Don't Compliment Girls You Want to Date on Their Looks. Here's Why

It’s common for men to try to chat up a girl by complimenting her on her looks. Yet all this does is make you sound exactly like every other guy.

Over on the forum, we had a member who protested that he struggles to compliment women on anything other than their physical appearances. He doesn’t care about or pay attention to women’s ornamentation, he says, and wouldn’t complimenting on something else be ingenuine? Here’s some of what he commented:

Iʼve long believed that the purpose of compliments in the early moments of an approach is to communicate sexual intent, which signals confidence and avoids creepiness.

For the intent to be sexual, I would have thought compliments on genetic features would hit the mark better than those on clothing or adornments. After all, a child she could give you might inherit her eyes, hair, complexion, or facial features — but not her shoes, blouse, handbag, or earrings. (Expensive earrings, maybe!)

You might think, “No, no, a girl isn’t thinking about having kids with some guy she just met,” or vice versa. But hold on — this isnʼt conscious.

…

I donʼt know if this is a problem most guys face, or if Iʼm just some genetic anomaly that is somehow immune to acrylic nails and handbags.

Well, on the rare occasion Iʼm actually impressed by some trinket, I now know what to do!

…

Maybe you luck out and she has a killer walk or some other standout behavior, but that’s 1 in 1000. What do you do with the other 999? Revert to a very genuine compliment on her physical features? I do most love those, but Iʼm told thatʼs not seductive.

He had a lot more theory behind his approach to opening with looks-based compliments. I love theory! The one issue with theory, of course, is that if you’re using it for something practical, like, say, putting girls in your bed, you need to turn your theory into testable hypotheses and test it out. Then test competing hypotheses. Then find which works best.

I can tell you, as most any other guy in the game can as well, that looks-based compliments are very suboptimal most of the time with girls (there are times and places and ways they can work. But in general you don’t want looks-compliments as your go-to).

Let’s look at why that is and what you can do instead, EVEN IF you don’t care a lick about women’s fashion choices (like our forum member).