Hey guys, wanted to share my experience the other day while approaching a woman at the gym.

So I've seen this girl around my apartment complex's gym for awhile. We would always trade glances every now and then, but I wouldn't normally do more than that. Just recently I've decided to step up my game more, and was primarily focusing on getting eye contact.

So in this instance I arrive at the gym and once again notice she's there. I make my way to the place where people can do tricep dips, while coincidentally they are located right behind a line of treadmills (where she happens to be). I continue with my workout and noticed that after she finished on the treadmill she moved to a machine that was right behind me. I look back and caught her looking at me, while she immediately turned her head. This repeated a few more times. Finally I decide to make a move. I noticed she was using the machine as support to do an exercise that required bending over, conveniently standing in front of a certain attachment I needed for my next workout. I approached and waited to catch her eye since she was using headphones. Once I got her attention I asked:

Me: "Are you using that at all?"

Her: "No."

Me: "Cool, thanks."

I got on the machine next to her and noticed she went back to the treadmill. I didn't think much of it, and figured I misread the eye contact we had as something else. As I'm doing curls laying down, she comes back into the freeweight area and chooses the bench next to mine. The area is pretty tight, and she ends up using the bench to do a lunge exercise. She's standing over me the whole time, and we go back to swapping gazes for awhile. While I'm resting, I noticed she was trying to get my attention. I paused my music and she asked

Her: "Hey are you going to be using that machine over there (she pointed to the smith machine where people do squats)?"

Me: "Not at all, go for it."

Her: "Okay good, I just didn't want to use it if you were about to."

She goes over there and does some lifts that primarily focusing on her ass, while still giving me the gazes that I would catch while looking around in the mirror. Later on I notice her gather her things, and remove her earbuds to head out the door.

That's when my primal behavior kicked in. I said "Excuse Me" loud enough to get her attention before she reached the exit. She turned around completely and smiled, and I made my approach.

Me: "Hey, sorry to stop ya, but I'm throwaweigh61! I've seen you around a bit and finally got the nerve to introduce myself."

Her: "Nice to meet you, I'm ___!" she reaches out to shake my hand and I do

The whole time my eyes were focused on hers as if that was where I was supposed to look. I felt some tension in my chest that got stronger the longer this went on. I proceeded to continue the conversation by saying

Me: "Uhhhhh.....umm. Sorry... just... uhhhhhh."

This has never happened to me before. "I'm a decent looking guy who gets female attention every now and then, what is going on?" Part of me was panicking, but the other part just kept looking into her eyes with some goofy ass smile on my face, with her doing the same. I decided to just sellout and hold this while still trying to formulate something to say. She took over the conversation then and there, and proceeded to ask me questions about myself, and really just guided the whole thing. We stood there for a few minutes in the doorway where she held the door the entire time, and I blocked the way for two people (apologizing both times I realized what I was doing). As the conversation came to an end and I found my social footing again, I asked for her number. She smiled and said lets start by getting to know eachother around the gym first, and reached out to shake my hand and say it was nice to meet me.

What I learned: Eye contact is a crucial part of interacting with people. Sometimes you can even use it as a crutch. In a moment where I literally had nothing to say, I decided to let my body do the talking. At the very least, I didn't butcher the encounter.