating sites, those interactions are overwhelmingly superficial. Since you now have a period of time where women will be more reserved, you need to be a bit more subtle. If you have wanted to enroll in a cooking class, add yoga to your exercise repertoire, or join a meetup group, then this is when you should do it. While women may not be looking now, when they do decide to come back onto the field, you want them looking right at the nice guy they’re already comfortable with from Thursday night spin class.

This dry spell will last until women start thinking about the next social signposts of the year, usually around Easter when they want to avoid the questions about being single that people seem to think are appropriate to ask at family gatherings. As we get further away from Valentine’s Day and move towards spring, your success rate will start to tick up. Accept that this dry spell is going to happen and maximize your strategy so that you can catch every bit of that increase.

If you handle the feast and famine cycle of the holiday period correctly, you can date an incredible amount and come out of it better than when you went in. There is no reason to despair over not having anyone on New Years or Valentine’s Day but you do need to prepare; if you prepare then you will be rewarded.

Author Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article do not represent the views of the Social Security Administration or the United States Government. They are solely the views of Ted Stalcup in my personal capacity or as a representative of EmLovz. I am not acting as an agent of the Social Security Administration or the United States Government in this activity. There is no express or implied endorsement of Ted Stalcup or of EmLovz by either the Social Security Administration or the United States Government.