I saw a couple of days ago that someone made a post claiming to have an argument against cold approach, and I have to admit I was intrigued. However, I was a little... disappointed with the post. I personally both use and teach cold approach, and think that it's far superior to online dating... So I've decided to steelman the other side and try to come up with the best argument possible against cold approach.

The biggest barrier to cold approach for many people, before even getting to the personal, is location-based. Cold approach requires many people moving through an area with enough frequency that it's worth your time to go out and try to meet them. For people like me in large urban areas, that's easy enough to find, but I remember being in university in a rural part of Texas. With certain exceptions (college bars, on campus, and the areas nearby), cold approach would have been very hard to do. I can't imagine that area has become more conducive to cold approach since the pandemic, making it barely worth going out for that purpose. This is issue one.

Next, we have the confidence and ego issue. While I agree that this is something to be worked on, most men simply do not have the constitution required to get blown out over and over again. And let's not sugarcoat this, when you first start cold approaching, this most certainly will happen. Throwing these guys in the deep end without proper preparation ends up with the posts we see too often here of "I'm just giving up" and leads down the MGTOW / incel path. Instead, it would be better for these guys to begin wading in and develop the skill as they go, but doing that alone is a huge pain, very difficult, and can take a long time. Cold approach is painful to the point of making many people give up altogether. This is the second issue.

Third, it's slow. The reality that cold approaching doesn't lead to much of anything when you're new. Even if you're very good at it, your best case scenario is an instadate, which is rare even for pros. Newbies are lucky to get a number or two, and those have a high likelihood of being ghosts. To get sex you need more dates, to get dates you need more numbers, and to get numbers you need to do more approaches. It's a reverse funnel that takes a lot of time and energy, which not everyone can commit. OLD on the other hand requires relatively little time and energy commitment and gets to the point faster. You may have few matches, sure, but the ones who chat with you are more likely to be DTF. They are also much more receptive to "netflix n chill" than random girls on the street.

Now, I'd like to once again point out that despite the above, I actually do still believe cold approach is the superior method of meeting women, particularly when you're looking for something more than just a wet hole. However, it's imperative for us to acknowledge and understand the issues that guys have when learning cold approach. This isn't an argument for OLD or anything else, it's simply pointing out the shortcomings in the cold approach system. If you guys have other problems you are running into with cold approach that I didn't list here or some ideas or objections to the above, I'd love to hear it!