So to my credit, I posted this challenge last night, and went and tried for my first number today!
She was working in Topshop and when I walked in she seemed to give me a friendly glance and moments later she gave me what seemed like a proximity IOI so I figured I'd be silly not to have a go.
I said to her "so what film would you suggest I buy?"
Her: "Hmm, that's a bit random"
Me: I don't know, I just thought you might be a bit bored of talking about clothes"
Her: "Okay, well I'd like to get the Avengers film, I've seen it twice and I'd like to see it again"
Me: "Did you like the Dark Knight Rises?"
Her: some stuff about how she didn't like the Bane character
Me: Slight disagreement, how much I love the original Dark Knight film
Went on to talk a bit about her work, I said something about my job and it was an okay conversation, seemed friendly. There reached a point though where she was getting a bit too rambling and I felt like there was too much comfort there, so I cut her thread and said:
"I've actually got to go and meet my friend in a minute, but it was nice talking to you, what's your name?"
Her: "It's Rachel" (didn't ask my name)
I then said something about how I'd enjoyed our conversation and asked if she had and she said "yeah it was nice" or something like that
Then I said "if you wanted you could give me your phone number and we could continue talking another time, maybe..."
Her (cuts me off slightly): "Um, no thanks"
I gave her a moment to see if she'd elaborate any further but she didn't. She just maybe commented again about "it was nice, but no thanks"
I held my stance and remained cheerful and said "okay, that's fine"
She said "sorry, I feel bad now"
I said "well, it happens"
Said bye in a fairly friendly manner and that was that.
I talked in a recent thread of mine about the importance of good conversational threads, and to be honest, I felt that these could have been stronger. I also feel that I failed to say anything that showed a strong independent will of my own. I feel that there was too much rapport-seeking and that I quickly built a certain level of comfort without any real attraction.
At first, walking away, I was just laughing to myself and found it funny that she was so honest in the way she said "no thanks", but then I felt a bit of a sting after a while, a feeling that I wouldn't like that to happen too often. However, if I want success I have to deal with failure, and my awareness of not having created the attraction made me want to try going full-direct with a girl. I was thinking, I'm a fucking MAN, I should be the guy who takes her world by storm, not a guy who she says "that was nice" about.
Anyway, that was approach #1 and I'm 0 for 1 so far. I'm going to make an optimistic prediction and say that I think I will get the 10 decent numbers in 27 approaches. That will give me something to shoot for. If I should go over 50 and end up batting consistently less than 1 for 5 on average then I think there should be some kind of penalty as there's a level of failure that's too much
