If not love at first sight — write.
More than a decade of romantic despair and rejection left Park Slope author Joseph Adago with a cracked morale, but with enough dead-end dating experience to ironically write a book on how to land a wife.
In his literary debut, “The Program: Master the Art of Dating and Attracting Women in Six Weeks,” the now-married 40-year-old details his self-made dating system that worked by trial and error to break him out of the love-stricken rut he had been in for years.
He says his system will do the same for other romantically inept men.
“It isn’t going to happen over night, but it will happen relatively quickly,” said Adago.
Hard work, in the end, overcame his own low self-esteem, awkwardness, and insecurity, which made it nearly impossible to land a second date with a woman. A licensed real estate broker, Adago applied the persistence he used to market rentals across Brooklyn to his dating life.
“You don’t just have to dress better — you have to speak well about yourself, you have to look at the stories you are telling women and see that they work, and you have to go on a lot of dates and practice at it,” said the Manhattan transplant, who moved to the brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood after he met his wife Olivia.
Adago’s “The Program” largely promotes online dating as a means to meet women and improve dating skills. In his book he gives an in-depth account of how to woo women with a web profile — and it all starts with other men’s Match.com profiles.
“I really started to study Match.com. I looked at the good profiles and I looked at the bad profiles to see what works and from that I was able to get about two dates a week,” he said.
Before he met Olivia two years ago on Match.com, Adago chronically dated nearly 80 women in a one-year span, primarily over the popular dating website. He closely analyzed the outcome of each rendezvous and penned his findings of do’s and don’ts in his dating guide, which was released on Nov. 26.
“Even if I went on a date and saw it was going nowhere and she wasn’t into me — I saw it for two purposes: one was to go on a date and hopefully meet the woman I would end up with and the other was just to get better at dating,” said the happily married man. “I went on a lot of dates for a year and I actually got a wife out of it.”
Joseph Adago’s “The Program: Master the Art of Dating and Attracting Women in Six Weeks,” at Barnes & Noble bookstores [267 Seventh Ave. at Sixth Street in Park Slope, (718) 832-9066, and 106 Court St. between Schermerhorn and State streets, (718) 246–4996, www.barnesandnoble.com]. $14.95.