date machine : junior high

Date Machine: How to Pick Up Women

amboabe — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:03:00 GMT

When I was in junior high my best friend would give me the names of the girls at his school that he thought were pretty.

I would go over to his house and call them while he listened, talking with the confidence of not knowing or caring about them. I hit it off with one girl and after our first conversation she asked me to keep calling her. So I did. We talked regularly for a month before an actual date was arranged.

She was going to see Three Men and a Little Lady with some of her friends at a theater across town. I convinced a couple of my friends to come with me. We had to convince my friend M’s brother to take us, which took a lot of whining and begging, that, in turn, made us late for the movie. We snuck into the darkened theater ten minutes after it had started. We couldn’t find the girls and decided to just watch the movie and meet them outside when it was over.

After a dramatic climax on an estate somewhere in the British countryside, we shuffled outside. My friend S had half a pack of Camel Lights and he waited for the chance to go smoke, growing irritated with my insistence on meeting these random girls.

Towards the back of the exiting crowd I saw a group of four girls. One in the middle looked like a fuzzy approximation of the face I had seen in J’s yearbook. I was already nervous, and as I saw them heading our way still oblivious to our presence, my heart started throbbing and my hands tingled with new sweat.

Feeling like there was no way out, I took a few terrified steps into the crowd. As I came nearer C looked up and saw me. Her face went blank and it looked like her mouth fell open just a little bit. I thought that she might turn around and run back into the theater to seek refuge.

“Hey, I’m Mike,” I said as I stepped in front of them. C’s friends started giggling. C looked me in the eye while her legs twisted against themselves.

“Hey,” she said.

I didn’t know what else to say and after a few seconds of terrifying silence passed I asked her to come behind the theater with me and my friends to smoke cigarettes. I knew C liked to smoke, she stole her mother’s menthols.

C’s face transformed from blank to incredulous. Her eyes narrowed and her lips parted in disbelief just before she started laughing in my face.

“No way,” she said. “Why would I want to go smoke cigarettes with you?” she asked. She grabbed one of her friend’s hands and started walking quickly away, saying she was late and had to get home even though it was summer and the middle of the afternoon.

Up until that point I had the self-loathing adolescent’s hunch that everyone found me physically disgusting, and this was the irrefutable confirmation I had been waiting for.

It took a long time to realize that I was only revolting to some people, not all. It’s always a surprise when I find people who are actually attracted to me. Even when I can’t reciprocate the attraction it’s always lovely to be reminded that I am desirable to someone, somewhere. And it’s even more of a surprise when I find myself together with someone I’m attracted to. Throughout the years I’ve found myself stealing glances at the women I’ve been in love with, wondering to myself how I wound up with someone so lovely.

I’m not adept at picking up women, and I don’t really try to. I resent the notion of seduction. I don’t want to convince someone that they should be with me. If they’re not interested from the outset then neither am I. But there are two general practices I’ve used when I’m attracted to someone, which I’ll now share with you, in sequential order.

1. Say Hello
2. Shut up

There are a lot of men who’ve applied endless thought and energy to the arithmetic of seduction. They’ve created a conversational roadmap that any man can use to make himself appear more desirable. The idea of following a conversation by rote or having a specific objective in mind while talking to someone doesn’t really inspire my sense of romance. But saying hello to an attractive stranger does.

It’s obvious, I realize, but how many people ever really act on attraction when they’re out? How many people catch your eye every day, and how many do you try and connect with? I do it once a week, sometimes less, and usually without anything coming from it. It’s easier to sit back and analyze a person, imagine who they are, look at what they’re wearing, build up a nice fantasy, and then let it all evaporate in a poof as they walk out the door a few minutes later.

Deciding you’re interested enough to risk rejection and embarrassment for the sake of saying hello to someone new is always worth it. Even in the crumbling flames of rejection, the knowledge that I tried has always been better company and comfort than inaction. Like everything else, you can worry that there’s a right way and a wrong way to talk to somebody, that there’s a formal set of standards for seductive conversation. But there isn’t. You determine what’s right and wrong, seductive or unappealing with each person you meet, and the standards are in constant flux. But you can’t find out until you say hello.

The next step isn’t as intuitive. I’ve been described as aloof since I was a teenager. I can be quiet and withdrawn, disappearing into a veneer of passive gazing. But I can also go on epic runs of motor-mouthing. It alleviates my anxiety to fill in all the silences with a gush of words. I have to force myself to talk less when I’m with someone new, to be comfortable with the presence of conversational slack.

I like to use conversation and wit to make a show of how much I like someone, and my speech can become slightly manic trying to rid myself of the tantalizing burden of the attraction. Instead, I am more attractive when I shut my mouth and trust in the fact that there is an innate attraction. It doesn’t need a flood of nervous puns and embarrassing stories to make it blossom. So when I’m out with someone I really like for the first time the thought that goes through my head more than any other is, “Shut up, just shut up.”

It’s hard to trust yourself when you’re taking a chance with someone you’re attracted to. You take the spotlight for a few minutes. You become the guy in the coffee shop or the dude in the vegetable aisle trying his luck with a woman. People are watching, people are eavesdropping; you’re on stage and have to perform. When I feel strongly enough about a person, I’ll force myself out in spite of the embarrassment, and then try to keep my mouth shut for as long as I can stand.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Women at 30, or the Scent of the Medicine Cabinet

Date Machine: My Friend's Girlfriend is my Girlfriend

Love Machine: Dating Someone with a Handicap

Date Machine: How to Pick Up a Nurse at the HIV Clinic

Date Machine: Full Disclosure

Sex Machine: The Bare Minimum

Date Machine: The Seductive Art of Dancing

Sex Machine: Becoming A Virgin Again

Sex Machine: Come On My Face

Sex Machine: Because I Can

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

Love Machine: Willing to Relocate

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

amboabe — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:42:00 GMT

I've developed the reputation of an ego-centric fop with some of my friends because I talk about certain people I'm sure have crushes on me. Not everyone is in love with me, I'm told over and over again with disgusted head nods. That's not what I think, but it's obvious when someone you're impartial to is attracted to you. It gets harder when you're attracted to them back. With people I've really liked I go almost blind to their cues of attraction. I have to rely on friends to translate their behavior into digestible niblets because I'm usually too busy deconstructing all the reasons they wouldn't want me.

My friend S went on a date with a woman this weekend. He emailed me after it was over and said he was ready to fall in love with her. He sent her an email the same night and told her he had a great time and wanted to see her again the next weekend. She wrote back three days later saying she had a nice time meeting him but was too busy to pursue a relationship. In my head that sentiment is followed by a sad face emoticon.

Talking to S about it, my natural reaction was to denigrate the woman. It was the end of the day and I was tired, I had been traveling all afternoon, lugging bags around airports, train stations, and shuttle vans; but I'm never too tired to turn into a surly bitch for show. Clearly this woman had to be in the same league as protozoal slime to have not appreciated S's finer qualities. She must have been a mule, a dim-eyed trough of experiential excrement.

I hate it when friends do this with me. Swallowing the vinegar of rejection isn't soothed by hearing someone dehumanized, especially when they had been such a fond point of reference a few days earlier. What hurts about being rejected isn't the idea that someone doesn't like you, it's the dislocation of realizing you had heedlessly flung yourself after someone who you weren't paying attention to.

It's an unknowable abstraction that sparks first attraction, a sporadic collection of setting, energy, humor, style, and physical cues. There's no accounting for how and when it will happen. What doesn't help bring it about is need. The times when I've been out with someone and felt some internal push for companionship, an urge to quell my insecurities about myself and my circumstances with validation from a woman, I've failed abjectly.

Rejection is funny, ultimately. It's a joke of probability, and there's little need to personalize it, especially after a first date. I remember the first time I was turned down. I was in seventh grade and had asked E to "go around" with me after slow dancing together at an afterschool dance. She thought about it overnight and met me on the playground the next day with two of her friends. She presented her fist to me with the words "push me" written over a blue dot. I pushed the dot and she opened her fist. The final judgment was written on her palm. "Let's just be friends."

One time I was dancing with some friends in a college bar that we used to go to when we were still in school. I had left my drink on a runner bordering the dance floor and at one point I walked over to re-intoxicate myself a bit. Two undergrads were standing near where my drink was and their eyes went wide with apprehension as I walked towards them. The alpha undergrad stood between me and her friend and nodded her head incredulously at me. "Sorry, we're not interested," she said.

I've been told "no" in a lot of different ways, but I had never been rejected in advance. Apparently the simple idea that I might have something flirtatious to say to either woman was so distasteful that it needed preemption. I loved it. I reveled in that story for months. It delighted me to have caught such a brief glimpse of myself through the unflattering lens of their eyes. It was like looking at myself in a funhouse mirror.

Rejection is worst when you need something from another person. The frame of mind that's brought a person to such a lowly state of desperation only makes things worse. Nobody can give you anything. You are the only thing you get in life. The only possession you have is the one you get right from the beginning: your naked and shriveled body crying helplessly in the doctor's arms.

Previous Posts:

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Date Machine: Look Ugly in a Photograph

Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On

Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry

Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Sex Machine: Getting Laid

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date

Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After

Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans

Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date