Approaching: Frame

In general, guys are terrible at approaching girls in bars and clubs. And not only approaching - they are terrible at getting anywhere beyond plain, everyday conversation. Let me start with the approach; in later posts I will talk about the conversation that follows.

Here are some very common approaches guys use in clubs:

1. Can I buy you a drink?
2. What's your name?
3. You are beautiful.
4. Your eyes/dress/ear rings/hair are/is beautiful.
5. You look gorgeous.

In general, the typical male approach can be divided into 3 groups:

1. Offering something (almost always a drink, but sometimes sex)
2. Requesting personal information, interview style (name, age, living location)
3. Compliment

Are these approaches good or bad? Based on observations, the first two are horrible: approaching a girl by offering something - say a drink - is to start off the interaction by signaling that you see the girl as having higher value than you, since you must offer her something. In fact, there are 3 bad things about the line "Can I buy you a drink?". The first is that you are offering a drink without any reason other than to hook up with her, which she of course knows - you are hardly the first guy to approach her with that line.
And the fact that so many other guys have approached her with that line before is the second disadvantage. The third thing is that you are not only offering a drink, you are asking for permission to offer a drink. Slightly better would it be if you said "I want to buy you a drink, what do you want?", because now you are doing 2 bad things instead of 3. We don't want to waste too much time discussing what doesn't work, so let us simply conclude that the drink approach is fundamentally flawed beyond repair. We must leave it and find other ways to approach.

What about offering something else, like sex? What about approaching with "Hey, do you want to have sex with me?". I have tried that approach twice, and after looking at me for about two seconds, both girls gave me a "no". Then, I approached them again with a very different strategy. I made out with one of them and slept with the other one, same night. The problem with the sexual approach is that it is doomed to fail because even if the girl is attracted to you and doesn't have any safety concerns going home with a complete stranger, she will feel like a slut accepting such a direct proposal. As guys we would usually say yes if the girl was attractive enough, but girls don't work like guys, they have a very different social and biological conditioning. While their walk of shame is going home from your place in party clothes the next morning, your walk of shame is more likely to be walking home from the club alone the same night.

So whether you choose to offer something as innocent as a drink, or something as blatant as sex - it will very rarely work. As my examples indicate, you can still get the girl, but you are working in repair mode after such an approach. What we want is to start off as good as possible, and to that end this approach is counterproductive.

On to the next category, requesting personal information. "What's your name?" is a very common approach. Admittedly, in the past I have been used this approach at times. And it does work sometimes. Now, just because it works sometimes doesn't mean it's good. For one thing, you can be sure your girl has been approached with this line before, many times. The approach is clearly signaling that you want to talk to her because you are interested in her, and since you know nothing about her, that interest must come from her beauty. This is not such a bad thing if we assume she finds you attractive as well. But if she doesn't, you'll be working in repair mode again.

Clueless guys usually follow up this approach with a full blown interview style conversation: "Hi, what's your name? Where are you from? What do you do? Are you having fun tonight? Come here often?". It's horrible, because the girl knows you are trying to not intimidate her by asking "nice" questions. It's extremely boring for her to give answers about herself in a sequence of unrelated questions, especially to someone she doesn't know and doesn't care about. It clearly conveys that you have nothing to talk about, and hence are boring, and hence have no value to her. In fact, she will feel that you don't genuinely care about her answers - and hence you don't really care about her either - you are just trying to get a conversation started, or your idea of what a conversation is at least, in the hope to reach that point of pleasure after all the "necessary conversation".

What about compliments then? Well they do work, but it depends on how you do it. There is a difference between approaching a girl with "You have great style, I want to talk to you" and "Hi, your eyes are so beautiful". To understand this difference, we must talk about frames.

In every interaction, there is an implicit meaning. When you are approaching a girl with "can I buy you a drink?", it is implied that her time and presence is more valuable than yours, and hence she is more valuable than you are. She is above you, and you must chase her in order to get her, because normally she would never consider a guy like you. When you approach a girl with "hey, do you want to have sex with me?" it is implied that you find her attractive and don't have time for bullshit, you want to get it on right now. When using "what's your name?" it is implied that you are interested in the girl, and you are being careful not to intimidate her. The implicit meaning behind the things you say and do is called the frame. Frame is an extremely important concept, because it is what really matters. It is not what you say or how you say it that determines the situation, it's the frame (then of course, what you do and how you do it indirectly affects the frame).

Most guys approach girls from either a "nice guy" frame or a very sexually direct frame. Frames are not only determined by what you say; in general, they are determined by how you come across (which includes what you say, how you say it, and in what context this happens). For example, standing alone at the bar eye balling the girl you like for a couple of minutes, then approaching her with "you are gorgeous, what's your name?" doesn't set up a frame that will work to your favor. It's creepy and will make her feel uncomfortable. On the other hand, entering a club laughing with your friends and walking by a stunning girl that makes your face shine up with a smile, pointing towards her and saying "you look gorgeous, I want to talk to you" sets a better frame. It's the energy, acceptance, friendliness, and alpha behavior. So what is meant by "alpha behavior"?

"Alpha male" is a term from the field of biology, and more precisely, from the study of social animals. You see, in virtually all groups of social animals, one male is the leader of the group. He is more dominant than the others, he is the one with the most power, the one that doesn't react to others but others always react towards. It shouldn't come as a surprise that he is also the male that gets all the females; the rest of his group can take the left overs of what the alpha male didn't want or could no longer handle after he's chosen his harem. Although we humans have come a long way and our psychology leads to more complex societies, we inherite a natural behavior based on tribal psychology. In many groups you'll see that there is usually one guy that stands out from the rest in that you will naturally and unconsciously seek your attention towards that person. They have a stronger presence, and behave in a different way. Here are some examples of typical alpha behaviors:

1. Not being afraid of meeting new people - having no fear of social rejection
2. Not reacting to things other people do
3. Not acting desperate or needy
4. Having high standards when it comes to girls (and friends)
5. Having fun, being fun and interesting
6. Assuming people will listen when you talk, and wait while you pause/think
7. Never begging for things, only telling people what you want and asking them for their opinions
8. Leading other people
9. Not afraid to say the things everybody thinks or knows, but don't dare to speak of
10. Having women around you
11. Having power (money, fame, public respect, being a leader of some kind, etc)
    

With the exception of the last two points, many people will describe these traits as those of a confident person. Needless to say, all these traits are good to display on the approach. A consequence of behaving like an alpha male (shorter: being/behaving alpha) is that you are never of lower value than other people, and in particular, not lower value than the girls you approach in clubs. This means that compliments which comes from a frame of "I am stunned by your beauty, I really want you now" is bad. This is exactly why "Hi, you are so beautiful, you are the prettiest girl in here" is not a very good approach. On the other hand, "You have great style, I want to talk to you" is much better because you are not directly remarking on her objective beauty, but rather on her taste, and then letting her know you want to know more about her. It's slightly challenging; you are setting up the frame "There is something about you I like, and that's why I want to know more. What else is there besides from that positive trait I just saw? Is there more to you than meets the eye?" which is obviously much better.

Then obviously these lines wouldn't matter if your body language is not congruent with what you are saying: imagine yourself walking up to a girl shaking and saying "Y...you have great style...(waiting for reaction)...I w...want to talk to you" and not having any eye contact whatsoever. This is bad because - looking at the list of alpha traits above - you are obviously afraid of talking to her, reacting to her, and not assuming she will listen to what you have to say.

It's interesting to note that most approaches work fairly well as long as you can hold a typical alpha male frame. Simple things like "Do you have anything to recommend?" in the bar will usually work if you can display enough alpha traits in your frame (the approach will for example work much better if you already have two girls having fun with you). This is a situational approach, it's relevancy is dependent on the situation: you are both standing in a bar, making it obvious that you are both going to order something. Situational approaches work well because they are casual: they don't usually address her/their beauty or anything about them, but something in the environment. I would definitely recommend you to use them: have situational approaches ready for the bar, dance floor, pool table, whatever is common where you usually go. Usually these approaches are created on the spot by guys that are naturally sociable; feel free to "steal" them from others. Make sure situational approaches remain casual; if you signal interest beyond the situational remark it may come across as you are being a bit sneaky. Let's say you are standing in the bar and initiate the conversation with the girl next to you by turning your head towards her, already smiling slightly, saying "Do you have anything to recommend?". She'll start telling you what she's going to have, and then you say "Ok, doesn't sound bad at all. What's your name?". This is not good, because now you are breaking the initial casual frame in an unnatural manner: You are using the situation - the bar - to initiate a casual conversation with her, but then you suddenly shift into personal questions. This is not smooth. You come across as if you didn't dare to to try to hit on her, so you might be insecure and might not know how to flirt, making you clueless with girls. And guys that are clueless with girls don't have much experience with girls. And if other girls don't like you, you most likely don't have any attractive traits. You are effectively breaking the last point in the list of alpha traits above. Note that this is not a critical situation; it is way better than the previously mentioned approaches.

When someone switches between frames and it comes across as strange, weird, sneaky, or anything negative like in the just mentioned example, we say that this someone is uncalibrated. Calibration is the concept of being smooth: knowing when to do what. We will talk a lot about frames and calibration in upcoming posts, for now let's talk about approach techniques.