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Hey Doc,
I’m writing to you today because of an issue that I’ve never been able to conquer. The issue is that I’m 33 years old and I have never approached a woman in my entire life, in public or any socially acceptable place. I think that I’m a pretty good catch but I’ve always had issues with my self esteem and my looks. I’m someone who goes to the gym 4 times a week and is trying his best to have a killer body. I’ve never been confident in my looks and I’ve never been confident in my social skills.
Lately I’ve been going to some bars that are close by. They are sports bars and I’ve been practicing eye contact and social skills with the bartenders. Though I don’t flirt with them. It’s just something I do in order to feel more comfortable around women.
When it comes to my side of the bar, where is patrons enjoy our drinks. I can never get myself to muster up the courage to either make eye contact or approach an attractive woman I see. No matter how many years I’ve been going out. I’ve never approached a woman or tried to hit on her or have a conversation. I’m honestly afraid of them possibly being grossed out by me or creeped out by me trying. Though I’m not trying to hook up immediately. I do wish that I could get over this hurdle so that I can eventually have a sex life again. I haven’t had sex in 3 years and it’s really starting to wear down on me. Maybe not so much sex but the intimacy and the dynamics that come from flirting, attraction and hooking up. The entire ritual is missing from my life and I honestly feeling like I’m missing out on an experience that many men have already managed to conquer.
I have my own place, a good career, I have some hobbies and I’m very low key and I’m minimalist. I don’t make 6 figures but I make enough to get by in the world. On paper I’m essentially good to go but in person it seems like I lack any confidence or even courage to go up and try to talk to women. I’d love to have a sex life again, I’d love to learn to flirt and I’d love to stop being afraid around women I find attractive. How do I change this entire mindset? What mindset do I have to be in exactly? How do I feel like I can just do it… and then actually Do it!
I hate to say that I’ve started even looking at paid PUA books and videos but they honestly seem to promise too much but at the same time I’m so desperate to just be a normal guy and be able to approach and flirt with women that I’m considering possibly buying these things. Even tough a part of me doesn’t believe they’ll change anything.
I just need some tips or something. I’m honestly getting older and it’s just embarrassing that I have such a struggle making eye contact and even going up to talk to women. I don’t want to end up 60 and alone and never have tried. What can I honestly do?
Signed,
Averting Eye Contact
Here’s the thing AEC: you’ve got a lot of good qualities and a pretty solid base for a good life. The problem is: none of that ultimately matters. Not for your immediate goals, anyway. See the thing is, your hobbies, your career, your own place, even your body to an extent… all of those are things that people aren’t going to draw people in. Those are the foundation for a good life, but nobody’s going to know you have them at a glance, nor are they going to really influence who’s going to want to talk to you or who you should talk to. There will be folks who’d be glad to know you have those – being a functional adult is a low bar to clear, but a lot of folks don’t manage even that – but that all comes later. And none of it’s going to imbue you with confidence or assertiveness by virtue of transitory properties of Having Your Shit Together. Certainly not in the way that you suggest in your letter.
You have two things that are holding you back right now. The good news is: it’s all in your head. The bad news is… since it’s all in your head, that means there’re no quick and easy fixes. It’s going to require a willingness to roll up your sleeves and get down to the messy business of uprooting negative patterns and expectations and good old-fashioned practice until things become natural to you.
As I said recently, confidence is born out of knowledge and experience. You can have things in your life – like a car or jacket or other material goods – that serve as a magic feather of sorts, allowing you to unlock the confidence you already have by making you feel like you have permission to be confident or to feel like you’re cool. But if you want actual, meaningful confidence and to feel like you can actually do the things you want to do – in this case, talk to attractive women and maybe get a date? Well, there’s really only one way to accomplish that: you have to actually go out and talk to people.
The issue isn’t whether you can do it; obviously you can. If you couldn’t go talk to people, you’d have a much harder time navigating the world, never mind doing things like holding down a steady job. The issue is that you don’t do it. And that comes down to expectations and fear. And fear, as the litany goes, is the mind killer.
Now, the fear aspect of it is obvious; you’re afraid of rejection, you’re afraid of being hurt and you’re afraid of humiliation. That’s ultimately what a lot of the fears of being called “creepy” come down to: how it’s going to make you feel and what the consequences will be if make a mistake. And like I told A Confused Asexual the other day, that fear is ultimately a form of self-protection. After all, our brains and our instincts are about keeping us alive and safe; happiness, romance, sexual fulfillment… those are all secondary considerations, if they ever come into the equation at all. So part of what you need, in terms of changing your mindset, is to recognize that the fear that’s keeping you from actually talking to women is a pattern of behavior that no longer meets your needs.
Your expectations, on the other hand, are how you look at yourself. This affects those patterns of behavior, in as much as you have a hard time believing that anyone would enjoy your company. If you were more assured of your own sense of worth, your own sense of value, then you wouldn’t have the expectation that you “should” have done this already, nor would you be as sure that you need to do everything perfectly or risk being labeled a Creeper and risk becoming a pariah. That same feeling – needing to know “what to do” and having a technique or formula to follow – is what leads folks to pick-up artists, red pill grifters and the like. Having some material you can rattle off at the drop of a hat or a sequence of things to say to women is a sort of confidence substitute, a temporary patch to get you off your ass and into the game. But, as someone who’s been in and out of that scene, I can tell you from experience: it doesn’t work for long, and won’t help you where it counts. Talking to women, flirting, building attraction, etc. are just the start. They’re what get you in the door. If you don’t have that sense of your own value at your core, then whatever you generate will be temporary at best, and the insecurities and fears will just come raging back and kick over everything you’ve been trying to build.
But here’s the thing. Remember what I said about confidence being born out of knowledge and experience? Well, fortunately, the thing you’re trying to be more confident in is fairly simple. You open your mouth and flap your gums. You say that you’re not looking to get a hook-up or whatever and hey, that works wonderfully for our purposes, because what you need right now is to just get to the point of talking to strangers without worrying about it. This works to your advantage, because it means that just about anything is a positive result. If you were to go to the bar tonight and make brief small talk with some of the other patrons of any gender, then you’re building that experience and getting yourself one step closer to your goals.
One of the things that made my life a lot easier, as well as improved my nights out, was learning to let go of expectations. I would prime myself for a good night in two ways. First: I’d have a social warm-up – talking to a friend or family member before I went out on the town. Think of this as shifting from “work” mode or “quiet and shy” mode and into a social headspace. Just as you want to warm up before exercising, limbering up those social muscles and getting yourself in a more talkative mood makes it easier to actually strike up conversations with people. Otherwise, you end up expending a lot of your mental and emotional bandwidth just trying to shift where your head’s at and work up the drive to talk. This always ends up taking longer than you think it will and it leaves you with far less gas in the tank, as it were. So a social warm-up, even if it’s just a phone call or video chat with friends, goes a long way to getting you ready to be social with strangers.
(Notice very carefully that I keep emphasizing friends and loved ones. The social mode you’re in at work or talking to co-workers that you don’t also have a friendship with isn’t going to help you here.)
The second thing that I would do to set myself up for success was to reframe my goals for the evening. When I would go out, whether at home or if I were traveling, I went out with a mindset that somewhere out there was An Adventure, something that would be the story of that night. That adventure could be anything. It could be finding a cool new bar or an awesome new restaurant to try. It could be finding a new, interesting nook or corner of town I hadn’t seen before or looking at it from a different perspective that gave me a new appreciation for what was around me. It could be talking to a fascinating stranger – or many people – and hearing awesome stories from folks I don’t know. Or I might meet a sexy somebody, maybe exchange numbers or maybe see if anything else were likely to happen. But whatever happened… there would be A Story before the night was over.
Because I wasn’t setting myself up for something I could fail at, I would go out with a more optimistic mindset and keep myself in a good mood for the night. By creating that expectation that something good was waiting for me out there, no matter what, I was encouraging myself to look at the world with curious and hopeful eyes and priming myself to take chances, try new or different things or otherwise get out of my usual routine and see what I might find if I decided to zig instead of zag.
So I’d recommend adopting this outlook for yourself, AEC. Warm up socially first, then go out with the expectation that somewhere out in the night is an adventure, and you have no idea what that adventure may be. Get curious about the other folks at the bar; assume that there must be something cool or interesting about them and see if you can find out what it might be. Encourage others to be part of that sense of exploration by getting recommendations or suggestions of things to try, whether it’s a new drink, a new restaurant, something interesting happening later that week… anything that is new and out of the ordinary for you.
Now here’s why this will help you build your social skills and make you feel more confident: because having that “there’s a story out there” mindset, you’re leaving yourself open to all possibilities. It means that you won’t have any expectations outside of “talk to interesting people”, which in and of itself, means you’ll be giving a much friendlier, lower-key vibe than someone who’s just trying to get into a woman’s panties. Having a low-stakes, low-investment conversation with someone who’s interesting (and, yes, attractive) is the reward in and of itself. Similarly, it’s priming your brain to not see things like “getting rejected” as an end, but rather a pivot point, a place where your story for the evening takes a turn and leads you in a new and potentially interesting direction. Yeah, being turned down stings, but if you’re looking at it as part of the story of the night… well, it’s not so bad at all. Especially since it’s coming as part of your being willing to put yourself out there and do things you’ve never done before. Plus: it’ll help teach you that rejection isn’t nearly as bad as you fear, nor that you’re doomed to just be a creeper.
Do this a couple times a week and before very long you’ll realize that talking to people – not just women, but people – is something you just do. You’ll get used to showing interest in folks, which makes you more interesting to them; after all, most people (especially women or femme-coded non-binary people) aren’t used to folks actually listening and taking in what they have to say. And as you get comfortable and more confident in your social skills, then you’ll be more comfortable taking things to a flirtier or sexier level when it’s time. Not to mention, you’ll be more successful, because social skills are skills, and you improve them through use and deliberate practice.
But again: none of this can happen unless you actually, y’know. Talk to people. So, make a point to start getting conversations going. Use the classic Plausibly Deniable Opener by making an open-ended statement when you’re sitting at the bar or have a “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear” moment when someone’s talking near you. Make a comment or pay someone a compliment on something that they chose – their clothes, tattoos, things that they had a hand in. Get curious about the people around you, and you’ll feel more empowered to get to know them a little.
The more you do it, the easier it becomes.
And hey, those adventures you’ll find yourself going on and the stories you’ll end up collecting? Those’ll make you a more interesting person, with more things to talk about… and leading to more people wanting to talk to you, too.
Good luck.
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