For a very long time I've heard many people (some I even hold in high regard and who are very close to me) tell me that if I want to talk to a cute girl I don't know, I should make sure she's interested first. Funny thing is, I didn't use to even think about that in my teenage years, all I really struggled with was thinking I didn't have anything of value to say. I didn't even think about whether or not she was into me, I just kinda subconsciously and intrinsically believed she could be interested. But ever since that moment, when someone told me "BUT DOES SHE LOOK AT YOU?" I got completely stuck in my mind, and every time I'm out and about (which doesn't happen that often nowadays either) and I see a cute girl, all I can notice is that she doesn't pay any attention to me. It's kinda crazy how little attention I get. I know people will say "just groom, lose weight, blablabla" but this has been an ongoing thing for YEARS, and I used to be in very good shape in my younger years and I still had the same issue.

But then, I have female friends and the very occasional date from OLD that tell me I'm good looking, very good looking, some even say I'm hot. So with that comes the expectation that I should get checked out once in a while, right? I'm not saying every woman should check me out like I'm chris Hemsworth, but maybe once in a while I should get a reminder that I could potentially be attractive to a modest percentage of women. But whenever I'm either in public, or at parties, or whatever event, or when I was back in college, I felt completely invisible. It was actually insane how few women even looked at me.

So anyway, I'm here years later and I'm still struggling with this. This dissonance between virtually every woman I know telling me I'm attractive and the complete lack of acknowledgement from women out and about (coupled with the implication that I should be "waiting" on women to look at me) has me thinking... both of those things cannot be true. So either every woman that tells me I'm good looking is lying for some obscure reason, or the whole "wait for women to look at you" is BS to some degree.

I think from a purely practical standpoint, it'd be more useful for me to get rid of this idea of waiting for women to show attraction before chatting them up. But even through all that realisation and thought process, every time I see a cute girl I could talk to, I revert to the "lets see if she looks at me and then give up because she doesnt" shtick. Even if I try to yell at myself internally that it doesn't matter and that I can't know for sure that a girl wouldn't be interested in talking to me just because she's not looking at me, at the back of my mind it feels like a very strong sign of disinterest and I can't shake it off and it completely kills whatever drive I have.

What goes through you guys' minds when it comes time to approach a girl that doesn't really seem to give you IOIs? Any tips of how I should approach this situation mentally?