Two years ago, Matt Tomporowski hit rock bottom. A serious relationship had just ended, and he couldn’t envision getting back into the dating game. His search for help led to Ronald Lee. The “attraction coach” brought in a fashion consultant, taught Tomporowski about body language, and encouraged the heartsick 34-year-old to get out of his comfort zone.

“One day he actually videotaped me outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery on Robson, just approaching women,” says the high-tech-industry employee, reached at his office. “I don’t know how many women I talked to, but I had 10 phone numbers by the end of the day. It was a really fun experience. And I think the women enjoyed it too, being stopped by a classy, well-meaning, fun guy.”

Lee’s attraction-coaching firm, Man Meets Woman (www.manmeetswoman.com/ ), is just one local outfit in what could be a burgeoning industry. In November last year, Lee launched Happy Sexy You, which offers similar services for women. Zan Perrion, a featured player in Neil Strauss’s bestseller The Game, has a mentoring program via phone and some in-person coaching. And three of Lee’s former students have started Lifestyle Transformations, which also offers to help guys get their act together—not just with women, but in all areas of life.

“It starts with your internal state,” says Jason Rude, one of the cofounders, on the phone from his Yaletown condo. Like Man Meets Woman, Lifestyle Transformations (www.lifestyletransformations.com/ ) features one-on-one coaching as well as workshops. It also offers weekend-long intensive boot camps. “You can’t find someone else to fill a gap in your personality. You need to become a complete person. And then you want to meet a complete person. Whenever you try to find someone to fill a gap, it’s just not sustainable. And so we don’t want to teach a guy how to get laid. We want to teach a guy to have a better life in general.”

Rude says he earned his qualifications as a teacher “in the school of hard knocks”. Ten years ago, the 32-year-old weighed 370 pounds. “I woke up one day and didn’t want to be that guy,” says Rude, a former footballer who continued to eat like one even after a motorcycle accident waylaid him. Even before that, he had problems. “I was never able to talk to a girl,” he says. “I never had the ability to communicate with women. I was 21 when I got my first girlfriend, and I ended up marrying her.”

The origins of Lifestyle Transformations and Man Meets Woman can be traced back to what insiders call “the community”. In 1995, a loose-knit fraternity of guys began exchanging, mostly over the Internet, strategies for meeting and attracting women. Since the 2005 publication of The Game, which detailed author Strauss’s experiences with the guys who had become superstars of the community, the movement has gone mainstream. Press and TV coverage followed the book’s publication. VH1 gave “Mystery”, an Ontario-raised player featured in The Game, his own reality series, The Pick-Up Artist. And self-styled dating gurus have popped up all over the Net, all with their own promises and techniques to remake and remodel budding Casanovas.

Although his involvement has been intermittent, Lee was in on the ground floor of the movement. Today, he distances himself from what he sees as something that has betrayed its initial promise.

“A lot of what they teach is wrong,” Lee says over coffee at a Commercial Drive café. Sitting next to him, in a Christmas-red coat, is Lisa de Lusignan, a coach with Happy Sexy You (www.happysexyyou.com/ ) as well as her own company, Paradigm Transformations (www.paradigmtransformations.com/ ). “It’s shallow,” Lee continues. “They teach tricks, like making them [women] feel like crap or whatever, and they [the students] end up being weird social robots.”

Understandably—with its boys-playing-soldiers lingo (“sarging”, “targets”, “in the field”)—the seduction community, as it’s come to be known, has gotten something of a bad rap. But Lee says he is one of the good guys, an instructor from the “direct” school, which teaches that the best way to get the girl is through confidence, authenticity, and understanding what is attractive to women. What much of the competition misses, he says, is “the most important thing: the emotional component”.

The 33-year-old comes from a sports-coaching background. He is also a student of Asian philosophy and qigong. Currently working on a book about his dating and relationship ideas, he estimates he has given advice to more than 300 men, the majority in a professional capacity since he started the company in 2003.

“I believe I’ve invented a new category of coaching,” he says. “There are relationship and marriage counsellors and sex therapists. But there isn’t really anyone doing attraction coaching—how to meet someone. I don’t believe we’re dating coaches. That’s too superficial. We have people work on themselves first. This form of interaction, where we take people out in public and give them feedback on how they talk to people, didn’t exist before we started doing it.”

At the moment, business is good. Lee has a team of three coaches, including himself. And he’s created Happy Sexy You for women.

“Doing this is just who I am,” says Happy Sexy You’s de Lusignan. With a master’s in counselling psychology, she can take her clients through the ABCs of dating or go deeper, depending on their needs. “I’m here to help people with their relationships. It’s something I’ve always done.”

Many of the women who come to her, especially if they’re over 40, feel isolated from dating, she says. She also hears from women in their early 30s. “They usually haven’t found one particular relationship yet and want to change their pattern.” When asked which is the most common pattern, de Lusignan doesn’t hesitate. “Chasing after men who are emotionally unavailable,” she says, “and thinking they [the women] will eventually change them.”

One thing most, if not all, of the city’s dating coaches seem to have in common is a mandate (pardon the pun) to emphasize honesty, authenticity, and directness over games, manipulation, and tricks when it comes to their students’ dealings with women. But the aforementioned Zan Perrion sees himself as taking this philosophy further, into the realm of what it means to be a man in the modern age.

Perrion is the subject of a chapter in The Game, and he, too, is working on a book about his ideas. “When we move toward the things in our life that have heart and meaning to us—no matter what the cost—attraction is automatic,” writes Perrion in his Natural Game forum, accessible through his Web site (www.zanperrion.com/ ). “Phone numbers are everywhere, and women of beauty are always in our life. This is grace. This is modern masculinity. And this is true attraction.”

Though not a student of Perrion’s, Tomporowski would agree. Tomporowski’s experience with coaching has helped him in areas of life he never expected. Not only has it helped him romantically, his newfound confidence has given him more authority on the job. He’s also bonded with a lot of new male friends who have gone through the same process.

“It is a challenge and a struggle,” he says. “And it really tests your courage and confidence to throw yourself out there and see if you can get that girl’s number or have a great conversation with her, where before you’d never even approach her.”

And yes, Tomporowski is now in a relationship—quite happily so.