Ever feel like the clock is ticking when you're talking to a girl you just met?

[Michael]

I chatted up a couple of girls the other day as I was walking by on a trail by the beach. I had seen them in the water earlier, taking pictures of each other, while I was on my phone texting a friend about plans for the weekend. We talked for probably 30-60 seconds, and in that time the one girl told me they were both from Mexico, knew each other from back home and this was their first time seeing each other in quite a few years. At that point I saw they were walking to the change room and I was walking a different way, so I wished them a nice day and kept walking.

Afterwards, as I was thinking about it, I realized a couple things:

1. That counted as an approach. I've generally been telling myself that I haven't done cold approach much because it's scary and I have approach anxiety, and while it's true there's a lot of girls I don't approach because I'm afraid of rejection, there are some types of approaches that just aren't that scary. Essentially, if I can think of something situationally relevant to say, quickly enough, and I'm feeling confident about it, I'll generally come out and say it. Sometimes it falls flat though and she acts like she didn't hear me, which always sucks.

2. These days, when I do end up talking to an attractive girl I just met, I often will "eject" at some point along the way. I get to a point in a conversation where I can either wrap it up smoothly, or stay in it without knowing exactly what to do, and I'll usually choose to wrap things up in order to avoid awkwardness and/or her trying to exit the interaction, or having things stagnate. In this case with the two Mexican girls, the girl who was talking to me didn't seem in that big of a hurry to get going and would have been interested in the conversation continuing, but the other girl was looking like she wanted to get going, and I think I ended up mirroring her and exiting the interaction myself.

It's sort of like, once I end up talking to a girl, there comes a point where I intuitively know there's something I need to do, and there's a time limit on doing it, but I either don't know what that is or I can't think of a way to do it smoothly, and so I end up ejecting in a smooth way to avoid the awkward feeling and deal with the time pressure. In a way, it's kind of like a generalization of approach anxiety - where with approach anxiety, you hit the eject button before you even go talk to her, but here you're ejecting at some later point.

Does anyone else have this happen, where you are in an interaction with a girl and you feel this time pressure to do something, but you feel like you can't figure it out in time so you opt out? I guess another way to put it is you're noticing an escalation window, but you're not sure exactly how to escalate and it's stressful trying to figure it out under the time pressure, so you don't escalate. I wonder if it would help to have some sort of stalling tactic here where you buy yourself a bit of time, giving your brain the ability to process things a bit more before making your move, rather than just ejecting. Is there a way to extend an escalation window?

As a side note, after I ejected I was feeling pretty good about the fact that I had approached them, and realized it was a good warm up for doing more approaches. But by that point I was already on my way home and didn't really feel like backtracking to do more approaches - another day I guess.

 

[Gladiator]

This is a common issue when approaching.

It's called "premature ejection" in PU community. It's a form of anxiety but the underlying cause is "fear of rejection".

You have approached and the set is going well and you have good feelings going and you don't want to lose those feelings by pushing further and so you prematurely eject the set to save face.

There are a few techniques to overcome this:
1. Rooting - feel yourself grounded when you're talking to the girl and pay attention to this subtly. This will distract you from the pressure you're feeling staying in the set.

2. Make the hoe say no - this is an old-school pickup technique. Basically you don't eject the set until she leaves. This is when she hasn't hooked yet but based on the context, you should know when to eject. Idea behind this technique is that you stay in the set until you get a definite NO.

3. Talk slowly - (this is my personal favorite) when you talk slowly with pregnant pauses, it'll remove the pressure off of you and makes the girl relaxed too. It's a mirror effect. You look relaxed by speaking slowly and she relaxes too and stays in the set and engages in the conversation.

4. Stacking - In LDM, stacking was used for this very reason. You follow a blue-print of a routine that you'll say after you've approached. It's basically a cold-read based on your approach. This will make her intrigued and helps in making her stay in the set. This will go on for a couple of mins and it helps hook the girl.
For example:
You: You look amazing in that bikini
She: Thanks
You: (stack.. instead of ejecting) You don't look like you're from around here. You must be South-American?
She: You're right.. How did you know?
You: I kinda guessed it from your energy.. blah.. Blah.. Blah..
She: Where are you from? (Hook)

Here I used her home country as a stack. But you can use job (you look like an astronaut..), education (you look like an arts student), personality (you look like you're an obedient student) etc as a stack. You can change this a little bit for any girl. Once you overcome this premature ejection issue, you can free-style.

BTW, there are times when you feel like ejecting the set even after she has hooked. This is also related to "fear of rejection".

You told yourself before approaching that you're going to approach her and nothing more. Now it's going well but subconsciously you fear that you're doing more than what you intended to do and this may result in rejection. Basically your brain is trying to protect you from getting hurt. So, you need to be aware of this and try to trick your brain.

There are many ways you can do this. One way I can think off the top of my head is, you can "delay" ejecting. You don't try to stay in the set cos that won't work. The more you try to resist what your brain is trying, it'll persist and eventually you'll fail. So, instead of resisting, just delay.. be aware that you're having this urge of ejecting and so you'll have to leave but just tell yourself you'll stay a "little longer". It comes with practice

 

[ElderPrice]

Boiled down, it sounds like you just don't know yourself or your desires well enough.

For instance, in this example of chatting up some girls at the beach, simply, what did you want to happen? What was your intent when you opened them?

If all you really wanted to do when you spotted them was chat then go on with your day, then you did exactly what you wanted. There is no problem here.

If you however spotted them and immediately decided "I want to fuck these girls," then that reveals the answer to your question. Your higher concern shouldn't be the ticking of a clock, it should simply be to work to move the interaction forward (in the direction of sex).

In other words, you can worry about timing and efficiency later. For now just make sure you're actually leading the interaction in the direction you actually want it to go.

So if you really wanted to fuck these girls, this would look something like:
Open/chat on the street -> Offer to join you for a coffee/street food / keep chatting -> Move to maybe another venue more closer to your place / keep chatting -> Invite to your place -> etc