I still remember the day that I learned the most important lesson a man can ever learn about women. It was the first semester of my sophomore year of college. My girlfriend had broken up with me the last semester of the previous year and I still hadn’t figured out why. I had begged her to stay. I told her that I was nothing without her and even cried in front of her. But she still left me for another guy.

What I didn’t understand was that when she had tried to break up with me just a month before, the emasculation of myself seemed to work wonders. She decided we’d give it another try and things seemed to go back to normal. But at the end of that month, she wasn’t snookered by my antics.

Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t faking. I felt like my world was ending and that she alone held the key to my happiness in life. So it was easy to cry and tell her that I “dwelled in darkness without her.” But I allowed myself to do it because I thought it would work. I thought that getting sympathy could buy me some points with the gentler sex.

I thought that right up until the day I took mental inventory of my recent experiences with women. Since I’d been back as a sophomore, women had been treating me differently. The ones I thought were out of my league were inviting me to have lunch with them. Senior girls were taking walks across campus with me simply because they saw me passing by. Two girls who I’d been friends with for over a year were literally feuding over the “rights” to me to the point that they stopped being roommates.

What had changed? I had. Rather than being a soft spoken weenie whose only skill with women was attempting to solicit sympathy, I had improved myself. I didn’t do it to “get chicks” or win back the girl who’d dumped me. I did it for me. I’d begun a part-time business, started back lifting weights with a buddy, and reunited with friends I had basically ignored when I was infatuated the year before.

I’d become someone that girls wanted to date because I was going places, had a life outside of any one woman, was physically stronger, knew how to have fun and the “looks decent wagon” hadn’t passed me by. I’d earned it.

When I’d cried and begged my ex to stay, she stayed for a little bit because she felt sorry for me. So she felt good in giving me another chance that I really didn’t deserve. But that never works long term. It’s like a sympathy date in high school, it’s a short term relationship because it’s based on sympathy, not attraction and love.

So what does this have to do with Mitt Romney closing the gender gap with Barack Obama? Simple, Obama was a sympathy date in 2008.

He hadn’t earned anything. He had been a senator for less than two years when he started campaigning. He rose to the top because women got warm feelings by voting for him. They felt like they did him a favor. He wasn’t qualified. He hadn’t earned what he got by having a record of successes to point to (or much of any record at all).

But as I said above, the sympathy date is temporary just like the sympathy reconciliation I received. This is especially true of Obama when women are able to see the resume of Mitt Romney. Romney has never been anything but a winner. He’s wealthy, not because he sold a book based on unearned and faddish popularity but because he turned around failing businesses and took the Olympics from debt to profit. He won the governorship of Massachusetts and actually balanced the budget instead of just talking about it – a rare feat these days. He persevered and won the nomination of his party and now he’s standing up to someone who doesn’t have successes to under his belt. In fact, Obama is in a similar spot to where I was the second time my girlfriend tried to break up with me. I relied on what had worked before because that’s all I had. But sympathy didn’t work the second time. She wanted a winner. She wanted a man who had things going for him and was a strong leader in life.

So when women are faced with the choice between a man who’s using the same ole “give me another chance” line she’s heard from him before and a man who doesn’t need another chance because he’s already done the things Obama couldn’t, they’ll likely pick the man who’s already a winner in his own right. The sympathy date rarely happens more than once. And the same is true for the sympathy vote when the country is in need of someone who can actually do what needs to be done.