Is the act of romantically approaching women out of date?

I feel like this whole conversation is so alienating. You talk to people. You interact with people. Some of them are women. Some of the women you interact with are really cool. Maybe you find them attractive. So you say, "hey I know this is kind of a random encounter, but I'd like to see you again. Is there any chance we could hang out and go see a movie or get dinner or something?"

You aren't making first contact with an alien species. It's just people. Someone you're interested in, who might be interested in you. Don't bring a whole lot of baggage to the dance, just see if they want to go out. Have something in mind to do.

Maybe that's how you could spend your off time. Engage in something creative. Have tickets to a show or a play or something that you do regularly that you can invite them along on. Listen to live music at some venue. Go to a pokémon tournament if that's your bag. Just something you can invite them along to, and if they don't want to come ask what they want to do.

A female friend once said that, at least in the US, men are often viewed by women as being either creepy or not creepy. The not creepy men have learned to avoid women due to the creepy men, so the only men who would approach a woman must be creepy.

Make of that, and its consequences, what you will.

Women have been complaining in popular media for decades about random dudes approaching them and asking them out. How is it a surprise that the trend is dying out? It's clearly something that most women don't enjoy to begin with.

Don't know how old your father is, but at least among Gen X women, creepy men absolutely have been part of the discussion. It just wasn't a public discussion until much more recently. Hell, the fake phone number thing goes back to landlines.

We're still at a point of significant cultural change in gender relations, and until an equilibrium point is reached, there's going to be apprehension about approaching others. To that end, it's important that we keep small gaffes made in good faith as social misdemeanors (to allow for opportunities to correct behavior) and not career-ending incidents. It only takes a quick browse of social media discussing one of these incidents to see why said apprehension exists.

That said, I still don't think we're having enough conversations about consent around positions of authority and social hierarchy in general. Too many people don't understand that being nice to someone when you're on the clock isn't implied consent for continued interaction with that person off the clock. That's the light stuff; it can go all the way to gross stories about cops and women. It all stems back to authority and power imbalance. This might be more of an issue in the US than elsewhere; I think ideals of "equality" and "social mobility" are so ingrained in our culture that some Americans don't have the social intelligence around the very real stratification that exists at the workplace and elsewhere.

Fear of rejection is a whole other problem that likely stems from everyone having more anxiety now. I was around a bunch of people in their late teens/early 20's a lot more than usual the past couple years and holy crap. I thought my social anxiety was bad. I don't know how these kids are going to function.

Ever since I was a young teen, I've been exposed to a lot of messaging about mean and harrassment and rape. I was already an extremely isolated kid, and it really drove me further away from women. I really didn't want to be a creep or make someone uncomfortable, and already had major self-esteem issues, and it really screwed me up tbh. Even during college, the school was super condescending about telling men not to rape people, and it really made me ashamed to be male. 2nd year, I started dating someone, but I just couldn't continue because I was so uncomfortable with it. I'm certainly an extreme case, but there is a lot of messaging out there affecting people, and not necessarily for the better. I've realized I'm trans since then, and apparently this is common in mtf people. In the end, I'm way more comfortable being with men, even though I'm generally less attracted to them physically in general. Anyways, I would LITERALLY NEVER approach a woman romantically in person, it has to be over a dating app of some sort where I know they're looking for something romantic and we can be upfront about needs and wants. That or they have to be very assertive and unambiguous in person, which very weirdly has actually happened to me.

I think both the "would you rather run into a man or a bear in the woods?" question for women and the "would you rather be emotionally vulnerable with a woman or a tree?" question for men scream loud and clear why there isn't much meeting in the middle on this issue.

Women are still living in a world that by and large treats women as property and rape as something that women should just get used to.

A woman in the US couldn't have her own bank account until 1974.

Until 1993, marital rape wasn't recognized at the Federal level, and only some states had laws against it.

So, up until just thirty-one years ago, raping your wife was cool and legal.

Women are watching politicians try to control their bodily autonomy by making abortion illegal, and the same people pushing that also happen to be pushing for an end to "no fault divorce" because they don't like women having the choice of divorcing them.

Women have so many good reasons to have had it up to here with men...

Now, women aren't responsible for men's emotional well-being and men really should do more to support each other when it comes to being open and emotionally vulnerable, but the downside is that it means men, overall, generally feel like they can't actually be open with women without it hurting their chances, romantically.

Much like it isn't every individual black person's job to educate every idiot white person they come in contact with, it's not every woman's job to educate every idiot man they come in contact with.

However, this impacts men who are just trying to find a footing and may grow into better people, given the opportunity. However, the attitude of that you're not responsible for explaining leads to nobody explaining except... right-wing asshats who are pushing division and hate. So, because there aren't left-wing men speaking to how to handle these issues and providing healthy in-gender support for other men, we're leaving it all up to women to do all the educating, and I mean, I get it, they don't want to, they're kind of over it, and that's probably why they're pretty rude about it, to boot. And since they're saying no and bowing out, that means young men are left to listen to voices like Andrew Tate.

I think both sides of this coin are doing each other a disservice. Women not having enough patience for men who could grow to be good men, and men not having enough self-reflection to realize that hanging your entire emotional stability on whether or not you are in a relationship is unhealthy, period.

There is very little positive guidance, just a sea of don'ts, usually worded as absolutes. And a lot of divisive "gender war" BS from all sides. Really not surprising.

At the grocery store? Lol no

At the bar, if you're hot sure

But I think the fear or social consequences is a relatively new construct.

Rejection and social consequences have absolutely been part of the game, pretty much forever. If I had to wager, what's different now is that young people spend time online that has replaced irl time, which has "upped the stakes" for irl interactions in their minds. They also just haven't been as conditioned to being rejected irl and learning to move on.

I say all this as an elder Millennial who employs quite a few 20-somethings, and who has several 20-something nieces/nephews

I've noticed less interactions between strangers in general. I think there is a general anxiety issue and a fear of conversations going south/ people getting aggressive. Whether or not that's rational idk.

I've never approached a woman. Is terrifying and not worth the humiliation.

I wonder how much of this fear is self-induced. Given we spend so much more of our time on the internet, and there has been a huge sexual reckoning for men. Women in the past two decades have gotten A L O T more vocal about shitty treatment from men, and that's a good thing. That said, male exposure to this vocal messaging has gone up and men are way more aware of it.

The thing is, though, is that men are missing the point. Women aren't necessarily saying don't come up and talk to me, but rather don't come up and grope me, or be a general pervert.

I have been out of the game for a long time, but I doubt treating a woman as a human, and being overall respectful would go over poorly, even if you were propositioning her for a date.

There's a lot hinging on the definition of "approach a woman in person" here, but the general conclusion of men being afraid of being labelled a creep tends to hold true in the people I know.

I have a friend who made moves on a mutual friend. As far as I know, he didn't do anything egregious. Farthest either said he went was putting his arm around her shoulder on a couch after she came back to his place with him alone to watch something after they had been hanging out and flirting most of the day. Both say he stopped as soon as she made it clear she wasn't interested (okay, hand off, I'm going to ramble like a nerd about this show because I legitimately wanted to show you it on top of anything else that might happen). She refused to attend anything where he would be present for over a year and had some very strong opinions about just how much of a womanizing creep he was.

So I've seen this sort of thing first hand.

But I think in general throughout time, guys generally didn't go up to a complete strangers and ask them out.

I approached my wife in person in a casual setting without any ulterior motives. We were both at a mutual friend's college graduation celebration. I knew precisely two people there, and they were chatting with other people. I had already exhausted small talk with most of the older family members of the graduate. I saw a woman off to the side not looking sure what to do with themselves and decided to try and start up a conversation. Maybe we could be awkward together. We ended up glued to each other keeping a conversation going for the rest of the event. Realized that night back home that I wanted to date her, and spent time checking out her facebook and talking to mutual friends to learn more about her before I asked her out via text. I even tried to make that casual, as I was inviting her to join me at a small local theater performance I was already going to either way, and dinner beforehand if she was interested. I didn't call it a date, just "hey I'm doing this thing that seems like something you'd enjoy, want to get dinner beforehand and come with?"

She was the roommate of someone in my friend group, and I was told in no uncertain terms by our mutual friends that if I screwed it up or hurt her they would hurt me.

So... yeah. Not going to flirt with a complete stranger for fear of being maced, or being socially ostracized by being labelled something like a creeper. Intense hesitation to date within or (in the case of my wife) on the periphery of my social groups lest I damage something.

After the show, I was so direct with my now wife about what I was looking for that she had to tell me to slow down, because if we had a relationship some of those things wouldn't only be up to me. And I told it to her saying "Look, I don't want to make ultimatums, but I don't want to waste either of our time, or for things to get serious only for some core incompatibility to come up and leave us both hurt. If any of this is a deal breaker, let's get it out in the open now and we can continue as friends, because you're really cool and I'd hate to miss out on that just because things couldn't work out romantically."

Ultimately things did work out, but it definitely wasn't the type of "courtship" people think of, or is shown in media.

My parents didn't meet as complete strangers either. Most people I know in relationships didn't.

You can do it if you follow these 2 rules: be attractive and don't be unattractive.

I think it IS getting out of date. It seems to me the modern approach is to contact the woman in a friendly manner without asking her out on a date, which is mostly a more comfortable situation for both sides and can lead to a date in the future if both sides feel like there's chemistry there.

I think the "me too" movement made me unwilling to approach anyone. I have a FWB from before that time and we work well together so i am cool with that.

Personally, from puberty through most of high school, I never approached any girls because I never had to--in my social setting it was totally normal and acceptable for girls to ask boys out, and I guess I was approachable enough, despite not being very popular, to get asked a fair amount. Yet I still had this culturally inherited concept that it should be me who was doing the asking, or at least learning how to do it. So I struggled with this a lot in my teenage years... part of the problem was that I also didn't have the stereotypical physical attraction to women, but a more personality-based one, so a lot of time was wasted trying to convert close platonic friendships into romantic relationships (maybe that works for some people, but not in my experience).

Ultimately, the woman I married was someone I approached without knowing her beforehand, but only after like weeks of making very mutual, not at all creepy eye contact walking back and forth on the same paths in the music center of our college campus. I think that's sort of the bare minimum: some signs of shared context, some shared interest or hobby, some smoke signals indicating mutual attraction. And for a minute I still thought maybe we were meant to be just friends, but obviously I was wrong, and part of how I know that is the way we met: with clear physical attraction established. This was all before dating apps, and I think I can see their appeal from that perspective; they reduce the uncertainty about "what kind of relationship is this going to become" to some extent.

Anyways, though, I'm pretty sure that I didn't have to put myself through the suffering of trying to "be a man" and build up the confidence to ask women out, because I was lucky to have a milieu in which they could comfortably take the lead. Heck, my wife might have been the one to break the tension eventually if it wasn't me. What I do regret, for sure, is the platonic friendships I lost with women during that phase in which I felt I was "supposed" to be converting them into girlfriends. The kind of reasoning that draws a direct line from changes in who is doing the asking out (for a variety of reasons) to male loneliness is really not helping any young men who are similarly confused.

The idea that a stranger cold approaching a woman was a significant factor in couplings is quite overblown. Most couples met through some sort of social grouping such as family, friends, religious gatherings, work, etc. This doesn't mean it didn't occur, just that it wasn't an overall productive method of finding a partner. As time has gone on, society has advanced to a place where women are too not only discuss openly about the problematic behaviors exhibited in cold approaches, but also be heard. The affect on young men is that most will not approach a woman due to the already present fear of rejection and the now added fear of being perceived as a creep.

It is not necessarily a bad thing that this is going away, but the large issue that should be addressed is the loss of a community many (I'm speaking for the US here) face. Many young people are frustrated with the dating scene and their inability to find partners. A community not only allows for opportunities to meet potential partners but a framework to enforce (through social pressure) acceptable standards of conduct to ensure all parties are safe and comfortable. I don't have the answers, but we as a society need to figure it out. There has been unfortunate trend of this frustration driving young people to extremist ideology. This has been most prominent with young men, as is historically the case, but it is starting to take root with some young women as well.

I approached a woman in a bar once back around 2009. after that it was nothing but tinder, I've got no clue how to figure out if a woman is interested in person.

I told her friend that I liked her. She married me (eventually).

From what I understand it's the fear of being viewed as a creep to approach a woman out of the blue.

You are the Nazi.

Why does it have to be one or the other? I've always had good luck just talking to people as people. You can't go into a new conversation with anybody with such high expectations. Just chill, be yourself, and see where it goes. If anything making a new friend is never a bad thing.

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I find most men approach women for sex. I think men need to learn to approach women for friendship.