Great. I’m the problem. I’ll happily accept that responsibility. Tell me how to fix myself, and I’ll fix myself.
Ouch. I’ll say this: Women can smell this much rejection on you. By your posts in this thread, your confidence is at an all-time low, and they know that too.
I guess my advice to you would be to stop caring so much when you get rejected. Don’t have thoughts in your head like, “Oh man, she’s gorgeous! I can’t mess this up!” You’re guaranteed to fuck it up somehow – your body language will be weird and creepy.
And get the concept of The One out of your head. It doesn’t exist. You’ll spend your entire life looking for a ghost.
How do you know something didn’t happen to her?
I read the first few posts of this thread this morning, and I can definitely sympathize. I come back and it’s three pages, and a quick scan shows a bit more venom than I expected.
And there’s someone I met recently who I definitely have my eye on. I’m not sure whether to read the whole thread or not.
Read the whole thread, then go up to her and ask her out. Don’t hope she notices your sly smiles, just tell her she’s pretty and ask her out. That’s the theme from those of us towards the end here.
And tdn, I wish I could tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong, but I can only deduce so much from a message board. DudleyGarrett has some great advice though, because half of the battle is not taking it all so seriously. I guarantee you that the minute you genuinely stop being obsessed with the idea of THE ONE or a perfect date, someone will fall into your lap.
I think what a lot of people don’t understand is that it’s actually more rude to say yes to a date and then just refuse to answer the phone when they call to arrange it. You’re not sparing anyone’s feelings that way. It’s actually worse because you’re giving him hope and then slowly crushing it as he realizes you’re never going to return a phone call. You’re actually being nicer by just being assertive and saying “no” in the first place.
I don’t. I don’t know anything. And there was no way for me to find out.
I should clear something up. True, my confidence is low right now. But in the past 15 years, I’ve managed to get some dates. Seven of those I considered girlfriends, four of them serious. I was even considered husband material by two of them. (If I ended up marrying them, I’d be in marriage hell right now. Or a widower. 
)
But my social skills were never that strong. And now they’ve attrophied for seven years. I really don’t even know where to begin. Where does one even go to get treated to cuntish behavior these days?
You should have asked her out.
Ya know, ever since I joined the SDMB I have read these sorts of threads. When my marriage started to break up in 2005, I read them with the horror of knowing that soon I would be out there. Exactly two years ago today, I filed for divorce and went on my first date maybe a month later. To my relief, it wasn’t bad at all and in fact was kind of fun…tedious maybe but still fun.
I met most of the women that I dated on-line, the majority of those on craigslist. If you’re too chicken to ask women out in public, do so on-line. If they’re posting an ad or answering an ad somewhere, you at least know that they’re available to date.
It’s a numbers game. In the year and a half or so before meeting The One, I went on a crap load of dates, most of which ended up being just one or two dates and that was it. Three turned into several week relationships which were nice for the most part. I only asked out one woman in meat-space. She goes to the same yoga studio as me and did say yes. Finally in January I met my current girlfriend so I’m now off the market. (She actually asked me out before I got a chance to ask her but that’s another story.)
The bottom line is that if I could get dates, anyone can. You just have to be confident, don’t let rejection get to you and keep trying. On-line was the way to go for me. Have you tried that? You have nothing to lose. Do it.
tdn, I hesitated to post that to begin with, because I know it sounds terribly harsh. And I don’t necessarily mean it in a “you’re a terrible person” sense. I mean, again, I don’t know you, but I recognize your screen name, and not in the “Oh shit here he goes again sense.”
So I’m not saying you guys have total personality flaws and are irredemable. (though maybe you do! 
I keed, I keed!) I think it’s more that maybe you need to work on your approach or technique. Having never been asked out by you folks, I couldn’t really be more specific than that.
Worked for me. Really.
And I hope I go first, because I really can’t imagine trying to find someone at my age, and I definitely will be a disaster if I let myself fall into hermitship.
Self-confidence is needed on both sides. Self-confidence on the part of the asker to be able to ask when they get the chance, and self-confidence on the part of the askee to be able to give a clear, ambiguous answer.
A lot of us girls were raised badly in this respect. You know, the guy always asks, we have to let him down easy, we can’t tell him we just aren’t into him, blah, blah, blah. So you see a lot of girls in their 20’s who just don’t know any better - and yes, I was one of them. I admit it. Hopefully we grow up out of it.
Dating sucks, no doubt about it. Humans suck, don’t we? hajario gives some good advice, but unfortunately rejection is a part of it all. And yes, I have asked guys on dates - a couple of times - and been rejected. With really transparent excuses, too. One of them told me he was engaged to a woman in Japan, who was 40 years his senior, and since he was getting married in three years, no way could he date. I suppose it wasn’t out of the question - it’s almost too far-fetched to be a story.
Yeah, I’m trying it now. Have been since early March. I haven’t tried Craiglist, but I’m on five or six other sites. I don’t even bother checking them for responses anymore. I sent out feelers to maybe a hundred women or so. It all resulted in one date, and that was pretty horrible. And I’ve “used up” all the women who seemed like reasonable matches. The rest are way ouside of my age range, outside of my local area, and waaaaay outside of my compatibility. I seem to be doing well with the Yahoos, however. You know, the ones who IM that the really truly love you, but are stuck in Lagos, and just need a little money to get back home so that you can be together.
I used to do not horrible with paper ads, but now they’ve all gone electronic, and they don’t seem to work for me.
Yeah, that’s the fallacy. I think a lot of women are geniunely trying to be nice, but they aren’t doing it right. A very simple, “Thanks, but I’m not interested”, or “I have a boyfriend”, would be a perfectly acceptable response. You don’t have to say “I’m not into you”. Heck, even the trite “I like you as a friend” would get the message across just fine. You can be direct without being blunt. But many women are afraid to be direct, and adopt a passive-aggressive approach out of a mistaken belief that they are “sparing feelings”, but which is much, much worse than just being direct.
You don’t have to be a social butterfly to be considered socially skilled. How are you when meeting males in public places? Are you relaxed?
I guess what has worked for me is when I was single and asking women out, I refused to let myself look at them based at all on their gender. I guess that might sound pretty weird, but it helped me get over any anxiety before I actually had a conversation with someone. If the conversation went well, I became more comfortable and got a better vibe as to whether or not there could be a romantic connection. When I felt things were moving ahead, I’d ask them out. I’d say my rejection rate decreased considerably and my confidence increased.
Aw, now you’re just making shit up.
You know what I find interesting? It seems to be true for many women that they find a guy being nervous to be a turn-off. But when I’ve dated women who were nervous about meeting me, I’ve found it endearing. It’s flattering to me that they would be interested in me enough to be nervous about it. And over-confidence is kind of a turn-off to me; makes me think she doesn’t really care about other people’s feelings. I’ve always wondered why there seems to be a disparity in attitude between men and women on this issue.
I don’t think it’s fair to make that guarantee. There’s the sheer numbers involved, for one thing; million-to-one shots happen to someone every day. But more than that, I just think everyone’s experiences are uniquely their own. My dating history defies easy categorization.
Since we’re sharing horror stories, I’ll add mine. Several years ago I started working at a new company. After a few months, I was developing a crush on a co-worker. She was in a different department, not someone I’d see every day, unless I went out of my way to. I was new to the area, and folks were going out of their way to include me in things. She and I started getting to be friends; had lunch once or twice, went to a museum, stuff like that. I had to find a way to ask her on a Date, something unmistakeable. I aked her to lunch; she postponed a couple times, until Valentine’s Day. I bought some flowers on my way to work. She postponed again. I gave her the flowers in her office and invited her to a play that was opening in a week. She said yes; so I made the arrangements.
A couple days later, she sent me an e-mail asking if I could get a third ticket so she could bring a date. In the face of something like that, it’s hard to see how boilerplate advice like “be confident” applies.
You say you had do to something unmistakable, so you asked her to lunch. Did you say, “Hey, I think you’re swell. I’d like to go out on a date with you sometime. Lunch sound good?” Or did you say, “Hey Barb, wanna go to lunch next week?”
Interesting. I only briefly tried match.com and it didn’t work too well for me either. I was on for a month and met one woman in real life. I think that craigslist is a lot more like the old paper ads than the others so that may be the one that works for you too. Best of all, it’s free so you really do have nothing to lose except a little time.
Are you trying to say that men and women are different? Wow. I think that you may be on to something here. 
No, but then I’m Smart, Beautiful AND Sane. Seriously though - yes. Hasn’t everyone experienced rejection? I didn’t curl up into a ball and cry my eyes out, though. I just moved on.
Yikes, you must’ve felt an inch tall and you’re right, confidence didn’t apply anymore there. But I think it is possible that your confidence mattered somewhere along the line there and she picked up on it. You were new to the area, probably didn’t know anyone and were vulnerable. These are just guesses based on my own life experiences in new areas. YMMV. Then again, it’s entirely possible that she just wasn’t into you. That happens too. But if that were the case, you could have picked up on it before the flower treatment.