It’s been awhile since we last posted - not for lack of stories, but really just because we were being lazy about sitting down and writing them up. We’ll be sharing a few stories today about our experiences in the last month. We’ve had some successes, some failures, and some in-betweens and want to put it all together in a way that can hopefully educate other couples with the same aim, and also any individuals who just want to think a bit more about the social dynamics of pickup.

Note: Capitalizing the pronouns to indicate if we were talking about the male or female half of this couple wasn’t really working. We’re just going as Bonnie and Clyde from now on.

This night actually took place soon after our first success (see previous Field Report), we were feeling on top of our game and ready to conquer the club, unfortunately that isn’t what happened – and we learned a little bit about things we would need to be aware of in the future. Our first approach was a cute short girl who was hanging with a group of her friends. It’s general knowledge that friends can pose a risk if you’re hitting it off with someone and they feel left out or like you’re ruining their night, so we decided to deal with it right off the bat. Conveniently, we had been stuck in a conversation with a nice enough but overly clingy guy for the past three minutes, so Bonnie walked over and recruited her to be her girlfriend to drive off unwanted guys. Great idea, she was enjoying the game, perhaps a little too much as she attempted to push off Clyde as well (“SHE’S MY GIRLFRIEND”), before being explained that we were together. She thought this was hilarious. We spent some time hanging out with her and then started talking to the group – at this point our goal was to get her away from them as quickly as possible, so after a bit of discussion (in which Bonnie explained that we sometimes find girls for threesomes, which she was excited by) we invited her to come hang out with us for a bit.

We headed to one of the backroom bars at the club which had leather couches set out. At this point the girl was unbelievably excited; she was lap dancing on Bonnie and making out with her. One girl from the group had stuck around, probably to make sure her friend didn’t get into too much trouble, a job for which she was severely underqualified. Clyde wanted a turn at the action so he politely asked her friend if we could have some time to get to know her friend, to which she sheepishly agreed before heading out of the room, and pulled the girl off Bonnie and onto his lap. After a little making out, things started to unravel when her whole group of friends came back into the room. They were clearly displeased about us having more fun with their friend than they were – nothing out of the ordinary, overprotective friends are one of the most common obstacles to taking people home. They effectively formed a physical blockade and things like “go away” and “she’s here with us” and “predators” were thrown around (actually, that last one was only directed at Clyde. Subtle sexism.). We tried our best to calm the situation but the damage was done, there was no recovering. We didn’t bring anyone home that night.

So now let’s analyze what went down

Here’s what we did that worked:

1) We created a fun game from the start that immediately made her feel “in” with us.

2) We generated an edgy situation, (crazy couple that picks up girls), and opened to door for her to be a part of it.

What we did that did NOT work:

1) Trying too hard to tear her away from her friends. Yes it’s necessary in the end, but we antagonized them early on leading to them being our enemies before things went to shit.

2) Not pulling when we knew we could. The moment we were alone and she was lap dancing on us we KNEW she was down. Hell we could have done it before then. But we wasted time and allowed the friends to regroup and ruin things, if we had led her out of the club immediately this could have been avoided. Wasting time kills game.

3) Not being aware of gender effects on socialization. Ever since this incident, it is Bonnie, not Clyde, that handles any potentially explosive situations, e.g. friends. Men are seen as intrinsically more dangerous, and having a girl explain that “we just want to hang out with your friend” is taken far better than this being said by a guy.