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I’m at a small bar, and a woman walks up and accidently brushes against me. I jokingly tell her to keep her hands off. She laughs.
So this is a good way to start, For those of you keeping track at home, Ancom’s opener is to jokingly reframe this woman bumping into him as her as trying to get into his pants; she’s clearly willing to play along with it since she laughs instead of fighting it. This implies that she’s at least a little interested in him – or finds him amusing, which is actually close enough for government work. Now to be sure: this is something that requires a certain level of social calibration, because it’s incredibly easy to come off as a dickbag instead of somebody making a joke. But it does set up the situation as potentially sexual rather than, say, becoming platonic BFFs.
I take that as an all-clear for demanding that she at least buys me a drink before she starts groping me. Said and done. She gets me a drink, and I ask who she’s here with.
Now here’s where things get a little dodgy; what Ancom is doing is testing for compliance by demanding that she do something for him. This is a technique that PUAs use to reinforce the frame – she’s seeking his approval by doing what he asks – as well as check how into him she may be. The more interested someone is in you, the more likely they are to do something you ask; sometimes it’s as simple as “tell me something cool about yourself” or “keep me company while I get a drink”. Sometimes it’s “buy me a drink”.
Now, demanding that she buy him a drink right off the bat is actually pushing pretty damn hard pretty damn fast; he’s demanding a high level of compliance from someone he’s literally just met. This not something I would advocate trying 99.9% of the time. It takes a high level of social calibration to do something like this without being an asshole, and the situations where it would be socially appropriate are pretty thin on the ground. You can pretty much only get away with trying this in singles bars and clubs – places where it’s generally understood that the purpose of being there is to meet (and sleep with) new people.
I’d would run with saying that she should at least introduce herself before she starts groping me – still pinging for a certain amount of attraction and maintaining a frame that she was groping me rather than just trying to get to the bar. Same result, but far less likely to repulse someone who might otherwise be interested in you.
Now that being said, she does seem to be attracted, since she actually does buy a drink.
She tells me she’s having an after work with some friends. I ask what she does for a living, and she says she’s a receptionist. I tell her that my mother always warned me about receptionists because they’re bad news.
OK Ancom, here you’re starting to push pretty hard on the sexual framing and it’s really unnecessary. She’s already leapt through a couple major hoops to show that she’s into you. It really starts coming across as trying too hard to establish a point and you start risking turning her off. Plus, “Mother always warned me about receptionists”? This isn’t even that clever as a frame; something like this is going to make even people who’re already attracted to you stop and think “What?” and kill any forward momentum dead.
She laughs again and asks me why I’m here. I tell her I came with some friends.
BLANK.
At this point I honestly don’t know how to proceed. I feel like I have zero information that I want to convey to her. I literally don’t know what to say. Can you please help me? This is driving me nuts, and it’s seriously keeping me from meeting a lot of women I would love to be in the company of.
Well, there’re two different issues here. First of all, you were pounding on the “you’re a sexual predator” button pretty hard, which was defining the conversation you were having; when she’s asking you why you’re here, she’s asking what your motivation (as though you hadn’t been telegraphing them pretty blatantly) was for being at that bar, that night. It’s an opportunity to flirt and keep the sexual charge going if she’s that into you already. You want to keep the thread going: “Well, I thought it might not be a bad night to be groped by an attractive stranger,” “Thought I’d get a few drinks and make some bad decisions.” That sort of thing.
Secondly, telling her that you’re here with friends is A) answering a question she didn’t ask B) pretty damn incongruous to the tone you were setting. You’ve gone from flirting to “Yup, here with my buddies.” Not even “my friends are taking me out for a drink because we’re celebrating $AWESOME_THING tonight.” Just “Out with friends.”
What do you want to say? Well, since you were looking to get laid that night, what you wanted to convey was enough about being a cool person to justify her being interested in potentially going home with you. You’d want to find out more about her in order to justify (to her mind, if nothing else) your attraction to her. You would want to find out the potential logistics for that night – did she drive her own car, or did she ride with somebody else? Does she have somewhere to be the next morning that would preclude going home with someone?
If this were someone you might’ve been interested in taking out for a date rather than banging right then and there, you might have wanted to look for common – or at least complimentary – interests by sharing some stories and experiences of your own and asking questions from her. You might want to seed a potential date early on by talking about a cool thing you like to do, then later on mentioning that you’re planning on doing $COOL_THING later that week and she should come with you, then get her number so you can follow up later.
The problem I’m seeing in what you’ve described to me is that you’re trying to get a lot of result for very little effort; you’re not really that interested in getting to know the people you’re talking to as much as progressing down the flow-chart to the desired end point. Hell, you don’t seem all that interested in your own life. Spend a little more time looking to connect on more than a surface level and you’ll find you’re having less of a problem with running out of things to say.
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