There’s been so much discourse lately on the “male loneliness crisis,” about which I have a lot to say… but today, I want to focus on one specific piece of that puzzle: the importance of meeting new people, and the ways that some men get it wrong.

In reading threads about this on Reddit (which, admittedly, are not necessarily representative of the general population), it seems to me that women and men give very different advice to men who are having trouble meeting new people to potentially date. Women usually say: Try online dating (or try harder), and/or meet people through hobbies, community groups, or mutual friends. Men usually say: Learn the social skills necessary to cold-approach complete strangers in public, and then do that as much as possible. Dating is a numbers game, after all.

This advice always baffles me because, while I’m sure there are some women in the world who enjoy being hit on by a rando while trying to go about their day, most women I know (myself included) hate this. For many of us, it’s been happening since we were teenagers (if not earlier), so there’s a feeling of predatory creepiness baked into it, even if the person approaching us is being fairly polite. Imagine the way you feel when a salesperson with a clipboard walks up to you on the street and launches into a sales pitch, while you’re in a hurry to get somewhere. That feeling is the same feeling I get when an unfamiliar man approaches me in public – only with an added layer of fight-or-flight fear: Is this person going to assault me? Is anyone around to witness it happening, if so? Where’s the nearest exit route? How far am I from home? Did I tell anybody where I was going? What if something happens?

It’s wild to me that there are entire schools of thought built around the male idea that approaching strangers is the best way to meet people. Pickup artists teach classes around the world on this, and men fork over their cash in fistfuls to learn this information. I don’t want to discount the parts of it that are actually valuable – I think some people with social anxiety or neurodivergence can benefit from “exposure therapy” in the form of talking to strangers as much as possible, for instance. But there’s no reason they have to do that with romantic/sexual intent – they can glean the same benefits from practicing chatting with their local barista or bank teller, both of which would likely respond better than random women on the street, who (as discussed) are already primed to feel wary of strange men.