If you’ve ever played high school sports, like baseball or softball, coaches like to get the team together in a pre-game huddle to pump everyone up. Consider this like your pre-game huddle in which you’ll be introduced to the philosophy behind the concepts that will be presented in this book. The goal is to offer you an alternative perspective on dating and relationships during an age of instant gratification.

Loveball, at its root, is the recreational sport of dating. Some people love the sport. Other people hate it. How much you love or hate any kind of sport really depends on your competency level relative to how much you enjoy it. If you suck at something, you probably won’t like it as much. But if you stick with it and put in the time it takes to better yourself, you’ll probably enjoy it much more because of the personal investment you put into improving your competency level.

Even so, there is still probably at least one sport you currently follow that you really enjoy no matter how bad you are at it. For me, that sport is dating. Despite the fact that I have been writing about dating and relationship topics for almost six years, I suck at dating and relationships. In fact, it’s the whole reason I started writing about the topic in the first place.

It all started the week before Spring Beak in 2006 when I experienced what has thus far become the biggest break up of my life. We’ve all had one at some point in our lives. Maybe you’re going through one right now. I won’t bore you with all the sappy details, but I will say that it was a very traumatic experience for me resulting in multiple broken phones, a late night visit to the emergency room after a heated argument turned bloody, and things flying over the balcony when I finally decided it was time to get out no matter how much I loved the guy.

It was a heartbreaking experience to witness someone I loved “Circle The Drain” as Katy Perry sings about in a song from her Teenage Dream album. Over a year had passed since our breakup, and only two weeks since our last seemingly hopeful conversation, when I received news of his untimely death, one I initially feared would happen in the bed we shared not long before.

It’s one thing to read about the different stages of the grief process, but it’s very surreal and out of this world when you have to actually experience it yourself. I suppose everyone deals with pain in different ways: drugs, sex, alcohol, shopping, ice cream, TV binges. We all have our poison. Unfortunately, most poisons end up killing you one way or another. My college boyfriend was proof of that. And quite frankly, so am I. The only difference is I’m still alive, mainly because I’ve had his death hanging over me all these years and could hear his faint whispers echo in my mind from beyond the ashes and into my dreams, “I know you hurt, but you don’t want this for yourself.”

After trying out almost every coping mechanism out of the book, I ultimately turned to writing as a safe, therapeutic way to manage my pain and deal with grief in my own way without completely shutting down.

I once heard from a grief coach by the name of Aurora Winter that it takes the average person something like five to eight years to get over a devastating loss, whether it be the loss of a loved one, a pet, or even a career. She founded the Grief Coach Academy to help people through the grieving process in less time. I couldn’t afford her grief coaching services so I was pretty much on my own, although I had been seeing the same therapist on and off since my life first started falling apart over and over again on an almost annual basis. So here I am, almost eight years later going through my final stages of grief because I lost most of my time in a state of quiet depression. In fact, the first few years are actually kind of a blur for me. Clarity only came to me within these last few years.

There are five emotional stages of grief that everyone goes through when they have lost a loved one: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It doesn’t usually happen in that exact order, but each stage is a natural part of the process.

I started writing about dating and relationship topics in the fall of 2008 for my college newspaper during the anger stages of grief. I was asked to write a weekly column on a topic of my choosing, so I proposed a dating column in an effort to bridge the gap in gender communication. What prompted this proposal was the anger I felt deep inside listening to my peers complain about such petty stuff in their relationships. I couldn’t help but zone out and think: If you’re boyfriend were to drop dead tomorrow, would this still really matter to you? I would get so upset because the women around me just couldn’t accept that men will be men and women will be women. As on outsider looking in, there was clearly a difference in communication styles between the genders and a lack of empathy on both sides. 

Perhaps it was my experience living with men for most of my life that made me more empathetic towards them after hearing all the things women would subject them too sometimes. We women are straight up cray-cray.

So I created this concept of Loveball under the notion that men have a tendency towards simplicity while women have a tendency towards complexity. That’s why there are entire industries dedicated to helping men understand women and helping women understand men. But I’m not here to help you understand each other better. I’m here to do you all a favor. I’m here to level the playing field, eradicate double standards (impossible feat, I know, but try I will), and most importantly help you practice good sportsmanship when it comes to rejection so you don’t get cray-cray on anyone. Been there, done that, not again seems to be universal mantra the older we get.

What initially started as an inside joke among friends has since become this evolving Loveball philosophy that people have been repeatedly asking me to put into book format. Well, here it is finally.

Dating from the Sidelines

Let the truth be told: I suck at dating and relationships. I hated the whole process of dating. And I used to dread first dates even more. But I knew it was something I had to do to help me move on. After all, what better way to move on than to start dating again? It can certainly help keep you occupied while you figure things out for yourself and start re-evaluating your whole outlook, your relationship needs and your innermost desires.

I hated dating so much that I even started a silly little blog called “Dating is a Payne” where all I did was complain about how backwards dating had become and share some of my dismal and even risqué dating experiences. Then I started writing for Examiner.com as the LA Singles Examiner and started to change my outlook given that I would be writing for a potentially larger audience beyond just my friends and family. No one wants to read about the pain in dating, I thought. So I ripped a page from my youth softball days and started drawing parallelisms between my experiences with dating and softball, a sport I still enjoy even if I’m sitting on the bench doing stats. That’s when it started to dawn on me.

Dating is a sport like any other. Every new player has to start from somewhere. Depending on your skill level, you may start out as rookie benchwarmer, learning the game through observation, trial and error and experience as a substitute player. But over time, every sub yearns to be a full-time player at some point and a more integral part of the game. As far as I was concern, dating was no different than a game of softball. If you want to play in an upper division league, then you've got to step up your game to become an upper division player.  

If you’re reading this book, there is a strong possibility that you’re over the dating game and you’re tired of playing games when you don’t even know the rules. And it’s not you’re fault because no one really told them to you. You’re just learning as you go through observation and experience much like the rest of us.

If you grew up in a household that held traditional beliefs, you may be downright confused about how this whole dating thing works, especially once you entered college, or maybe the real world, and realized that all your morals and beliefs were pretty much thrown out the window, whether you did it yourself or someone else did it for you.

Like many of you, I grew up believing in one pattern of dating, that you go on a few dates, you get married, and then you have sex and spend the rest of your lives together, whether you're happy or not. Then came the 90s, or the age of instant gratification, and all of that changed with the advent of the Internet. By the time I entered college, the patterns of dating had shifted dramatically, and I quickly learned that college dating was completely backwards from everything I knew about relationships.

In college, it seemed like more and more people were having sex first, and if the sex was really good or more than halfway decent, then they would decide to date, get married, have kids and all that merry jazz. So I went through college foolishly believing that sex equals a relationship. Boy, was I in for a rude awakening. 

Years later, I had to learn the hard way, one fuck after another, what it really takes to get the relationship I wanted and to make it work for me at that particular point in my life because, let's be real, our relationship needs change based on where we're at in life. And at that point in my life, I was needy, over-emotional, and incredibly insecure with myself. What I needed at that time was someone to validate me, and I always expected that void in my heart to be filled by anyone of my boyfriends until one day, I got a clue, started picking apart my love life piece by piece and finally discovered how to make the dating game work for me instead of against me.

It all starts with YOU.

If you’re reading this book, maybe you can relate to this experience of a generational shift in dating paradigms. Maybe you’re disappointed with your current dating pool, or maybe you’re just fed up with players and womanizers playing with your heart like it’s a throw toy for a clingy puppy.

Maybe you’re tired of being treated like a piece of meat at the meat market. Or perhaps you’ve become way too jaded by the dating game after a string of romantic misfortunes that all left you with nothing more than a broken heart and a few extra pounds.

You have all this love inside your heart that you’re dying to give away, but you don’t want to give it away to just anyone... not the way you would your genitalia, anyway. After all, your genitals don’t really mean anything to you, do they? They’re but pawns in a twisted game you enjoy playing with yourself.

O! but your heart …

For once, just once, you wish you could meet someone who was on your same level, someone who was actually in your league, so to speak. Well, guess what? I believe you can! And in this book, I’m going to show you how you can create your very own, exclusive dating league and get the relationships you’ve always wanted.

Thinking Outside the Box

Creating a dating league of your own is easier than you think, but it involves changing the way you think and approach dating from the very beginning. Too many of us blindly enter the dating game filled with false hopes and high expectations that usually end up in disappointment. And when you’re constantly being disappointed by your dates, it’s easy to say “Screw this!” and give up on finding love or meeting someone worthy of your time. So you delete your online dating profile only to re-create it all over again a year later until the cycle repeats itself.

Dating Tip #1: Lose the false expectations.

The most important thing you can do to become a more successful dater is to change your attitude and perception through the practice of reframing, which refers to your ability to take a seemingly negative situation and turn into a positive experience. To help you start reframing the way you think, your first need to understand one key principle: The quality of your relationships affects the quality of your life.

The impact of relationships on a person’s quality of life is undeniable. Unhealthy and strained relationships have been known to create more stress, lower academic or work performance, reduce productivity and have a negative impact on a person’s self-esteem. On the other hand, healthy and happy relationships can lead to less stress, higher academic or work performance, increased productivity and even have a positive impact on a person’s self-esteem. Like it or not, our romantic relationships can have an adverse effect on our overall quality of life if we don’t choose your partners wisely. Can you think of a past or present relationship that may have enhanced or diminished your quality of life?

Keeping the quality principle in mind, it is also said that the sum of your worth can be determined by the average worth of your five closest friends. If you surround yourself with supportive people who are constantly adding value to your life with shared intellect, you can expect your quality of life to increase. Likewise, if you surround yourself with unsupportive people who are constantly putting you down and adding zero value to your life, you can expect your quality of life to decrease.

Dating Tip #2: Adopt a game-like mentality.

Dating is a game. Until I was able to finally accept this notion, I actually thought dating was a pain, so much so that I used to dread going on dates and even started a blog called “Dating is a Payne” where I basically bitched about the dating game and shared some of my own experiences for anyone who could relate.

I absolutely loathed the dating game, and I hated to even think of it as a game because I didn’t like playing games that didn’t have any clearly defined rules. So you know what I did? I created my own damn rules.

If there is anything I’ve learned after nearly a decade of one-night stands and booty calls, pseudo relationships and friends with benefits, online dating and casual flings, it’s that dating isn’t about finding love and romance. It’s not about finding a relationship or getting married. And it’s certainly not about filling that void in your heart because you, or someone else, couldn’t.

On the contrary, dating is all about finding yourself and getting to know who you are from the inside out. It is my belief that every moment and interaction in life is a journey of self-exploration as we make endless discoveries about ourselves by meeting new people, interacting with them and discovering their reactions to us. If we can understand ourselves first and foremost, then we can better understand the people around us and, ultimately, build stronger relationships with the people that are part of our worlds.

The most important thing you can do to for yourself as you jump back into the dating scene is accept and come to terms with the fact that dating is, in fact, a game. But no one ever said you had to play the game by anyone else’s rules but your own.

Even I had to admit to myself that dating is a game and, last time I checked, games are supposed to be fun. So if dating is not fun to you, then you’re not doing it right. This book was created to help you become a better dater and date only on terms deemed acceptable by you and only you. This book is about giving you the foundation to create your own rulebook for what it takes for someone to date YOU.

Through the pages you are about to read, I am going to bring back the fun and excitement in your dating life by simplifying the dating game into three simple elements: identifying the players on the dating field, determining the value of the prize you want, and creating your own playbook for winning that prize, otherwise known as the relationship of your choice.

If dating is a game, and love (or lust) is the prize, then I am in it to win it and you should be too.

Are you ready to become a Loveballer?