&gt; she could be a normal person and try to understand what I&#x27;ve been doing my whole life until now<p>A date is not a normal situation. Just like job interviews, there are all kinds of objectives people can have that influence their behavior that don&#x27;t really involve you that you&#x27;re not going to know about going in.<p>She may have been on a bunch of dates with guys where there were these long, boring discussions on stuff that the guy found interesting but she didn&#x27;t. That happens a lot from what I&#x27;ve been told. So she forms a strategy for making her dates better.<p>&gt; I was listening to her about her own stories.<p>You weren&#x27;t just listening, you were listening and forming judgments. You need to be aware that these judgments you are forming aren&#x27;t necessarily correct and that you should allow her to correct them before you let them take control of your date.<p>You need to participate in the telling of the stories, not just sit there like a cold fish.<p>&gt; If I say I only want a programmer woman (since I&#x27;m a programmer), but who is even better than me.<p>I would say you&#x27;re being needlessly and destructively dismissive of potential mates. You don&#x27;t pick the woman you want, you pick among the women you have available to you.<p>If you really want a programmer, then you should be taking positive steps to meet more of them. Same with any of these criteria. If that&#x27;s really what you want, yet you&#x27;re limiting yourself to just what comes along, than your desires are just wishful thinking. It&#x27;s like marketing, you need to have a way to target your audience.