You Don’t Need To Meet Women, You Need To Meet Strangers
And here is how you can start
What you’ll get from this article: A way to bring real connection into your life and escape the constant soul-crush of modern dating
No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.
You’ve probably heard this from a buddy of yours because we all have at some point:
“I just don’t know how to approach women”.
The dreaded women, whose communication cues are hieroglyphics, and whose social games shift more often than staircases at Hogwarts.
At least that’s how it may feel to someone who is unfamiliar, especially if that person’s self-worth partially depends on how the woman reacts to them. Someone who has externalized their self-esteem, but let’s come back to that in another essay.
These men think they need a handbook to approach a woman, and that if they can just crack the code, it will all be Easy Street. But the problem is not that they need to learn how to talk to women, it’s that they need to talk to more strangers in general.
Dating is downstream of connection, and connection is downstream of basic communication. So learn to communicate in general, then specialize from there.
Many people believe they’re great at communication because they can mentally picture themselves talking to a few different categories of people, except usually those mental images kind of look like people they already know. Believing you can talk to any grandma just because you can talk to your grandma is still a locked system. It’s not the same as being able to lip-tango with anyone who steps onto the proverbial stage.
But you need that.
You need to be able to walk into a new environment with a new type of person and simply trust yourself enough to be able to converse, to naturally connect with somebody that you have no preconceptions for, somebody who is unfamiliar to you. Someone that you can't draw any previous connections towards and that you can't make any assumptions about. Even with a blank slate, you trust yourself enough to create something.
Achieving that self-trust means reaching a level of comfortability with connection itself, that lets you fully relax. There’s no more fear of engaging with new people because you understand the process of discovering something that you can connect with them about, and I do mean process. You know the patterns and the steps to take to go fishing for a concept you can link over. You don't have to have a pre-connection in order to create conversational flow, because you’re confident that one exists somewhere, and you’re chill because you know how to find it.
Often, one of the specific causes of nervousness from conversation comes from the duality of trying to listen to them while also anticipating conversation in your head, meaning you’re thinking instead of hearing. You're never fully present, and you're never fully at ease.
That leads to anxiety and bodily tension, and a mishmash of audio and mental streams. You're trying to be witty and look smart, but also keep in time with the conversation so you don’t have awkward pauses, and it all just ends up being a mess. Not to mention you have no idea what your face was doing the whole time. After that, everybody walks away feeling a little bit sweaty and tired from having engaged in conversation, and it feels like a chore to want to connect again.
Once the process becomes a little bit more natural to you, you don't have to dig as hard in order to find the patterns of communication. It's not so much about having specific anecdotes ready or noticing niche things about people. It's more so just understanding the dance of conversation, the nuance that comes with hearing somebody reflect on their thoughts, getting to add on to their thoughts with your own words, and building a bridge where you are saying, "I relate to your experience because I validate your existence as you stand in front of me."
To succeed in connection, you should strive to do that with everybody.
That’s the little secret of conversation that makes it fulfilling and genuine: you just have to see the other person. Acknowledge their full existence, as they are there in front of you. Then you can see how to relate to it and how to have an intentional connection.
For dating, it is limiting to landlock yourself into the boundaries of ‘discussing things with women’ (as opposed to just discussing things with people) because there's an anticipation of the way the conversation should go. You’re orchestrating the conversation before it’s begun. You’ll just get bogged down by thinking you need to signal interest, while also signaling masculinity, and being polite, and making sure that you're not stepping on her toes, adding boundaries and tints onto the connection.
At the end of the day, you're a person connecting with a person. Of course there are some rules (mostly just don’t be a dick or try to take advantage of someone) but for the most part, it's just a person connecting with a person, a human-to-human interface where you're trying to bridge similarities in perspective and experience and conversational flow.
To be good at dating, it would help to drop the dating aspect of it for a while. I think a tremendous amount of people could benefit from going out and learning how to talk to a stranger as opposed to learning how to talk to somebody that they're romantically or even lustfully interested in. Connection is connection is connection, and understanding it from a foundational level, rather than learning weird pickup rules or unspoken games of dating apps, is probably going to bear more fruit.
And if you're like, "Okay, well, how do I do that? How do I go out there and learn how to talk to strangers?", I'll give you the first rule: Let go of your shame. That's absolutely the thing that holds most people back: looking embarrassed or dumb or needy for connection, and if things aren’t reciprocated, it can be a direct route to shame. For some reason, people like to hide the fact that they desire to connect with somebody else because if the person that they desire to connect with does not also mutually want to connect, one person looks needy and feels unworthy, and that's a real blow to the self-esteem. But I promise you this: everyone wants to have genuine connection, everyone wants to be seen and validated and appreciated. Maybe not by everybody all the time, but absolutely at least by somebody, some of the time.
So chuck that shame, it’s not serving you any favors. You’re just making yourself smaller and blander until it gets so small that suddenly you *plink* out of existence. Acknowledge that you are a human who wants to connect with other humans, do it from a genuine place, and there is nothing to be ashamed of.
If you get really comfortable with potentially being somebody who can look a little silly, suddenly all the anticipation of embarrassment falls away. Actually, the person who's willing to be a little louder and take up a little bit more space, putting themselves at a stronger risk of potential embarrassment, often ends up commanding room. If it is all done with a genuine intention. If it is false, volume is a mask. If it is honest, volume is a vibrancy with life. The same goes for those who seek connection in the public space, those willing to look directly into the potential of embarrassment and decide to go forward anyways, especially because they fully acknowledged another human and can architect an intentional line to connect with them.
Those who have deep vibrancy in their life are the ones we look up to, because they do not stand in the shadow of fear that the rest of us do. They have escaped the dread of shame and embarrassment that whispers so frequently in our ears, and their lives are much deeper because of it. They feel more real, more human, and they brighten the lives of those they interact with.
You can be that too. You can be a bridge for others to cross, to get to a more enriched side of themselves. Drop your fear, drop your shame, drop your intention of directing how a connection is going to go, and invite others to do the same. Forget about learning how to talk to women and focus on learning how to talk to humans.
Go out and talk to strangers.
With love, from me to you,
Alec
Nice insight.