We Don't Need More Cold Approaches At Grocery Stores. We Need Bigger Social Circles.
Women say they want to be approached more often--but the key is shared social settings and activities, not pickup lines.
Exactly a year ago, I wrote about the fact that women enjoy men spontaneously flirting with them more than the 2010s #BanMen feminism trope would have us believe. Despite loud voices overrepresented in the media insisting that “women just want to be left alone” unless they’re on a dating app (and maybe not even then) women in my surveys, as well as women I’ve known in real life, have expressed frustration with the fact that dating apps are the only place where they can expect to meet men. (79% of single women on a recent survey indicated they wish they were approached by men more often.) A few years ago, I spoke with an approachably cute girl in her mid-twenties—the type of girl who should have received lots of male attention—who told me that outside of dating apps, men did not speak to her at all.
There is some eroticism and excitement to meeting someone spontaneously and feeling a spark, or developing romantic feelings for someone you already knew through other means. Dating apps remove a great deal of risk and embarrassment, thus why people like them, and thus why they are increasingly becoming the only socially acceptable method of meeting a partner. But along with the benefits of reducing opportunities for embarrassment, apps eliminate spontaneous and exciting situations where your attraction to a person comes out of knowing them first and experiencing a three-dimensional version of them—the things that cannot be captured in photos—instead reducing everyone to a few lines of text and some images, which are particularly unforgiving for men in particular.
But when I wrote about the death of spontaneous flirting, some binary thinking emerged in the resulting discourse, and maybe some of that was my fault for how I worded things. When I said that women would like to be “approached” more often, some people (both men and women) had the assumption that I was claiming that every woman is attracted to a wide swath of men despite clear evidence that women are actually pretty picky, and that most women would like to be approached anywhere, anytime. Obviously, had I been arguing this, I would have been wrong. The reality is much more nuanced, but I fear that the “leave women alone” narrative and the rise of dating apps threw out the baby with the bathwater. The “baby” in this scenario, is the “warm approach,” where a shared social setting (or assumed-to-be-social environment between strangers) facilitates the approach and makes it less weird, even if some risk is still involved. (As any seasoned pickup artist will tell you, it’s a numbers game, and rejection will be the most common outcome.)
The vast majority of cold approaches (ie: approaching a complete stranger in a non-social setting, such as the grocery store or DMV) are unappealing. Perhaps a resurrected JFK Jr. with a British accent would be able to pull it off, but most men can’t—even moderately attractive men who would have success through other means. Context is very important to women’s sexuality, and women aren’t typically in a sexy mood while buying detergent. I never called for a widespread return of the abrupt cold approach, although I think some of these are better than none. Instead, we need more lukewarm or warm approaches, which can’t happen without people leaving their houses more often, doing more social activities, being more open to the risk of embarrassment or mild discomfort, and most importantly: having bigger platonic social circles in the first place.
