What This Post Is (and Is Not)
This post shares personal experience and practical observations, not professional advice. Everything here comes from years of dating experience, reading, and live face-to-face contact in social settings. These are not universal rules. What works for you will depend on your values, boundaries, and life context.
What you will get from this post is clarity, not certainty.
You will learn how to spot alignment earlier; use a simple green, yellow, red flag system based on observable behavior; apply realistic timelines that protect your emotional energy; run a quick financial alignment and direction check; and use live face-to-face contact in social settings to see how people actually show up.
With that said, this post represents only highlights.
It is not the full body of work.
Always prioritize consent, personal safety, and personal responsibility when applying anything you read here.
Why Dating Feels Confusing Right Now
Dating feels confusing because much of it happens in places where real behavior is hidden.
Profiles, endless texting, and curated images allow people to manage impressions. Many people spend weeks talking over digital platforms, only to feel immediate misalignment the moment they meet in person.
That confusion is not bad luck.
It comes from not having enough information early.
When dating stays abstract, you are forced to guess. You fill in gaps with hope, chemistry, or potential. By the time real behavior appears, emotional investment is already in play.
Live face-to-face contact in social settings changes that. How someone listens, regulates themselves, handles discomfort, and interacts with others becomes visible quickly.
This post is about learning how to notice those things sooner, before confusion turns into attachment.
Two Divorces and a Deliberate Reset
I didn’t arrive at this perspective theoretically. I arrived at it through repetition.
My first divorce in 2012 exposed me to patterns I didn’t yet understand. My second divorce in 2017 made it clear that those same patterns were repeating.
That was the turning point.
After my second divorce, I made a deliberate shift. I stopped reacting to dating emotionally and started studying it intentionally. I wasn’t trying to become more confident or impressive. I was trying to understand what I was missing.
I had been dancing since 2012, but before 2017, dance was primarily a way to move my body, regulate stress, and socialize. I was gaining experience, but I wasn’t yet treating that experience as information.
After my second divorce, that changed. I began consciously annotating what I was seeing and feeling—attraction, pacing, presence, consistency, and mismatch—using dance and live social settings as repeatable environments for observation.
That shift—from exposure to observation—is where the insights in this post come from.
Why I Stopped Using Dating Apps
I did briefly try dating apps at different points in time. But they were a waste of time for me.
Not because dating apps are inherently bad, but because they delay clarity. Apps keep people in messaging loops, which I call forever texting, where presentation matters more than behavior.
They were also less enjoyable.
Meeting people through live face-to-face contact in social settings gave me immediate information. How someone carries themselves. How they listen. How they treat others. How they respond to interest or rejection.
After a short period of experimentation, I stopped using apps entirely.
Dating worked better when it felt human, embodied, and observable.
Choose Social Settings That Reveal Behavior
Where you meet people matters.
Some social settings encourage distraction and surface interaction. Others allow conversation and opportunities for connection.
I met people through dance communities, classes, restaurants, comedy nights, jazz venues, and social gatherings. Places where you could talk, observe, and feel someone’s presence without forcing connection.
When the environment supports interaction, you do not need tactics.
You simply see how someone shows up.
Alcohol and Dating Clarity
I never needed alcohol to connect, and I advise against relying on it.
Alcohol lowers anxiety, but it also lowers awareness. That tradeoff matters. When awareness drops, perception becomes less precise. You may feel more relaxed, but you are also more likely to misread interest, boundaries, and emotional cues.
Alcohol can create false confidence. It can also create false attachment. Both feel convincing in the moment, and both often fade once the environment changes.
Because of that, clarity mattered to me.
I wanted to know whether attraction, interest, and connection were present without altering my state. If those things only appeared after alcohol entered the picture, I treated that as information rather than something to push through or override.
This is not about abstinence.
I do enjoy a vodka, soda, and a lime. I’m not opposed to alcohol. What I avoided was needing it to feel present, expressive, or comfortable. There’s a meaningful difference between sharing a drink and using alcohol as a bridge to connection.
When connection depends on liquid courage, it often rests more on the substance than the people involved. For me, dating worked better when I stayed regulated, observant, and clear-headed from the start.
A Full Life Changes How You Date
I show up with a life that is already full.
I am a Latin dancer, life coach, military veteran, martial artist, holder of a master’s degree, gym regular, home cook, well-traveled, and a father.
I also developed dating signatures over time.
Cooking rooted in Cuban and Puerto Rican cuisine.
Salsa and bachata as a way to connect and get to know people.
Dependability, accountability, and responsible behavior.
Direct honesty, even when uncomfortable.
Being a present father to my two daughters.
These traits were built over years. They are not widely appreciated. They are valued by a select few.
That selectivity matters.
When your life is grounded, you’re not trying to earn attention. You’re watching how someone fits into the life you already have.
How Environment Reveals Behavior
Following my second divorce, I began to notice that people changed depending on the environment. Those changes weren’t subtle. Energy shifted, confidence rose or dropped, engagement either stayed consistent or faded. Paying attention to those shifts made decisions clearer. They told me whether someone was worth continuing to pursue or whether it made sense to disengage early.
That awareness sharpened most when I was actively dancing and meeting people in live, face-to-face social settings.
Dancing placed me in repeated, low-pressure situations where conversation, movement, and proximity happened naturally. There was no time to rehearse responses or manage impressions. How comfortable someone felt, how present they stayed, and how they adjusted in the moment showed up without explanation.
Once I saw how revealing that could be, I began applying the same principle more deliberately.
I developed a habit of stacking dates by moving through a few different settings in the same evening—dinner, a bar, and sometimes a night of dancing. Changing environments made it easier to see how someone adapted, whether their energy stayed consistent, and how they handled different social dynamics.
After repeating this enough times, the contrast became impossible to ignore. Some people stayed essentially the same regardless of where they were. Others shifted noticeably depending on the setting and the audience.
Those differences mattered. They removed guesswork.
Consistency predicts long-term compatibility far better than intensity ever does.
Dating Timelines That Protect Your Heart
Many people sleep together by the third date. That pattern isn’t good or bad on its own, but it matters because intimacy changes how we interpret information. Physical closeness can create a sense of certainty before enough data exists to support it. Chemistry begins filling in gaps that knowledge has not yet earned. Deciding your boundary before you reach that point keeps the choice intentional rather than reactive.
Around three weeks, emotional attachment often accelerates. Familiarity settles in, routines begin to form, and expectations quietly take shape. At the same time, people tend to soften their standards because disengaging now feels more inconvenient than it did earlier. This window is a useful moment to pause and ask whether the connection still feels stable, or whether you are overlooking things you would have paid attention to in the first week.
Paying attention early matters because those first interactions often carry the clearest signals. Before attachment and momentum build, behavior is easier to read and easier to evaluate without distortion.
That’s where structure becomes useful.
Stacking experiences, as I spoke about in a previous section, can speed clarity by showing how someone behaves across different contexts in a short period of time. Moving from one setting to another reveals adaptability, emotional regulation, and consistency without needing months of gradual exposure. The goal isn’t intensity. It’s information.
Understanding timelines is necessary to protect clarity, not to rush intimacy. Used well, they create intentional pauses that help you stay honest with yourself while attraction is still strong and judgment remains intact.
Green, Yellow, and Red Flags
I didn’t start dating with a checklist in my head. The flags showed up first as feelings I couldn’t quite name, moments where something either settled me or subtly unsettled me.
Over time, patterns became clear.
Green flags felt boring in the best way. Reliability. Emotional steadiness. Respectful behavior that didn’t need to be announced. Plans were kept. Communication stayed consistent. There was no pressure to perform or accelerate things. Being around them felt calm, not exciting and unstable.
Yellow flags showed up as friction. Defensiveness over small questions. Avoiding conversations about money or responsibility. Friends, family, or social media quietly steering decisions. Nothing dramatic, just enough resistance to signal that alignment might require more effort than it was worth.
Red flags didn’t need interpretation. Dishonesty around money. Lack of autonomy. Emotional pressure early on. Behavior that created ongoing anxiety instead of curiosity. When those appeared, the body noticed before the mind caught up.
I learned to trust those signals.
They weren’t about labeling someone as good or bad. They were about fit. About whether two people could move forward without constant negotiation, tension, or self-abandonment.
These flags aren’t moral judgments.
They’re indicators of alignment.
Financial and Directional Alignment
I stopped trying to understand someone’s financial life by asking about numbers. Income didn’t tell me what I needed to know. Behavior did.
I learned to start with one simple question:
How do you think about saving versus spending?
Not to debate it. Just to listen.
The answer itself usually wasn’t the point. What mattered was how someone framed responsibility, tradeoffs, and the future. Some spoke with intention, even if their situation wasn’t perfect. Others deflected, joked, or became defensive. That reaction alone was information.
From there, I paid attention to behavior.
Daily habits mattered more than stated values. How they treated service workers. Whether they respected other people’s time. How they used free time when no one was watching. Whether spending was impulsive or considered. Whether planning felt natural or avoided.
That’s where alignment showed itself.
Status, for me, was never about income. It was about direction, responsibility, and stability. A sense that someone was building toward something rather than drifting through the present.
Money behavior compounds. Over time, it either creates options or pressure. Love doesn’t cancel that. It amplifies it.
Understanding this early saved me from confusion later.
Top 10 Lessons to Take With You
1. Live face-to-face contact reveals more than messaging
2. Consistency matters more than charm
3. Decide boundaries before chemistry clouds judgment
4. A full life prevents settling out of loneliness
5. Alcohol can blur judgment and attachment
6. Friends, family, and social media influence relationships more than most admit
7. Money habits predict stress better than attraction predicts love
8. If something feels off early, it usually is
9. Selectivity is clarity, not avoidance
10. Depth is rarely appreciated by many, only by the right few
This Is Only the Beginning
What you’ve read here are highlights.
They are not enough on their own to create lasting change. That requires continued reflection, experimentation, and accountability.
If you want to go further, you have options.
You can book a call with me to work through your patterns with structure and feedback.
You can download the 7-Day Reset to slow down and recalibrate how you are showing up right now.
Or you can pursue a deeper journey of self-discovery on your own through deliberate practice and reflection.
Whatever you choose, understand this clearly.
This post is not the destination.
It is the beginning of something deeper.
Clarity comes from continued work, not a single insight.
