The first ever study of creepiness was done just a few weeks ago and had a really interesting result, which is that men and women experience creepiness differently. Men think of creepiness as taxidermy, as the supernatural, scary movies, clowns, those sorts of things. Women have those same associations plus one more.
Women associate creepiness with men, and that was the inspiration for this video because it dawned on me that somewhere in the course of every guy's life as he's flirting, he has done something creepy. I know I have, and the reason is because we don't have the same understanding of creepy that women do, so I figured that by diving into the most common ways that guys are creepy without realizing it, I can save you that trouble and, hopefully, take you off of the path you don't want to be on. So the first thing that you might be doing that I see guys do all the time because I live in Las Vegas, is with eye contact.
Creepiness typically follows a Goldilocks rule, which is to say that too little and too much are both bad. You need to get it just right. We all know what too much eye contact looks like.
It's the guy who sees a girl and he's drunk, so he just stares at her, right? Or it's the guy who gets right up in her face, and he's just too close he's invading her personal space. Too little though can be uncomfortable as well.
That's when a guy comes up from behind a girl and approaches her, and just startles her, just "Oh, my god, what were you doing there? " I see this all the time on the dance floor. A guy who kind of like slips in and starts grinding up behind a girl without her really realizing he's there, and all of a sudden, surprise, there he is.
So, the rule for eye contact, when it comes to approaching a woman that you're interested is that you want to have enough that she can sense you coming, but not so much that she's seen you standing there for 15 minutes working up the courage to talk to her. What that means is that within the first 1, 2, maybe 3 times that you make eye contact with her, you need to go speak to her. Now, I realize that this is hard because first time can go, "Crap, that's a pretty girl," second time, "Oh, god, what will I say," third, "Oh, no, she saw me," and then you're like, you know, six times later, you don't know what to do.
How do you train yourself to speak to a girl once you've made eye contact just a few times. Here's how. Start, while you're out in a bar or a club, making eye contact with everybody--wait staff, bussers, men, women, whoever it is.
Make these little micro interactions of eye contact. Second, throw in a smile. So you walk pass someone, you give them a little smile, right?
Third, if you want, you can throw in a high five, a wave, whatever. And what you're aiming for here, one, is to feel, first off, internally comfortable with these tiny, little interactions, so that you're not just staring at your feet the whole time. And, second, it's to see how many people you can get to respond in kind because every person who responds with a smile, a high five, a wave, that is an invite to go start a conversation with them.
The way that you're going to get good at this, I will tell you right now, a little hint for you, is that the more fun that you're having, the better each one of these micro interactions will go. If you're having the time of your life, people are going to just, about 100%, want to high five, whatever, "Hey, what's up man? " They're going to want to be part of that.
If you're really nervous and bored like, "Hey," nobody's gonna respond to you. So, start doing that, then you can direct it towards the women that you're interested in speaking to specifically. Now, you've gone up, you stand in there, you're having fun, you see a woman, you caught her eye, you smile, and wave.
If she smiles and waves back, done. She sensed you, you can walk up. Maintain eye contact while you're going, with a smile on your face, and say, god, just about anything.
An easy one to go is, "We just made awkward eye contact. If I didn't say Hi, it was about to get weird, right? " A little joke, and now you're talking, "What's up?
I'm Charlie. " Super, super easy, I literally came up with that on the top of my head, but that should work. So, that's the first thing--eye contact.
The second thing is you're going to me in conversation at some point, right? Conversation has a million ways to be creepy. There's a million ways you can do it wrong, but the most common one that I tend to see is with compliments.
Men go out and they see a woman they're attracted to--this happens all the time in Vegas, I overhear it--and they say things like, "Oh, my gosh, you're just so beautiful like, wow, I don't even know, we don't have women like you where I come from, it's oh, wow, I'm like you made me so nervous. " And, again, well intentioned, they really are nervous. They don't know what to do, but what they don't realize is that every time you compliment someone, you increase the amount of tension that they feel.
And if you've ever been over complimented, perhaps, by someone at work who wanted a promotion, or an intern, it feels like, "Okay, what does this person want? " Like what are they buttering me up for? So you need to find a way to release the tension that you create when you compliment people.
You can still compliment women, in fact, you should. That's one of the most effective ways to show them that you're interested. So what do you do?
You combine the compliment, which creates tension, with a joke, which releases tension. This is a big topic, it's a technique called push-pull or pull-push, whatever you want to call it. I have another video on it, it's here on YouTube.
I'll throw a link in the description, a link up here, it's got examples from Russell Brand, Craig Ferguson, really good. Watch it after this one. We're gonna move on now to the third piece, which is touching.
Goldilocks rule, again, in effect, too much, too little, not gonna work; too much, obvious. A guy who's grabbing the girl, being really aggressive, again, tends to occur when guys are drunk. Too little though, just as creepy and just as bad.
I was guilty of this in the past for sure. I'd walk up, I'd be talking to a girl, and I feel like I'm kind of interested. I want to see if she's, you know, she's gonna respond and I'd like to tap her on the shoulder.
Or we'll take a picture and I'd _ over, I'd kind of like hold her hands as I gently laid my hand on her shoulder very, very light. That's creepy. You don't want to be doing that because that indicates some sort of incongruence in you, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that, but, basically, incongruence is when what you're saying and what you're doing don't match, which creates the impression in her that you have something to hide.
That is the core of creepiness. So, how do you touch the right way? What's really important here is that you realize there's not just one way.
I live in Las Vegas; I go out all the time. If you have a certain level of social acuity, you could probably run up, give a woman a hug, grab her, spin around, dance with her on the dance floor, no problem. But, that I can't recommend blanket to every single person because if you haven't developed that sense of social awareness, you might run into serious problems.
So the safest way to do this is to think of it like this, early in the interaction, once you're talking to someone, even as you're like kind of maneuvering through the crowd, any where from 1 to 3 seconds, somewhere on her arm, in North American culture, is generally safe. You're gonna be fine. That's not too much.
That's a fine amount to see where her level of receptiveness is. So, if this is her shoulder, this is my hand, while I'm talking I might go, "Hey, me and my friends are gonna go over there to the bar, do you guys want to come with us? " I rest my hand here, I get her attention, I take it off.
Or we high five, I give her a fist, she makes me laugh, I'd go, "It's freaking awesome," you and her high five, hold her hand for a second, 1, 2, let it go. That amount is going to give me the most crucial thing, which is information, because creepiness comes from not taking social cues. At this point, I need to be receptive and open to how does she feel about that.
If I'd say, "Let's go over to the bar," she says, "Sure," grabs my hand and walks to the bar with me, she's clearly comfortable touching me, at least, to some degree, which means, next time, maybe I'd give her a hug, maybe we'd go to the dance floor. But if I touch a girl and I'd go, "Hey, we're going to the bar," and she goes like that, and goes, "Yeah, we're gonna stay here. " That's a pretty clear indication that, okay, she's not feeling comfortable enough with me for whatever reason, maybe that's how she is, maybe she's having a bad day, maybe she just doesn't like the color of my shirt, that she does not want me to be touching her, and what that means is one of two things.
I can, A: end the interaction, or B: go back to speaking to her with less touching; see if we can connect a little bit more, and then, in a couple of minutes, see how she feels with a similar kind of, you know, 1 to 3 second touch. If that doesn't get any better, guess what? not a match, time to move on.
So, that is touching, 1 to 3 seconds on the arm, generally, you're safe, but, of course, pick up the feedback and act accordingly. This is where creepiness comes in. It's the guys that don't receive the feedback.
The fourth thing--trapping. This is the one I see guys most unaware of, which is, again, it's tough because you've never experienced this. But if you're a guy, what you tend to not realize is that most of the women you're interested in are going to be smaller than you, they're gonna lose in a fight to you, right?
They're gonna be shorter, they're gonna weigh less. All of these things that make you a literal physical threat to them, this is why women, over thousands of years, have evolved this sense of creepiness. It's a visceral feeling of this might not be safe for me.
So you can imagine a time where you're trapping them physically in a small space even if you're just talking to them and the conversation is going great. That it might make her feel like, "Oh, my gosh, I need to get out of here," unless she has a very high degree of comfort with you. So, I see this happen, a guy and a girl having a great conversation and go, "Let's sit down over here.
" They go to a booth, she slides in first, he slides in second, and it's ruined because, now, he has trapped her in this booth, and she doesn't realize it, but all of a sudden, she's going, "I need to get out of here, "I need to go to the bathroom," "I need to find my friends," "I need to just not be here. " The same thing occurs at bars, right? A guy walks up, a woman's at a bar.
Her back is to the bar here, she's facing me, say, I'm now, physically, blocking her exit; worse, if two of my friends come out to say hi, now we've got a wall of guys blocking her exit. That is no bueno, right? So, when it comes to trapping, just be thinking, put your own back on on the wall, put your own back on the inside of that little booth, right?
That is going to keep her feeling like she can walk away and it's going to have you arrange the right way. So, don't trap, a simple thing. Make sure that you are the one who is having a tougher time exiting than her.
That is the most common things I see about creepiness. I could not possibly do the topic of how to flirt or how to not be creepy just in this short video, but I hope that you guys have found this helpful. If there is other things that you're interested about flirting, generally, go ahead, write them in the Comments.
I'm not trying to make this channel a flirting channel, but it is, of course, an experience that all humans have at some point. So if there's questions you have on it, I do want to touch on them here. If you're curious, as a guy, what to say when you walk up to a woman because, you know, you got the eye contact, you know not to do all these other things, what do you actually say?
We actually set up a different video. This one's off of YouTube, but if you click the link here, it's gonna take you to a different site. You drop your email on the thing and you can go watch this video on the three things that I say to start 99% of the conversations that I have.
They're very basic, they're very simple. They work and they get conversation rolling in an easy way. So if you're curious what those are, go ahead and do that.
Of course, if you have not yet, subscribe to the channel. Typically, we don't do a lot of dating stuff like this, but this is something that occurred to me because of this whole creepiness thing, and some of the things that I've seen in Vegas, but we do have Charisma Breakdowns. We have this talking head style videos where I answer your questions from the comments about how to be more charismatic and confident in your life.
So, if you've not yet done so, you want to see our videos on your homepage, subscribe to the channel. And, of course, I hope that you've enjoyed this video and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.
