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FR  Candle girl volunteers time she's working until; botched window?

ThePhoenix

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
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315
NOTE: If you're in a hurry, skip to the second heading, as I suspect the approach itself was fine.

Day 1: Pretty Good Approach

It was a month back on a Wednesday, in the main megamall downtown.

Followed a girl into a store selling aromatherapy candles etc. Didn't approach her due to her engaging with sales staff. But I predictably got approached by the girl greeting customers. She briefly advised me of a sale. I acknowledged her pleasantly, but didn't converse further in spite of her being a decently cute black girl. Fairly lively but not loud, early 20s or so. Kinda short, alas. I just left, but came back for her several hours later at 7:30pm.

I slipped in to avoid her at first. Worked my way to a wall she was doing some maintenance near. She was soon knelt down working in a cabinet near the floor. I realized this posture was advantageous so decided to go in then.

I've had a lot of trouble finding excuses to move girls. I sometimes use store wares as clever props, and it occurred to me that rather than bring the item to the girl, I could bring the girl to the item. Only problem is, the item is part of the opener, so I'd have to ask her to move before the intended "opener". Decided it was worth a shot at least on a worker (almost certain compliance), and in fact it seemed to go well. I got close and she looked up without any pre-open and greeted me. I could've made more of a point to smile. Told her like, "perhaps you can help me with something." She took a few seconds to finish up and then I directed her to an item on the wall some 5 to 7 feet off.

Used some intentional pauses at this point, though I slipped up and let her break one. I made an absurd query about the item. She was mildly amused and kind of played along. I then told her, as I touched her, that I was just joking, - she said she had figured, - and that I wanted to tell her she's cute. She said thank you and may have done a little curtsy.

I'm not sure that explicitly disclosing that I was just joking, given in this particular case her probably understanding that anyway, was wise. Mind you, her playing along was subtle and ambiguous.

"Tell me your name." Complies, and asks me my name, which I answer.

Gestured for her hand, and did the usual grasp between fingers and thumb. I let our hands linger. Worked perfectly. She left her hand in mine for a few extra seconds, and at the end I put my fingers up a bit to stroke hers as we pulled our hands back. It was hot. I think she noticed unconsciously, though we were still talking at the time. Pulled it off so smoothly, especially having never done it before. Funny thing is, I just found myself doing it!!

She takes me a bit aback with, "yeah, you look like a Phoenix." Claimed to be able to tell people's names. I asked her something about her being good at cold reading. Her answer wasn't definitive.

She was quite friendly and reciprocated most of my personal questions and volunteered details I hadn't asked.

As usual, asked her if she's a student. Presently she's just working, but intends to go back. Was originally studying social work, but wants to switch to neuropsychology. I said something like, "that sounds better!"

Instead of going for her number last, I got it on a high point. Said something like, "let me see if I can guess the spelling of your name," and passed her the phone with a contact open. She said it was almost right and fixed one letter. Left the phone in her hands with a gesture, and she typed the number while saying in a cutesy manner, "I'll just slip my number in there." She almost seemed surprised at herself.

I asked her what time she got off. "9:30, kinda late."

I said something like, "oh, cuz I was gonna say we should grab a coffee or something", and added that I'd been hoping she got off earlier.

Said she had a lot to do that night and we agreed to make it another time. She seemed positive. Not wanting to end on the failure, I asked something about neuropsychology. Her explanation didn't seem tremendously informed.

Customers appeared but she seemed torn as she was enjoying herself with me. She pulled towards them while still facing me, and I just pointed to them and told her with a chuckle that she'd better help them.

My non-verbals were largely unmonitored, but I think are getting naturally better.

9:28pm: me: Hey hey Tanika! It's Phoenix.. save my #

9:40pm: her: Nice I will
(Apparently, the young ones are sometimes using "nice" as a meaningless filler word without positive connotaion, kind of like French "ah bon.")


Day 3: A Window, or Not?

Engaged the girl Friday:
11:27am: me: Tanika! So how's my candle pusher this morning

2:10pm: her: It's going well thanks! Just at my other job working till 7 on break.
2:10pm: her: What about you
Her reply reads like idle chatter, but I have in past missed windows so reliably that I'm now inclined to look for them very liberally. So I start to wonder if "till 7" is a subtle meet suggestion. I decide to nonchalantly probe logistics:
2:19pm: me: I'm good! So do u live downtown?

2:52pm: her: That's good and yeah I do
Not exactly what I wanted to hear. Among other things, it probably means having to pull her to her place.

3:54pm: me: I'm in [ebonics nickname for my suburb], so u tryin to make me come far! (;

3:55pm: her: Lol nice

4:02pm: me: Not that familiar with the area so you'll have to make a suggestion!
Deferring leadership wasn't great, and I knew it. Should've just skipped to asking her exact area.

6:02pm: her: Yeah I'm new to [City] only moved down here in October. Was living in [another suburb] before and then [satellite town]

6:13pm: me: Sounds like an adventure then! What area r u in?

...
She doesn't actually live downtown per se, more midtown. She could actually hop on a city bus at her corner that would pass right by my door, but it's an hour that way.

There are several bars & restaurants right near her intersection, but I don't know them off-hand and I also don't want to get too fancy. So I check a big coffee chain's web site and find one just off this intersection, too.

However, this is where my brain starts on a heating curve that would eventually have it frying. Is this going to be an evening meet? I'm more used to meeting girls at coffee shops, and in the daytime. Evening seems more like bar time than coffee shop time, although the coffee shop is open until 11pm. Is suggesting the coffee shop going to seem off? Should I suggest it as an initial meeting place with a plan to find one of the bars? But I'm not really a bar person. And bouncing around from location to location might convey a poor understanding of what women actually want (to go home and fuck).

I go with my feeling that the meeting place should be a simple excuse to get her in person, with a view to going home with her soon after:
6:45pm: me: Ok! There's a [coffee chain's nickname] there

6:48pm: her: Yeaaaaa
This is where text sucks. Is this enthusiastic agreement? Epiphanic acknowledgement? Prompting? Sarcasm? Or just plain feminine embellishment?

An even more important question, however, is just exactly why this girl had told me that she was working until 7pm. I had not asked her that, she just volunteered it. Part of me suspected that her telling me this amounted to saying, "I'm going to be free after 7pm so I want you to meet me and take me to bed smoothly." The other part couldn't quite envision this translation as being realistic.

In retrospect I probably should have just proposed a same-day meet directly after her 2:10pm message. I hadn't quite wanted to do that, because the "stock" chances of getting a same-day meet are not high and so I would risk beginning a chain of non-compliance. I wish I had've been more brave! The chances may have been a lot better than "stock" given her having already hinted at a time. Instead, I had been trying to feel out the logistics without actually making a direct proposal, and unfortunately the medium had dragged this out to near to the actual possible meeting time!

It would now be extremely short notice to propose a feasible meet, but at once I couldn't get it out of my head that maybe she had intended to! I decided to try to feel out the situation, but without actually proposing anything, such that I wouldn't be stacking negative-compliance:
6:56pm: me: Am just finishing some stuff... u an owl or a lark?
That's when something really unexpected happened: the phone rang! She called two minutes after I sent that message. My initial greeting was unmonitored but something like "hey, whasup" in pretty much the way I'd answer a guy friend whose call I'd been expecting. After that I went with a deeper voice. But we didn't manage to talk at all as for some reason I was not able to hear her at all. (Maybe she had placed the call by accident!)

I decided to text her 8 minutes later:
7:06pm: me: I think Donald Trump messed w the connection! [We had been joking about him when we met.] U'll have to txt

7:08pm: her: An owl
7:08pm: her: Idk what a lark is
I guess sometimes I forget how young some of these women I talk to are. I'm not a spring chicken, and my dad wasn't that young when he had me, so consequently some of the expressions I managed to pick up might have fallen out of use several generations ago, lol. (It's easy to pick up new stuff, but it's also easy to neglect the disappearance of stuff you know.)

So, either she knows what those terms mean and she's saying she's a night person, her second line being emphasis and good for my cause, or her second line means she literally doesn't know these expressions, in which case I have no idea where we stand towards meeting tonight.

Thinking fast, I decide to clarify the terminology in a way that isn't going to make her feel like I'm schooling her on it, while also hinting at a meeting. At this point I definitely didn't want to directly propose a meet tonight, because notice was so short that the chances of her not being up for it were too high. But I didn't want to discount the possibility she had actually wanted to meet tonight, so I kept it as a hint, albeit a fairly obvious one:
7:13pm: me: Well, a lark couldn't meet up at 845pm... which makes the owl luckier (;
If I was going to make it out to her area, I needed to hear from her fairly soon. So I was stressin' when I didn't hear back. But I didn't want to get all chasey and contact her again.

She eventually did answer that night, but only after it was getting quite late, and her answer didn't tell me much at all:
10:14pm: her: Lool true
Fuck me. I decided to just call it a night and not bother answering that.


Aftermath of a Failed Escalation Window?

The next morning, day 4, now Saturday, I re-engage her:
9:29am: me: So, Tanika, this 2nd job. Ur not secretly an advisor to Donald Trump, r u?

3:45pm: her: No I am not lol I am a simple cashier
3:46pm: her: I don't even pay attention to Donald trump

3:58pm: me: Good! He would just make you mad. So, having 2 jobs, do you even have days off, or are we better to meet up after work?
This query prompts the first "wall of text" I have received from a girl:
4:19pm: her: Yeah exactly and I don't need to be mad in life so I don't think about it, & I have a day off here and there once in a while but I typically work 7 days a week. I'll only meet up after work if I have the energy for it and if I don't have other thingsto[sic] do and take care of. Like unpacking and cleaning. Doing laundry ect..[sic]
4:20pm: her: I had a weekend off beginning of February and I used it to get out of the city and see my parents. My schedule always changes and idk when my next day off is. I haven't looked that far ahead in my schedule
Fuck me! I didn't know quite what to make of this. In theory I would expect getting a wall of text from a girl (as opposed to sending one!) is good... but one explaining in depth how meeting with her is next to impossible?

I decided that given the length of her last transmissions, I could afford to go with a bit longer of a reply than my usual one or two liners, to try to empathize a bit while trying to overcome her "no time" frame:
6:33pm: me: I understand! Sometimes it feels like I never have time for a thing. But, Tanika, you only live once. Let your house be dirty one time! I will not mind. (;
She never answered.

I was somewhat afraid of scaring her off with that implied suggestion at the end, but if anything I tend to be too harmless, which I want to overcome.

I pinged her a couple times by text without response:
Day 8, Wed: 12:45pm: me: Tanika. You up for squeezing in that coffee tomorrow after work?

Day 11, Sat: 4:52pm: me: Tanika, I need you to [do this utterly impossible and infeasible thing relating to what I joked around with when we had met]

I called her on day 18, a Saturday, around 10am. No answer, so I left this voicemail. I used decent vocal depth, though I could've tried to be more sultry as opposed to just pleasant and chill:
Hey what's up Tanika, it's Phoenix. I been super busy but, ah, we should definitely, ah, try to hook up for that coffee. Ah, squeeze that in some time soon! Ah, so give me a shout, ah, ####. Aright. Again, it's ####. Take care.
(Wow, that would read so much better just replacing "ah" with silence!)

Not surprisingly, 2 weeks later, I haven't heard back from her.


Analysis

So, what went wrong?

The approach itself I think was good. Had a good vibe and many things were on point, such as moving her, lingering hand touch, etc. She reciprocated personal questions, and also was fairly responsive at first by text, so I think there was decent initial interest.

What is really bothering me is, was her volunteering the time she got off on day 3 a window which I should've jumped on more decisively? And, was not making a meet-up happen that evening what destroyed the interaction? Her co-operation seems to have plummeted after that, so I have to suspect that was a missed window. But I did make some effort to guide things in the direction of a meet; if that's what she wanted, why didn't she try harder to go along with my suggestions moving in that direction? I suspect I needed to be more decisive with that; was that where I failed?

And what was with that wall of text from her? If she had already lost interest, why was she investing long explanations? I'm used to girls who don't want to bother with you giving vague, one-line refusals. Did my implicit suggestion I'd wind up at her place scare her off? That's the point contact went dead.

I'll try a short, low energy ping by text, but I think this one is lost.
 

Seppuku

Tribal Elder
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Re: Candle girl volunteers time she's working until; botched window?

Hey Phoenix!

I'm going to venture what I think the picture was.

In hindsight, and given what she said the next day about her impossible schedule, and especially this:
I'll only meet up after work if I have the energy for it and if I don't have other thingsto[sic] do and take care of
it seems she really was hinting at a meeting at 7pm.

However at the time she mentions about finishing job at 7, I agree that it was ambiguous. But your inner voice is telling you it's a hint. So here you should have investigated a little further, to be clear. Shooting directly for a meeting would look rushed and uncalibrated, so I would do in two steps. (i) gauge interest, and (ii) propose. She hinted at her schedule, so a nice way to gauge interest is to hint at yours, like you're also free at 7, and look for any positive reaction. Something like this:
11:27am: me: Tanika! So how's my candle pusher this morning
2:10pm: her: It's going well thanks! Just at my other job working till 7 on break.
2:10pm: her: What about you
2:19pm: me: Currently working on something but I should be finished by 6:30
2:21pm: her: Nice! [Positive reaction, go ahead!]
Instead, you embark into discussing her logistics. The discussion extends until past 7pm - when it's too late but you don't know it. If you had immediately checked her interest to go out at 7pm, you would know early on that you have a deadline to have things sorted out.

Another thing: at 6:48pm you have identified where she is and a nearby coffee shop. Why didn't you logically proceed to the next step:
6:45pm: me: Ok! There's a [coffee chain's nickname] there
6:48pm: her: Yeaaaaa [NOTE: For the record, this is actually enthousiasm]
6:56pm: me: Am just finishing some stuff... Let's meet there at 7:20pm (or whatever realistic timing)
But instead, you engage into the 'owl or lark', and Trump joke. At 10pm when she replies, it's too late. What happens the next day is that her mood changed. She just "don't feel like it" anymore - and I think she subtly wants you to know that she was open to going out the night before (the 4:19pm wall of text).

Because she was obviously busy with her work, the texting pace was slow, making it hard to sort out the logistics of a meeting between 2pm and 7 pm. So it was I think difficult to pull it off overall within the time frame - and the next day the hot feeling was gone! These feelings are very transient, and we got to exploit them while they're here - as far as possible.

Seppuku
EDIT. And if you live an hour away, my "let's meet there at 7:20pm" wouldn't work - because she's unlikely to wait for you until the time you realistically show up. It means that you should have established the date place before 6:45pm - in order to make it in time. Again, would have been nice to gauge her interest early on.
 
the right date makes getting her back home a piece of cake

ThePhoenix

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
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Messages
315
Re: Candle girl volunteers time she's working until; botched window?

Hi Seppuku,

Thank you for the insight!

Seppuku said:
However at the time she mentions about finishing job at 7, I agree that it was ambiguous. But your inner voice is telling you it's a hint. So here you should have investigated a little further, to be clear. Shooting directly for a meeting would look rushed and uncalibrated, so I would do in two steps. (i) gauge interest, and (ii) propose. She hinted at her schedule, so a nice way to gauge interest is to hint at yours, like you're also free at 7, and look for any positive reaction. ...
That's exactly what I needed to do. lol. I feel like an idiot for not thinking of this at the time!

Seppuku said:
Another thing: at 6:48pm you have identified where she is and a nearby coffee shop. Why didn't you logically proceed to the next step:
6:45pm: me: Ok! There's a [coffee chain's nickname] there
6:48pm: her: Yeaaaaa [NOTE: For the record, this is actually enthousiasm]
6:56pm: me: Am just finishing some stuff... Let's meet there at 7:20pm (or whatever realistic timing)
But instead, you engage into the 'owl or lark' ...
Primarily, in the moment I wasn't confident in her interest in meeting that day, which I should have ironed out earlier in the manner you suggested above. I was a bit too absolute in the "same day proposal is too early" rule and was overly worried about what a refusal could do to later chances.

Getting there in short time was also tricky, so I also wanted to gauge what kind of latitude I had with time. But I didn't want to ask outright and risk negative compliance. I was hoping she'd get that the 'owl or lark' bit was intended as a prompt for whether or not she'd be open to meeting somewhat later, but in retrospect she either didn't understand it at all or was unimpressed with my not being direct.

Another girl, another lesson!

I think that there is also an element of "I would have to be very lucky for her to want xyz" mentality, where in reality she probably does want xyz. It is a large mental shift that takes some time and experience.

Hopefully, understanding that this young woman I had just randomly approached at a mall was probably up for a meet and likely more, is enough to embolden me to approach the 9 women I don't approach of every 10 I want to!

Cheers!
Phoenix
 

Seppuku

Tribal Elder
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Re: Candle girl volunteers time she's working until; botched window?

Hey Phoenix,

glad to be of help.

I was a bit too absolute in the "same day proposal is too early" rule and was overly worried about what a refusal could do to later chances.
To be fair, I also usually consider it safer to ask for the date two days ahead rather than same evening. Because it is more likely that she already has plans for the immediate evening, rather than for two days away. But like you said, she volunteered the 7pm. That's a potential signal you want to investigate. So yes, it is good to have some general rules ("ask for two days away"), but it is also good to keep an open mind and differ from the rules according to her signals. Well, I guess you got the point now.

Besides, she was sending other signals of interest, that should have given you confidence to pursue. First, when you probe for logistics ("where do you live?", "there's a coffee chain there", ...), she knows exactly what you are doing and why. So if you see that she kindly provides you the info you're asking, it's a good sign.

There were other positive signs.

3:54pm: me: I'm in [ebonics nickname for my suburb], so u tryin to make me come far! (;
3:55pm: her: Lol nice
Here you are implying about meeting, and she reacts positively ("nice"). By the way, implying about meeting in this manner is a very subtle move. You can use that to gauge her interest level. Again, a positive reaction is a good sign.

And finally, when you mention the coffee chain, she answer "Yeaaaaa", which, in my book, conveys enthusiasm. Another good sign!

For me, there were enough positive signs to go ahead and propose.

Another girl, another lesson!
Yes! Frankly I think you were close from getting a date from cold approach, kudos about that! Just keep going, you will get there!

Hopefully, understanding that this young woman I had just randomly approached at a mall was probably up for a meet and likely more, is enough to embolden me to approach the 9 women I don't approach of every 10 I want to!
Exactly! It's the power to generate dates out of thin air. What a positive thought.

Alright, good job! I am staying tuned to your posts.

Seppuku
PS. I have a primary education in Physics. You display in your posts a very good knowledge of hard sciences as well as history of science. Rare enough to be noticed!
 

ThePhoenix

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
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Messages
315
Re: Candle girl volunteers time she's working until; botched window?

Seppuku said:
For me, there were enough positive signs to go ahead and propose.
I will try to adjust my future interpretations to be more optimistic! Erring on the positive side will tend to have better outcomes overall, and at the worst she backs off and you're no worse than you started in the big picture.

We are taught that women are difficult to sleep with; so much of this learning curve is really just a reversing of that mentality.

Seppuku said:
PS. I have a primary education in Physics. You display in your posts a very good knowledge of hard sciences as well as history of science. Rare enough to be noticed!
Yes.. (well, I must admit, Internet helped with the history, but I knew what to look for.) Now, I'm torn whether to call myself an artist or a scientist. I kind of live in their intersection. :) But I think the mental discipline makes the girl stuff a little easier too, it's just unfortunate I spent so long with that domain getting an exemption from my usual discipline.

Physics... interesting.. depending on what kind, that could be a real coincidence!
 
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