Remember That Women Get Approachee Anxiety
There was a post at Alpha Game last week in which a self-styled omega male reader asked for advice on basic conversational skills. I empathized, as a recovering shy person myself there was a long time where I was paralyzed by my embarrassment at not being able to carry on conversations.
However, the whole topic combined with my earlier post about the personality demands of “beautiful high-quality women” got me thinking about a couple of bad mental frames guys can get into when it comes to approaching women.
SOME GIRLS ARE BAD COMMUNICATORS
When you’re a young dude and especially if you’re not into small talk, it’s easy to blame yourself and think that it’s “your problem” if conversations with girls don’t go very well. Likewise, it’s a point of Girl Canon to assume that by virtue of their sex, girls have great communication skills and are socially top-notch and so any botched conversations must be because the guy is socially awkward or something.
That’s simply not true. Plenty of girls are crappy conversationalists, dealing poorly with topic changes, reading tone, managing cadence, interrupting, listening, or talking about something the other person would be interested in. It has helped me, on the whole, to consistently remind myself that women do not have it all figured out in the game…lots of women have “approachee anxiety,” get nervous around guys, don’t know what to say and so say whatever insipid thought might come into their minds, and otherwise fail at properly shepherding the conversation forward. When you consider the plethora of girls who socialize mostly with other women and in addition aren’t getting approached frequently and thus don’t have much practice chatting with guys, it’s not hard to understand why many of them aren’t that great at the conversation thing.
This goes double for those occasions when a girl is interested in you. Standard PUA teaching is that a woman will drop stereotyped indicators of interest (IOIs) when she’s into you, such as touching herself, touching you, laughing at what you say, or asking your name. But it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes a girl will respond to the interest of an interesting man with a total unnerved shutdown that looks like non-interest, or a free-wheeling lack of conversational tact. I’ve heard literally dozens of women say how embarrassed and flustered they feel when an attractive guy is talking to them.
It really knocks the pedestal away to remember that it’s only half your fault if the conversation sucks. The past few years I’ve been able to internalize that I’m an interesting, dynamic guy, and if she can’t keep up an interesting conversation with me, it’s HER problem, and I don’t stand for a woman making men feel like they are the ones with the problem because they can’t keep the girl entertained when she can’t be bothered to carry her weight in the discussion.
GIRLS CAN’T READ YOUR MIND
In turn, this discussion brought to mind how easy it is to psych yourself out when approaching by thinking that women have some kind of mind-reading ability and can tell exactly how nervous you are and what your insecurities are and all the rest of it. Don’t go down that path – she may have a bad read or squarely no idea what’s going through your head. This came up in LaidNYC’s interview with Manosphere Radio:
“For most guys, your nervousness is honestly pretty subtle, and girls aren’t experts on male body language. This mythical woman’s intuition, it’s all bullshit – girls don’t have like a magic window into your soul. I feel like guys have this idea that when you approach and you’re nervous, a girl’s gonna know that you’re a nervous low-value virgin or whatever. But in reality, you’re giving her way too much credit.”
Host Peter then quotes Krauser who posits that a bit of nerves can make you a bit more “real” and head off the “player vibe.”
Anxiety in general tends to heighten one’s self-consciousness, and approaching is no exception – that’s one of the outcomes of approach anxiety, you begin to doubt your own value and project your doubts onto other people. For all you know, she spotted you walking in and has already projected onto you her conviction that you are the sexiest guy she’s seen all night. Just walk up to her, say the opener and cast out any thoughts that she’s got you figured out. Some approach anxiety is almost always going to be there, don’t make it worse by making irrational assertions to yourself because of it.
While it’s true that women are going to pick up body language and kinetic cues that you might be unaware of, don’t mistake that for someone having a full informed picture of your own emotional state. People misread cues all the time, and if women had this magical intuition in spades, they’d be dominating all the poker tournaments and arms negotiations.
KEEP IT REAL
I find that recalling these two truths gives me a couple of things. One is a sense of ease that the other person might have as many butterflies as I do. Another is a sense of empathy for her, which helps stave off the adversarial frame of the typical night-game approach and build the human connection I am going for to begin with.
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Be Yourself, Unless You’re Nervous, Than Be Someone Else
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