Dude. That’s just…it’s like finding out that there’s a colony of molemen living six inches under your house, and they have a party on your lawn every night. Still probably not for me, but I’m quite baffled that I never even knew it existed.
WarrenM
2822
“How did your team do tonight?” Seriously. It is JUST THAT EASY.
You don’t have this problem obviously so you’re not understanding it. No, it’s NOT easy.
A middle-aged marketing exec with a lot of makeup, a skin-tight wardrobe, a seriously big ass, and an incredible tendency to talk right over replies to her own questions was aggressively pursuing me at work last year.
SHE played in kickball leagues. And now she’s going on a singles cruise. Just sayin’
JM1
2824
Can I just point out that as a dirty forren bastid, “kickball” sounds completely fucking retarded.
Hey, man, every ship needs some ballast…
What, and cricket doesn’t? At least kickball tells you what to expect.
So does cricket.
<chiiiiiiiirp…chiiiiiiiiirp>
I’m here all week, folks.
JM1
2827
Cricket has been around for a very long time. “Kickball” was presumably invented fairly recently. Is it just some sort of cultural cringe about playing football?
I’ve been married for 17 years, so I’m a bit out of practice, but I think I get it.
Look, what happens is that the delay in going up to a cute chick and talking to her works against you. You start trying to go through the conversation, trying to refine your technique, nit-picking at what you might say and before long you’ve made a mountain out of a molehill. Now you’ve built up the experience so that it’s like trying to strike up a conversation with Genghis Khan who might lop off your testicles if you say the wrong thing. It’s now a REALLY BIG DEAL and you’re so tense that if you stuck a lump of coal up your ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond. It doesn’t have to be that way.
The first thing you have to understand is that the worst thing she can say is “no”. That’s the worst negative outcome you can get. Though in some cases, that may be the outcome you want in the long run, hehe! Big deal. You say no every day. Do you want to super-size that? No. Will you in a donation to the firefighters fund? No. See? It’s not a big deal. You do it all the time. If she says “no”, that’s an ok answer. You know why? Because then you’re not wasting your time. It can’t be a personal rejection, because she doesn’t know you. It certainly isn’t the end of the world, because there are a couple dozen million available women out there in the USA.
So, frankly, if you see a cute girl that attracts you, don’t hesitate. Don’t try to work through the conversation in your mind. Don’t go to the bar to down another beer to work up the courage. Just walk up to her, look her in the eyes, say “hi” and ask about something relevant that’s going on. It’s really that simple. Ask her about her shoes. How does she like the band? How she takes her coffee in Starbucks? Whether she’s grateful for the break in the weather. It doesn’t really matter. Then once she answers, introduce yourself and let things flow from there.
If you can let two things guide you:
- Don’t wait.
- No is an ok result.
Then you’re fine.
Finding a date is just like sales. It’s a numbers game. Or, looking at it another way, it’s much better go down swinging than to leave the bat on your shoulder. You can’t hit a pitch if you don’t swing the bat. It doesn’t take an ultra-confident guy to do that. It’s just takes someone who understands how logical it is.
WarrenM
2829
Finding a date is just like sales. It’s a numbers game.
Which brings us around again to internet dating. :)
The first thing you have to understand is that the worst thing she can say is “no”. That’s the worst negative outcome you can get. Though in some cases, that may be the outcome you want in the long run, hehe! Big deal. You say no every day. Do you want to super-size that? No. Will you in a donation to the firefighters fund? No. See? It’s not a big deal.
I should clarify at this point that I’ve been married to a woman I met via internet dating for 5+ years now so none of this really concerns me personally.
I will just reiterate that for guys like me, all the pep talk in the world will not overcome the reality of the situation. I needed something to get me over that initial hurdle and I found it online.
And, you know, there’s also another reality here … At the time I was trying to date, I didn’t go to bars or play sports or do much of anything really outside of video games and work. That makes it really difficult to meet someone who I could have a relationship with without changing myself so much that it wouldn’t be sustainable. Sure, I could force myself to go out to clubs or play sports or whatever but that wasn’t me. It wouldn’t have been real and ultimately would have failed.
Thank you for putting this better than I could.
I don’t think internet dating is about people who are scared to talk to girls. I think it’s about people who lack contexts in which they can meet and initiate conversation with potential dates. You can go about creating those contexts in lots of different ways – join a class! make new friends! attend every party you can possibly get yourself invited to! – and it’s worth doing, but this stuff can take a long time to set in motion.
Dating isn’t just about randomly walking up to attractive women in bars and propositioning them. Well, for some it is, but that’s not how I’ve met people in the past nor how most of the people I know met their wives/girlfriends. I suspect most successful relationships come from people who have common interests, mutual friends, overlapping social circles, shared group activities, whatever. Internet dating, with its profiles and presumption of a common goal, doesn’t replace these structures, but it does at least provide some context for what you’re trying to do.
ElGuapo
2832
So back to internet dating. I know, I know I said I was done with it, but a really attractive woman messaged me back (after a week long delay) on OKCupid and well, attractive woman. So I meet her last night for dinner and had a great time.
We were talking a bit about online dating and the hit or miss ratio, messaging strategies, etc. We pretty much agreed it’s skewed heavily towards attractive women. There was an OKCupid article that I think was mentioned upthread that basically says that some huge number (over 60%?) of men will message the top 10% of attractive women, i.e. attractive women get all the messages, or put another way guys will just take a chance sending a message to an attractive woman. Non snarkily and honestly, she confirmed this and said she pretty much doesn’t contact guys because the messages come in so fast she can’t keep up. Most of what she gets are guys much older than her (I am in fact 7 years older than her but I think she was talking about guys in their late 40s and 50s).
Pretty much this. I learned that sitting around at coffee shops. And that’s funny thing. I had to learn that post-college. Basic social things. Ah well.
shift6
2835
I am with you on this. The the nice thing about meeting as part of a team event is that there are three or four things to talk about, especially as the weeks pass. Great opening “lines” have already been suggested here: ask about today’s game. Then, next week, ask about how they did better than last week. And so on. Do it for six months with no eyes on romantic contact just to break the cycle, my fiend. It broke me of my “opening shyness”.
There’s also what WarrenM said. While I definitely am shy and that’s complicated the real life approach, especially back when I was still in school and/or working at the library (lots of hot women there, believe it or not), that alone was not sufficient impetus to do the internet dating thing. I made occasional attempts to get a date, got invariably turned down or strung along until it was clear even to me that it would never happen, and met people online who were awesome and on other continents or halfway across this one or male.
But these days, work isn’t a viable dating arena, I’m done with school, my social outlets haven’t had anyone eligible in years, and I have zero interest in the more traditional venues (certainly not sports or bars. Eugh.). So, the internet, where I am already involved and as a bonus also not shy. Only, this time I’m actively looking and doing it in ways that guarantee a population that’s local and single and looking.
I’m Swedish, and I knew kickball was somewhat of a pastime in the US!
And then bust out a laptop with the Rimbot forecasting the performance of her team for the following team. Make sure you go into excruciating detail about how the calculation is made and start talking about a player’s KCK (kicking percentage).
It’s a playground game that’s just like baseball, except you kick a big purple inflated rubber ball instead of swinging a bat at a little hard ball. It’s the same kind of ball used for the game “four square,” if you have that on playgrounds across the pond.
WarrenM
2840
NOTE: Ball does not have to be purple. That’s not a regulation or anything.
