Does he need help?

Professional dating consultants promise to show the awkward and unattractive the ropes for surviving Seoul’s cutthroat romance scene. Do they really serve a purpose or are they sleazy opportunists?

Can the art of pick-up really earn the heart?

By Yun Suh-young, Jung Min-ho

In the 2005 romantic comedy “Hitch,” Will Smith plays Alex “Hitch” Hitchens, a “date coach” who mentors men on how to approach women and win their hearts.

“Three dates is all you need,” to get a woman interested he promises Kevin Jame’s hapless Albert. But he needs a heavier dose of his own medicine to woo sexy gossip columnist Sara, played by Eva Mendes.

While Hitch is a fictional character, his story is a reflection, to some extent, of reality. At least it is in Seoul, where an increasing number of professional dating consultants offer counsel to help the goofs, the awkward and unattractive survive the city’s romantic battlefield. And the price of getting the inside track on dating is often an entire month’s salary, and sometimes even more.

Real-life date counselors present themselves as skilled professionals with the discipline, expertise and know-how to justify their charges.

But do they really equip their male customers with the guts and guile to get their ideal woman? Or are they just opportunistic scam artists and womanizers who have found a way to make money, the sleazier cousins of self-help authors who claim credit for their customers’ success or blame them when they fail? Is there really a science for winning over women?

After interviewing several of these self-proclaimed date doctors and experiencing their “training” programs, answers to these questions began to emerge.

A young man approaches a young woman standing outside a cosmetic shop on the street near Hongik University in Mapo-gu, Seoul. Hitting on girls is part of the lesson “students” learn from pick-up artists. /Korea Times photos by Yun Suh-young

Pick-up artist or con artist?

Dating consultant Baek, who prefers to be called by his nickname “Mastakill,” presents himself as “The No. 1 trainer” that can empower “dating-disabled guys” to become “enabled ones.” He is apparently unaware of the offense his self-promotion slogans are likely to cause.

Throughout the conversation, the 33-year-old continuously claimed that men can increase their attractiveness to women through proper training.

“What we do is teach techniques that help guys appeal to women and so they can sleep with them fast,” he said. “We even teach how to control the length of relationships.”

The service provided by Baek is expensive. For a nine-day package of lectures and practical training, “students” will have to pay 4.95 million won ($4,386). A six-day “boot camp” program, which seems just the same without the practice, cost around 3 million won (about $2,650).

According to his company’s website, men who are not capable of seducing women are “equivalent to cripples” and his trainers are perfectly capable of fixing their problems. The website also includes images of nightclub parties where young men mingle with scantily-clad women, which apparently intend to serve the same functions as “before-and-after” photos at plastic surgery clinics.

Baek has so far garnered around 1,000 customers. He said he stopped counting the number of women he slept with after 124 at the age of 25.

When asked whether dating consultants like him are taking relationships too lightly, Baek shrugged and said, “no matter what men do, it’s always women who hold the keys to relationships.”

He wasn’t too concerned about ethics or morals. All that mattered to him, he said, was whether what he teaches really works for his customers. And if it does, prices he charges are more than worth it for the man who had been lonely and desperate.

But Kwak Hyun-ho, another dating consultant, believes that decency should matter more in his line of business.

“There are many liars,” Kwak said. “Before I started my own business, a dating consultant who I had considered doing business together with said ‘there are many pushovers. All you have to do is to con them and leave with money.’ Many people like him are in this business.”

Kwak claims that consultants who guarantee skills and strategies that work “100 percent” aren’t dating professionals but con artists. But when asked what distinguishes professionals from con men in this business, Kwak offers only a vague answer, “sincerity.”

“Doing it for years professionally, my customers still have many failures,” Kwak said. “It is all marketing to attract more people. Do all dating consultants really know what they claim to know? No. Some are not even qualified to teach. I know because I worked with them at one point.”

Baek is more upfront and blunt about what he is offering.

“We tell our customers to go for the ‘full-close,’ which means having sex. Such a date should take about seven hours from first encounter to achieving the evening’s objective, which is to have sex. We tell men to do this because it becomes an easy way to get into relationships with women,” he said.

“Fast is important because dating is an emotional game. Women don’t get into bed with men unless they have emotions for them. Whether or not our clients have sex is an indicator of how close emotionally they become to the woman they meet.”

The word “pick-up artist” entered the public lexicon in the 1970s when American author Eric Weber published “How to Pick Up Girls.” Then followed the 1980s movie, “The Pick-up Artist,” the Neil Strauss book, “ The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists” and the reality television series, “The Pickup Artist,” that aired in 2007.

Dating consultants first began appearing in Korea in the mid-2000s. They first ran their businesses through small online communities, but now the most famous of them, such as Kwak, appear on television shows.

Worth the money and time?

Dating consultants claim that many men have been helped by their services.

Then there are men like Cho, a 30-year-old who would rather forget the experience. He paid 1 million won to a dating consultant five years ago out of curiosity. But he got more than he bargained for in a bad way.

“What they taught me was to show a woman an expensive foreign car key after borrowing it just to pretend that it was mine or to lie to her that I lived in an upscale neighborhood. It was all about lying to get her into bed,” he said.

“It was completely different from what I expected. What I wanted to learn was how to interact with women, how to get their attention and how to be witty in my speech. I wanted to learn how to build a genuine connection with a woman.

“The consultants teach as if the ultimate goal is to have sex. And to achieve the ‘best results’ in the shortest period of time, lying is a requirement. But the other guys who were customers seemed to follow the instructions they were told without guilt, and that also bothered me.”

Unfortunately for people like Cho, dating consultants never offer refunds. After providing what they promised, many dating consultants don’t expect to see their customers again, and this explains why so many of them set the prices of their services so high.

In the movie, Hitch says his job is about not deceiving but creating opportunities. Kwak seems to have a similar philosophy, but admits there are many more consultants who could be described as scam artists.

“There are a lot of guys who actually come because they want to date. But many of the ‘companies’ in this sector use sex in their marketing because men like it if things are more provocative. There are many con artists in this field,” he said.

Kwak said part of the reason he was eager to appear on television, other than promoting his business, was to distinguish himself from other dating consultants he considers to be “fraudulent.”

“Those who teach that sex is everything are frauds. About 80 percent of scam artists in this field are fraudulent,” he said.

“These guys lack sincerity. What matters to them is money and making money easily. They always promise easy results. But changing a person takes a long time and this is definitely not easy.

“I define success as changing the way my clients meet and interact with women. I want to surpass the point of challenging myself to change an ‘impossible’ guy into a ‘datable’ one. Having more attractive men on earth would be good for women too, right?”

Kwak, a 27-year-old, confesses that he was once a womanizer and claims he dated about 1,000 women in his life. He once thought the game was all about sex. Now, he says he is looking for something more meaningful in relationships.

“I don’t date anyone now. I thought it was inappropriate to date someone seriously when I have to meet a lot of women for my job. Now I really want to meet a woman who is understanding and sincere. I won’t date a person if my feelings aren’t sincere,” he said.