I was meeting a friend that I haven’t seen in 8 years tonight at an upscale happening lounge/bar in LA.

Honestly, I was just having a terrible day so far, probably the most sad/down I’ve been in a whole year (something bad happened at work). But I sometimes do get in these moods where I’m surprisingly either social or super unsocial, irrelevant to my day’s success. Today I was sad, but feeling super social.

I get to the elevator to go to the bar with two older women, immediately say a funny thing, we all laugh and converse a little by the time we’re upstairs. I don’t make anything of it because I’m not too attracted to them, but it sure did put me in a better mood so far. We say our goodbyes, have fun tonight etc.

I’m a little early to meet my friend, so I take a seat at the bar, sit right next to this girl. She eyes me a little and then I initiate the intro, she’s super sweet and from out of town visiting and at the bar by herself. She seemed super into me right off the bat, definitely fuckable but I wasn’t really into her either. Besides after 10 minutes, my friend showed up and I essentially ignored her after.

My friend and I are there for about an hour and a half total. The first out of town girl says her goodbyes to me halfway through and my friend takes her seat. 10 min later my friend goes to the bathroom. In comes these two other older girls (I’m 25, they’re both mid 30’s), one is smoking hot, the other is again fuckable but not my type. Immediately I start talking to them after they ask if the seat is available, make them laugh a little bit and get some rapport going. My friend comes back, sees me talking to them, joins in on the conversation for a minute, but despite his really good looks, it turns slightly awkward after he bombed a cougar joke and he just sits back down.

I converse with him for another 30 minutes until he has to go and these two older girls are still behind me. They now take the seat, and all 3 of us continue our conversation, we’re getting to know each other, making jokes etc. Now this is where I get stuck.

At these points of the interaction, where they know I’m super social, I’m a fun time, I have good looking friends, I feel like I just seem alpha. Even my friend was amazed both times how easily I talked to the first girl and both these girls in a matter of seconds (while he was in the bathroom) and had them enjoy my presence (I’m not the best looking tbh, probably middle of the pack, but my personality and confidence is super high. Also, I don’t get approach anxiety).

But I have a really hard time flirting, isolating and closing. I flirted a little bit, touched a little. But I have a very hard time getting from the phase of where the girl enjoys my presence, thinks I’m cool, we’re vibing, to the phase where I start hitting on them and showing my intentions. I don’t know what it is. I can have an amazing conversation which starts with flirty vibes, and then I start making it platonic by the end. Especially when there was only me and two girls, I couldn’t isolate her for shit. I probably could have thrown some flirty assumptions in there, after they mentioned they were staying in the area tonight, they were asking about my hotel situation and my weekend plans. But I didn’t.

This is my biggest sticking point and would love some insight on how to fix this, as I suspect it’s purely a mental hurdle.