You can connect with her and will treat her like a person not a princess

Love it when women explain how to approach people. You can see her falling apart just demonstrating because she's so uncomfortable even just pretending.

Goldenboy IMHO it sounds like you're trying to find the one perfect way that entails no possibility of rejection, feeling uncomfortable, or even being anxious.

The one thing that young psych gets right - is that yes, we all feel anxious at times - especially when we don't know what will happen. Her point to focus on process is also good.

But let me ask you some questions:

You obviously want to talk to her, to see where things might go - but what are you doing to solve this?

Listening to interviews, coming on the board to ask questions, read, read, read?

How has that worked for you?

---

In my opinion, it sounds like you're struggling with avoidance and anxiety.

The way out of that is to practice staying with unpleasant feelings - like anxiety - and learning to move your focus to the situation around you, and to try different things while feeling that way, not by making the feelings / thoughts / sensations go away.

If you try do something that is too overwhelming - which might be talking to the girl on the bus right now - you might not be able to keep your focus where you like, feel worse, and end up avoiding more again.

Of course, if you feel like you can be anxious and it's no biggie to say 'hello' like Grinus says, go for it!

Otherwise, go slowly, you can practice stepping into anxiety at home for say 5, 10, 15 minutes and really feeling it completely; or you can practice doing things that make you feel a little anxious but not too much, and from there practice being more flexible with your behaviour.

The theory / readings should help you to move your focus off of trying to control the outcome IMO, and to enjoying yourself rather than trying to get anything. (IE enjoying the process with the anxiety/excitement that comes from the unknown). If they're aren't doing that, but just making you feel better when reading, then are they really helping?

Just my 2C.

Thanks Hineini.
You're commenting on a 10 year old thread.

Man. The looking back at this thread. I remember the bus situation.
I never saw her in the bus again

That said, it was interesting to see the difference of me 10 years ago

Thanks for the time machine

Care to share the difference / change / reflection?

Just say "hello"

she will give you all you need from there if she is interested.

Simples

Best Pick-Up Lines

Worst Pick-Up Lines

So what’s the take-home message from all of this? If you’re really interested in meeting someone, a simple “hello” is likely to open far more doors than some sexual innuendo.

Overall, respondents agreed that cute-flippant opening lines were the least desirable and that innocuous and direct opening lines were the most desirable. Within this general consensus, there was a consistent tendency for women to dislike cute-flippant opening lines more than men and to prefer innocuous opening lines more than men.

These findings support expectations from research on sex role socialization that men prefer a more direct and aggressive approach toward social encounters while women are inclined toward approaches that are nonthreatening and benign. The lesson from our results is that men are best advised to avoid "coming on too strongly" when using opening lines for meeting women.

Why, then, do many men (and some women) persist in using cute-flippant opening lines? There are three good reasons: fear of rejection, intermittent reinforcement, and lack of social skills. People can protect themselves from rejection with cute-flippant opening lines by denying their loneliness and desire for a relationship. Unfortunately, while guarding their egos, they are likely to lose the person they wish to meet. In this light, it is useful to consider that an innocuous approach can protect against rejection because the line user can pretend the innocuous statement was meant literally rather than as a communication of social attraction. The advantage of innocuous opening lines is that they offer a less threatening context for the recipient's response. Cute-flippant opening lines are also reinforced by popular books and magazines that stimulate our fantasies with stories overplaying the number of "successful pickups" that actually occur in real life. Although these fantasies exist more in people's words than in their actions, they may be experienced on rare occasions. We found a small minority of women who gave favorable evaluations to men's cute-flippant opening lines... Unfortunately, we have not determined any method for identifying those women who apparently provide the intermittent reinforcement perpetuating the myth that men in general can be successful with the "macho" approach. Pending identification of women who prefer cute-flippant opening lines, we recommend their use only for men who are gamblers.