REVIEW: I'm Not Meeting Women, So I Went to Some Night Clubs

NeantHumain · Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 4:43 pm Post subject:

I don't drink, but I just haven't been meeting women in my day-to-day life, and sometimes a guy wants some sort of female companionship even if not ideal. I went downtown because I know that's where the night clubs with people around my age like to go, and I got lost and then had trouble finding park (plus traffic was horrendous), so I didn't actually get there until 1:00 A.M.! Most of the women were there with friends or already chatting with some guy. I tried talking to a few women, but I had trouble hearing them, and they probably had trouble hearing me. The quality of the women was variable, but I didn't see many who were "my type" (I am getting less picky as time goes on, though).

These types of environments are not only noisy but also exceptionally crowded. Beware that you have to be willing to push your way through the crowd, and it's not just women you'll be brushing against! Sad

All the night clubs interlocked, and some had doors that would take you right into another one, so I really didn't know where I was and didn't particularly care either. In some of the night clubs, people were dancing (albeit not well choreographed, so I think, if you think not knowing how to dance is a big deal, chances are neither does the girl). Some clubs have strobe lights—probably so you can hardly see the people you're dancing with; they may also play the music so loudly (or the bass at least) that you can feel the sound waves (and not just in your ear drum, I mean). Bizarrely, the overwhelming sensory blitz had a calming effect for me, but I was aready heavily detached from the environment to begin with. I probably dissociated a bit to deal with the crowds, the noise, and the lateness of it; it was like all this stuff was happening all around me, and I was just passively watching through some filter that dampened and slowed everything down. Well, anyway it allowed me to focus on my goal, which was to meet women: I was constantly scanning the environment for women I might want to talk to. I went alone, but I tried to get rid of the creepiness factor but just approaching women without any kind of indication that what I was doing was odd or desperate. One woman did seem somewhat interested in talking to me (I noticed the eye contact and smile that gets mentioned a lot in this forum as an indicator of attraction), but she was with two friends, and they continued talking and basically were in the way.

Overall, it was a dud. If you want to "work" such an environment, you probably need pretty good nonverbals to compensate for the noise, a high ability to tolerate the sensory bombardment (or at least the ability to dissociate mentally from it), and some decent understanding of informal social pragmatics. Also, a wide spectrum of people do attend, but the probability you'll run into your city's second foremost (the foremost being yourself) Proust scholar are low. A better mindset is, "Who looks like someone fun to chat with? Who might be a pleasant person to be around?" You've got to be open-minded enough to look for traits that you don't necessarily esteem most highly in yourself (well, the same goes for making friends in general, I guess; you'll really limit yourself if you're only looking for other chemists or other philosophers or other libertarians).