[throwaway, because I know people here]

Canned material? Or does it matter? Mystery Method or d'Angelo? Just be confident or plan for everything?

This sub is suffused with debate from morning till noon on everything from clothes and aftershave to IODs and DLVs. But I always say, whatever works for you -- keep doing it.

But there is one nugget I have mined from trawling through the seven seas of PUA, and it's this: keep approaching.

I don't mean to say that this is a numbers game, as you've often heard. Somewhere in the holy texts you'll find a simple obsevation, incapable of refutation, that hot chicks have had this very 'pick-up conversation' thousands of times by the time they reach 21. And that simple exposure has made them experts.

For us, it's a charged exciting run at battle. Once a night, once a week, for some maybe once a month, we target our prey and gird our loins for battle. We approach one woman. Our senses are heightened, our breath is quickened. And our minds disect every scrap of dialogue, searching for meaning, nuance, and encouragement.

This of course is absurd over-analysis and betrays our laughable seriousness. As if we were using differential calculus to count our change while buying milk at the convenience store. Women can of course see this a mile off.

They have listened to a hundred, a thousand eager suitors proffering endless inanities in the vain hope of finally bagging a HB. And each was rebuffed, callously and meticulously, as blandly as the cashier who, glassy-eyed, asks you 'paper or plastic'.

The ONLY cure for your stammering, your palpitations, your lame ineffectual banter is exposure. The more often you have this meta-conversation ('I like you. Do you like me?'), the calmer you will be -- the more observant you will be. Did she put her hand on your chest? Did she say how drunk she was? Did she laugh at your dumb jokes?

It's all well and good to eventually figure out what to say when, for example, she says she has work in the morning, or that she never goes out on weeknights, or that she just wants to 'stay friends'. But there are a thousand other moments, comments, situations, looks, gestures, jigsaw fragments of intent that you must prepare for. And the only way to know them all (or at least enough of them) is through exposure.

So have that awkward conversation, try that dumb line, ask the leading question, open that set. Get your balls out. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Remember, every approach is a chapter in your PUA manual. There is no failure, only feedback. I wish you courage and luck!

tl;dr: don't practice, just play.