Without reading the last two pages of arguments/conversations I have an anecdote to share.
This past weekend I had the exact experience discussed in some of these posts. Walked into a McDonald’s downstate, and a man who was at least thirty years my senior said, “You have very beautiful eyes.” He didn’t even wait for a response, just said it in passing, and by the time I realized he meant me, he was already out the door.
I’m 33, and that was incredibly flattering and made me smile all day. And yes, if I had been twenty-three I would probably have felt greatly different. I am much more confident of myself now and in a much better position to receive a random compliment.
So I am all for random compliments, and intend to continue giving them, and giving them to girls, too. Someone here suggested the method of complimenting a specific aspect of their appearance; that is what I plan to do. If it makes people feel skeevy, I’m sorry, but most people I know like compliments. And maybe if more women complimented each other we wouldn’t always be so darn bitchy to each other.
I get this and I’m thinking a) You’ve got a stack of these that you hand out or b) You’ve been watching me for while, long enough to think about making a card for me.
How much of the inappropriateness of a non-young (i.e., middle aged or older) guy commenting to a beautiful stranger comes from socialization and evolutionary tendencies?
By the time a guy gets older, he has either risen to the top and taken a position of power - become an Alpha Male in some form or fashion - or has demonstrated that he will most likely NOT be an alpha male
When encountered on the street, there is often no easy way to determine alpha-male status - and since the non-young guy is approaching the woman, he comes across as needy, which increases the possibility (in a split-second judgment on the part of the woman) that he is NOT an alpha male
So a woman’s position is to IMMEDIATELY dismiss the approach as “ick” because not only is he a stranger and not within her normal “mating criteria” (again, boiling this down to animalistic evolutionary biology, if I may), but he is coming across as a non-desirable, non-alpha male. Case closed.
If the woman was able to quickly ascertain that the man was clearly an Alpha Male - some visual clue or something, like pulling up in a Ferrari or being George Clooney (who is old enough for Ick but would never, ever hear it because he is Alpha on so many levels) - she is more likely to modify how she responds to the attention.
FWIW, I am male, 45, would never, ever think to say anything to a beautiful stranger on the street although I find myself wanting to daily. As a senior executive at a small company, I can say that women respond to me differently when they are fully aware of my position in my small little business world. Weird but true.
Little to none. Unless you mean being told from a young age not to talk to strangers (especially strange men). Getting honked at by a guy in a Ferrari or groped by a guy in a YSL suit isn’t really a treat (though I have definitely noticed that they seem to feel entitled to it a little more than the homeless guys who hit on me, so perhaps they do get away with it more).