Dating Coaches Are On the Rise. Some Women Are Investing Thousands

Yahoo

14 hours ago

In October 2023, after two years of no dating — preoccupied caring for her sick parents and recovering from a difficult break-up — Shirley Williams, 39, implemented a new strategy to find her husband. First, she'd complete self-evaluation exercises, where she'd discover her flirting style and humor type, but also her hang ups: overly assertive and unreceptive. Next, she'd overcome her reluctance to dating apps, creating profiles on Bumble, Match, and Hinge. If she matched with 170 men, only 30 would make it to the next round in a process called 'funneling,' weeding out those who could get her number. When only four made an impression upon Williams — who used a strict 20-minute phone screening to determine whether or not they could take her on a physical date — they had a week to ask her out. (She would only agree to quick meetings over coffee or ice cream.) Only one man, Ty, would keep her interest. By their 10th date, he asked her to be his girlfriend. In January, he asked her to be his wife and they eloped on April 29th. She credits her happy ending to Anwar White — the self proclaimed 'Fairy God Brother' whose 'Get Your Guy' program guided her through the process.
'I invested $10,000 into my dating coach Anwar White and met my fiance in one year…on Hinge,' Williams told her 4,400 followers on TikTok in April. 'Anwar always preaches 'You are the CEO of your love life,' and I am the CEO of Willie B Studios,' says Williams, referring to her content studio. 'We are doing very well over there, and I needed to be taking the same strategies and tactics and bringing them into my love life.' Only 3,500 people liked Williams' post, but her video circulated over 10,000 times, sparking a conversation within Black social spaces: Was Williams a victim of exploitation, or was her investment necessary? If she could afford it and it worked, who cares? 'I've been working with [Williams] for multiple years,' White tells Rolling Stone. 'A lot of people are focused on the price point because it's a fair amount of money, but they're not understanding that that price is me being available to her 24/7, for multiple years at a time, but also all of my intellectual property.' (He has more affordable classes starting at $149.) Over the past few months, the topic of Black women's ignorance in dating men has gained traction online. White wants to change the narrative for women like Williams, and his 586 clients to date.
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Yet in a tech-forward world, which has contributed to the loneliness epidemic, paired with an overall decline in marriage, has the rise of dating content and coaching become a business tactic preying upon women's desperations and vulnerabilities? Or are dating coaches, like Anwar White, responding to a cultural need and building a new ethic within the dating and marriage sphere?
'I want Black women to be very self-centered,' White tells Rolling Stone. According to Census data, heterosexual Black women, like Williams, are the least likely to marry. 'I coined this term called 'white women audacity,' because having that in dating is very important. It's about you focusing on yourself, making sure you're happy and that your pleasure is first. A lot of women, specifically Black women, have been conditioned to prioritize their parents or men and that's not something that is going to serve them.'
White's insight into the dating world comes from his experience as a Black gay man, and from observing the relationships of his maternal figures, who raised him in Georgia. His great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother were each married three times. 'This work is very personal to me. I've seen a firsthand account of this landscape and what it can do for Black women.' White found his first clients on the elementary school playground, where he paired up his peers. But after he completed his MBA at Columbia University in 2010, he realized his gift and started his business. 'Being a gay male, I navigated both boy and girl circles,' says White. He noticed how successful his women friends were in their careers, but not in love. 'I was like 'Let me take this over,' and before I knew it, they were in relationships within a couple months and in a couple of years they were either engaged or married.' By 2015, after advising dozens of friends and family, White was being recommended to extended networks. He'd soon quit his corporate job in fashion and become a certified dating coach. In 2020, when the pandemic hit, he was among the dozens of dating coaches who migrated to TikTok and Instagram reels, expanding his clientele even more.
White is not without his critics: Some believe that, regardless of his sexuality, it is problematic for a man to be dictating women's lives and behaviors. Yet White maintains his intentions are not to mislead. 'I'm not a single man out here or cheating on his wife or some narcissist trying to get women to fall in love with me,' says White, who is married. 'Ninety percent of this work is inner work, it's not male centered. It's about understanding their clarity and using dating as an opportunity to practice,' a practice that White feels historically, Black people, especially women, haven't had autonomy to do freely.
Dr. Sarah Adeyinka-Skold, a professor and researcher of gender and sociology at Loyola Marymount University, believes it's unfair to judge how Black women choose to find love. 'It would behoove people, even Black women, to ask, 'Why am I mad when a Black woman decides this is how she's going to solve her problem?' she says. 'Black women are the most disadvantaged in the dating market because of the way American society is structured. We have to survive racism and sexism at the same time, which creates people who are disintegrated in a system that is not set up for them to win.'
In a recent post, labeled 'What To Say While You Are Dating,' White pushes women to 'talk their shit.' 'You cannot be cute and mute while dating,' he says in a video that received over 91,000 likes. 'Sometimes that's really hard for women because they've been conditioned and programmed to perform for men and we're not doing that anymore, that's lame…Let's start with boundaries.'
Most of White's clients who spoke to Rolling Stone are over the age of 35, a testament to the shift in dating culture that is impacting everyone. 'Since the dating apps came out 20 years ago, the game has changed, we're not playing in the same field anymore,' says Connie Lozada, 47, a client of White's from New Jersey, who recently got engaged. 'I'm a late Gen Xer, who grew up without technology. I was going on skills from the 1990s and not 2024, so to have somebody navigate that for me was helpful.' For Lozada, who opted for the $3,000 'Get Your Guy Club' package — a cohort of women who have unlimited access to White's content and meet with him for a year, as a group, weekly on Zoom — much of his work is therapeutic and rooted in overcoming relationship issues. 'You are taught to dig deep. For some of us, our choices in men were based around trauma,' says Lozada. 'I was dating men like my father and I never set boundaries or a standard for myself. I added [Anwar's] strategies, and learned how to weed out guys, which helped me recognize my fiancé.'
Despite critics seeing women like Lozada and Williams who've invested thousands of dollars into a dating coach, as 'pick mes,' the women in the program see a different narrative, one in which they aren't ashamed to admit their desires and traumas forming genuine connections. And they are finding it on their own terms. 'We're socialized to be pick-mes,' says Reagan Jackson, 45, of Seattle, who is in the Get Your Guy Club. 'I don't think that we're taught how to date and we make a lot of mistakes. Dating coaching has changed that for me and has given me back a sense of dignity and autonomy that I wasn't feeling before.'
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