0/7 Matches at a Speed Dating

Smooth21 · 2018-05-07T16:30:36+00:00

If it makes you feel any better, I'm 0/50+ with regular dates in the past year

But guess what? It just takes one

singlecellfromearth · 2018-05-07T21:19:58+00:00

I noticed throughout your post that you seem a little bit self-involved and degraded the women.

"girl was telling something strange or dumb,"

"I'm a bit biased to old singles - there must be a reason they are still single"

"Why am I not good enough for these random girls"

You talk about wanting to improve but you might also want to learn where your deficiencies are. (Sometimes you focus on your strengths, sometimes shoring up you weaknesses, but at least knowing the full package that you offer, you can come up with a better gameplan).

Btw are you a foreigner? The way you speak could also be an impediment

Kenic_In_MD · 2018-05-07T13:56:45+00:00

Nothing you can do, speed dating is trash. I tried it at a DC meetup for speed dating. They took a bunch of our money, made the guys (not the girls) switch tables/partners and the girls basically rated who they wanted contact information from. And the hosts emailed you with their contact info. Huge waste of like 2 hours, and the girls were BLEH. Approaching during night game/the bar would have been way easier. My thoughts are, don't sign up for it again and save your money.

t1mman · 2018-05-07T17:49:06+00:00

It depends on so many factors and 7 is such a small sampling that nothing can really be concluded with this.

One more thing, the ratio of Male to Female was not 2:1, If you have a bigger selection, you "up your standard". The other sides lowers them (like you did, none of them really interested you but still, you selected 7 of them). In order to get a "back" from them, you have to be on the "upper" scale of the selection.

I don't know anything from your interaction, but drifting away when people talks makes be think that you where not listening, not curious of them, thinking more about your next thing to say instead of listening. I might be wrong, but if I'm not, it's a major turn down for many people. A social interaction is not "people telling stories to each others", but an interaction between the two. There's a nuance between an interaction and just "two monologues"! Again, that might not be your case!

BTW: There is nothing wrong with getting back to study, it rather honorable IMHO! You are putting your life first, investing on your futur and, 27 is still rather young!

TonyDCoaching · 2018-05-07T18:38:30+00:00

With most speed dating events if you don't make a match you're allowed to go back. So go back, and meet 10 more women, try again.

Also, bring a phone, hit record and leave it on the table. Then you can listen back later to see if you're saying anything odd, or boring, etc.

It could be any number of factors from bad vocal tonality, eye contact, awkward/boring subject matter, nose hairs.

Without more information it's impossible for us to tell.

Just go back, and try again.

Zoidberg22 · 2018-05-07T20:59:53+00:00

I can never find speed dating events for people under the age of 25 honestly. Most of the people who go to these events are closer to 30.

recyclablebanthas · 2018-05-08T04:26:18+00:00

____1____

I have to sign up for the category 25+. (Which bothers me.....there must be a reason they are still single. Same applies for me.)

Listen to yourself here. You're so willing to hold onto this arbitrary (and false) belief that there's something inherently wrong with anyone who's single after 25. Why you're imposing the ridiculous doctrine of leftover women on yourself is beyond me.

This age bracket..... you're still talking about the 20s here. Which is young. End of story.
You're willing to throw yourself under the bus as you defend this belief, which lowers yourself and everyone you were about to talk to. Not the best way to prep yourself going in, thinking of yourself and them as lesser before you even opened your mouth.
It's your job, not ours, to come up with counter-evidence and fact check your own brain, instead of allowing garbage thoughts like this to circulate and change your brain chemistry to your detriment.

____2____

None of them really got me interested....

Well, you're kind of setting up barriers against connecting with them when you set up the premise going in that there's something wrong with all of them before they even open their mouths.

____3____

Since probably 90% are going to start with "So, what are you studying?" I tried to start somehow different. I sometimes tried to not even touch the topic at all.....

Here's the dirty little secret about low-hanging fruit, easy question/small talk like this. Take it because it's not about the easy openers like this. It's about actively listening and devoting all your brain power to taking in what they respond with. Then the important part: think about what they said and draw from it when you make your follow-up.

Bonus points if you direct your questions towards their motivations (why they did something) and emotions (how they feel/felt about something).

Spending time avoiding the "easy questions" doesn't help because real conversations come from the follow-up. Which comes from paying attention intently to what people say, while they're saying it.

____4____

I was still me. E.g. I love talking about math, physics and science in general. I love to explain what I'd like to become (Computational Physicists) and what I'd be doing if I'd get there......non-tech people usually don't give a shit.

You've been knee deep in STEM studies for how long now? You know more than most people about this, right? You know that scene in The Avengers where Tony Stark and Banner start geeking out and lapsing into conversation that's over the heads of all the others, all the while, Stark exclaims that he's finally found someone who speaks English?

Similarly, you are several levels deep in your area of study and have years of context. Think about what this means for how you relate to people. You wouldn't think to expect a complete novice to start off in the courses you're in now, lacking the years of study you have put in.

And yet you want to have a discussion with complete strangers that basically amounts to an advanced primer on science that they lack the context for. You're doing the equivalent of making cultural references to movies people haven't seen.

It's not that they wouldn't give a shit. It's that you could be finding a way here to talk about it in a way that strikes us as humans. Any subject can be engaging if you know how to relate it to others in terms of emotions and motivations we can all relate to. This might sound boring, but it's actually an art.

Look at Benjamin Zander's talk on classical music, which is a stereotypically dry and boring subject, and yet he had the audience in the palm of his fucking hand. And he basically did it by breaking it down into human desires and motivations that anyone could relate to. Doing this with a given subject is a very interesting and advanced thing to do; well worthy of your brain power.

____5____

....I caught myself drifting away with my thought if the girl was telling something strange or dumb, I had to think about what she just said....

I mean, you realize now that this was a mistake. And not only that, but you're information is power and you're depriving yourself of it when you drift off.

Every human is a puzzle. I've had conversations with people I thought were the most vapid people on the planet, and every single one had layers once I got past the bullshit.

Getting at those basic motivations and emotions that make us all tick, is an art.

____6____

Anyway, I was wearing nice cloths, I had a good parfume on me (for which I got plenty of compliments of women). But still, zero matches.

These things are irrelevant, but I think you know this.

____7____

I don't do cold appraoches at the moment (too busy with myself).

Quick note on a pet peeve of mine. You're doing cold approaches all the time.

"Cold" means you're dealing with strangers.
Approaches are portrayed as this thing where a guy is standing off to the side and psychs himself up to go walk across the courtyard in front of everyone and go talk to a stranger.
This is a stupidly limited interpretation of "approaching." Do you go to the bank? The library? To your campus? Do you walk on streets in a city or town? Then you're approaching all the fucking time. And others are approaching you. The thing is, you're just not always opening.

So cut it out. You approach. And you don't open, not because you're "too busy." It takes a split second in passing to drop a conversation hook or make a throwaway comment that doesn't even need to lead to a conversation. You could do these things but you're over-thinking shit or worrying yourself and making it complicated.

____8____

Theory 1....Theory 2.....

Nope. It's that you're going into interactions looking for reasons that you are crap. Or looking for something wrong with them. Look at your mindset going into Speed Dating. You decided before anyone even opened their mouths, that you were crap and so were they, because..... age.

And you kept judging. You tuned out and they noticed. You talked about your major in a way that unintentionally gave them the finger, the same way it might alienate people if you started talking about Book 4 of a book series to someone who hasn't read page 1 of Book One. And you didn't do what you could to dig into who they were and what made them tick. Especially if you didn't focus on good follow-up and instead moved onto unrelated questions without digging into the Why or the How of what they just said.

Example: If someone says, I'm from City XYZ, you have so much follow-up you could be talking about. What was it like growing up there? How does that city compare with this one? And so on. But if you're simply answering about how you relate to their hometown and then changing the subject, that's tone deaf and passing up so many opportunities.

____9____

Theory 3: They are all 25+, I'm 27, so chances are high they are older. (only one asked me for my age though) They might look for a more serious relationship. They want someone successfulll, not someone who didn't pass once and now starts over again. => Me not being a good candidate for starting a family.

OH god. Listen to yourself. Stop it. STOP. WTF. I know people in their 40s and 50s with no interest in families or finding someone "successful."

So stop thinking you're Charles Xavier. You're not.

What's happening is that your anxiety..... that negative voice in your head, is cooking up bullshit theories, and you're not standing up to it. You're not questioning it or fact-checking. You're just rubber stamping the bullshit and building on that foundation.

On the subject of fact-checking, you need to start fighting these negative thoughts you're allowing to screw you over:

Negative thoughts create a feedback loop. Thoughts like this can lead to a change in brain chemistry, and a feeling. This feeling can lead to more thoughts about a bad feeling, and then back to more negative thoughts. These negative thoughts can be fought and your brain re-wired. Two takes on fighting them: Link 1 Link 2

____10____

Try disagreeing with them for the first half of the convo then for the second half, make them feel like they're winning you over and start agreeing.

No. Your whole issue here is that you're already not connecting. You don't remedy that by breaking rapport that you haven't built yet.

hunterpua · 2018-05-07T20:46:52+00:00

Love how detached you are from all this.

Try disagreeing with them for the first half of the convo then for the second half, make them feel like they're winning you over and start agreeing. There was a speed dating study done wherein the male researchers who disagreed with the girls in the first half and allowed themselves to be won over by the second half got the most matches.

To explain the psychology behind it, it basically plays on the Sunk-Cost Bias where people want more out of something they work hard for. Its also Pavlovian in that when you let them win you over you reward them for their hard work which in turn encourages them to do more hard work for you. Its a beautiful cycle.

You should test that out.

Title	0/7 Matches at a Speed Dating
Author	leaiaiai
Upvotes	2
Comments	22
Date	May 7, 2018 10:46 AM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/seduction
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/8hmkd9/07_matches_at_a_speed_dating/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/seduction/07-matches-at-a-speed-dating.1446177 https://theredarchive.com/post/1446177

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