Q: How did you get started giving relationship advice?
A: It was all by chance, really! I happened to arrive at the 000Relationships Network just as Sarah Paul was leaving. Sarah Paul wrote the original “How to Be Irresistible to Men,” but it was time for her to go off and have a baby, so I stepped in to fill her shoes. I’d just finished a writing degree, and I’d written my thesis on a subversion of the romance genre, exploring what femininity and masculinity and sexual attraction really mean. So this seemed like a natural step forward.
Q: Was it hard to fill Sarah Paul’s shoes?
A: The biggest challenge for me was all the internet stuff. I was used to writing for professors or doing travel writing, not really writing online. Online writing has totally different stylistic conventions, like shorter paragraphs and use of capitalization and italics. Then there was all the web programming, Dreamweaver, e-commerce, all that side of it. The research was the easy stuff! That was the fun bit.
Q: What makes you different from other online dating & relationship experts?
A: There are a lot of us giving advice online, like Mimi Tanner and Cucan Pemo, Paige Parker, Christian Carter. We’ve all got our own unique angle, like Christian Carter does the man’s view and Paige talks about getting rid of the drama. I’m all about love. Basically it’s the idea that like attracts like, so if you play games to attract someone you’ll just attract someone who plays games back. Some people think we’re Christians, but it’s not a Christian idea per se. I think it’s common sense: if you want to attract better quality partners, you need to become a better person. Relationships are really all about learning and self-development.
Q: Do you practice what you preach?
A: I try to! I spent the first three years dating right and left, and I actually tried the whole modifying-my-personality-to-attract-men thing. It didn’t work, because it just attracted men who thought I was someone else. That was disastrous, to say the least. I finally just gave up on the whole dating thing and focused more on my own life, and it was then that I met my husband, who, strangely enough, had also given up on dating and was focusing on his own life. I think that’s the secret: wu wei, the Taoists call it. Once you give up actively trying to meet someone is when you meet someone!
Q: Are you in a relationship?
A: Yes. I’ve been with my husband for three years now.
Q: Can you tell us a funny story about being a dating expert?
A: Probably the funniest story would be when I just started dating my husband. Sometimes I tell people to Google me to show I'm a legit person - you can't be too careful about who you meet these days - and he came back with, "So I hear you're not real." He'd clicked on this link saying, "Is Amy Waterman a scam?" and found all these people discussing whether I actually existed or not!
Q: What’s the main message you’d like to leave our female readers with?
A: Believe that it’s possible, that it’s possible for you to find real love. That’s the message I open my “How to Be Irresistible to Men” course with. A lot of women are angry with men, and they’re actually looking for someone to dump all their anger on. That’s not how you attract love. You attract love with love – with liking men. Once you believe that it’s possible for you to have a loving, honest, nurturing relationship, then you’ll stop accepting poor substitutes for the real thing. But most women don’t think they’re worth it, or that they deserve it. We don’t love ourselves enough. We’ve got to start loving ourselves first and foremost, and then a man who loves us will magically appear.