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by jeffp12
I’d say my closest friend is Adam. Adam looks kinda like Ben Affleck, but growing up, he looked like Cartman. Long story short, he got tall, lost a bunch of weight, and now he has very high standards for women and also had a mom that would do everything for him and so he expects to find a girlfriend that’s mega-hot and also will do his laundry and cook for him and be his slave. In other words, he’s almost always single.
Adam’s method of attracting women goes like this: Get off work, play Call of Duty and drink every time you die until about 9 (let’s call it 10-20 beers). Then go downtown, drink more, and then he reaches his hitting-on-girls-zen-mode and will go through a bar and talk to every girl he sees, but only for about 30-40 minutes before he gets too drunk and has to head home.
But during that hour, he is amazing. He’ll just take a girl by the hand and start dancing with her. Some girl he hasn’t spoken to, hasn’t even looked at him yet, and not even on the dance floor, middle of the bar. Another trick of his is to high-five every girl he sees. Sometimes that means walking around the bar high-fiving, sometimes when he’s too drunk that means standing near a busy area and keeping his hand up. People will instinctively want to high five you back. Instant-ice-breaker. Since he’s quite tall, sometimes when a girl tries to high-five, he raises his hand too high for them to get to to tease them. Sometimes he holds their hand when they high five him and starts dancing. Sounds creepy, but fucking works a lot.
He doesn’t need a wingman right? Wrong. Before he gets to that zen-mode, even 12 beers in, he’ll be way too nervous to talk to girls. We’ll go up to groups of girls together and start a conversation. It’s way easier to approach people you don’t know in a group than it is to do it all by yourself.
For most people, this is all that wingmanning entails. Just be willing to, at a moment’s notice, walk with your friends up to a group of strangers and start a conversation. Some of our other friends are horrible wingmen. Basically they will stand around/sit at the bar and talk about the girls. Who’s hot? Who’s ugly. It’s not at all uncommon to hear “she would be okay if she lost 3 to 5 pounds.” They are that picky…about hot girls. But they stand around talking about it. “Let’s go talk to those girls,” Adam will say, and they’ll get all picky and find some excuse not to. Makes it a giant hassle. A good wingman has your back and is with you all the way. “Let’s go talk to those girls” – “Let’s do it.” Build confidence, ease tension, help break the ice, etc.,
If Adam can acually get our other friends to go with him, Adam starts talking to one girl, our other friends will stand behind him silently or just talking to each other. Thus the group of girls will all be staring at Adam, judging him, which makes breaking the ice extremely hard, and amplifies any awkward silence. If all four dudes started talking, it would build some “momentum” for the conversation. But instead, Adam has four girls judging him and then after a couple of minutes, one dude will tap him on the shoulder and say “these girls aren’t buying it,” and they bail on him.
Wingmen help by making it a group activity rather than a solo activity. It makes starting a conversation with strangers so much easier, and going “lone wolf” makes people think you have no friends.
By the same token, a female wingman is preferable to a male one. That’s because women are subconsciously going to be more attractive to a guy that’s around other women. Just by being there and talking to him, it shows he can’t be too crazy or too much of an asshole. The only real pitfall is appearing like you are together.
The joke is that a wingman is there to make you look better by comparison. And so some people might see me (short, skinny, weak, nerdy, glasses) standing next to Adam (tall, works out, no glasses) and think he’s using me to make him look better.
When I’m a wingman, I basically am just hitting on girls, same as my friends, but since I’m not single, it’s actually easier for me. There’s no pressure. I’m not trying to get laid here, so it’s just fun, talking to people, etc. A lone wolf can get really anxious and full of self-doubt, so the wingman is there to ease the tension. Basically my job is to help break the ice by chatting up other people in the group, not being weird, and going with him when he approaches new people, not getting awkward and silent about it.
Once you break the ice and start hitting on someone, you have to take a next step. That might be going from just chatting to dancing, or going off to talk somewhere alone, away from friends, or that might be asking for a number. A lot of people can get past step one, get into a conversation, but then completely chicken out and can’t ask for a number or to dance. And while chickening out, they don’t want to quit, so they try to stay near that girl, keep the conversation going longer until they grow balls or something, and thus they can come off as really clingy and that creeps people out. We want things we can’t have, we want things that are scarce. So if a dude comes up to a girl and won’t leave her alone, he’s not scarce at all. But if the dude talks to a girl for a while, then his friends take him away to do something else, that keeps him scarce and so when he runs into that girl again 20 minutes later, he seems cooler, like he’s more popular, less clingy.
One of my favorite tactics to break the ice if Adam is having trouble getting a conversation started, or if say there’s some girls near us but he’s chickened out and now we’re awkwardly standing near them is to ask the girls a question out of the blue. Ask a silly question or “we’re trying to settle a bet…” My favorite is to ask what famous person Adam looks like. That’s because he looks like Ben Affleck mixed with Michael Phelps, and people will answer one of those two pretty quickly and then we can get into a debate about it (Adam always insisting he doesn’t look like either of them, despite having gone as both of them for halloween in the past). Instant ice breaker, gives them something to talk about for a minute or two and that’s all you can really do.
During Adam’s zen mode of hitting on girls, there’s not much you can do since he’s fearless. BUT when he nears the end of zen mode, that fearlessness becomes recklessness. I’ve had to prevent him getting arrested more than once.
One particular night, we’d been hitting on girls for a while, I was actually single at the time. We made a few laps around this bar and his zen mode was waning, so it was about time to go. He says he needs to sit down for a minute and he grabs the nearest bar stool. He’s not near vomiting, but he could get in a fight. His dream is for some asshole to do something douchey like punch me or hit a girl so that Adam can justifiably jump in and punch the shit out of the douche.
So Adam takes a seat and I stand nearby and then he turns and starts talking to the girl sitting next to him. She’s in a group of three girls, and all three look at him, judging, so I jump in and start talking to one of the girls. This being a rather douchey/fraty kind of bar, I notice that this girl is wearing glasses and looks fairly nerdy so I’ll hit on her and I open with the line, “so we’re the only two people here wearing glasses.” Which starts a conversation, we talk about college, jobs, where we’re from etc., all while Adam is talking to the first girl.
This first girl is short, about 5 foot 3, and Adam says something about how tall he is and she responds, “well I’m a captain in the Army, so I could kick your ass.” Adam insists he could beat her up since he’s got a foot on her and who knows how much reach with those spindly arms. She insists she could beat him up, he insists he would beat her up and this starts spiraling out of control to the point that I think a fight might happen. Not that they’re being aggressive or threatening about, but they’re clearly both drunk enough to say fuck it and start wrestling in the bar. So I try to change the subject and cool things down, but that doesn’t work. So then I decide I need to get Adam out of there before he either hits a girl or gets beat up by a girl that went to West Point. He had been kicked out of that same bar one week earlier for slapping the bartender’s girlfriend’s ass not ten feet from where we are standing, so I know that bad things can happen in a hurry at this stage.
But I’m also hitting on this girl and getting somewhere. Now, had this been another time of night, I wouldn’t have been in a hurry and I might have waited too long or chickened out, but since Adam was forcing my hand, I had to ask this girl for her number and then get Adam out of there, and do it quick. So I asked for the girl’s number. She wanted to give me her e-mail address instead, and I said, “nope, definitely not taking an e-mail address. I’ll take a phone number, or a no, but not an e-mail address.” So she gave me her number, then I got Adam out of there.
Three years later I’m still dating that girl. Adam takes credit for it.
And that sounds like a joke. But if you look back on it. . . it’s like Adam was doing a long con here.
He broke the ice with a group of girls, enabling me to easily slip in and start talking to a girl. Then he was a huge distraction, getting attention from both of the other girls and providing a topic of discussion for all involved that prevented any awkward silences from cropping up (these girls suddenly found themselves in a debate about the importance of “reach” in a bar fight), and then he put me on a deadline so that I had no choice but to act quickly, giving me no time to psyche myself out or to get clingy. And then he makes me look like a great catch by comparison. That’s picture-perfect wingmanning right there.
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