7 Reasons Why Your Approaches on Girls Don't Hook

If you approach girls but they rarely or never hook, what’s the cause? There are 7 technical reasons why women may not hook.

Whether by day or at night, sometimes you’ll approach a girl yet it just doesn’t hook. Sure, there are the girls who aren’t into you. But what about the ones who open well, and feel like it should work... yet for whatever reason you cannot make things connect?

My usual suggestion for men who have trouble getting their approaches to hook it to improve your fundamentals... things like walk, posture, fashion, eye contact, and voice. The stronger each of these are, the faster and more reliably women hook.

Nevertheless, even men with strong fundamentals can run into this “girls I approach just don’t hook” phenomenon. They approach plenty of girls. But those approaches go nowhere.

So if you feel like your approaches connect a lot less than they should, this troubleshooting article’s for you: things to tweak to make those conversations hook a whole lot better.

Below, you’ll find seven (7) technical reasons why men’s approaches often don’t work.

If you’re doing any of these wrong, you’ll want to switch it up. Fix all the issues, and you can expect a noticeable boost in the number of women you hook.

Here’s the list.

#1: You Stand Too Far Away

“Is he trying to talk to me over there?“

Many guys keep their distance on an approach. They don’t want to spook this girl, after all. They’re still strangers. It’d be boorish to assume she wants to talk to them and get in her space.

However, if you’re too far when you open, you are out of the ‘familiar zone’ and in the ‘polite zone’.

Politeness is good when you interview for a job or talk to your doctor. And when you hand your boss that printout he asked you for, you don’t want to be up in his face about it. You probably don’t want to be super close when you talk to a nun or a priest. And it’s always weird when you talk to the suit guy in the suit store at the shopping mall and you get really physically close to him while you ask about your inseam.

But with a cute girl you’d like to flirt with and ask out (and at some point be naked on top of) it’s weird and incongruous if you stand far away.

It seems the reason men do this is they don’t want to offend the girls who might not be interested in them. The thought process seems to go like this: “Well, I don’t know if she likes me yet. So I’d better hang back, just to be safe. I don’t want to make her uncomfortable if she isn’t into me.”

This is the same too-safe thinking I talked about in “Why Cold Approach Works Better Than Anything Else.” You should not worry about coming across in the best light for women who DON’T like you; you want to conduct yourself the way the women who DO like you will like best.

On any given approach, you will meet one of two different sorts of women:

1. Women who don’t like you.They’d prefer you stuck to the polite zone. Actually, they’d prefer you just didn’t even bother them in the first place, thanks very much.

2. Women who DO like you. They’re happy to meet you but will be confused if you stand too far away. It excites them when you stand nearer. Don’t jump on their shoulders or anything, but if you stand too far it will feel awkward and incongruous to them.
   

You don’t have to press your chest up against her chest or anything like that. But you should be about the same proximity to her you’d maintain with a girl you went on a date with. If you want her to go on a date with you, treat her like a girl you’d take on a date.

You cannot live your life for the people who don’t like you. There will always be people who don’t like you. The most likeable guy in the world has people who don’t like him – maybe the reason they dislike him is because of how likeable that guy is (“That guy is such a suck-up, I want to punch him in the face”).

When you approach a girl, assume her attraction to you and get inside the familiar zone. Make it comfortable for women who like you.

#2: You Don’t Smile

“I wanted to talk to you. ‘Cause I think you’re really pretty.”

As we’ve talked about on Girls Chase before, smiling is a less attractive look in men (in general) than a more pensive look is. Girls like the sexy, edgy, serious guy.

Yet we’ve also talked about various smiles that work:

• In the article on smiles, and
  
• In the article on facial expressions

... for instance. So should you smile or not?

Well, here’s the thing. When you approach her on the street, or in the bar, or wherever, she does not know you yet, and she does not know your intentions. Heck, even if she does know you, and you approach her at work or in school or at a party, she doesn’t know if you’ve had a bad day and are in a foul mood, or if you’re coming to have a nice chat with her and have a pleasant time.

If you do not smile on approach – and a LOT of guys do not smile on approach – she’s going to have her guard up for you. That means you’ll have a tougher time connecting with her, and may not get through at all. It may also mean she views you as less socially savvy: “Oh, he wants to talk. Well I did not get that impression from him at all when he first walked up.”

This is easy to fix, but it’s a major stumbling block for lots of guys.

If girls don’t respond as well to you on your approach, ask yourself this: do you smile when you walk up? Because this should be a habit.

You needn’t grin like an idiot throughout the entire interaction. But you do need to smile on approach.

#3: Your Opener Seems Forced/Insincere

tfw you don’t want to approach her, but you have to.

This is not always avoidable if you’re new or you’re rusty. You’ll be in your head and nervous, and you’ll spit your words out robotically. The opener feels forced.

But once you’ve warmed yourself up a bit, the forced nature of newness or rust is supposed to go away. Yet for some guys, it doesn’t.

The main reasons an opener may seem forced or insincere are:

• You brace for rejection. If she can tell you are bracing for rejection, the opener will not seem sincere. It is going to seem like you don’t actually want to be there; like you’re only there because you think you have to be there. For her, this is strange: why would you approach her because you HAVE to approach her?

• You robo-approach. Sometimes guys will go out and spam approach one girl after another. If you do this, with this kind of robotic/automatic approaching on, it’s very hard to stay sincere on your approaches. Women can tell when you are making a ‘robo-approach’ like this – and it feels off. Are you here to sell her something? Do you want her to contribute to your charity? Exactly what is this all about? Because she can tell it isn’t that you are interested in her.

• You don’t like her. This is another problem guys who do lots of approaches will run into. If you’re going off a quick glance for your approaches, sometimes you’ll approach a girl and realize only after you’ve begun your opener that whoa... this girl is not that cute. Or this girl is a lot older than she seemed from a distance. Or yikes, her voice is weird and freaky. And as soon as a thought like that hits you, your opener will switch from “sincere expression of interest” to “forced thing I’m saying just because.”
  

The best solution to forced/insincere openers is to take a moment before you approach and pick out something you genuinely like about a woman. Then compliment her on that.

Even if you’re a little nervous and you brace for a rejection, a sincere compliment nullifies a lot of that. And you’re unlikely to robo-approach or approach girls you don’t like if you take half a second to ask yourself whether there’s something about them you do like. Even if you are mass approaching women, a sincere compliment takes a lot of the “he’s just saying this to every girl” edge off.

Also, with bracing for rejection, much of the time this goes away after a little practice / a little warming up. However, if you struggle with this, I suggest you check out these articles on approach anxiety:

• Overcoming Approach Anxiety
• How to Demolish Approach Anxiety Forever
• How to Develop Approach Addiction (and Destroy Approach Anxiety Forever)
  

... and this one on warm-ups:

• Tactics Tuesdays: The Warm-Up Approach
  

#4: You Don’t Introduce Yourself

“I’m just gonna wait for this chick to guess my name. Even if it takes all day.”

There’s a long-running debate in the dating advice community about whether you ought to introduce yourself first or not. The guys who say “nay” believe it’s best to delay the introduction, and just talk to a girl until she is so interested she decides to introduce herself and ask your name first.

In my experience though, with the exception of perhaps a few very talkative type men, this does a lot more harm than good. A few reasons why:

1. Once you’ve introduced yourself, you’re familiar. You’re now someone she knows. If something distracts her and you need to get her attention, it’s not, “Um, hey! [wave at her because you don’t know her name] Take a look at this a sec,” but, “Hey Tammy, take a look at this a sec.” If one of her friends shows up, it’s not, “Here’s some guy I met,” but, “This is Vern.”

2. You avoid the “We don’t know each other” disconnect. Related to the last point... but this bullet is about connection. If you go to take her number, it’s not, “Oh yeah, also, what’s your name?” If you reach the point where you want to take her contact info, and you do not know her name yet, in my experience very few of those numbers turn into dates. It’s simply too incongruent to care more about wanting to know her contact info before you know who she is. If you seem to have connected well, but you don’t know her name yet, it’s very hard to not have that connection slip when she realizes/remembers you don’t actually know each other. A la, “Wow, it’s like we know each other so well! Oh wait, lol, we haven’t even traded names. Never mind then, I’m silly... I do not know this guy at all.” While there may be a few women who will be thrilled by a deep connection with a man they don’t know, there are many more this is too weird for, and for whom it spoils the connection.

3. You get it out of the way early. What if you’d prefer she asked you, but you want to have a contingency in place of, “If she doesn’t ask me, I at least need to ask her first before I get her phone number”? What if you’d ask her anyway, but you’ll wait for the right moment to do it? Any and all “I’ll ask her later” plans like these add mental overhead and reduce your ability to think on your feet and be in the moment. Just ask her her name right away and get it out of the way so you can worry about where to take the conversation, rather than when to ask who she is.
   

If you’re worried about not remembering her name, just repeat it three times and it’ll usually stick:

You: I’m Vern.

Her: I’m Tammy.

You: Hi Tammy, nice to meet you.

Her: You too!

You: Okay, so tell me this, Tammy: blah blah blah...

Then if you remember to, use it a few more times throughout the conversation to really embed it in your head. But typically, thrice at the start is all you need to make yourself remember it.

If you’re particularly bad with names, you can use mnemonics (memory tricks) to help yourself remember. For instance, she says her name is “Tammy” and you visualize a picture of a huge jar of jam next to a giant letter T. And say to yourself internally, “She’s Tammy. That’s ‘Jammy’ with a ‘T’.” You won’t forget her name for weeks after this.

#5: It’s Unclear Why You’ve Approached

It’s not as obvious as you think.

If you’re a Girls Chase reader, you know better than to use a true indirect approach (nothing wrong with effective indirect game, though). The problem with true indirect – where you imply zero interest in her from the start, and she instead must ‘win you over’ and make you interested herself – is it’s very difficult to hold girls’ interest with, and very finicky to use. In addition, it screens for girls who are not interested in you, rather than girls who are – which is the opposite of what you usually want to screen for.

The problem a lot of guys run into though is that they neither:

• Communicate interest with their nonverbals/vibe, nor
• Communicate it explicitly with their words
  

Newer guys in particular are prone to “she should just know” thinking. For example, “I approached a stranger at a bar. She should just know I am interested,” or, “I started talking to a girl on a street corner. She should just know that’s because I like her.” But she doesn’t just know.

As a woman, she approaches people for all kinds of reasons besides wanting to have sex with them, and she will assume the same is true for you. She also has lots of men approach her who just talk to her and leave; so her past precedent with men is that many of them are just friendly guys. Maybe some of those men wanted to sleep with her but never communicated it to her; probably a good chunk of them really were just being friendly.

Your job is to not assume she can read your mind, and instead make it explicit... without putting all your cards on the table. So, either show your interest nonverbally (with touch, close physical proximity, and sexy facial expressions). Or, use compliments that make it sound like you probably like her. Either compliment her on the opener, or compliment her soon after opening: “You have a gorgeous smile.” “Your hair is beautiful.” You can also open with a statement of interest, like Ricardus’s “Are you single?” opener.

Just make sure she can tell you probably like her / are interested in her on your approach. Don’t play ‘hide the banana’. Just put it out there. Don’t rob her of all the mystery, of course... but she should be able to say, “Okay, I think this guy probably likes me.” The girls who like you will stick around this way... and the ones who don’t won’t waste too much of your time.

#6: You Don’t Resolve Physical Discomfort

She won’t be smiling like this when people start to run into her from the back.

By ‘physical discomfort’ I mean any kind of lack of comfort she feels due to the setting or other physical element of the approach. You hanging out in the polite zone is one source of physical discomfort; you are too physically far away from each other, and it feels weird. But there are other sources too.

Examples:

• Neither of you is locked in. Instead you are both out in space, in vulnerable positions. For instance, you stand and talk to her at a crowded street corner as people stream by on all sides of you both. Unless she is super into you (or super oblivious), she will feel a mixture of self-consciousness, awkwardness, and risk standing there like that, and will be difficult to hook.

• One of you is locked in, but the other is in discomfort. If one of you is locked in, but the other is still in discomfort, this can trigger her ‘something is wrong’ alert, too. If you’re locked in but she is out in space and people are jostling her, she may start to feel awkward about it. Or if she is locked in (say, her back is against a wall) but people are streaming by and bumping into you, it’s going to feel weird to her that you don’t just move to a more comfortable position.

• She has a heavy bag. If you approach a girl who has a bunch of heavy grocery bags in her hands and start to chat her up on the street, it will feel very ‘off’ to her if you do not quickly help her put the bags down. This is true for any kind of burden she might have with her (a stack of books, a duffle bag, etc.). Within a minute or two of the open, if you intend to talk to her more, you’ll usually want to either take her item from her and set it on a bench or a half wall near to you, or gesture for her to (you taking it is best; it’s a gesture usually only those close to her will make, and raises trust).

• Her shoes are uncomfortable. Especially if you’ve approached a girl on the street at the end of the night, you can run into a bunch of situations where a girl’s high-heeled shoes are killing her and she just wants to get somewhere and get them off. If your conversation goes long, you’re going to want to find somewhere she can sit with you, rather than continue to stand there and be annoyed at this guy preventing her from being able to get off her feet.
  

So long as there are sources of discomfort like this around her, it’s much harder for her to get into a conversation with you. Seek to remove discomfort like this whenever and wherever possible, and let her settle into her chat with you unburdened.

#7: There’s Nothing to Discuss Past the Opener

When she’s waiting for you to make conversation, but none’s coming.

What do you discuss after the opener? A lot of men trip up here. It’s a pretty common question we get on Girls Chase from newer guys, too: “What do you talk about to women after you open them?”

The Big 3 after the opener are:

1. Small talk
2. Banter/flirtation
   
3. Deep dives
   

Usually you should skip too much deep diving if you plan to get her number and meet back up later. Deep dives are best saved for the date or experience you’ll use prior to sex with her (though you can deep dive on earlier dates if you’ll take her on more than one date, too).

So on most initial approaches, that’ll leave you with small talk and playful banter/flirtation. You want a mixture of both of these.

Small talk is the general getting-to-know-you stuff. You don’t want to spend too much time on this (because it can turn into a trap). But you need at least a little of this, almost always. It’s possible to be the super interesting guy who never asks small talk questions, I suppose, but it’s not realistic for most men and you don’t need it to get most women.

Playful banter / flirtation is the fun stuff: little light teases or small jokes. It’s how you let a girl know you’re not just here to make dry conversation with her, but are instead commencing the mating dance. Flirtation is a core piece of human courtship; you need to include this in your early conversations to shift women into ‘courtship engaged’.

So long as those two pieces are present – small talk and flirtation – that’s usually all you need for an initial conversation. Don’t stretch it out too long (five to 10 minutes is usually more than enough), then ask her out and get her phone number.

If you’d like an example of how a normal early conversation can go, check out this article:

• Conversation Example
  

Better Approaches, More Hooks

Improve your mechanics, hook more girls in.

Make your approaches more technically correct, and you will reach the hook point a lot faster and more often with girls.

To recap, here are our seven (7) reasons your approaches may not hook as well as they could:

1. You stand too far away
2. You don’t smile
3. Your opener seems forced/insincere
4. You don’t introduce yourself
5. It’s unclear why you’ve approached
6. You don’t resolve physical discomfort
7. There’s nothing to discuss past the opener
   

Each is fairly easily solved with a little attention and better mechanics.

Once these technical problems are out of the way, you can perform your approaches without having to worry about tripping up on unnecessary speed bumps.

I hope if you struggle with getting girls hooked enough, this gives you a few things to tackle to increase your hooks.

Are there any other common technical/mechanical mistakes you’ve run into getting girls to hook after the approach? Let me know in the comments below if so. Or if you just have a question on hooking, let me know there too and I’ll get you a reply.

Always,
Chase Amante