Why Does Evan Coach Smart, Strong, Successful Women?

Evan,

What do you mean by smart, strong and successful women? If a woman doesn’t meet those criteria, does that mean that she can’t find love or just can’t be coached by you? I ask because a lot of love coaches out there use the same terminology and since I am a lawyer with an Ivy League background whose practiced for over 13 years but have had sporadic employment over the last five years. I wonder if I meet the criteria or have to “fix” something or figure out what’s wrong in my life first before I can attract the right man? —Mimi

Hmm. Interesting.

It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would think:

a) A woman can’t find love if she’s not smart, strong, and successful.

b) I would refuse to coach someone who does not fully categorize herself as “smart, strong, and successful.”

So let me do something unusual for you, Mimi.

I want to pull the veil off my business and be fully transparent about how I came to do this job and choose my clients.

It’s a far more interesting answer than my answer to you: (which is, in a nutshell, “No”)

In 2001, I was the most successful unsuccessful screenwriter in Hollywood. I’d written a dozen sitcom scripts, a dozen feature film scripts, had agents and managers, and took meetings with executives at every network and studio in town. But finally, after a brief flirtation with success in the form of a Top 3 finish in Matt Damon/Ben Affleck’s Project Greenlight, I had to face the facts: I was 30-year-old, penniless, and didn’t even have a resume.

Men need help, but only women ASK for help.

I took a job answering phones in customer care at JDate, and enrolled simultaneously in UCLA’s MFA program, so, at the very least, if I couldn’t get paid to write screenplays, I could get paid to be a screenwriting professor.

Predictably, I got fired from JDate after 9 months (something about telling a verbally abusive and mentally unhinged caller to “fuck off”), but used my free time to write my first book, “I Can’t Believe I’m Buying This Book: A Commonsense Guide to Successful Internet Dating” and build my first business, e-Cyrano.com, an online dating profile writing service.

Fortunately, the book got a great write-up in Time Magazine, which led to features in USA Today and on CNN, and the next thing I knew, I dropped out of film school to make a go of running e-Cyrano full time.

Suddenly, I was writing ten to twenty online dating profiles a week, and achieving great success. Clients confided in me:

“This is working great. I’m getting so much more attention. The emails from strangers are even better. What should I do now?”

The next thing you know, by late 2004, I was an online dating coach, charging a minimal amount to help people with their online dating usernames, headlines, photos and emails.

Online dating coaching led quickly to dating coaching. Dating coaching led to relationship coaching. I wrote “Why You’re Still Single: Things Your Friends Would Tell You If You Promised Not to Get Mad” in 2006. This blog began in 2007. I got married in 2008.

While I was officially a “dating coach”, it became readily apparent that my clients were, through no doing of my own, 80% female.

It was further verification of my theory that men need help, but only women ASK for help. After a few years of playing with pronouns and trying to write content for both genders, I was forced to make a business decision as I built a new EvanMarcKatz.com in 2010.

I was going to cut men off of my mailing list entirely.

Not because I didn’t like coaching men — as a man with vast dating and coaching experience, I LOVE helping guys and often find it easier to lead them to success. It was simply a matter of economics.

Why was I contorting myself to attempt to offer paid advice to a demographic (men, 35-55) who pretty much never ask for it?

The only question then was how I was going to market myself. And after years and years of teaching myself to be an entrepreneur and businessman, I learned something valuable — the narrower your niche, the more passionate your following.

I asked myself, “Who are the women who are most likely to be receptive to my services and shell out hard-earned money for them?”

It took me 10 years, 300 dates, and nearly 5 years of coaching others to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Was it the 80-year-old woman on a fixed income?

Was it the 50-year-old struggling single mom, who can barely put food on the table for her kids, much less worry about dating?

Was it the 21-year-old college graduate who gets hit on everywhere she goes and isn’t close to settling down?

Of course not. It was the woman who was already hiring me. I knew who she was. I’d just never labeled her before.

She was the female version of me.

Very bright. Very driven. Very ambitious. Very busy. Very social. Very confident. Very picky. Very critical. Very difficult. Very blind.

It took me 10 years, 300 dates, and nearly 5 years of coaching others to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Once I did, I was able to create a system that would allow women to achieve results much quicker. Who were the women who were most likely to sign up? Smart, strong, successful women, of course!

These are women who have everything going for them but their dream man.

These are women who have masculine energy but want a man who is “more man” than they are.

These are women who have worked so hard in life to achieve independence that they can’t even see that their own good qualities are the biggest obstacle to their own success in love.

I wrote my third book, “Why He Disappeared” in mid-2010, when my business coach, another smart, strong, successful woman, told me that the most important question I could answer for women like her was “Why did he disappear”?

In that last book, I articulated the same thoughts I’ve formed over the years on this blog: how smart, strong, successful women struggle because:

a) They want the 1% of the men who are more impressive than they are.
b) These men often have serious downsides and flaws, including selfishness, narcissism, workaholism, and commitmentphobia.
c) The best of this 1% often doesn’t want to date the female versions of himself.

As a result, smart, strong, successful women can either modify their behavior and become more traditionally feminine (supportive, warm, patient, nurturing, playful) OR simply choose DIFFERENT men who DO want women who are – for example – tough, blunt, critical, and busy.

Remember, the reason I am successfully able to give this advice is because a) I am very much like the women I advise and b) I am also very much like the MEN they seek.

So, Mimi, is there something wrong with you if you’re not an alpha female? Absolutely not. In fact, dating is probably easier for you.

And if you’re wondering how you should interpret my advice, here’s all I got for you: everything I write here is something I deeply believe in, something that I’ve lived through, and something for which I have considerable evidence to support.

If you want to date a smart, strong, successful man, you will find that my advice works wonders. If you want to date a shy, insecure man who is afraid to ask you out, waits for you to call him, and never looks at/thinks about/slept with other women, I’m probably not your guru.

But make no mistake, Mimi. You don’t have to “fix” yourself. You just have to understand the behaviors and thoughts of good men, and make better decisions and choices. That goes for all women, not just smart, strong, successful ones.