Hello - can I get some feedback on my experience last night? I’m trying to see if I could’ve done anything differently to improve my chances of being able to meet someone lol.

Quick background: I’m a 5’6” Asian 24M with glasses. Just a guy not looking to be lonely and deal with my social anxiety lol. I’m trying to actively work towards turning my life around. In Boston for the summer, regularly exercising, watching my calories and eating out less, and overall my social skills (talking to people in general and making friends) has improved. But now I want to focus on talking to girls bc with me it seems like if I don’t actively try to practice it nothing ever materializes. So please don’t tell me “things will just work out” lol.

I recently started being honest with myself and set a goal of taking a girl home from somewhere (could be a bar, mutual connection, etc.) I haven’t dated someone in 2 years and haven’t taken anyone home since last September (but that was the one and only time it happened and it was on Bumble). But in any case my first step is being able to TALK to a girl in social places (events, bars, clubs, etc.) I figure: as long as I’m actively practicing or trying to get better at something, I am okay with failing at it. I’m fine w getting rejected and all so long as I get the chance to try.

Part of it is definitely because I’m working on my social anxiety in bars/clubs/events: if I want to go talk to a girl I should be able to without feeling judged as a single loser by my non-single / professional friends or by everyone else in the bar! I keep telling myself that but I end up never talking to anyone.

So last night, I went out to an arcade bar in Boston (I live there) with a friend of mine and his work buddies. They all are in relationships and kinda nerdy (but so am I haha) so they were perfectly content with playing games and drinking and chilling together.

I had set my goal for the night to be really simple: find a girl you want to talk to and at least TRY to talk to her. So I was trying to look around the bar (discreetly, I didn’t want to be judged) and find a girl to talk to because the only girls in our group were girlfriends of the guys who came out.

I wasn’t really able to make eye contact with anyone, nor was there any dancing areas or whatever, there were a lot of girls with guys already - looked like they were already dating. There was like one group of girls that I tried to catch eyes with but I feel like I got no response. I was just sitting at a table playing games. It was super annoying bc I wanted to tell someone “Hey I’m gonna get up and go find a cute girl to talk to” and not be judged for it even though that seems like a desperate-single-guy thing to do.

At one point, I did ask these group of girls, on behalf of my group, if we could play a specific game, and they ended up getting pissed and left bc we were kicking them out (they were hogging the table all night tho lol) so I tried talking to them but couldn’t say anything more than just the initial ask. There were no other naturally occurring situations that I could try talking to a girl for the rest of the night.

Is there something I’m missing or not doing here? I don’t know if it’s a combination of lack of confidence or maybe the environment was just bad, but I really just want more practice talking to girls in social situations, and yesterday felt really disappointing bc I didn’t really get a chance to. Should I have been actually just walking around the bar like a creep, finding a group of people with a cute girl to talk to? Should I have approached more directly instead of trying to just catch someone’s eye? Was there something else I just wasn’t doing / was doing wrong?

I guess I could treat this as a feedback journal: Day 1 was disappointing, what can I do differently?