10 Rules to Survive the Dating Jungle

By Tara Richter

You've entered the dating Jungle! I know, it's a bit scary out here. Doesn't matter if you have just got divorced, had a bad break-up or starting to date for the first time. It's not easy venturing out into the dating world. Within the book you'll discover how to become more approachable, learn the art of flirting & how to keep your dating anxiety under control. Use the 10 Rules to take control of your dating life today!

As seen on “Almost Royal” a BBC original series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richter Publishing LLC
• Release date: Jan 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310185267

Tara Richter

Tara Richter is the President of Richter Publishing LLC. She specializes in helping business owners how to write their non-fiction story in 4 weeks & publish a book in order to become an expert in their industry. She has been featured on CNN, ABC, Daytime TV, FOX, SSN, Channel 10 News, USA TODAY, Beverly Hills Times and radio stations all over the world! Her degree is in Graphic Design and she worked in the copy and print industry in the Silicon Valley. She has written and published 10 of her own books in just a few short years. Tara now has published many other authors in her local Tampa bay area including Anthony Amos & celebrity entrepreneur, Kevin Harrington, Shark from ABC’s “Shark Tank” with their joint book, “How to Catch a Shark.” Richter Publishing has streamlined the complex writing and publishing industry so anyone can become a published author in just a few weeks!

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DISCLAIMER

This book is designed to provide information on dating only. This information is provided and sold with the knowledge that the publisher and author do not offer any legal or medical advice. In the case of a need for any such expertise consult with the appropriate professional. This book does not contain all information available on the subject. This book has not been created to be specific to any individual’s or organizations’ situation or needs. Every effort has been made to make this book as accurate as possible. However, there may be typographical and or content errors. Therefore, this book should serve only as a general guide and not as the ultimate source of subject information. This book contains information that might be dated and is intended only to educate and entertain. The author and publisher shall have no liability or responsibility to any person or entity regarding any loss or damage incurred, or alleged to have incurred, directly or indirectly, by the information contained in this book. You hereby agree to be bound by this disclaimer or you may return this book within the guarantee time period for a full refund.

In the interest of full disclosure, this book contains affiliate links that might pay the author or publisher a commission upon any purchase from the company. While the author and publisher take no responsibility for the business practices of these companies and or the performance of any product or service, the author or publisher has used the product or service and makes a recommendation in good faith based on that experience.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

INTRODUCTION

Have you just come back to the dating world and finding it a bit scary out there? Are you the only single one left in your group of friends and can’t figure out why? Are you new to the online dating world and don’t know where to start? Have your romantic relationships just not turned out the way you envisioned?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this is the book for you! I would consider myself an expert at dating by this time in my life. I am currently 34 years old, been engaged twice, and married once. After I divorced who I thought was my soul mate, I really started taking a new look at my romantic relationships and why they just weren’t going in the direction I thought they would be. I stopped blaming everyone else for my bad romances and finally started to look inside myself. My dating history had one common, painfully obvious factor: me. Going back into the dating world, I didn’t want to do another repeat of my marriage. I had truly thought I found my life partner at the time and was rudely awakened when it didn’t turn out the way I dreamed it. I knew I really needed to dig deep down inside myself to find the roots of my romantic problems. I was finally going to put a stop to the broken record of bad romances. I was finally going to have the relationships I always dreamed of. I deserved it, and I was going to make it happen!

As I ventured out into the scary dating world of fakes, freaks, and fanatics, I soon remembered why I wanted to be married in the first place. The dating world is more like a jungle. Before you venture out, you need to be armed with wisdom, courage, strength, and possibly some mace. Strap a few cans of pepper spray to your Gucci belt, clip a few throwing stars on your Prada heels, throw some face paint on, and use your oversized Coach bag as your shield. You are ready to endure the beasts in the jungle!

Okay, well, maybe it’s not that bad, but mace isn’t a bad thing to carry! You do have to be careful out in the dating jungle because you just don’t know who you’re going to meet. There’s the guy who’s only looking for a good time, and after you sleep with him, he’ll never call you again. Follow that with the garden-variety liars, cheaters, con artists, druggies, married ones, and straight-up psychopaths. It almost makes a girl just want to stay home every night with a bottle of wine, a couple packs of cookies, and a box set of Sex and the City. Even as wonderful as that sounds, you’re definitely never going to find Mr. or Mrs. Right by sitting on your couch at home eating cookies. You have to take life by the stirrups. Get out there and live it!

Once I decided to start going on dates, I started setting rules for myself to follow so I wouldn’t slip back into my old dating habits. If a date didn’t go well, I would reflect on it afterwards and develop a new rule. I wasn’t going to let all these bad dates go to waste. They were field research. Learn from the bad, improve, and move on. I starting writing my rules, and this was how the book was born. As I discussed my dating problems with my other girlfriends, I noticed we were encountering a lot of the same issues. These rules are a group effort—a combination of our experiences out in the jungle. There are quality guys and girls out there. You and I are quality people, right? If you follow these rules they will help you navigate through the scary jungle, bypassing the snakes and lizards to find your loving Tarzan or Jane.

RULE #1

HEAL ALL YOUR WOUNDS FIRST BEFORE LOVING ANOTHER

This is the most important rule in the entire book. It is why I put it before all the others. It is very important that you master this rule before you go on to any other rule in the book. It may take you a couple of weeks or months, and that’s okay. Take your time with it. How many wounds need healing will dictate how long you need. This isn’t a race, so don’t rush it.

As has been said many times over, you can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself. How can you expect to give someone else love if you can’t give it to yourself first? In order to love yourself, you need to heal any emotional wounds that you have endured over your lifetime. These can be any bad relationships in your life—boyfriends, husbands, fathers, brothers, mothers, close friends, et cetera. The first relationships that you develop with your immediate family during adolescence have a huge impact on your dating life and how you perceive an intimate relationship should function.

This is my first rule in the dating jungle because if you don’t start off on a positive place within yourself, none of the other rules will matter. You would only be building the rules on very shaky foundations. If you had just one bad relationship and learned from it, that’s great. That’s how it should be. You realize that’s what you didn’t want in a partner and went for the opposite in another. This is healthy, growing and developing in the right way. If you’ve been in a string of bad relationships, one after another, you need to start taking a look inside yourself. I did.

I had three major relationships in my life that were pretty much all the same, just different jerks. They might as well have been the same guy with different faces and addresses. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. After my marriage ended I thought I was going insane. I couldn’t believe how I kept finding these crazy guys. What was wrong with me? I thought to myself, I’m attractive, intelligent and down-to-earth. Why can’t I find a normal guy? I really thought maybe all guys were jerks, or that I just deserved this. Maybe love just wasn’t in the cards for me. It seemed like everything else in my life was perfect, besides finding love.

Before we called it quits on our marriage, we tried going to marriage counseling together to see if we could work it out. My husband, we’ll call Lou, only made it to 2 sessions, and then we decided to file for divorce. I decided to stay and continue therapy. I figured I was going to need it to help me through the devastation of divorce, and it couldn’t hurt, right? I used the time to talk about why Lou was so bad. I complained about how rude he was . . . inconsiderate, unfaithful, and a liar. I figured she would agree with me since she had already met him and knew what I was going through. Instead she just looked at me calmly and asked why I was letting him treat me this way. She told me I was a smart, level headed person; why would I let someone manipulate me?

I wasn’t sure. I never really stopped to think of it like that. I was always putting the blame on him—he did this to me, and I’m the victim. This started to turn my thinking in a new direction. We stopped focusing on Lou and starting focusing on me. I went from being a passive actor in my own life to running the script.

Over the next five months of therapy, I came to the realization that the relationship I had with my father wasn’t all puppy dogs and fairytales like I thought it had been. At this point in my life, my father and I were actually really close. It hadn’t always been that way. When I was about 3, my mother and father divorced. I didn’t know why at the time, and I still don’t know all the details. But when I was older my father did confess to me after a few drinks one night that he was unfaithful. After the divorce, he moved about 3 hours away, to a bigger city. He would come around every now and then, though I remember not wanting to go spend time with him. For about the next 10 years I really don’t have any memories of him being around. My mother put herself through school and eventually got a teaching job in the city where my father was living. We ended up buying a house within close proximity of him. It was then, around when I was 12, that he starting participating in our lives more often, but the relationship was still rocky.

My mom was very busy working and raising two kids, so home-cooked meals were rare. We usually went out for dinner to fast food restaurants. The extra calories didn’t sit well on my already large frame. During adolescence I was very tall. Adding extra pounds to an