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They say you can’t choose when or how you meet someone you fall for. But we beg to differ. You should at the very least be able to alter how you meet someone who you might spend the rest of your life with — at least when it comes to telling your kids and grand kids how you met. If you can avoid it, don’t spark off that first conversation with the guy making twinkly eyes at you in these situations.

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Just as everyone is sitting down to assess their plan of action with their diets, their workout regiments, their careers, and their finances, the new year is the perfect time to sit down and assess your plan of action with your love life. If things didn’t go the way you’d hoped in 2012, for the most part that was no stroke of bad luck. It was an accumulation of wrong decisions, shortsightedness, and perhaps failure to respect yourself and your needs. Don’t just charge into 2013 saying, “My love life will be better this year!” Ask yourself how?What will you consciously do, or perhaps not do, to improve your love life? A great way to begin is to make a list of behavior and treatment you just won’t tolerate. This might help you get started with your list.

So it may seem random for Lance Gross to be doling out dating/relationship tips on meeting and maintaining a baller but considering he recently played an NFL player in his movie “The Last Fall,” we thought it would be good to ask Gross, along with the film’s director Matthew Cherry, about what it takes for a woman to maintain with a professional athlete. Check it out.

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There are universal truths about dating and love. Subconsciously, we all know what they are. But each time we get hurt or disappointed, we fool ourselves into thinking that our situation was “different” and that something else was at play. We go on to torture ourselves for weeks, trying to understand why things didn’t work out. In the end, when all the muck and details have been worked through, we come back to the same answers every time.

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You may think your feelings, thoughts and romantic choices are all under your control. But, for better or worse, human decisions are subject to hormones, the environment and even the change of seasons (some say the full moon, but there’s no proof yet). See how the dip in temperature may affect everything from your moods to your love life.

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So every guy you get involved with ends up cheating, being non-committal, dropping off the face of the planet, making a terrible boyfriend or in one way or another, being a douchebag. And you’re beginning to think that you—your particular personality, or maybe the way you look—attracts douchebags. Well there’s good news and bad news: you’re not the type to attract douchebags. You’re just the type to welcome them in.

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You are going to feel like a fool many, many times in your life when it comes to love. You’re going to lose sleep trying to decode the guy whose been dragging you along—who loved you one day and ignored you the next. Every guy will seem unique to you but, it’s actually easier if you know this: They’re all the same. Or rather, the men that break your heart will seem like the same and most likely fall into one of the following categories.

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Have you ever had a man do something so right, you’ve thought, “Somebody must have taught him that?” I bet you plenty of women in his life, after getting mad at him plenty of times for the same thing, taught him what women do and don’t like. Like this:

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Your spontaneity offends us

“Want to get dinner in an hour?” “I’m drunk at a bar. I want to see you, come out!” At first, men think women will read this as, “If I ask to see a women so soon, she will feel I really want to see her.” They eventually learn that we see it as, “If he really wanted to see me, he would have checked what my schedule was way more in advance than this!”

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“Just be yourself.” What does that even mean?! It’s the most generic, yet most popular, piece of advice before a first date. The truth is, it is good advice, but it can be hard to follow because we also often don’t realize when we are not being ourselves. You’re being yourself if you do this:

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Between high school sweethearts, when it’s perfectly okay to text each other from across the room and say “I love you” within one month, and the dating challenges of your late twenties, a lot changes. Those young adult years are a crash course on men for most women. Most of us walk out of our twenties with these understandings about these very interesting creatures: