A service for my fellow geeks...

[WILL]

Dominique Louis, Gamer, Developer... and Doctor 'Love'.

:lol:

[Huehnerschaender]

When I finally get my coffee mug, showing I won a price in a competition, THAT will be attracting to women :lol:

Many open ended questions will follow... Whaaa! You did that? How? And then the discussion flows

hehe, just kidding.

Personally, I don't need to attract women at the moment. I am very happy with my girlfriend and our children.

@Eric: I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope the other guy was none of your friends... It's very hard to lose someone this way.... try to look into the future and don't let the things get you down!

[savage]

As promised, I said I would post my experiences. Let me state that these are experiences of connecting with people. Once the connection is made, it is up to each person to take that connection and turn it into a relationship. Anyway, here we go ( WARNING this is a very long post )...

Monday the 14th of August was interesting. It was the Launch part for Channel 4's new channel called Film Four. There were loads of good looking to stunning women. Unfortunately I had asked my movie buddy Andrea and her BF to join me at the launch party held @ Somerset House. I say unfortunately, not because of them, because with all the talent around, I couldn't just abandon them and go off and chat to people as I had not seen them for a while. I spent the first hour or so chatting with them, but at the same time making eye contact with various women in the arena.

They left just before the movie started ( around 9:30pm ) which then gave me the opportunity to chat to a very very nice looking Indian lass who was sitting next to me as the lights went down. I touched her on the shoulder and said "So do you work for Channel 4 or are you a ringin", turns out her sister is the Channel 4 bod. I then asked her if she had seen the movie ( The Big Lebowski was showing ), she said no so I suggested she watch other Coen brothers films like Fargo and Raising Arizona. I then proceeded to chat to one of my co workers sitting nearby. The movie started and is quite funny in parts ( much better watching it for the 2nd time than the first ) so I was really getting into the film and laughing out loud. I later over heard her chatting to her sister's boyfriend about me chatting to her and he said something like "and that impressed you did it?". A few minutes later she asked me how many times I had see the film and pointed out the white Russians ( linked to the film ) were being served at that bar. I replied that I had not been to the bar yet. At this point I think she may have been a little tipsy as she was a lot more chatty and eventually she went off to the toilet and got lost on the way back, so I called out to her and pointed out that she was sitting next to me. She sat down and said thanks and ran her hand over my head. I said no problem. A bit later she offered me some cake, but decided to just say no thanks. As the night progressed she leaned in more and more when we chatted and she initiated all the physical contact and when it started raining I offered to share my umbrella. At this point she moved closer and rested her head on my shoulder as we watched the last 15 minutes of the film. Man, I just about freaked out, on the inside ( being married and all it almost felt like cheating, but then I had not done anything apart from talk to the girl ), but kept it cool on the outside. She complained about it raining so close to the end but I just asked if my umbrella was doing it's job, to which she replied yes. About 5 minutes before the end, the heavens opened and her sister and their gang decided to leave. We exchanged names and that was that.

As I said nothing happened, but it's a great boost to the ego. This sort of thing has never happened to me before. Heck I can make friends with girls with my eyes closed, but to reach the point of resting heads on shoulders usually takes quite a bit longer than a couple of hours .

On Thursday I was catching the train to Leicester Square and noticed that one of the girls on the tube was one of the really attractive women ( I'd say a 8.5 to 9 on my scale of 1-10 ) that I had made eye contact with at the FilmFour launch on the Monday. If anyone has ever travelled on the London underground, you would know that no one ever talks to a stranger. But I was determined to either have a successfull interaction or crash and burn. It's the only way to learn. I pushed past a few people, gestured towards her and said "Weren't you at the FilmFour launch party last Monday". She said yes and that she worked for Channel 4. I said I worked for them was well and we exchanged which deparments we worked in. I then teased her about not staying till the end of the film on the Monday, when it was bucketing down. I then had to get off the train and she said "nice to have met you" and I replied "like wise". Simple, straight forward, friendly. At least if I bump into her again at another company party, I have some initial rapport to base it off.

Well last Friday ( 18th of August ) was Big Brother final night at Channel 4. I had organised to meet a friend of mine, who's single, before the BB final party kicked off. I was expecting the BB final party to be packed full of Channel 4 staff, but in actual fact it turned out to be a dud. There were very few people there and neither P ( my friend and fellow geek ) nor I were that interested in who the winner would be. We chatted and had a few drinks there ( I was on cokes and orange juices all night, while P was having bottled beers ), but around 9:30 we decided to bail as it just didn't seem like a party atmosphere.

I knew a few pubs in the area, but they were fairly stagnant when we got there. We ended up stopping in a bar called the Ha, Ha Bar. The crowd were obviously an "after work" crowd, which meant that most people had been there since 5 or 6 pm. Needless to say we chatted to a few drunks, but when some guys and girls nearby started doing push-ups to impress each other, P and I knew it was time to leave. We went to Temple to see if we could get into the Walk About pub, but when the bouncer asked for £7 to get in ( it was already 11pm ) we declined.

Luckily P knew some other places in Soho, that didn't charge to get in, so we went back to Embankment and walked to a cocktail bar, who's name escape me. It was quite a small 2 storey place. After P got a Mojito cocktail from the bar, we went downstairs and proceeded to convince ourselves we didn't have the right lines to approach any women. Big psychological mistake. P made an attempt at approaching this red head who was talking to an oriental girl. He was going to ask them If they knew who had won BB as a way of starting a conversation, but due to not being assertive enough, we think it just came across as weird and uncomfortable. Then these 3 girls turned up. 2 were blonde and the other was a dark haired Indian girl who sat at a table nearby. 1 of the girls was obviously the ring leader and was attempting to play cupid as she seemed to be the most out-going of the 3 and was trying to set up her other 2 friends. She asked me to pass on a message to the Indian girl. The message being "Get your sexy arse over here". So I obliged and went over to her and said "Your friend says, get your sexy arse over there now". She laughed, but didn't move. I went back to the 2 blondes, one of which looked very similar to Kirsten Dunst ( http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000379/ ) and asked them which part of South Africa they came from as they definitely had a strong South African accent. One was from Durban and the other from Jo-berg. That kicked off the conversation and it turns out they have been in London about 2 and 3 years respectively. The Kirsten Dunst look alike was called Chantelle and I spent the next half an hour chatting to her, while P went back to the table and spoke with the Indian lass. Eventually we all ended up back at the table chatting about various things like the difference between SA and Australian sense of humour and I found out the Chantelle was a receptionist for an Investment company and that her dream job would be to become a dancer, but realistically she would probably become a nutritionist in about 5 years time. The conversation was easy and there were no long pauses. P went to the bar and the girls said they were going upstairs and asked if we were coming. I said we would come up in a few minutes. P and I stayed downstairs for about 15 minutes and it was getting close to closing time for the cocktail bar. Obviously 15 minutes is a long time in bar-time so when we got upstairs, the bar had emptied and the girls had gone. It was now 12:30pm. Moral of the story is, if you have some rapport going, don't leave it too long to reconnect that rapport.

It was also closing time at the cocktail bar ( 12:30 ), so P and I headed to another place round the corner that P knew about called the Meeza ( or could have been Meezo ) bar. This venue had a Cuban/Latin American bar downstairs, while upstairs was a bar and lounging area. We stayed upstairs and got some drinks and sat down to clock our surroundings. There were various groups in cubicles and around tables but they all seemed to be mixed groups. We noticed 3 blondes sitting by a bar and again approach anxiety kicked in. What should be say to start off the conversation. We talked about asking if they knew who had won BB, but we convinced ourselves it was lame. Eventually we decided to walk around the bar just to see who else was there. Psychologically we had convinced ourselves that we could not chat to these blondes. Our route took us past the 3 blondes. P was walking ahead and I was about 2 steps behind him. As we approached the 3 blondes I noticed 1 of them showing the other a photo on her digital camera. At this point P had walked past them and I jokingly stuck my head round to pretend to look at the photo being shown on the camera. It was a photo of an elderly couple on holiday. The girl holding the camera tilted the camera towards me so I could get a better look. So I then asked, so are these your parents, I don't remember the answer, but she had a strong germanic/nordic type accent so I asked where they were from and it turns out that 2 of them were german, one from east germany, who was 30, and the other from west germany, who was 29, and the 3rd was Swiss and she was 25. They all lived and worked in Brighton and had come to London on a girl's week-end away. At this point P had back pedalled and joined me in keeping the conversation going. As we were blocking a main route in the place, the staff asked us to move so we did and I ended up sitting slightly behind the 2 germans and spoke to them, while P spoke to the swiss girl. The west german girl had french facial features and IMHO was the cutest. The other 2 girls were also nice.

The conversation ranged from what music we all enjoyed to what it was like growing up in East and West Germany during the cold war and if the movie Goodbye Lenin was a true representation of the transition of what they went through when the wall came down. The west german girls spoke French, Spanish and of course German and English, so I got to practise my French and Spanish a little. We showed them an NLP ( Neuro-Linguistic Programming ) experiment which seemed to go down really well. It basically involves making someone feel happier than they initially are. I don't think it worked very well on the west german girl, because I messed it up trying it on her. Heck it was the first time I had tried the experiment on anyone ( I had only just heard about it when P had told me about earlier that night ) and she was the first subject. Her breathing did become faster and stronger, but she said her happiness level did not increase greatly. But when I performed the same experiment on the east german girl, she went bright red and seemed to stay in the state of heightened happiness for about half an hour. P tried it on the Swiss girl and she also seemed to respond well to it. It went so well that they started getting a bit serious ( use your imagination ). At this point I started backing down as I went out to have a good time and wanted to meet new people and try out new techniques of approaching women. I had achieved my goal and did not want to do anything that I would regret. Though thinking about it now, if I had drunk any alcohol at all that night, there is very little doubt in my mind that I probably would have done something I shouldn't have.

We chatted with these girls until the bar closed and the staff threw us out at 4:00am. P really hit it off with the Swiss girl and got her number for when he next goes down to Brighton. We walked them back to their hotel, which was in the centre of Picadilly and then caught the bus back to P's house ( as his was closest ) where I crashed until 8am and then headed home.

Overall a very entertaining evening. I learned not to take too long to reconnect rapport, and also when to stop so that you don't get yourself into any unnecessary trouble. If you don't know anything about NLP, read up on it. It's essentially the ability to change people's mental and emotional states through touch and you choice of words. For it to work effectively you really need to build rapport and trust first.

I will not be posting any more postmortems as I think I have shown that if you change your thinking from "I'm here to get a date/girlfriend" to "I'm here to meet interesting people" women pick up on that and things have a habit of working out. The thing is to see failure as a learning experience and not as a reason to hide behind a computer and ignore the world. If you have to, make notes after each rejection, write what went right and what went wrong. You'll probably spot a pattern and be able to correct it.

Well that is it. I hope you found it interesting and I hope the shyest ones amongst you feel inspired enough to get out there and meet people. You really have nothing to lose and lots to gain by meeting new people.
Maybe one of these new people will be the person of your dreams.

[Traveler]

Good story there savage.
I'm not sure though why you waited another 15 minutes, when those girls asked you to come up. No wonder they left

[savage]

Good story there savage.
I'm not sure though why you waited another 15 minutes, when those girls asked you to come up. No wonder they left

I'm no expert in these things, I was just trying stuff out and playing it by ear. Obviously in this instance I did the wrong thing, but I've learned a valuable lesson.

[savage]

A couple of instances where approaches failed are as follows...

I had just come back from indoor climbing on a Sunday and had bought myself some hot chips with vinegar as I was starving and tired. I was dressed in tracksuit pants and a t-shirt and was probably still sweaty from the climbing work out. So you can imagine not the most attractive look. But when I got to the tube platform there was a girl waiting to take the train and she was seriously a 9+. I sat down a 2 seats away from her on the platform. As I sat down she put on some head phones, so I thought what the hell and asked in a calm/soft voice "What music are you listening to?", the look she gave me was ice cold frosty and she mumbled something to me that I could not hear. But I ignored it and persisted, "Are you listening to classical music?", again she looked annoyed at my persistence ( and probably silly question ) and mumbled something else. At this point I backed off. But if I were to put myself in her shoes, I probably looked like a vagrant and she was dressed very nicely. I also came across as subdued and probably creepy instead of alive, fun and carefree. She probably formulated an image of stalker/nutter in her mind.

It is said that women are more scared of men who speak softly, than those who speak assertively and a little loud ( not to be confused with arogantly loud ). Even though it was an unsuccessfull interaction looking back and analysing how the interaction went, gives me usefull clues of things to work on and improve.

Another example of a failed interaction was on that Friday night in the cocktail bar. Just after the South African girls had gone upstairs, 2 other girls came down and were sitting behind P and I. They started talking to some guys and each other and I noticed they were speaking French. I tapped one on the shoulder and said "Vous ete francaise?", to which she replied "Yes!". Now this immediately told me she was uncomfortable speaking French to me and the way she responded was the equivalent of "back off". Maybe they were trying to impress the guys they were with, or the guys they were with were their BFs. This is a second time a French girl has spoken to me coldly when I have spoken to them in French. So my future tactic will be to speak to them in English and not to let them know I speak French until I have built up better rapport with them. Again another learning opportunity, rather than thinking all french women hate me .

Better to crash and burn and learn something, than never to have crash and burnt and therefore learnt nothing.

Ok this really is my last expereince post on this subject.