Opening

I’ve noticed as I’ve reviewed our discussion boards that lots of our posters are much more comfortable with meeting girls during the daytime, and find bars, nightclubs, and parties somewhat alien environments (although to be fair, there are also plenty of guys who are far more nighttime-oriented there as well).

When I stopped and thought about this, one of the things I realized was that when I first started hitting nightclubs, they were a pretty intimidating environment to experience:

• The loud, pounding, deafening music
• The big, imposing bouncers and other club patrons
• The flashy, intimidating-looking women
• The specter of approaching a girl only to meet her boyfriend’s fist
• The feeling that everyone else there belonged a lot more than you did
• The self-consciousness of knowing all these party people would see you get rejected if things didn’t go perfectly with a girl you went up to
  

Especially when you’re rolling solo, like I was most of the time early on, you feel like you stick out like a sore thumb, and make for an easy target for anyone looking for a fight and look like someone to be avoided for anyone trying to have a good time.

Everyone there who’s having fun – the people you want to be around... well, they don’t need you. You don’t even know how to break into the same category as them.

So this article’s going to serve as companion piece to my article on picking up girls in bars and clubs and your primer on how to be social: the 6 secrets every social man figures out sooner or later about how to work a venue, how to get comfortable in an intimidating environment like this, and how to set yourself up for more social (and sexual) success than you can shake a billy club at.

We had a request recently to do a few more articles on approaching and opening. There’s not really too much more I can say on opening beyond what we’ve already got on here – if you’re in need of a refresher, articles on opening include the below:

• Pre-Opening

• Genuine Interest Dynamite

• Troubleshooting Your Opening

• Easy Opening with Indirect Direct

• When to Use Direct Openers Versus Situational Openers

• Opening Body Language

• Book Excerpts: Short and Sweet Tips for Your PUA Openers

• Are You Single? Why to Always Ask Girls This

• Book Excerpts: The Direct Opener

• Game Openers That’ll Get You Girls

• How to Use Indirect Game to Get Girls

• How to Compliment a Girl Like You’ve Know Her for Years

• How to Approach a Girl Wherever You Are (Easily)

• Meeting Girls in Messy Situations / Friends Around

• Approaching Girls Sitting Down

• Shotgun Opening and Reopening Women Later in the Night

• How to Use Situationally Relevant Openers with Women

... however, one we haven’t covered much in-depth yet is the playful/nonverbal opener.

What’s playful/nonverbal? It’s essentially using body language and touch to open women in a playful, teasing, flirty way – often one that eschews any form of verbal opening altogether.

When you just want to have fun, or you’re feeling lower energy, or especially playful, or you find yourself in a bar or nightclub where the music volume is cranked so high that speech is inaudible, playful/nonverbal can be the ideal way to run your opens.

Men are nuanced beings in many ways, but there are also some very certain ways in which men are actually quite simple. And there are a few things about all men that I know to be true:

1. Men like hot girls (whatever “hot” means to them and assuming that they’re straight)

2. Men like getting laid (no further qualification needed here)

3. Men (straight men, anyway) like getting laid with hot girls

And yet, the unfortunate truth is that so few men are able to make it to step three. Some guys get laid with massive infrequency and with mediocre looking girls. Some guys are unable to bring hot girls into their lives, and if they do, are only able to do so playing the role of orbiter or solid friend zone friend. Some guys are able to sleep with a hot girl by fluke or once in a blue moon.

And then there are the few. The few men who are able to get laid with a high amount of consistency – regardless of location – with the most beautiful of women. They don’t do so all the time, but definitely often enough to keep the good times rolling. And even when they come short, they have enough core confidence to not even care anyway.

So today I want to talk to you about how to become one of the few.

“I wonder if that mural is trying to tell us something,” you say to the woman nearby to you while waiting for the train, and she looks at the painting – an image of a thief being beaten by a woman with a handbag – and laughs.

“I think it’s saying, ‘Don’t rob people,’” she responds.

“Good advice,” you say. “Where you headed?”

Situationally relevant openers are versatile, simply because they are among the most innocuous openers out there, which makes them perfect for ambiguous situations where you don’t want to convey your interest too strongly. They’re simple enough to get down – just talk about something interesting or relevant in the environment – but there’s some nuance to them, and if you learn it, you have yet another powerful tool in your toolbox for starting conversations with pretty new girls.

Something I see guys doing that always makes me want to hold up my hands and go, “Wait! Too extreme!” is getting miffed and walking away from women without giving them a properly put-together parting shot.

I was guilty of it for a long time, and when you’re still being emotionally affected by the women you’re meeting (i.e., before it’s become more or less pure process with little emotional involvement), it’s pretty easy to fall into this trap.

That is, the trap of realizing that things aren’t going your way with a given girl, getting upset, and storming off out of the interaction with a spiteful “Huh. She’ll realize what she’s lost when I’m gone!” attitude.

Ever do this? I bet you have, and if you’re like most men I bet you sometimes still do.

Thing is, how often do those girls you abruptly cut contact with like this ever get back in touch with you and turn things around? Never, right? Occasionally they may reconnect with you, but ever notice how they treat you rather patronizingly in those cases? They know they’ve gotten to you.

At best, all you ever get out of ending things with girls this way is a psychic victory... you get to think to yourself that you “won” because you walked off and left her hanging.

But you didn’t win, not really. You didn’t get the girl.

There is a way you can though – not all the time, but a whole lot more often than you will with the “get irked and storm off” approach, in any event.

I call it “the parting shot.”

You arrive in a new town. Maybe you move into your new place, maybe you start to explore the city’s attractions, maybe you check outsome restaurants.

But wherever you go, you can’t seem to get away from that one dominating thought. No matter what you do, your mind keeps coming back to it: finding attractive, single women.

It can be somewhat intimidating to go out and find single women in a new town, or even an old one. But in reality… it’s really quite easy. And today I’m going to outline exactly where to find these not-so-elusive single women, and how these places can be applied to pretty much any city.

Today I want to talk about two different but related kinds of opening:

• Shotgun opening, and
• Reopening

You'll mostly use these with women in social nighttime venues (bars and clubs, parties, networking events), but they're practical by day as well, in the right places (charity events or rallies, beach parties, barbecues and cookouts).

Shotgun opening coupled with reopening is an effective one-two punch for talking to lots of girls while not getting overly bogged down in go-nowhere conversations with women who are only interested in you socially, rather than romantically. This is how you work the crowd and build a foundation in social events that you build on later into the evening.

Done right, you'll frequently find yourself with a bunch of women who already know you and are comfortable with you and who may even be actively chasing you later into the night, when their walls are up to other men just beginning to approach them fueled by liquid courage (that is, alcohol), who will be standing around wondering how you're getting such warm receptions with all these gals while they face one cold shoulder after another.

Shotgun opening + reopening is how.