The Three Main Types Of Ways To Meet Women
There are lots of ways for guys to meet women, but I think you can slot them all into three broad categories. Each category has its pros and cons and draws on somewhat different traits and skills. I'll go into them more below. They are:
- Meeting women through your regular life
- Meeting women by approaching strangers
- Meeting women by using dating services
Also, even if you have a fair amount going for you, none of these approaches offer instant gratification. Each of them will involve times where you'll have to be patient or put up with frustrations.
Meeting women through your regular life
This is when your natural day-to-day activities put you in situations where you end up meeting new girls. Examples:
- Meeting women through your friends and acquaintances
- Meeting women at work
- Meeting women at school
- Meeting women at small, intimate parties
- Meeting women through clubs or organizations
- Meeting women through classes, sports teams, etc.
- Meeting women through your hobbies
This method of meeting women has strengths such as:
- Usually considered the most normal and natural way to meet new prospects.
- When you meet someone this way, it has an overall 'easy' feel to it.
- The women you meet this way will often be open, friendly, and unguarded. They know you're a friend of a friend, or in the same class as them, so you've been pre-screened in a way.
- You'll often have things in common with the women you meet in this manner, like you'll have the same interests, or like hanging around the same types of people, or have similar world views.
- If you have a sufficiently rich and varied life, you can meet plenty of women without having to try. You just run into them as you do your own thing.
- There's not really any stigma attached to it.
The drawbacks are:
- Whether you meet anyone is pretty random and out of your control. One night you may go to a party and meet someone, the next three times you may not meet anyone new. You may join a club and not find any prospects there.
- Meeting a good number of prospects requires you to have a social circle or schedule of activities where you'll frequently come across new people. Not everyone's routine or network fills this need. Sometimes you hang around with the same people all the time and no one new or interesting ever comes into the picture.
- To get the most out of this method you need a pretty good group of friends and a lot of interesting things going on in your life. Although it's a worthy goal for it's own sake, building this up can still take time. Not everyone may be up to the task. For socially awkward, inexperienced guys, cultivating a cool group of friends may be a big challenge on its own.
- If this is the only way you meet girls, good prospects may not come along that often. So when they do appear, you may place too much importance on them. Your thinking may become, "She's the first cool girl I've met in months, I have to make this work!" It adds so much sabotaging pressure to the situation.
- Dating within your social circle can lead to drama if things go wrong.
Summary of skills this approach emphasizes:
- Being able to have a group of friends, and not just a bunch of dudes who play video games together, one that often meets women.
- Being able to have a pretty interesting life, that again, often puts new women in front of you.
Meeting women by approaching strangers
Basically any situation where you talk to someone you don't know, and the circumstances don't make the introduction for you. Examples:
- Chatting up a girl at a bar
- Talking to a girl at a big party where you don't really have any connection to her
- Approaching a woman at a bookstore
- Hitting on a girl on your university campus
- Introducing yourself to a woman at some sort of event
Pros:
- If you can do this, you'll never be short on women to meet. You can just go to a nightclub or wander around your campus and come across lots of girls you may be interested in talking to. If they're not into you, there are always more out there. You don't need to hope a cute new girl will be hired at your job or anything.
- If you're comfortable talking to women on your own, your ability to meet them is totally independent of how big your social circle is or how many buddies you have to go out with. This point may be relevant to inexperienced guys who are naturally a little solitary, or who are unpracticed in making friends.
- When you talk about approaching strangers a lot of people's minds go to the idea of trying to pick someone up for sex. But you could just as easily go up to a cute, smart looking girl at a bookstore, get her number, and start courting her in an honorable, wholesome manner.
Cons:
- This is a huge drawback: Approaching a strange woman is difficult and nerve racking for almost all guys. I'm betting most inexperienced guys are going to feel anxious doing it. It can take a while to get used to going up to people you don't know.
- You also need a tolerance for rejection and playing a numbers game. Even if you're a pretty normal, attractive guy, your approach is still going to be rebuffed at times.
- Women aren't always receptive to having random guys come and talk to them. You don't have to be a master seducer, but it takes a certain level of social savvy to be able to come across as a cool person and not yet another annoying guy who wants sex. When you meet girls in other ways you don't have to deal with that "Who is this guy? Is he a creep?" barrier.
- There's a bit of a stigma attached to meeting women this way. It brings up associations of cheesy players trolling dimly lit bars. There's that attitude that if you're chatting up a girl you must only be after one thing. People say things like, "You can never meet anyone good at a club." Some people believe that going out and trying to meet girls is pathetic or trying too hard, and that if you're cool you should be able to meet women "naturally".
- If you live in a small town or tight knit area you may have to watch your reputation. You can't go around talking to anyone like you can in a city.
Summary of skills this approach emphasizes:
- Having the guts to approach strangers.
- A tolerance for rejection and conversations that don't go anywhere
- Having the ability to make a good impression once you've approached someone.
Meeting women through dating services
This is where you're putting your intentions of wanting to meet someone on the table and going through some sort of service to meet other people who have similar goals. For example:
- Online dating
- Singles events
- Introduction services
- Speed dating
- Newspaper personals (do people still do this?)
- I'd even consider asking your friends to set you up with single people they know as falling into this category.
Good points:
- It's efficient and cuts to the chase. You're not hoping you'll meet someone cool at the gym one day. You're being proactive and looking for what you want.
- At events like speed dating you're guaranteed to meet several new women.
- For other things like online dating sites, you have to put in the effort to get noticed, but you're given access to a large number of potential partners, who you can try to contact at your convenience from the comfort of home.
- Online dating isn't physically restrictive. Your prospects aren't limited to people in the same room as you. You can contact people all over your area.
- Online dating can take time, but it's pretty easy to do. You just sit around at home and composes messages or browse profiles or whatnot.
- Online dating can be great for guys who are shy because online interactions are much less stressful. You do have to be comfortable eventually meeting in person though.
Not so good points:
- Most of these services cost money. But on the whole you may find a membership to a dating site cheaper than hitting the bars every weekend hoping to get lucky...
- The stigma associated with using dating services is pretty big. Tons of people use them, but there's still this feeling that if you need to turn to them there must be something wrong with you. If you can set your ego aside, they're pretty helpful though.
- Even though they're arguably the most efficient way to meet prospects, some people just don't like using dating services. They'd rather be out there meeting girls in person than sitting at home sending out dozens of emails and trying to create the perfect profile. They don't want to speed date and have the same conversation with fifteen people.
- That classic problem of people's online presentation not matching how they are in real life.
Summary of skills this approach emphasizes:
- Being able to initially present yourself well (e.g., having a good profile, sending out good messages when you contact people, having two minutes of interesting things to say to all your speed dating match ups, etc.)
- Also being comfortable with rejection and playing the numbers game (i.e., emailing several women but only hearing back from a few).
- Just being able to tolerate this style of meeting people.
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