Do Fears of Inferiority Hurt Your Chances With Women?

Yes, and it invites the rejection you are afraid of. If you walk up believing she is above you, that belief leaks out through your voice, your posture and your words. She cannot see your height, your salary or your acne from across a room as fast as she can feel a man asking for permission to be there, and she starts pulling away. Here is how to deal with it, and what to do when you are stuck.

You rarely say "I am inferior" out loud. It comes out sideways.

• You start with a compliment that works like an apology: "Sorry to bother you, but you look amazing."
• You laugh before she has said anything funny.
• You look at the floor, then at her friend, then at your phone.
• You talk fast so she can leave sooner.
• You agree with everything she says, even when you disagree.

Each of those tells her the same thing: this man thinks she is out of his league. Women react to that the way anyone reacts to being treated like a prize, with a mix of flattery and discomfort, and then they drift off.

a dating coach has coached men for around twenty years, and the same reasons come up: too short, too old, too heavy, wrong skin color, not enough money, bad skin. His answer is blunt. Every one of them has been beaten by a man in a worse spot than you.

He also describes himself as short, pale, a bit overweight, and a former acne sufferer, and says he still dated women he never expected to date. Judge that however you like. The useful part is his point about any trait you carry: some women love it, most women do not care, and a few do not like it. That holds for everyone. There is no version of you that every woman wants, and there is none that every woman rejects.

A lot of what feels like a fixed flaw is fixable. Weight, fitness, clothes and grooming change in months. The traits you cannot change matter far less than you fear.

Count it out the way coach does. Of billions of women, a tiny share would be your top picks, and that tiny share is still in the hundreds of millions. No single woman is scarce. The only scarce thing in the room is you. Nobody else has your stories, your sense of humor or your way of looking at things.

Treating one woman as the prize you must win at any cost is the thing that makes you shrink. Treating her as one of many good options makes you easy to talk to.

Most men with this fear set an impossible goal: make her like me. That is a good way to feel inferior, because her opinion is out of your hands.

My reset for approach fear is much smaller. The job is to walk over and make a noise so she knows you are there. Everything after that is a separate skill you are still learning. If your mouth dries up and you walk away, you still did the one thing you were practicing, and that counts as a rep.

A rejection is the same size. It is a verdict on that approach, in that moment. Sometimes the woman has a boyfriend, a bad day or a friend pulling her away. It says nothing about your worth.

You can act your way into feeling level with her long before you believe it. A few moves help right away.

1. Tease her. A light tease treats her as someone you can joke with, not someone to impress.
2. Give an opinion. "I think that's a terrible idea" beats "whatever you like."
3. Offer something. A funny story, a question with some personality, a plan for the next ten minutes.
4. Slow down. A pause makes you look relaxed. Speed makes you look nervous.
5. Stop asking for approval. No "is that okay?" after every sentence.

Say these out loud on a walk before you try them on a stranger. It feels silly. It works.

Fear of inferiority shrinks when you collect proof that women respond to you. Coffee shops, streets and bars give you that proof in volume. On a Cold Approach Bootcamp, you get two four-hour blocks a day of live approaches. A coach stands next to you and points out the exact moment your posture dropped or you started apologizing.

What if I really am less successful than she is?

Success is not what she feels in the first thirty seconds. She feels how you carry yourself. Plenty of women are drawn to a man who is relaxed, curious and playful, whatever his income.

Can I fake it?

You can practice it. A calm voice and a slow pace will feel fake at first. After enough reps they stop feeling fake.