It’s tough being a shy guy in the dating game. Take it from me, a supposedly smart and nice guy who was ignored by girls for most of my life.
If I liked a girl, then it would feel literally impossible for me to ask her out. What if she said no? Then I’d have to awkwardly see her at school or work again.
Even worse, what if she said yes? Then where would I take her? What if the date was bad? What would I even do with a girlfriend if I had one?
And to top it off, for years I was extremely insecure. I thought I looked ugly growing up, I was scared to smile because of my slightly crooked front teeth, and I believed my appearance was the reason no girls ever showed interest in me.
So for years, I watched from the sidelines as the girls I liked went out with the more popular and confident guys.
Shy women usually don’t have the same problems us guys do. I talked about this in my video on social anxiety and dating. As long as a girl is cute or attractive, many guys will see her as girlfriend material… even if she’s shy, quiet or socially awkward.
(Don’t get me wrong, women have many of their own frustrations in dating. But being shy is not the same block for them as it is for men.)
The truth is that many shy men can go months or even years without having a girlfriend, dating or even kissing a girl. Some women claim that shyness is cute and that you should just “be yourself”… but when they say “shy” they probably mean the strong silent type of guy, not the nervous socially awkward type like I was.
Why Is Being A Shy Guy So Difficult?
Well, the first obvious reason is that confidence and social status are probably the most attractive things to a woman. Think back to your high school, who were all the cutest girls dating? The popular and cool guys, the ones who spoke up fearlessly, a.k.a. the ones with the most social power. (There’s actually a scientific reason for this that I’ll explain more about later.)
A second problem: It’s extremely rare for a girl to initiate and ask a guy out. So a shy guy has to somehow overcome that paralyzing anxiety you feel when you want to go talk to a girl you like.
Lastly, what do you even say to her? This is one of the most common question I get. And if you don’t know how to flirt and spark a girl’s interest… then no girl will ever seem interested in you, and asking her out may even be a weird thing to do.
In this article, I’m going to provide you with key pointers to getting the relationship you want. I’m going to start off with the basics so that even a guy who is a virgin and totally confused about dating, can be on his way to having a girlfriend.
1. Where To Meet A Girl?
You could become a stock photographer. Thats one way to meet women.
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Formula
There is no perfect answer for where ANY guy can find a girlfriend. People meet each other in many different places, in many different ways.
In fact, one of my reasons for writing this article is to bust a lot of the MYTHS that some dating advice or so-called “pick up” coaches are spreading. So let me now bust one of the big myths about WHERE to meet women…
Busting The Clubs & Bars Myth
When I was first trying to overcome my shyness around girls… I went out of my way to go to clubs.Why? Because some random dating coaches recommended it. I even had an apartment a couple blocks away from one of the main nightlife areas in the city.
It was miserable. I hated the obnoxious too-loud pop music. Pretending that I liked dancing. Heck, I barely even drink alcohol. So I had basically thrown myself into a social situation where it’s the HARDEST to meet women if you’re a more introverted or intelligent guy.
It took me a few months of banging my head against the wall to realize the obvious:
Women are everywhere.
Now I live near a downtown university, which means there’s a seemingly endless stream of cute girls walking down the street whenever I step outside. If you live in a more suburban area outside the city, then go to a nearby shopping mall, bookstore or a busy coffee shop. I guarantee you’ll see plenty of women.
Where Can You Meet A Compatible Girl?
Stop thinking about where to meet any girl. Start thinking about where you can meet the girl who is right for you.
The problem with meeting girls at nightclubs or even going to one of those”single people events” is that there’s a very small chance that you are compatible with a random girl.
If you’re into self help or spirituality, then maybe the best place to meet someone for you is at a yoga class.
If you’re a hipster grad student, then maybe that’s the girl beside you in class, or the one reading a book at the bookstore.
If you’re a bro that likes to get smashed drinking beer and watch sports (if you’re reading this article, then probably not)… then this could be at a sports bar or frat party.
The first step to finding a girlfriend is to put yourself into situations where you can meet many different girls that have a high chance of being compatible with you. This doesn’t mean you both need to be the #1 and #2 Harry Potter fans. It’s more about finding people who have compatible values, lifestyle, and personal energy.
(Side note: Even though I often meet random girls in the daytime, I’ve accepted that the vast majority of these conversations will never lead to dating or a girlfriend. But it is a great way to improve your social skills. Meeting people at a business or networking event feels pretty easy when you’ve already gotten past the fear of rejection of talking to beautiful women who could reject you.)
Most guys meet their girlfriends:
At school, work or while doing one of their hobbies. (The key is to get out of the house often.)
Through friends. (Friends they usually met in one of the places I just mentioned.)
Online dating is also getting more popular. Although I’m not a big fan, the fact is now almost a quarter of adults ages 25-34 years old have used online dating. (source)
Exercise
Write down a list of 5 places you could go to meet compatible women. If you’re sitting at home all day, then the rest of this article won’t help you much. You have to put yourself into situations where you have a chance to come in contact with women. That’s the first step. If you don’t have many friends or a social circle, then you’ll have to get some or be proactive in other ways.
Pro tip: check out MeetUp.com and see if there’s any events that seem interesting to you. Think of any hobbies you’ve ever thought of trying — whether it’s drawing, martial arts, meditation — and see where these classes are offered. Even if you don’t meet a girlfriend, you could make a new friend that introduces you to the girls in their social circle.
Now to the next step…
2. Why Aren’t Women Attracted To You?
Want to know something a bit embarrassing?
Growing up, I was surrounded by girls. There were plenty in each of my classes. In high school there were probably hundreds. I had a couple part time jobs where I met a dozen more.
And yet, I still never had a girlfriend.
Even in university… where there were SO. MANY. DAMN. WOMEN. EVERYWHERE… I still didn’t ever go on a date. So clearly, just being in a situation where you’re NEAR a lot of girls is not going to get you a girlfriend.
Don’t Be Yourself
Well-meaning people may tell shy guys that you just need to “be yourself” and eventually some girl will fall in love with you. Just like in the movies.
Don’t believe them. The movies aren’t real. Script writers just write what people WANT to be true. Here’s how reality actually works: If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.
“Being yourself” is not going to get you a girlfriend. You’ve already tried that. Has it worked? Since you’re reading this article, probably not. So if you want a girlfriend, then you’ll need to do something different. You’ll need to BE someone different.
Looking back now, it’s no wonder why girls never showed any interest in me. The truth was, I was a loner and not a very attractive person. Depressed, insecure about how I looked, little sense of fashion, and unable to even look a cute woman in the eyes for more than 1 second.
I had to change myself and my behavior before my dating results changed. I had to become a more assertive, outgoing and interesting person. I had to overcome many of my fears and build new conversation skills. I had to learn how to become more comfortable with myself and comfortable connecting with other people.
(Important note: Becoming comfortable with yourself is much different than “being yourself” and not changing. You cannot have close personal relationships unless you are comfortable with yourself. I’ll explain more about this later.)
How Attraction Works, According To Science
First, let’s think about what attracts men.
What grabs your attention? If we’re going to be honest, it’s a woman’s appearance first and foremost. A cute face, nice breasts, round hips, soft skin, a certain walk. Men are wired to feel attraction to a woman whose body displays signs of fertility, health and youth.
I want you to now imagine a girl or woman you have a crush on. How does she look? Probably really cute. Guys can like a girl a lot just because of how she looks… even if you’ve barely talked to her in the past.
Now, I’m not saying that looks are everything to men, but they’re the primary thing that attracts us to a girl in the first place. Only after we find a girl physically attractive are we open to being even more won over by her personality, common interests, etc.
I’m sure you can’t think of a time when a girl you were totally physically not attracted to suddenly won you over with her sense of humour. (Yet this happens to women all the time.)
Why do men tend to be visual and more superficial? Because that’s the way evolution designed us. It wired us to be attracted to a women likely to produce healthy kids with great genes.
For example, ever noticed how the woman is almost always a few years younger than the man in any couple? Why is this? Because a woman who is younger was a lot more likely to have a healthy pregnancy in the distant past.
Whether this is true or not today doesn’t matter. It was true a few thousand and a few million years ago. And that’s when the attraction part of our brain was designed by evolution. Cavemen who mated with younger women were more likely to have healthy and surviving kids, so now guys are wired to be attracted to younger women in general.
(Note that I say “in general.” Right now I’m talking about what is generally true, but there are always exceptions.)
(Source: FiveThirtyEight.com)
Scientific studies have also found that men across cultures prefer about a 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio. Why? Because it’s this body shape that would most successfully give birth to a child in our distant past. Turns out human babies have enormously big heads to fit that big brain.
And the fat stores around the hips are used in the later stages of pregnancy, allowing a woman to survive to have the baby and breastfeed it in our past when food was scarce.
“Between 1955 and 1987 the waist- hip ratio of Ms America contestants and Playboy playmates varied only between 0.68 and 0.71.” – Professor Devendra Singh at the University of Texas
This male desire for youth, health and fertility is also why women have the instinct of adornment. Almost all women wear makeup to make their lips and eyes look bigger, and almost all guys don’t. Younger girls also usually wear much more revealing or skintight clothing across most cultures than guys do.
The reason why I’m explaining to you how a man’s attraction system works is so you realize that attraction is not a choice. You do not choose who you are attracted to or not. It’s a reaction that is wired into you. Attraction is a feeling that happens automatically in response to some stimulus. For men that stimulus is usually visual: long shiny hair, straight white smile, big innocent eyes, a curvy body, etc.
Now here’s where all this science becomes useful to you…
What Makes A Man Attractive?
A woman’s attraction system is triggered by much different things than a man’s. Women are also attracted to indicators that their genes would survive… but this has little to do with the man’s body.
Here’s how the excellent sexual evolutionary biology book, “It’s Not You, It’s Biology” explains it:
A man is attracted to a women’s ability to grow a baby inside her. A woman is attracted to a man’s ability to grow a baby outside him. How does he do that? Resources. […]
In any species that survives by cooperation, stuff is gotten through social power. In all social species with pair-bonds, females are attracted to evidence that males display a chance for power in the community. […]
Humans compete less for territory than for rank. The attention of the tribe is a kind of psychic territory where we harvest the resources we cooperative apes need to survive. He who controls the attention is high status and sexually attractive.
You should read that quote 2-3 times. When it fully sinks in, it will change the way you see the social world forever.
It basically means that your looks aren’t nearly as important to attract a girlfriend as you probably believed. Sure, if you’re ugly or fat, it may be harder… but the primary thing that attracts or repels girls is not your looks.
I’ll mention this example again…
If you think back to your high school or college, who were all the cutest girls dating? The popular and charismatic guys, the ones who threw parties, led the sports team, etc. There’s a reason why the stereotype of the high school quarterback dating the school cheerleader exists. Back in my high school, I can even remember two guys who were very chubby, but they still got girlfriends easily because they were funny and confident.
Here’s the good news: confidence and social status are mostly communicated with your behavior. It’s about the way you talk, the way you act, the way your beliefs work. And your behavior can be changed with learning, practice and repetition. This means you can become more attractive to women by working on yourself.
First You Need To Feel Valuable Inside
There’s just one problem: confidence is hard to fake. If you feel insecure about how you look, you secretly think you’re a loser compared to other people, and you’re sweating with nervousness whenever you talk to a cute woman… then it’s going to be really difficult to just “act” confident.
This is why in my courses I focus a lot on changing your inner thought patterns and beliefs, not just learning new conversation tricks. When you feel good about yourself, then confidence comes more easily and naturally.
One of the key mind-shifts to feel more comfortable and confident around cute girls is to knock them off the pedestal you’ve created for them in your mind. That’s one of the big focuses of my popular article on overcoming shyness around girls. (You should go read that article as soon as you’re finished with this one.)
This is also why often the best advice in dating is to work on yourself. Improving your grooming, style and lifestyle will make you feel like a much more valuable person, and that will naturally shine through to any woman that you meet.
Which brings me to the third step of this article…
3. How To Talk To Her?
The most common question shy guys have with dating is “What do I say to her?” This question reveals that your focus is in the wrong place.
How you talk to her is much more important than the words you say to her. Of course, you don’t want to awkwardly run out of things to say, but a girl becomes attracted to a guy because of his behavior underneath his words, not because of the words themselves.
The Behavior Underneath Your Words
What do I mean by this? Well, the most straightforward examples are:
Strong eye contact. Most shy guys break eye contact with attractive women quickly because the tension makes them too nervous. Yet in my experience women are very attracted to strong, piercing eye contact. Being able to comfortably look her directly in the eyes is a sign of a high status, dominant man. (In fact, this is why you should never look monkeys in the eye… they may feel their dominance threatened and attack you.)
A clear resonant voice. Speaking up in a clear way shows people that you value what comes out of your mouth. Instead of a weak voice that people find hard to hear. I believe this is a sign of approval-seeking: people are hard to hear when they are afraid of being judged. And signs of seeking approval are low status and therefore unattractive.
Feeling relaxed and comfortable inside. Something I learned from Dr. Robert Glover: a woman is looking for a man to be part of her emotional security system. So if you are nervously fidgeting and feeling tense, then she can’t relax talking to you, and will instinctively be turned off.
These are just 3 simple examples of behaviors that can instantly make you more or less attractive to a girl. These types of behaviors underneath your words communicate a lot more about you, your dominance and social power, than your words ever could.
Scientists call this your meta-communication, and dating or “pick up” coaches sometimes call it sub communication. Improve it, and you’ll become much more attractive to women.
(Important note: you DON’T need to have perfect bullet-proof “alpha male” confidence to get a girlfriend, you just need to make some improvements in the right direction. It’s just like a woman doesn’t have to look like a model to have a boyfriend, but she does have to put care into her appearance.)
As long as we’re on the topic of how to talk to girls, I need to mention one more thing…
Touch Her!
A lot of my dates look like this: a regular conversation with touching. Whether you want to make her into your girlfriend or just sleep with her, touching is often the secret for turning a boring friendly conversation into a charged one. And the sooner you start touching her while you’re talking to her, the easier it will be to avoid the friend zone.
So how do you touch her?
On a first date I always try to sit BESIDE the girl instead of across from her. It makes the situation feel a lot less formal, and it makes touching her much easier. Then as I’m talking I might lightly touch her on the shoulder, forearm, leg, etc. If you do this every couple minutes casually, without drawing any attention to the touches, then there’s almost no way she will think it’s weird. In fact, guys touch each other in conversation like this all the time, too.
If the date is going well and she’s clearly into me, I’ll make it less subtle. Take her hand and caress the outside, or examine her jewellery. Lightly brush her hair back from her face. Touch her lower back while we’re walking.
By touching her, you’ll also quickly find out if she’s interested in you. It will be obvious from the way she responds or ignores your first light touches. So you’ll be able to know if she’s interested BEFORE you ask her to go on a date out of the blue.
Conclusion And Next Steps
I hope this article has given you a few key pointers on where to meet a potential girlfriend, what really triggers a woman’s attraction, and how to communicate in a high status way so that women find you more attractive.
These insights really helped me, and now my dating life is certainly above average. I’ve dated multiple women who have offered to be my girlfriend. Having choice instead of loneliness feels great, and I deeply wish for you to experience the same transformation I did.
If you enjoyed this post, then I have some good news.
I’ve put together an email course specifically about how to overcome shyness around girls. These emails are going to go more in-depth about how to meet girls, what to say to make them attracted, how to get sexual, and so on.
This course is NOT for guys who can get some dates already. It’s specifically designed for guys who are very shy around girls.
This is going to be a completely FREE email course (for now). But since there is so much demand for this information I may take it down any day and instead sell a product on overcoming shyness around girls.
Sign up for it by clicking the orange button inside this box:
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