What social skills are necessary in order to be approached by desirable strangers?

[Lights]

Hypocrites. There are all sorts of people out there. I don't take it to heart.

 

But clearly something is very wrong if this is virtually all I ever encounter!

[Odyssey]

Bingo! Now we're getting to the real issue. You see it as wrong, when i encounter the same situation, i see it as no big deal. Someone has to do the approaching (yes, even it's all the time) because the initiating is just the means to an end. The end result is more important. You can't think, i do this all the time, why can't they do the same. These are strangers we're talking about, so don't take it to heart.

 

Light, i know you don't want to talk about it in this thread. But you really have to delve deep and ask, "why does this affect me and maybe not others so much"? Only you can answer that.

 

That's why some people in this thread didn't answer the topic question, because they sensed a bigger issue within your posts. They just wanted to help you get to the bottom of it. They care.

 

I gonna leave it at that, since I've strayed off your topic. Light, you're an intelligent person, but sometimes...it helps to look at things from a different angle.

 

I hope you'll find what you are looking for in life. I wish you the best of luck.

[Lights]

The nightmare has no end...

[HokeyPokey]

I agree with many other sentiments on this thread about learning more social skills and overall awareness, but...

 

Perhaps you are discounting approaches because they are not the ones you desire? You did ask how can I be approached by "desirable" strangers. What is desirable? Is it personality, appearance, social status? What types of approaches and encounters are you expecting and in what situations?

 

I find that emulating successful people often gets me the results I want. People who are approached by others smile often, appear cheerful and content, and are quite present in the moment. I have a friend who isn't attractive or particularly intelligent and she would be approached constantly by strangers.

 

Why? Because she is friendly and always smiling. Her great attitude radiates outwards. She also never over-analyzes social situations and was comfortable wherever she went.

 

I knew another girl who constantly looked sour. Never smiled, had a bad case of stink-eye, and clearly was carrying around a huge chip on her shoulder. Guess what? Nobody wanted to be around her. She had few friends and few social interactions. She had to approach men because they wouldn't talk to her.

 

Nobody wants to be around someone who complains, sneers, or is critical of everything. People CAN read that on your face alone and will avoid you. A genuine smile is much more magnetic than a forced opening line like, "Hi my name is ____. " That seems a bit too desperate.

[Lights]

I agree with many other sentiments on this thread about learning more social skills and overall awareness, but...

 

Perhaps you are discounting approaches because they are not the ones you desire? You did ask how can I be approached by "desirable" strangers. What is desirable? Is it personality, appearance, social status? What types of approaches and encounters are you expecting and in what situations?

 

I'm not discounting anything, because as it stands right now, no approaches are coming my way at all.

 

Desirable here will vary with the context. If I were to choose only one definition in only one context right now, I'd choose to define it as high-powered, highly motivated fellow students looking to excel and to work in good faith. Basically, the top of the class in a school environment or other similar elites in similar environments such as work-training or the like. (Ideally, I'd like to create the ability to do similar things in other contexts [wherein other definitions of desirability would apply] as well.)

 

I find that emulating successful people often gets me the results I want. People who are approached by others smile often, appear cheerful and content, and are quite present in the moment. I have a friend who isn't attractive or particularly intelligent and she would be approached constantly by strangers.

 

Why? Because she is friendly and always smiling. Her great attitude radiates outwards. She also never over-analyzes social situations and was comfortable wherever she went.

 

I knew another girl who constantly looked sour. Never smiled, had a bad case of stink-eye, and clearly was carrying around a huge chip on her shoulder. Guess what? Nobody wanted to be around her. She had few friends and few social interactions. She had to approach men because they wouldn't talk to her.

What is stink-eye?

 

Nobody wants to be around someone who complains, sneers, or is critical of everything. People CAN read that on your face alone and will avoid you. A genuine smile is much more magnetic than a forced opening line like, "Hi my name is ____. " That seems a bit too desperate.

 

I'd like to believe so, but as it stands right now all openings are "forced" and "desperate" no matter what I do. Even what should normally be the most normal and mundanely basic of approaches do not seem to flow naturally my way. Why? I only wish I knew...

[Calendula]

Having also gone back and forth with multiple posts trying to help you figure out how to improve your social situation (http://www.loveshack.org/forums/t201642/), I agree with Trimmer's post below and much of the advice that was posted in the rest of this current thread.

 

I just honestly don't think you are going to be able to get the kind of help you need or advice on how to improve your social situation on these message boards. We give you ideas, we give you advice, we discuss possibilities, yet you either don't seem to understand or ignore so many of the suggestions. You also seem to refuse to proactively act on what is said, or to accept that YOU and YOUR ACTIONS might be what is leading to your problems interacting with other people. I think that you need to talk to a counselor, extensively, and that you need to actually LISTEN TO and act on what the counselor suggests for you.

 

You also refuse to discuss any mention of whether or not you might have Asperger Syndrome, and from reviewing your many, many postings, and reading up on Aspergers, I think having this condition is a very real possibility for you, and that you should get checked for it. If nothing else, if you do have the condition, it might give you a point from which to start getting real help for understanding and improving your social situation and finding some happiness in your life.

 

I don't think that your current problem, or in fact any of your social problems, are something that can be solved by any cook-book or self-help book approach, and I think that it is dilusional of you to think that it could. Many people have tried to give you a great deal of good advice on how to answer your question, but it seems that you are listening to only what you want to hear, and are discounting anything that could possibly work before even giving it a chance. While I have empathy for your situation, and hope that you can find happiness, I have already tried my hand at helping you and unfortunately have little else to offer you for advice.

 

For your own sake, please look into the Asperger's diagnosis and seek the help of a professional counselor. I honestly wish you the best of luck and hope that you can find some way of being happy with your life.

 

 

After reading several years of thematically similar threads from you, with what sounds like virtually no progress being made, I have to strongly suggest you get some help from a real, live person - maybe a counselor or therapist, life coach, relationship counselor, or something similar. Somebody who can interact with you in real life and make some suggestions based on those observations.

 

Your posts show a lack of understanding of some basic elements of human interaction (your blase dismissal of eye contact/body language because "it doesn't work for me"; it's not just that you don't get the jokes, you aren't even sure whether they are jokes or not; your persistent attempts to reduce human interaction to a kind of a machine-like input/output, deterministic cause-and-effect, computer program-like structure etc...) And frankly, your insistence on what you won't tolerate, and your statements seem to reveal a kind of arrogance and entitlement that I don't think I would like to associate with.

 

Now, having said all that, you might reasonably reply that I can't possibly determine all that about you, just from your text postings here. I would agree, and turning that very same logic around, you can't expect people here, from just your text postings, to be able to give you a fully-informed perspective on all the subtleties of your situation. Human interaction is about interacting with humans, so if something is going wrong, you can't fully examine it in text, nor can you reduce it to a simple set of deterministic instructions that will "get you high-value, desirable approaches."

 

There's something going on - something intangible, something indirect, something unspoken, or something else, that is a problem for you and your interactions with others. You speak of your own failure with such certainty: you consider ideas of eye contact and body language to be "theories" because "they've not gotten me even one approach in my lifetime." Yet you apparently see those around you interacting with some kind of success that you can't even touch, let alone duplicate with any confidence. Something is going on that several years of posting isn't getting to the bottom of.

 

I'm not saying you shouldn't or don't have a right to post here, or anything like that. It's just not getting you anywhere. You will need to seek skilled, personal, face-to-face help to make any progress on this.