The Numbers Game
A long time ago I realised that sex and women were my prime motivational factors in life. Some people are driven by money, some are driven by fame or recognition, some are driven by power, some are driven by altruism; I am driven by lust. I suppose I was lucky to have made this revelation a long time ago, although it meant that important things like studying, or staying fit, took a back seat. It also meant that whilst I should have been studying for my degree, I was attempting to make sense of the whole game of pulling.
When I was a teenager, I was a disaster; I would stand in the corner sipping my colourful drinks and watching all the (what would now be christened as) chavs, slobbering over squealing banshees with too much make up, not enough clothes and rapidly diminishing motor-skills. And I was wracked with jealousy. I wanted to get my paws on those bulges of patchily-tanned flesh protruding from the flimsy New Look dresses. So I sat and I watched, and studied their moves. One common tactic seemed to be to go up behind a girl on the dancefloor, grab her and grind your pelvis against her in a modern day re-enactment of Elvis “raping” the chastity of the bible-belt girls from the television. When the quarry inevitably turned around with a curt dismissal (4,3), the lothario would simply swing his hips towards the next available girl. This continued until he chanced upon a lady who was either suitably refreshed, or had lower expectations of her suitors, and promptly the unsubtle dance of courtship began.
It struck me that this approach did actually work, a surprising amount of the time; but it wasn’t for me. It came with two inherent problems; firstly you had to look like a prick X number of times before you actually pulled; and secondly, you exercised very little control over who you were pulling. It was a matter of the first girl to not refuse, almost like a “prize every time” lucky dip at the travelling fair. I mentioned this to a friend and he said that; if you approached every single girl in a nightclub and said “nice shoes, fancy a shag?”, statistically, one of them would say yes. I’m not sure where he got his raw data from, but it worked on the same principal that a blindfolded man with a gun will hit the target eventually. Either way, I never had the balls to be that blindfolded man.
Fortunately, as I developed physically, so did my attitude, and with it grew my self-confidence. When I went clubbing, I would keep my eyes open for someone who ticked all of my particular boxes (usually this was signified by an involuntary catch of breath) and then would go over and say hello. I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet, but I had a staggeringly high success rate. This was not due to my looks (which are an acquired taste at best), or my charisma (my favourite jokes usually come from Terry Wogan) or my irresistibly good body (I could make a living as a professional Before Model), but simply because my approach was specific to the person I was approaching. I don’t believe that any woman has ever felt special being 8th in the queue to have their arse grabbed by a chav with writing on his jeans.
After courtship, marriage and separation, I returned to the dating game, and decided to join this website as it caters to my specific tastes. And I was interested to see the scattergun approach is still alive and well. From what I can gather through various friends and forum threads, there is a school of thought that sending a copy-and-paste message to dozens of members, you will engage them and entice them. And I imagine it works occasionally (if a lady got a generic message from the most gorgeous man she could possibly imagine, whose profile effectively said Mr Perfect-for-you, she may be likely to respond). Whereas I believe that most effective communication would be a personal message which demonstrates that you have read their profile, and taken notice of it. I could be entirely wrong, but I imagine the hit ratios are higher for the gentlemen who use a somewhat more considered approach. The other chaps are simply playing a numbers game. It’s like any cold-calling sales job, you have to knock on thirty doors to make a sale and you need to make ten sales per day; so get knocking.
Written for ToyboyWarehouse by Kenny Bloggins
Comments