Coffeehouses, cont’d. Bars, too.

Belle takes note of my previous post, sympathizes with my reluctance to approach strangers in coffee shops, describes her conflicting feelings about being approached, and encourages me to start the conversation next time.

My itchy trigger finger hit “Publish” on that post before I explained my reasons for not moving further forward. CharleyCarp comes up with a defensible one in his comment: Eye contact alone is not necessarily an invitation to converse. I was genuinely uncertain that she wanted me to approach.

I’ve been attempting to acquire an awareness of nonverbal cues over the past couple years. My long-standing mode of operation has been to only become aware of positive evaluations of me if they are put forth in unambiguous words. In the past, I would have considered it a brazen overinflation of my worth as a human being for me to even think that a woman who merely shifted her eyes my way might be interested in talking to me. In the past, if she had wanted to talk to me, she would have had to explicitly repudiate my low self-regard by walking over to me and stating, “I would like to talk to you.”

It should not surprise the reader that this did not, to the best I can recall, ever happen. (This self-doubt is, of course, also very self-centered, as it is experienced without considering the feelings of the other person enough to realize that she may have self-doubts of her own.) It should not surprise the reader that the blogger has not lived a life filled with romantic success. So I’ve tried to start learning how to handle ambiguous positive signals. Hence, my standing in coffee shops coaxing myself to allow for the possibility that, despite my disbelief, that eye contact may actually have meant something.

CC confirmed Conservative Me’s hunch that a shared gaze alone means little, and suggested for the future a gradual escalation via a small smile.

Before I move on, some words on the fear of rejection. Naturally, one response to my hand-wringing would be that I should damn the torpedoes and move straight to an attempt at conversation, despite the ambiguity of the signal. Such advice is often followed by a “Rejection won’t kill you” or perhaps by a “What’s the worst that could happen?” And it’s true, rejection doesn’t kill. And yes, I do admit that part of me probably was afraid that an overture would lead to unpleasant feelings, and that those feelings would knock away the good feelings that my obligation-free morning had brought me. But I’ve also been wondering if that stock take on rejection is flawed because it doesn’t give sufficient weight to the feelings of the rejector.

Specifically, wouldn’t an unwanted advance make her uncomfortable? What about the good feelings that her quiet morning in Starbucks might have been bringing her? I mean, she was probably no wilting flower, and thus could probably have executed one brush-off with aplomb, but what if this happened day after day? Wouldn’t I be helping to create an unpleasant environment for her? CC’s advice seems good, and so next time I’ll just take the intermediate step of smiling a bit. I’ll start looking in the mirror and practicing my non-threatening smiles.

Here’s where I attempt to justify the above silliness by trying to go all Bowling Alone on this shit. My questions are:
1. Assuming there ever was one, is the culture of casual encounters in public places (no, I don’t mean that, but I delight in leading your mind there) falling apart? Did it used to be common knowledge how to approach a stranger in a coffee shop? Or is my ignorance here just a sign of my being an outlier freakazoid, rather than of a larger trend?
2. Where in the past were these skills acquired? I learn about social skills from blogs. Blogging was invented well after humans started breeding. What did I miss growing up that has left me so unprepared? In the thread at her place, Belle mentions getting social instruction from women’s magazines. These have been around longer than blogs, but they were also invented after sexual reproduction. To what extent has explicit instruction always played a role in the acquisition of social skills?

I’ve always assumed that social skills were acquired primarily through implicit learning, and that I somehow lacked sufficient intuition and didn’t have the experiences (with failures of intuition leading to deliberate avoidance of future experiences) necessary to acquire them.

I started to think more about what I’ll call “structural problems,” however, that same night at the bar. I was gchatting with HH before heading out to meet some friends at one of our standard haunts, and she asked how I would react if a “cute girl” talked to me while I was out at the bar. This led me to consider how I’ve never had (and presently lack) a group of dudes with whom I went to bars with the aim of “picking up girls.” Are such groups common? I was out with three guys on Friday, one of them partnered, but talking to strangers was never on the table. There was no consideration of whether or not we were in a “target-rich environment” (cf. Top Gun). There never is. So at the bar, it occurred to me that in lacking such a group, I might be missing out on another traditional source of social instruction. Obviously, I’m a lot of fun at bars.

(I realize this all reads like a parody of someone like me. You are free to laugh. But this is the sort of analysis I find myself going through routinely as I try to fill in the gaps in my social skills as an adult.)