How A Magazine Scrap Changed My Love Life Forever

Cinema City Movie Complex, Tel Aviv. November 2005.

It was a little after midnight on a Tuesday. The late show had just finished, and people were heading out of the movie theatre.

Among the few people there were my old-time army friend Eitan and myself.

He had just come back from a big backpacking trip overseas and I was visiting Israel after my first semester of university in Australia. We had a good catch up session and finished it with a movie.

The way out of the huge complex forced us to walk next to the almost empty food court.

Two girls were sitting next to each other around a square table. One of them was very cute. I pointed her out to Eitan.

“Look at that girl, how cute is she?”

“Want to go talk to them?” he asked.

I did. But there was no way I would ever walk there by myself and introduce myself. I hadn’t done anything like that before.

“Are you going to make it happen, bro?” I asked, as if we were talking about defusing an elaborate bomb rather than talking to two people.

Eitan cocked his head to the side and gave me a weird look.

“Really Almog? I’m surprised at you.”

I guess he had seen me do a lot more challenging things during our army time together.

He walked over to the table and said with a smile, “Hey we noticed you guys and wanted to say hi. Can we sit with you?”

The two girls looked at each other and said, “Yeah, sure”.

We sat down in the most idiotic way. I was sitting across from the girl I wanted to chat with and he across from the other one. We had two one-on-one conversations talking over each other. It was awkward.

This girl really was adorable. Her and her friend were working as waitresses in a café in the movie complex. We had a nice friendly conversation.

10 minutes into our conversation, a dude came over to the table and said – “Are you guys ready to go?”

“Yep” she replied.

Oops. She did mention she was waiting for someone who was coming to pick her up… Ech. This wasn’t really a surprise.

“It was lovely meeting you, Almog” she said and flashed a smile.

Her friend and her stood up and started walking away from the table.

As, I was looking at her feminine silhouette walking away from me all I can think was:
“Noooooooooo…..”

I didn’t ask her for a phone number!

Why did I miss this opportunity? Bleh.

My Social History

Asking girls out was a big deal for me. It would take me a long while to work up the courage to ask a girl out.

When I was growing up I was pretty shy. I didn’t stand out in social events, and I didn’t feel like I have much to say.

I had a lot of female friends in high school and in life. I got along with them very well, and enjoyed gossip sessions together. I was “one of the girls”.

You would think that having good rapport with women like that would be enough to be successful with women, but it wasn’t.

Eventually, I kissed a girl who had a big crush on me in high school. She acted like she just wanted to be my friend, started training in my gym and came to music concerts she didn’t like just to spend alone time with me.

It took me about a year to figure out she was interested in me, and another month to go for the kiss.

I felt like telling a girl I was attracted to her was almost offensive. It would create such discomfort – and I didn’t want to ever make anyone feel uncomfortable. I wasn’t that kind of guy.

I failed to understand cues. My cousin organized a date between me and a girl who noticed me and told him she was interested. She eventually let him know that she lost interest when I didn’t kiss her, even though we were alone, in her room, and I was giving her a massage.

To her, it was clear she wanted to be kissed. I just didn’t think there was a right moment.

So it happened that my dating life consisted of girls who made it absolutely obvious that they were interested in me.

Or alternatively, girls I met in online dating – which back then at least – had very few girls I was particularly attracted to.

There had been a few ladies I met while I was backpacking throughout Australia and South-East Asia. Everything seemed to happen a lot more organically and easily then. I had no idea how to recreate that.

So, I guess it’s easy to see why I never asked for that girl’s number.

I got so lost in the conversation, and had done it so few times before, I just never found the right moment to do it without making her feel uncomfortable.

As if someone asking for her phone number would ruin her entire week.

As if asking it using some magic wording would make a difference.

As if there was a perfect moment to ask, and if I focussed really hard, I would find it.

Oh well.

A plan

I went back home and devised a plan.

I was going to go back to the cinema complex, go to where she told me she works at, and ask for her number then.

And two days later, on that Thursday, off I went to her café, hoping she’d be on shift.

It was about 745pm when I arrived.

I tried to not look like I was there by myself or just for her. That would be a loser thing to do, right?

So, I went with my new laptop and my laptop case. The plan was to look like I was doing some kind of important work.

And there she was taking my order. She remembered me and said “Hi” with a big smile. “What would you like?”

I had a nervous attempt at flirting. “Something with a lot of caffeine.”

This failed to come out as hilarious and sexy as it sounded in my head. So I ordered a cappuccino.

Now I was a little busy already, chatting frantically online with Eitan on MSN messenger – which is where everyone hung out online back then.

“Dude, I’m back at Cinema city. I went to that café and that girl is on shift. How should I ask her for her phone number?”

On and one we chatted and time went by.

After about 20 minutes, I figured it all out. I would call her to my table, ask for the bill and then say “and can I have your phone number too?”.

It was hardly an amazing master plan, but I had built up enough nerve to go through with it. I was like a bullet ready to be fired, full of potential energy.

Two days of planning and 20 minutes in the restaurant culminated in this moment.

I lifted my eyes from the screen and scanned the room. Where was she? I couldn’t see her.

As minutes passed by, she wasn’t showing up. My adrenaline started dropping. I was feeling exhausted.

After another 10 minutes of looking around, I realized that her shift had ended and she went home.

Another opportunity missed. All the hard work, thinking and preparation were for nothing.

I left the place with my head bowed and went back home.

Add that to my string of failures in dating, I guess.

But this one wouldn’t let go.

A Magazine Scrap

I was in bed that night, tossing and turning.

The deeper meanings of it all hit me.

Will I ever have my shit sorted with women?

Why did I keep missing out on opportunities like that?

Why was it so hard for me to do something simple like ask for a phone number?

Will I ever date someone I choose or will it have to be the girls who choose me and make it painfully clear?

These were real, existential fears. I felt like I wouldn’t live life to the fullest if I had such an average dating life.

In my dating life, I felt like I was just a spectator, looking at the world from the outside, and not really acting in it.

I wasn’t making anything happen – I was just drifting along through it.

Then, a scrap of paper came to mind.

Just before coming back to Israel after my first university semester in Australia, I went to Thailand for a few weeks.

While waiting in a hostel’s reception in Chiang Mai for him, I was thumbing through an issue of “Marie Claire” they had lying around.

What caught my eye was a story about a dating coach from LA, who called himself “Mystery”. Mystery wore ludicrous outfits, practiced magic, and was apparently incredible at teaching men about meeting and attracting girls.

It felt interesting for a bit when I read it, so I tore the article out, neatly folded it and put it in a book that I had just bought. Then, I forgot about it.

That night, that scrap of paper came back to mind. It was still lying inside the book.

Research

So in the middle of that night, after rereading this article, I was keen to read more about this guy.

I looked up his site. He had a book. Interesting.

There was a free download of the first few chapters. Something about them rang different from other books I’ve read.

They weren’t trying to paint a rosy picture of reality or give politically correct dating advice about being overly romantic.

He had obviously spent a lot of time approaching women and honing his craft.

His views were weird but they made some weird sense to me. I could see how this would work.

And best of all, it was a system. If you just followed all the steps right, you should be able to attract a girl.

In retrospect, that book seems ridiculous and a lot of what he preaches was totally over the top and way too much effort. But at that moment, it felt like I found something I had been searching for a decade.

I consumed every little morsel of that book and adapted a few of its mindsets.

The concept of actually being able to approach a strange girl in a bar, and have a conversation with her, and have her be attracted to me seemed within my reach. Maybe being “better with women” is something one can learn?

My first approach

When I arrived back to Australia, instead of flying back directly to Brisbane (where I was living and studying in university), I went to Melbourne for a week.

In Melbourne lived a good friend of mine who had zero problems approaching women. Together, we went out to a few bars on Fitzroy street in the seaside suburb of St Kilda.

I was so confident after reading all of those books that I had little problem approaching a pretty girl who was standing by the bar. We had a great conversation. I asked for the phone number, and I didn’t get it. She had a boyfriend.

It didn’t matter. I asked for the phone number!

A lot of things happened after that.

I found out there were entire city-based internet communities of guys working on their social skills. I made some new friends in Brisbane,we all pushed each other and had a blast together.

I devoted a lot of time breaking through my personal shyness and social boundaries.

Another Magazine Article

Fast forward to a few years later.

I was living in Melbourne and working as a dating coach for men.

I took the lessons I learnt on my journey, and was helping other guys make their dating lives better with them.

On the 17th of April 2009, an article I wrote was published in “Mx”, a Melbourne daily newspaper with hundreds of thousands of daily readers.

I was titled “Get That Girl”. The somewhat-ridiculous tagline (which, by the way, I did not write) said, “Dating Guru Almog reveals the biggest mistakes guys make when meeting girls”.

Perhaps somewhere in Melbourne that day, a man I don’t know ripped that article from that magazine.

Maybe that was the first time he considered he could improve his dating life, act differently, and get different results. Perhaps this was just the nudge he needed. Maybe he too folded it in a book and found it months later on a restless night.

Funny how life is sometimes.