Well, that’s nice, you say. Now what are we going to do about it, doc?

So glad you asked. Let’s take them one-by-one:

1) Make meaningful connection to other human beings a priority.

In Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a rich Russian judge finds himself on his deathbed at age 45. He’s spent his whole life doing the ‘right’ things - the right education, job, marriage, neighborhood, social circles. Yet, on the brink of death, he realizes that his life has been utterly devoid of meaning because of a lack of real human connection.

Sure, we’ve all got careers. But realize that when you’re on your deathbed, you’re not going to wish that you spent more time at the office or on term papers. Your memories will be composed of moments of meaning, and those moments are often created with people you care about.

Luckily, it’s fully within your power to create those meaningful memories now so as to forestall an unpleasant deathbed review. Just like you schedule gym time, salon time, and aimlessly-noodle-on-Facebook time, you can schedule in connection time. As Kahlil Gibran put it, seek your friends with time to live, not time to kill.

By virtue of being more achievement-oriented when growing up, some of us didn’t develop social skills for connecting meaningfully with people. Now being a late bloomer is okay. What’s less okay is staying stuck when there are so many resources out there for getting unstuck. There are multitudes of online resources, and as a place to start, my books for women (www.taoofdating.com/women) and men (www.taoofdating.com/men) do not suck.

As for dating, work on getting to know people well. As Kant would say, treat them as ends in themselves, not as means to satisfy your own needs. This brings us to the next principle.

2) Make other people feel great around you.

More often than not, our achievements don’t make others feel good around us. So we just may have to cultivate new skills that do make others feel good.

The simplest of those is charm - the ability to make someone else feel like a million bucks. It’s remarkably accessible to all of us, and - good news in these times of recession - it’s free.

One simple way to be charming is to be relentlessly complimentary. Not a toady, mind you, but genuinely appreciative. Notice people’s efforts, and praise them for it.

The paradigm shift that I want you to have is to go from the realm of ‘they should like me for who I am’ to the realm of ‘how am I bringing more joy to the lives of those around me’ - the realm of service. Instead of ‘what have you done for me lately’, think ‘what can I do for you.’ Serve first instead of waiting to be served.

It’s scientifically proven that engaging in service makes you feel good. And when you brighten other people’s days on a regular basis, you start to glow, and believe me, people will notice. There are also service-oriented skills that specifically make you a better dating prospect, like cooking, massage, and being exceptionally good in the sack.

Which brings us to…

3) Embrace your sexuality.

Unappetizing but incontrovertible fact of the day: you came into being as a result of your mom and dad getting it on. This is the union of yin and yang that the Taoists talk about, and by virtue of it, you’re a sexual being.

After you’ve made your peace with your own sexuality, here are two thing you can do to cultivate it. First, get curious about it. Read all the books you can about sexual technique - how that was less important to learn in college than organic chemistry I can’t fathom - and get good at it.

Sex is like driving: everyone thinks they’re great at it in spite of receiving zero training in it. So set aside the ego and start from the top - Zen mind, beginner’s mind.

Once you’re better-informed sexually, it will permeate the rest of your life and naturally move you towards cultivation principle #2: to have more of a sexual presence.

This means more playful banter instead of being so damn serious. It means looking people directly in the eye when they speak. It’s conveying a hint of unpredictability and danger instead of playing it safe. It’s going after what you want with playful enthusiasm instead of shying away from it in fear.

4) Get out of your own way.

Buddhists have this neat little idea called ‘no-self’, or anatta, which some scholars say contains the essence of all Buddhism. It says that nothing in the universe has a fixed identity, especially you.

As you are sitting there, reading this article, you just took a breath. Trillions of air molecules exchanged with your blood, millions of neurons fired as you read that last sentence, and you are in essence not the same person you were ten seconds ago.

Embracing no-self can be tremendously liberating. You’re less likely to feel rejected, hurt or abandoned if there’s no self to be rejected, hurt or abandoned. And you may be more likely to go ask that cutie for his or her phone number.

Practicing ‘no-self’ also removes a lot of imaginary barriers to real intimacy - titles, nationalities, creeds, prejudices. If, as in the Hindu tradition, you were to recognize the divine in each person you meet, you would significantly expand the possibilities for experiencing love in this life.

Again, nobody’s asking you to marry the first hillbilly who turns the corner. Rather, this is about practicing openness. And when you embody openness regularly, you’re more likely to capture the attention of Mr or Ms Right when they come sauntering along.

5) Practice wealth-consciousness instead of poverty-consciousness.

Neediness is unattractive. Self-sufficiency and wealth-consciousness are better bets. So even if you haven’t had a date in decades, act as if the world is your giant dating supermarket and you’ve got unlimited cash in your pocket.

Why? Because it’s true. The days of 150-person tribes when your genes wouldn’t make it to the next generation unless you married your snaggletoothed cousin are over. In today’s urban habitats, there are thousands if not millions of potential partners.

That’s the giant supermarket. The money in your pocket is your attractiveness as a person - all the ways in which you can bring more joy and fulfillment to your companion. And if you’re practicing no-self, healthy sexuality, an attitude of service and deep connection, who’s going to resist?

There is nothing in the five suggestions above that you can’t start doing right now. As the old Persian proverb goes, “From you action; from the heavens, blessings.” So go forth and create your own blessings already. The power’s been yours all along.

I have a mini-confession to make: I wrote the Tao of Dating books specifically for smart folks. The writing of the books was precipitated by the endemic dating woes on the Harvard campus, as I observed them as an advisor and earlier, indulged in them as a student.

Those kids graduate and pretty much continue to have the same dating woes — only now with fewer single people around who happen to live in the same building and share meals with them every day. So if they had challenges then, it gets about 1000 times worse once they’re tossed from the warm womb of their alma mater.

From my observations, the following dating challenges seem to be common to most smart people. In fact, the smarter you are, the more clueless you will be, and the more problems you’re going to have in your dating life. Once upon a day I used to be pretty smart, and believe me, I had a lock on clueless.

On the one hand, this makes no sense. Smart people can figure stuff out, right? And this stuff is simple!

On the other hand, it makes total sense. For simple things, it takes someone smart to really screw it up. So whether you went (or should have gone) to the likes of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Swarthmore, Amherst, Dartmouth, Brown, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, Penn, Caltech, Duke, read on:

1. Smart people spent more time on achievements than on relationships when growing up.

Smart kids usually come from smart families. And smart families are usually achievement-oriented. Bring me home those straight As, son. Get into those top colleges, daughter. Take piano, violin, tennis, swimming and Tibetan throat-singing lessons. Win every award there is in the book. Be ‘well-rounded.’

Well, you’re a talented little bugger. Of course you should develop those talents. At the same time, there’s an opportunity cost associated with achievement. Time spent studying, doing homework, and practicing the violin is time not spent doing other things — like chasing boys or girls, which turns out is fairly instrumental in making you a well-rounded human.

The upshot of all that achievement is that you get into a top college — congratulations! — and then continue doing even more of what you were doing before. Dating is at best another extracurricular, #6 or #7 down the list, somewhere between Model UN and intramural badminton.

I’ve been co-hosting young alumni events for name-brand schools for long enough to know that these kids come out a little lopsided (which sounds so much better than ’socially awkward’, don’t you think?). All they need is a little tune-up, or a little dating textbook like The Tao of Dating for Women or Men, to get them going — plus a little practice.

Of course, as noted above, things only get worse once you graduate. And if you’re frustrated with your love life, you just might try to compensate by working harder and achieving even more to fill that void. Left untreated, this condition can go on for decades. I know people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond who still haven’t figured out how to create an intimate connection with another human being.

It’s because they’ve been going at it the wrong way. Which brings us to…

2. Smart people feel that they’re entitled to love because of their achievements.

For most of their lives, smart people inhabit a seemingly meritocratic universe: if they work hard, they get good results (or, in the case of really smart folks, even if they don’t work hard, they still get good results). Good results mean kudos, strokes, positive reinforcement, respect from peers, love from parents.

So it only makes sense that in the romantic arena, it should work the same way. Right? The more stuff I do, the more accomplishments and awards I have, the more girls (or boys) will like me. Right? Please say I’m right, because I’ve spent a LOT of time and energy accumulating this mental jewelry, and I’m going to be really bummed if you tell me it’s not going to get me laid.

Well, it’s not going to get you laid, brother (or sister). It may get you a first date, but it’s probably not going to get you a second date. And it certainly won’t bring you lasting love and fulfillment.

Here’s the thing: your romantic success has nothing to do with your mental jewelry and everything to do with how you make the other person feel. And making someone feel a certain way is a somewhat nonlinear process that requires a different kind of mastery than that of calculus or Shakespeare.

In other words, you need to earn love (or at least lust). Sadly, no mom, dad or professor teaches us about the power of the well-placed compliment (or put-down), giving attention but not too much attention, being caring without being needy. I wrote a whole 280-page book about that, so that’s a story for a different day.

3. You don’t feel like a fully-realized sexual being, and therefore don’t act like one.

At some point in your life, you got pegged as a smart person. From then on, that was your principal identity: The Smart One. Especially if you had a sibling who was better-looking than you, in which case she (or he) was The Pretty One.

Now you could be absolutely stunning (in which case you’re both smart AND pretty and everyone hates you except for me — call me, like, immediately), but your identity is still bound up in being The Smart One. So maybe you dress frumpy and don’t pay a lot of attention to your appearance. Or never bothered to cultivate your sensuality as a woman. Or your sexual aggression as a male.

Attracting a partner is all about the dance of polarity. Energy flows between positive and negative electrodes, anode and cathode, magnetic north and south. Unless you actually convey femininity as a woman or masculinity as a man, you’re not going to attract a suitable companion of the opposite sex.

Part of the issue is this: when all of your personal energy is concentrated in the head, it never gets a chance to trickle down to the heart, or, god forbid, the groin. By virtue of being born of the union of male and female, yang and yin, you are a sexual being. Deal with it. Now do what you need to do to perpetuate the race already. Use what mama amoeba gave you.

That brings us to…

4. You’re exceptionally talented at getting in the way of your own romantic success.

Here’s an incontrovertible fact: every one of your ancestors survived to reproductive age and got it on at least once with a member of the opposite sex. All the way back to Homo erectus. And even further back to Australopithecus. And even further back to monkeys, to lizards, to the first amphibian that crawled out of the slime, the fish that preceded that amphibian, the worm before the fish and the amoeba that preceded the worm.

And you, YOU, in the year 2009 C.E., the culmination of that miraculously unbroken line of succession, you, Homo sapiens sapiens, not just thinking man but thinking thinking man (or woman), are the only one smart enough to screw the whole thing up.

Perhaps you should consider thinking a little less then.

Because heaven knows that the amoeba, worm, fish, amphibian, monkey and primitive hominids didn’t do a whole lot of thinking. Their DNA had a vested interest in perpetuating itself, so it made sure that happened.

Turns out your DNA works the same way, too. And maybe when you’re really sloshed at a party and your whole frontal lobe is on vacation in the outer rings of Saturn, you’ve noticed that your lizard brain knows exactly how to grab that cute girl by the waist for a twirl on the dance floor. Or knows exactly how to arch your back, flip your hair and glance at that handsome hunk just so such that he comes on over to say hi.

To put it plainly, you are programmed to reproduce. Now quit thinking you’re smarter than the 3 billion base pairs in your genome and 4 billion years of evolution. Actually, just stop thinking altogether. Let the program do its work.

5. By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet’s inhabitants as a dating prospect

Let’s say by ’smart’ we mean ‘in the top 5% of the population in terms of intelligence and education’. Generally speaking, smart people seek out other smart people to hang out with, simply because they get bored otherwise. And if they’re going to spend a lot of time with someone, intelligence in a partner is pretty much a requirement.

Well, congratulations — you’ve just eliminated 95% of the world’s population as a potential mate, Mr or Ms Smartypants. Now, luckily, the world’s kinda big, so the remaining 5% of the gender of your choice is still a plentiful 160 million or so people. Even if only 1% of those are single enough, good-looking enough, local enough and just all-around cool enough for you, that’s over a million people you can date out there.

Still, that’s less than one in five thousand people. And if you live in a smaller city, it may be just a handful of folks who are going to meet your stringent criteria.

At this point, you have three choices:

A) Loosen up

B) Do a very thorough search all over the planet and be prepared to move to Duesseldorf OR

C) Join a monastery.

My hearty recommendation is choice A. The purpose of relationship (and perhaps all of life) is to practice the loving. No partner is going to be 100% perfect anyway, so learn to appreciate people for what they have to offer, not what they don’t. And love them for that. That’s what real loving is.

Nobody’s asking to lower your standards here; you should still spend time only with worthwhile company. But do question the standards to see whether they’re serving you or you’re serving them.

When you open your heart to love, you may find fulfillment in ways you never imagined possible — like the day you tried sushi or beer in spite of your trepidation, found it surprisingly alright, and expanded your personal envelope of pleasure. Taking that into consideration, given a choice between happy-go-lucky and picky-but-lonely, happy sounds like more fun.