Pick-up and transgressing the barriers between us - the vast social barriers!

After the prolonged hiatus in my attempts to figure out how to start talking to women out there in meatspace, I decided this week to get back to the most basic step of all - saying "hello".

Specifically, saying hello to someone I don't know. Even more specifically, saying hello to someone I don't know but I might like to get to know better, because she's female, attractive appearance, in my age range and much more than that you can't tell just from looking.

Saying "hello" doesn't sound hard, right? Although given that my typical performance hasn't been good, maybe that's too optimistic. But the thing is, what I tend to struggle with is what to say after saying "hello" - the thing that explains why "hello" in the first place.

So, the plan was this: say hello to an attractive woman walking the other way, as we pass on the pavement, and just keep going, no looking back. No "what to say next" need come into the equation, and no need to worry about what I'm going to say to start things off (I actually decided to say, "Evenin'" as in, "Good evening") either. One word. How hard could that be?

The more astute amongst my readership may have guessed that there wouldn't be much of a story if it was easy. And indeed, it was a lot harder than I imagined.

Here's what happened: I espied the woman to whom I would say "Evenin'" with plenty of time to recognise that this was the opportunity for which I had been preparing. It was evening, and so dark, but plenty of street lighting and other people milling around. Zero worries.

And yet - I still felt a tight knot start to grip in my stomach, and anxiety start to rise. What the heck was going on, what on Earth could cause such a reaction in this zero-pressure situation?

Then I remembered my parents talking about how when they moved from Yorkshire to the South East, how they were struck by how nobody said "'ow do" down here. "Up Home," as Papa calls it, it was commonplace for random people to greet each other in passing. In these parts, not so much. And I grew up round here. So there was a social barrier because it is not "the done thing".

So I resolved to be more like Papa, and play by those rules.

All in the space of a second or two. So, I did say, "Evenin'!" to the attractive woman walking the other way. And, lo and behold, she said "Evening!" back (what else would she do?) I had successfully crossed that barrier, transgressed it, if you will, and had not been struck down by lightning or anything else for that matter. This is what the advice I have been reading on pick-up seems to emphasise and start with: whatever you're imagining as the awful consequence of saying something, it's highly unlikely to be as bad as you think, and in fact most often will be quite pleasant (such as, exchanging a wish of a good evening in the street with a passer-by). The idea that I took on board back in the summer was that you want to build up as many of this pleasant little experiences as possible to boost the confidence levels and then once you get comfortable with "hello", you can start to think about the next step. I struggled to get going with that in the summer, but who knows, maybe 2012 will see a change in that?

One other thing that occurred to me as I walked away from the encounter was that I am also definitely an introvert; I like to live in my head a lot and don't like intrusions that much; I find company exhausting (even when I'm enjoying it). So it's entirely possible that another source of the anxiety and reluctance to make even that small move was that my nature creates stronger barriers for me in that sense, and so for my introverted brain it was a bigger transgression than for a more extroverted person. If so, then I guess if I want to have success with meeting women, I need to get used to making that step, because the feeling won't go away.