So NYE my best friend and roommate from college (let’s call him Luke) go to a party at the apartment of one of his old high school friends. Right off the bat I was told that this party would consist almost entirely of people from his high school, basically, everyone there would know everyone but me. I really liked the idea of having my ability to meet new people and make new friends challenged, and so I was game.

About ten minutes in Luke and I are playing beer pong when the first group of girls, including a blonde HB8 and brunette HB7 (lets call them Alice and Mary respectively) from his high school walk in. Luke introduces me and I do my best to remember their names but return to my game of beer pong and allow them to mingle with the rest of the crowd. When we’re done playing beer pong Luke and I start chatting them up. They all wanted to know who I was (being that I was the only unfamiliar face in the whole place) and so I introduced myself and made small talk. We joked back and forth about how they knew random girl x in the corner since they were in diapers, random dude y on the other side of the room since tee ball and so on and so forth. Eventually one of the bottoms to the girls cheap plastic champagne glasses fell off and so for whatever reason I thought it would be a good idea to put it on the brunettes head like a hat and challenge her to see how long she can keep it up there. I used a little bit of kino, holding her arm, while I placed it on her head. This got a few laughs and we took turns wearing and sharing our new hat. I think one thing that really showed confidence was that when it fell off the brunette’s head I picked it up immediately and held the blondes arm while I put it on her head. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to do that and as I was doing it I was second guessing myself, but I think having the confidence to just do it without asking definitely didn’t go unnoticed.

After this little game and maybe 10 more minutes of talking and lots of laughing I made an excuse to leave the conversation and went into the kitchen. There, two girls, an HB5 and HB6 were writing something on the whiteboard on the fridge. They wrote #LisaAndSamanthaAreTheCoolest (or something along those lines) and so I turned to them and said “Hmmm let me guess” and I pointed one after the other and said “Lisa, Samantha?” I got their names right (after all my chances were fifty fifty but even if I got it wrong I don’t think it would have made a difference). I told them that I was gonna change what they had written and they said okay but warned me against writing anything bad about them. I ignored their conditions (sort of) and wrote something like #LisaAndSamanthaAreJustAlright (could I have written something better? sure, but I think this got the job done). After that they laughed and play hit me on the arm and we had a good time after that taking turns writing new things on the whiteboard. I again made an excuse to leave this group and then turned back to go talk to Alice and Mary.

After about five minutes I’m talking to Alice and I notice that Mary is gone, I see that she’s playing beer pong with Luke and so I just continue talking to Alice. Their game takes a long time and so Alice and I had a lot of time to talk to each other. Eventually I left Alice and went up to Marie and said “hey you stole my (beer pong) partner,” and she said “yeah, you were busy” and looked in the direction of Alice and gave me this “I know you were hitting on my friend” stare, which I didn’t really understand because I hadn’t made any real moves on either of them at that point, I was just enjoying the conversation and reveling (is that the right word haha) in the fact that I was able to get along so seamlessly with a group of strangers.

Fast forward an hour: I had made some other friends, some dudes some girls, followed Luke around a little bit, drank, pissed, drank, pissed some more (by the way I was by no means trashed, sloppy or incoherent, I felt very much in control). Eventually I’m sitting down and Mary sits down next to me and just starts going on and on about how attracted she is to me, how funny and smart she thinks I am, etc… then she goes on about how she’s the hottest, smartest girl there and how she’s smarter than Alice and that I should go for her, saying things like “I want you but I can tell you like her so do whatever but I think you should pick me.” This is something I’ve never experienced before and honestly never really want to experience again. I generally dislike people who self boast and especially those who put others down in order to advance themselves, especially when it’s their friends, which is exactly what Mary was doing to Alice behind her back. Anyway I again made an excuse to leave the conversation but told her that I’d see her later. I went to talk to my friend Luke, who by the way is back from the army and leaving the next day and I told him the situation. Basically I told him that he should go for Alice (since when he goes back to the army he wont be seeing many girls for a long time) and I’d go for Mary (even though she wasn’t the nicest person, I knew it was a sure thing and I did want to hook up, after all that ball was still gonna drop). So I drag Mary to the back porch and we start making out against the wall, she pushes me, I push her, it’s fun but in the back of my head all I can think about was all the things she said and how big of a turn off it all was. Eventually we went back inside.

We go back inside and separate, I again start talking to the group of girls from the whiteboard and about five minutes in this new girl, brunette HB7 walks into the kitchen. I introduce myself almost immediately and reach out for a handshake. Her face lights up and she smiles wide (idk if this was her personality, if she found me attractive, or maybe she recognized me as the guy who seemed to always be talking to somebody new, regardless I could tell that she was at the very least happy to talk to me). I continue to hold and shake her hand and I say something like “im just shake your hand the entire time we’re talking, cool?” and she obliged and laughed. So here I am talking to this girl, and all the while I’m shaking her hand. At one point I tell her she has beautiful eyes and a really nice smile (which she did) but that the rest of her face was really ugly and that if it weren’t for here eyes and smile I might have to talk to her like this, and I turned my back to her and started talking to the wall. I said all of this jokingly of course and she thought it was hilarious (maybe the whole thing was a little push pull, idk I just said what came naturally). The girl left to go to the bathroom but she told me shed be right back. In that time Alice came up to me and told me that Mary was basically a hot mess and steaming over the fact that I was talking (and ill be honest, flirting) with other girls. The brunette with the nice eyes and smile came back and we continued our handshake and our conversation. Eventually Mary comes over and literally drags me away and without wanting to make too big a deal out of it I turned to the other girl and whispered that I was being taken against my will and that I’d find her again.

I never did find her again as Luke, Mary, Alice and I took a cab to the bars. I hooked up with Mary and Luke hooked up with Alice (which worked out perfect as that was his last night to hook up before going back to base). Below are some of the things I learned from my experience.

I learned so much from my experience that night and I can honestly say that I’ve never had more fun at a party. There was a post recently about how this guy lives in a gay neighborhood and he doesn’t mind getting lightly hit on by them but that when one of them doesn’t seem to care that hes straight and is super aggressive it makes him very uncomfortable. Anyway, the way Mary acted, telling me how she was so great and I was so great and that every other girl at the party wasn’t worth my time, I think is probably not too far off from what that guy was talking about. I had never experienced it in my life and I can only imagine how uncomfortable that behavior would be for a girl coming from a guy. In other words guys, don’t be too aggressive, be okay with whatever happens, have options, don’t lock in on any one girl, be open to all of the possibilities. I by no means was the life of the party but I felt like it because I spread myself around. I didn’t care if the girl was unattractive, attractive, in a group, or by herself, I talked to dudes and even chilled on the couch by myself for a few minutes here and there. I treated every person as an opportunity to make a new friend and as a result I had multiple girls who were into me. This is the approach I will take to every party I go to from here on out.