I'm following the Stylelife Challenge from "Rules of the Game". Was doing great until yesterday (day 4) where I had to ask three random women where I could find a good menswear shop or some other similar question. Basically, I came close to crashing pretty hard.

I gave myself four criteria for someone to approach:

  • Not wearing headphones or on the phone. (Nightmare mode: both!)

  • Not a tourist, or someone who really looked like they did not want to be interrupted.

  • Aged 18-35. I could probably approach anyone above this range but I could do that already so it's not part of the challenge; I don't have a problem with people, just new people in any kind of attraction/sexual/boy-meets-girl context. Not approaching below should be obvious (paedophile paranoid country).

  • By herself. Not sure why I did this, probably a rationalisation to limit chance of success.

To cut a long story short, I was walking for over an hour before I managed to ask someone, passing up about 15 excellent chances and perhaps another 15 reasonable ones. I felt worse as time went on, my failure to approach anyone compounding itself by knocking my confidence pretty badly. Almost went home early twice too. tl;dr: Shitty feeling.

Anyway, I did finally approach someone. She was waiting by a pillar and I doubled back to her (wide street). Turns out she didn't speak English that well but getting an actual result from the question probably wasn't my real goal here. I said "thanks anyway" and disappeared.

Walking away from her I felt great and was really geared up to ask more, until I remembered that it was a huge fail that I had only managed one in an hour. Need to try and bottle that initial good feeling so I can summon it at will.

In my defence, this was:

  • London - Everyone is so insular and doesn't want to speak to strangers; if you speak to a stranger, people will stare at the spectacle. And the idea of sarging on the Underground makes me actually laugh.

  • Oxford Street - Pretty wide and busy street, difficult to see anyone coming before they are past you. Hardly anyone is hanging around, meaning that everyone is a moving target.

  • Raining - I had psyched myself up to do this and was feeling confident.. and then it started to rain really hard. The street cleared up a bit and everyone was walking at an even faster pace. My hair goes bit shitty in the rain too.

  • Football time - The England-Algeria match was about to start, so the tourist-native ratio was even higher than normal.

But these are all excuses. :/ Any ideas? I'm going to do two things:

  • Try this again in an hour.

  • Stop reading PUA material (except for self posts in seddit and the next day in "Rules of..") until I have this sorted. Keyboard jockeying is so unbelievably counter-productive. This is a good lesson to learn in itself.

EDIT: Just opened two more \o/