‘The Date Coach’ Is Here to Help Improve Your Passes

The way Paul Whittemore tells it, he was looking out into the sea through the palm trees along Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica and picturing the state of his new-found bachelorhood. It was not a pretty sight.

After being married for 15 years, Whittemore was recently divorced and had dived back into the shark-infested waters of the Southern California singles scene. “Like a lot of guys, when I got married I was 22 going on 16,” he says, “so I hadn’t learned everything the first time around. And what I had learned I had forgotten.”

The women he liked didn’t seem interested in him. He couldn’t seem to make those all-important first dates click. Gazing into the surf that day, he had a glimmer. “I was thinking it’d be wonderful to have a coach, like an invisible coach, who could go out on a date with me and then at the end of the date could debrief me and say this is what you did right and this is what you did wrong.”

This being California--where coping, actualizing, visualizing, centering, focusing, maximizing and bonding are residency requirements--Whittemore was on to something.

Last week, five years after the idea germinated along the coast in Santa Monica, Whittemore officially became “The Date Coach.” From his Newport Beach office, where he has a private practice, the 43-year-old psychologist and former philosophy professor hopes to help other wayward daters master the social graces. The program is separate from his clinical practice and doesn’t involve therapy.

Whittemore says his practice is replete with people with unsatisfactory personal relationships. His basic “date coach” program lists for $800 and involves 10 sessions with him and a series of “practice” sessions with an assistant that includes flirting, first-date phone calls and lunch dates.

The flirting session will occur on the premises of his office and is meant to simulate a chance meeting, such as in a doctor’s waiting room. Whittemore will provide post-flirting feedback.

The practice dates will be 50-minute lunches at local restaurants. Afterward, Whittemore’s assistant will give him “an actual checklist as well as some verbal feedback as to what the person’s strengths and weaknesses were. Then in a very supportive and confidential setting, here, I will go ahead and give them some one-on-one coaching.”

The client will go on a second date with a different assistant, “and try again and then get more advanced feedback.”

While not wanting to give away his secrets, Whittemore said men often make the social blunder of trying to be too nice.

“Perhaps one of biggest things men do is that in an effort to be agreeable, they will not be decisive. So they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, what do you want to do?’ They won’t offer anything specific. Women tend to respond to men who come across as competent, confident and decisive, and I’m convinced men can come across that way without being seen as bombastic, domineering or disrespectful of the women.”

Women have a tougher task, Whittemore said. “Women have a very, very difficult line to walk in our culture, because unlike a man, if a woman uses the same kind of behavior in her personal, dating life that brings her success at work, she’s going to usually run into trouble. For example, if she’s the executive of a company, she needs to exhibit qualities of decisiveness, control, taking charge. She has to do that. However, in her personal life with a man, if she exerts control or is trying to take charge she may not realize it, but this has a negative effect on most men.”

I’ve lost track of where the battle of the sexes stands these days, but that sounds vaguely like fighting words for some women. Whittemore said he’s not afraid of being criticized “because what’s really important is that we recover that there are some psychological differences, and what men need from women is different than what women need from men. . . . It’s not a matter of any intrinsic inferiority, and I’m also not talking about submitting to any kind of domination. What I’m talking about is both verbally and nonverbally conveying those qualities of femininity that men instinctively are drawn to--the quality of softness, the quality of receptivity. Women can do this without losing self-respect. In fact, they’re going to enhance it, because they’re going to have the kind of effectiveness with men they often don’t have.”

He acknowledges that “The Date Coach” sounds very Southern California trendy, but says, “I think there’s something that’s very serious about this, and that is when people find they’re able to make the kind of connections with the opposite sex that they want to. This isn’t frivolous, this isn’t just frosting. We’re talking about being able to make meaningful connections that will develop and last, and this is extremely important for a person’s well-being.”