Amid the shelves and shelves of dating manuals and relationship guides, you’ll find Sam de Brito’s Building a Better Bloke. It’s neither a dating manual nor a relationship guide (strictly speaking, at least) – but chances are, your local bookstore will group it with these genres.
What sets de Brito’s book apart is that it’s actually concerned with building a better bloke, as the title suggests. It’s not about providing men with cheesy pick-up lines on order to nab the ladies, or encouraging them to change their lives in ten seconds. It’s a funny, frank and sometimes brutal look at improving the whole person – and de Brito acknowledges that this isn’t a quick-fix.
De Brito, who writes a blog for the Sydney Morning Herald called All Men are Liars, wrote the book because he could see two problems. The first was that men could be pretty clueless when it came to dating and the second was that they were often looking for guidance in all the wrong places.
Lauren Smelcher chatted to Sam about how to build a better bloke.
Early in your book, you say that men who follow the advice of ‘pick-up artists’ won’t find the women they’re looking for because all they’re doing is following a script. What do you think is the best way to approach a woman?
Well, the ‘pick-up’ guides do work – but if you want to attract a person of quality, then there’s more to it. It’s the same for women. Women will see through the game that these pick-up artists play pretty quickly if they’re intelligent.
Why are we so fascinated by the complexity of dating? And why do we find it so hard?
Dating has changed so much in the last forty or fifty years. Back then, people had very ritualised forms of dating – you’d go to a debutante ball, or you’d go out dancing. Today, we have so many other ways of meeting people – but I think it’s made us more clueless than ever. The onus is still on the man to approach the woman. And that still causes anxiety for a lot of men.
In your blog, you discuss ‘Perfect Man Syndrome.’ Do you think too many women are limiting themselves by only searching for the ‘ideal’ man?
Well, the blog is for a male audience, and it was meant to be provocative! So it’s not necessarily what I believe. But in saying that, some of the women I’m friends with are conditioned to expect far too much from men. I think that some women have a distorted view of what Australian men are really like.
So I guess I see my job as getting the two to meet in the middle – that is, reduce the expectations of women and make men pull their socks up. Maybe then we’ll all be a lot happier!
One of the unique things about your book is that it’s not simply a ‘dating guide’ – it’s really about self-improvement for the whole person. Why do you think that’s so important?
In doing research for this book, I found that a lot of ‘dating literature’ is quite manipulative and it’s focused on quick fix solutions. I think that’s kind of like putting wallpaper over rising damp – by giving a man a pick-up line, you’re not really solving the problem.
So I think we need a more holistic approach – men need to have active interests. They have to take care of themselves physically – not to be conventionally attractive but because it’s good for you. They need to have strong female and male friends. I also think it’s important for men to have a network of other men around him – women are so lucky to have close friends who they hang out with frequently.
And finally, I think it’s important to give something back. The charitable impulse is something that everybody should tap into.
What do you think of the new ‘tough love’ philosophy behind womens’ dating guides, such as He’s Just Not that Into You?
Well, I think they’re probably right. Let’s face it, a man will crawl over broken glass for the possibility of sex – so if he’s not calling you back, then he’s probably not that into you.