Compliments from strangers - a few thoughts on pick-up

This post is more-or-less brought about by a sequence of events and thoughts that brought to mind an episode from my days at university, more of which later. The main thrust is to think about how I relate to some PUA advice that, on the surface anyway, looks to be less bad than a lot of it.

The particular advice is that, in day game, a pick-up artist is best off opening with a compliment, as opposed to the "neg" that is the staple of night game (that is, pick up in bars/nightclubs). This sounds quite positive, but I still struggle with it. Thinking about why took my mind back to my uni days:

I was about 18 or 19, at a bar with a few of friends/acquaintances on the same course as me, including one or two women. Now, at this stage I was still well and truly in my "Nice Guy" phase of relating to women and feminism (embarrassing to admit that I had one, but I did, and hopefully those ways of thinking are relegated to the past). I was also, however, trying to become better at being a teensy bit more direct about my desires and/or getting to talk to women in the first place.

I therefore was watching as the girl I wanted to talk to received a line from a guy (my memory says it was another member of the group I was with, but it may have been someone else). The line was nothing if not "direct game": he said, "You've got great tits!"

I remember being angry at her response (bear in mind that this WAS back when I was a Nice Guy, and I wouldn't think the same way now!). What she said was an enthusiastic, "Thanks!" and she went off to talk to him some more. I was angry because everything I had absorbed from trying to understand feminism and how to be Nice and not Bad said that what the right answer should have been was, "How DARE you reduce me to a body part?!?!" I will leave you to do your own analysis of how many ways of wrong that thinking was It's possible that this incident was the seed that got me away from thinking in Nice Guy terms, in that it showed me that the myths I held about how to relate to women were exactly that: myths. I guess I'm lucky I didn't fall into the trap of finding PUA at that stage (not that I could afford it as a student, but anyway) because I definitely passed through a phase of "girls only like the mean guys, so I should try to be more mean" thinking before I came out the other end as a wiser and more aware human being.

The point being, that I had an idea about how it should work, and then it didn't work that way when I saw it in action. I also had no idea how to make it work the way I had seen it working.

Back to the PUA advice. Day game often means stopping a woman in the street (or a book shop or wherever) to strike up a conversation. The trouble I have with this is that I find it hard to figure out how to offer a compliment to a stranger, that hasn't been solicited (if someone shows off a talent in public, then sure, I can compliment with the best of 'em!)

Today, I was out and about, trying to put this (and some more specific advice) into practice, but that really didn't work out the way I wanted it to. I'll type up the full "update" and in it explain what I'm talking about.

So, I set out in the afternoon, hoping to time my trip so that I might coincide with women who were getting off work early. I felt good, but not, as it happened, good enough. I started by making my cheery, "Afternoon!" greetings to two or three women who were coming the other way, which went more positively than yesterday. I was very annoyed with myself on the last one, though, because she was very good-looking and I really should have said something that was a proper opening line - I thought I had a chance. The fact that my greeting was also the most positively received one of the day so far only served to persuade me that I had missed an opportunity. On the plus side, it was a positive reaction, which will serve as another reminder that people don't normally bite your head off just for talking to them out of the blue.

So, on with the show, I hoped. As it happened, not that many women around: I'd been quicker with my earlier errands than I expected and that meant I was earlier to the main areas of town where I thought I might meet some women. To the supermarket - it's as much a day game environment as anywhere, although the trolley might make some of the interactions more tricky.

Three times, bottled it. Only one with a real excuse (I was in the queue for the checkout and going after her would have annoyed several other people even if I didn't annoy the woman whom I wanted to approach).

The issue was this: I would see a woman I wanted to approach, and then my brain would go bananas:

"complimentcomplimentcompliment, come on, someone think of something. YOU! What have you got... no, that'll never do - she's not wearing earrings! ... We can't say that! (not without getting arrested, anyway!) ... Her shoes, did anybody notice her shoes, at all? Oh, wait. She's gone."

(inspired by Ed Byrne's "What Are You Thinking?" sequence - specifically the bit from about 7'55" in this Youtube video)

The point being that finding something that is appropriate to say to a stranger, unequivocally a compliment, and also true, is trickier in the heat of the moment than it sounds. (See also this post and this one.) The other problem was that I would get locked into a "prediction loop", which is something I seem not to have mentioned before but it's an issue with most of my approaches or failures to approach. What I mean is when I all but try to have the conversation with her in my head before I have it in person. I want to know what my next line is before I have to say it. I think that realistically I do need to have not just my opening line but my second line (i.e. first response to her) lined up, because I don't expect to have enough cues to work with at that stage - some of the other pieces of advice I've read recently deal with how to decide "what comes next", which sort of helps, but also leaves me trying to plan what the next step is going to be before I get to it, by remembering that rule. So now I try to plan the first two steps at least before I make an approach. Given how much difficulty I have just with the first step, this seems like a surefire way never to approach!

I think anxiety does play into this a little, although I'm in two minds whether that's the best word for it. The problem is, as I have mentioned before, feeling like I need something to say before I want to say anything at all, and since what I really want to say is usually the second thing, not the first, out of my mouth - that's how come I need to plan it two steps ahead before approaching. The anxiety, if such it is, is that I will be caught out as having bothered her for no reason, by virtue of not having anything to say.

This thing of "needing something to say" leads us right back to where I started, with the anecdote from my university days. In that last link in the paragraph above, I wrote:

In my head, there is just no reason for her to care ... In my world, if someone says hello (and/or introduces themselves) then it generally means they have something they want to say, so you wait a couple of seconds to find out what it is, and if they don't say it, you start to turn away and then you leave. That means that I need something to say after I say hello, otherwise nothing is going to happen.

Now, I am sure that this is not quite analogous to my mystification at the uni student's reaction to "nice tits!" but it feels like the same sort of mental block (of course, I'm not going to get angry about women behaving differently than I expect!) In a sense, I guess that the quoted assumption is accurate: you do need to say something to hold a person's interest, after all. The tricky part is that I don't have the knack of devising it on the spot, meaning that I need something to say lined up in advance. This problem seems like a mismatch of styles of communication, in that I seem to be framing a conversation as having a purpose - "these things are the information I need to convey, these are the questions I want to have answered." But that isn't quite what's going on when the objective of the conversation is to forge some kind of connection. The key question may be to work out how I can switch modes and communicate with a stranger in that "connecting" way instead of the "information trade" way.