One popular piece of dating advice that circulates the internet for women is: mirror a man’s energy. Mirror his actions. Mirror his investment.

But what if this advice, though seemingly harmless on the surface, is actually stealing from your feminine energy and your value as a woman?

Worse still, it’s making you show up with low value traits. 

The advice to mirror his energy seems fair, right? Seems like this advice is getting you to not chase a man and to not get over-invested. Right? 

It’s the kind of advice that makes you feel like you’re protecting yourself. 

However, instead it’s holding you back from true dating success. Here’s what I mean.

Why Mirroring A Man’s Energy Is Maladaptive Dating Advice

I want you to imagine for a moment that you were learning to ride a bike for the first time and you haven’t quite got your balance yet.

No matter how hard you try, you just seem to keep steering your bike wheels to the left. If you’re a parent and you’ve taught your child to ride a bike, you’ll know exactly what I mean. 

So the person instructing you sees you keep steering your bike to the left, and in an effort to help you, they say “turn right! Turn right! If you don’t turn right, you’re gonna crash into something on your left!”

But in reality, what they’re teaching you is called overcorrection. Because you’re still learning to calibrate your balance, you can’t seem to stop steering left. 

But by overcorrecting and steering hard to the right, you’re not going to be any more likely to avoid a crash, even though it might initially be an authentic part of the process of learning to balance on a bicycle. 

So how does this apply to dating?

In the case of dating, that “crash” is the complete and utter destruction of the emotional connection and emotional attraction in the relationship.

Often people advise you to mirror a man’s energy in order to minimise your early investment in him, to stop you from chasing men and instead be chased, and to avoid coming across too desperate.

For more on getting a man to chase you, read my article: How to Make Him Chase You and Value You [High Value Women Secrets].

SPECIAL REPORT: How to Become the World’s Most Attractive & Feminine Goddess (Even if you have no self esteem or no man has ever paid you any attention…) CLICK HERE to download it at no cost.

Mirroring = Losing Sight of the End Goal In Dating 

I understand that it’s hard to know how much interest to show versus how little to show in men, and sometimes we adopt this belief that in order to be feminine, we need to receive all the chasing and the effort from men. 

But this is where people lose sight of the end goal in dating: to create a pair bond with a man.That is the true art of excellence in balancing on the metaphorical bike.

Here’s the thing. You can’t create a pair bond without emotional attraction and emotional connection.

And you can’t create emotional attraction and emotional connection by mirroring a man’s actions. 

Because to create momentum in building attraction and connection requires a mutual desire to engage with each other and the desire to take the risk of at least reaching out every now and then. 

If you want to learn the high value way to reach out and initiate with men, take our free class on the dark feminine art of high value banter. CLICK HERE to take the class. 

Here’s the video I made on this topic: Don’t Mirror A Man’s Energy: The Price Women Pay…

The Real Cost of Mirroring His Actions

Here’s why mirroring a man’s energy will sabotage your efforts to create a pair bond and build emotional attraction. It’s because it makes you passive.

Throughout the years when I’ve taught this, women have said, but feminine energy IS passive.

Really? Does that mean that when you are “on top” in the bedroom, that you’re no longer feminine, because you’re taking the reins?

In order to create a strong rapport with a man, you can’t be passive. In fact if a man is really into you and you’re passive, he’ll feel that passiveness as disinterest.

Take this example (and my response) from a lady who posted in my facebook group:

Sigh. How did we get to this place in modern dating where women assume that their only job is to stay quiet and wait for the man to shoulder all the risk of reaching out?

This concept of being passive or mirroring is what I call a maladaptive dating strategy. Let me explain. 

Mirroring His Actions: A Maladaptive Dating Strategy

As a woman, you have a feminine bias for attaching early. This bias makes you get attached to a man earlier on average than a man will attach to you.

Why do you have this bias? So that you can inspire a man to fall in love and attach to YOU.

Now here’s the negative part of this feminine bias for attaching early: a lot of women don’t have a secure attachment style, so they find that managing their level of attachment to a man is about as easy as nailing jelly to a tree.

If you want to get a score for how securely attached you are, take my free quiz below. I’ve embedded it right here:

Do the quiz: What is my attachment style?

Furthermore, a lot of women with insecure attachment styles think attachment is wrong. 

So instead of understanding that there’s a high value way to inspire a man to fall in love through the feminine bias of attaching early, women decide it’s safer to avoid making mistakes, and instead play the dating game not to lose. 

So they’ll sit there and micro-manage their actions through this principle of mirroring. 

Now, is mirroring entirely wrong? It’s not wrong, it’s just not effective at making men fall in love or want to take you on a second, third and 4th date. 

Why would he? When he’s potentially got some playful, happy 23 year old women interested in spending a few hours with him and who aren’t bothered about making the mistake of seeming too keen? 

I know what you’re thinking. Do we have to compete with 23 year olds now? They have nowhere near my level of maturity, responsibility nor experience.

And you would be right. But be aware that when a good, masculine man is choosing, it makes much more intuitive sense to him to choose the playful woman who is reciprocating and returning interest. 

For more on developing the skill of playfulness within you, read my article on How to Banter With Men to Build Attraction. 

Why It Makes More Sense For Men to Choose the Woman Who Reciprocates?

Because that signals attunement. And the ability to attune is crucial if you want to build an actual relationship with a man and not just throw your rules upon him. 

But in order to attune, you need to be able to lean into your desire to attach. 

Yes it makes you scared. Yes, maybe your heart beats faster and it feels a little more risky.

But your attachment is needed to inspire a pair bond with a guy. You must learn to own your bias for attaching early. 

I understand that if you have an anxious attachment style, it becomes a much bigger problem to manage.

I get it. As an anxiously attached woman myself, I’d say that yes, your feminine bias for attaching early makes you vulnerable in early dating.

An anxious attachment makes you double down on that anxiety. That’s where it gets messy. 

But just because you’re anxiously attached, doesn’t mean you’re relegated to playing this dating game to lose. 

Only losers do that. 

And yes, dating is a game. The anthropologist Helen Fisher who studied the brain in love said that. She said, love is nature’s only game. 

I’ll add to that by saying you just need to play with good intent, which is by leaning into being playful. 

And don’t run from your natural feminine bias to attach early. That’d be like me advising men to stop showing interest in women they find attractive! How maladaptive would that advice be!

Use your bias for attaching early. It’s a feature, not a bug. 

This is exactly why I made my program, ‘High Value Attachment’. The promise of this course is to help you to use your innate feminine bias for early attachment to create deeper attraction with men and inspire a deeper commitment from him without you looking needy and low value. 

Discover how to use your feminine bias for attaching early to inspire men to fall in love: CLICK HERE.

So what’s the solution?

I’m sorry to say that authenticity and finding your balance on the metaphorical dating bike is never going to be smooth or easy. 

You need to be bold enough to take those risks of reaching out. Not chasing, but at least reaching out playfully. 

The lady whose question I mentioned (above) way overextended herself and spent far too much energy in trying to micromanage her own actions.

Her focus should have been on leading with playfulness. Her focus should have been on enjoying and having fun with a guy.

She would’ve spent just as much energy doing that, if not less energy.

At the end of the day, yes there’s that perpetual elephant in the room for us women: the need for a commitment from a guy and even the ring.

MORE: How to Get His Commitment And The Ring (3 Magical WORDS).

But that’s the thing…getting to that commitment and the ring is more often than not, counterintuitive.

You need to focus on your skills and the process of gaining those skills of playfulness and building emotional attraction. 

Don’t be passive. You’ll just lose good guys to attractive, innocent young women who aren’t afraid to be playful and show interest. 

Mirroring isn’t your superpower. Inspiring emotional attraction and emotional connection are. 

So if you want to develop the skills of playfulness and building attraction, let me invite you to our free high value banter class. 

In that class you’ll get plenty of free examples and ideas on how to lead with playfulness through banter. 

And I know that some of us never grew up bantering. If you’re like me, then you probably grew up in a more serious and toxic household. 

Those homes are never going to inspire anyone to develop the skill of playfulness. 

But I learned how to banter when I broke free of that toxic household, and you can too. So if you’d like to discover how to use the dark feminine art of high value banter to weed out the low effort men and the players and create emotional attraction with the BEST of men, make sure you join the class. You’ll be glad you did. 

Let me know in the comments what you feel about the idea of mirroring. I’m always open to discussion. 

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Renee is the founder of The Feminine Woman & co-founder of Shen Wade Media where we teach women how to show up as a high value high status woman whom easily inspires a deep sense of emotional commitment from her chosen man. She graduated with a bachelor of Law and bachelor of Arts majoring in sociology and psychology. She has been a dating and relationship coach for women in the past 15 years and together with her husband D. Shen at Commitment Triggers blog, they have positively influenced the lives of over 20 million women through their articles and videos as well as 10’s of thousands through paid programs through the Shen Wade Media platform.

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