Women need to be more proactive if they’re looking for love, says relationship coach Matthew Hussey, who has tips on how to do it.

Before becoming a love coach, I spent some time researching female relationship patterns. I interviewed lots of women and realised one thing in particular about them: they wait too much. I believe that at any given moment a person has two options – to wait for an opportunity or to create it. When it comes to love, every woman I’ve spoken to seems to wait for it to happen to them, instead of making it happen. Like most men, I enjoy coming up with strategies and formulas for getting from A to B, and I’ve spent the last two years working on them for women and their relationship objectives. I’ve developed a tried-and-tested, proactive approach for them to achieve success in their love lives. So, if I could teach women nothing else, it would be to be proactive in a way they never have before. Stop waiting and start creating. For many women this means getting over one fundamental barrier – fear of rejection. Most women at some stage in their lives have been hurt in love and this usually leads to a ‘playing with fire’ effect where they stop taking risks in their love lives because they equate taking risks to pain.

If you come at the situation in a more carefree way, though, you’ll reduce the impact of a so-called ‘rejection’ (which is actually just to do with the guy not being the one for you). Three practical ways to do this are: one, to add more to your life. We usually make too much of things when we don’t have enough else going on, so always be adding more strings to your bow; trying new things, meeting new people and building on your life – that way, if a relationship goes wrong, you’ll have a much stronger foundation to fall back on. Two, change the meaning of your situation. While we can’t always control events, we can control what they mean and a situation is whatever you label it as. So if, when you go through a break-up, you label it ‘the end of the world’, it will be that for you, but if you label it ‘an exciting new opportunity’, it will be that instead. Finally, remember everything leads to growth. Whatever the relationship issue, half the battle is realising that it’s all necessary pain, because it makes you grow. Just use it to become the person you want to be.

While being proactive will get you more of what you want in your relationships, as a man, I can tell you that our hunter instinct is evolutionarily hardwired into us. So, although we’ve come a long way since living in caves, many guys still want to do the chasing. So, I advise women to take the white handkerchief approach. In old times, a woman would drop her handkerchief for a guy to pick up, using it as a prop to instigate conversation. Although the woman was essentially pulling the strings at the outset, the guy believed he’d initiated things. A modern take on this is that, if you see a guy you like and want to talk to, instead of doing the obvious thing of walking over and initiating a conversation, start by asking him for a small favour – like directions to the cloakroom, if you’re in a bar. The effects of doing this are threefold: you’ve initiated conversation in a way that doesn’t risk you being ‘rejected’; engaging in conversation is easy because you casually lead on to asking him more questions; and, lastly, the interaction begins with him investing something in you, and no matter how small that is, the effect is powerful.