Your life is about relationships. Everything is about relationships.

Your relationship to other people, to yourself, to the air you breath in, to the food you eat, to the world you interact with. All of it is relationships. Life is an elegant dance.

Let’s learn to dance.

Here a a couple of the most useful tips that have helped me recently.

Instigate invitations instead of waiting.

I spent most of my life waiting to be invited by people only to realise I would basically end up completely alone. Don’t expect people to invite you. Invite them instead. Create opportunities, talk about what you like, invite people to participate in your world.

Everyone likes to be invited. Start inviting. If you’re never invited, soon you will be invited too.

This is most self-evident while dancing. Especially as a man, you job is to invite. As a man, if you do not invite girls to dance you’re not gonna end up dancing much, if at all. Take charge, invite people to dance.

It takes two to tango.

This one took me the most time to finally understand. If you’re taking 100% responsibility for the relationship you are not in a relationship. 

Let me repeat that, because it is probably one of the most important pieces of advice concerning relationships:

If you’re taking 100% responsibility for a relationship you are not in a relationship.

This means you have to let go of people. If people don’t want to dance with you, move on. This goes for any relationship you have, from your parents, your siblings, your fiends, your bosses, your job, anything and anyone.

Why would you want to be with someone that doesn’t want to be with you?

If you invite a girl to dance and she says no, why in the world would you try to convince her that you’re worth dancing with? Just move on. There are plenty of other girls to invite. Most of them want to dance with you.

And yet, we tend to keep going to people that are unavailable. Repeatedly asking people who have already said no by virtue of not saying yes in the past. We keep trying to fix people or get them to change. We try to make people want other stuff than what they actually want. We try to convince people of our worth all the time. You know kind of like that annoying salesman who keeps trying to sell you his product when you’ve already clearly shown you’re not interested. Stop doing that.

Realise it takes two participants to willingly step into a common space to dance.

Stop wasting your energy trying to convince people to dance with you. Use that energy to invite people. Do that enough times and you’ll quickly see how fast you’re surrounded by a multitude of partners you can dance with.