How to Approach a Woman in the Rain

Do not try to hold a conversation on a wet sidewalk. Go where people are already sheltered and already standing around: a mall, a train station, a covered walkway, a gallery, a campus center. A student on one of our live calls asked about a city where it rains almost all the time. The coach's answer was that a city like that has built its life around the rain, so the places to talk to people are already there. You work with what you have.

A woman walking in the rain is holding an umbrella, protecting her phone, and trying to get somewhere dry. She is doing the opposite of browsing.

That does not mean you cannot approach her. It means that you have chosen the setting where everything is working against you: she is moving fast, she is looking down, and neither of you wants to stand still. The better question is where those same women end up when they are indoors and unhurried. That is where the conversation gets easy.

Shopping malls are the first answer our coaches give for bad weather, because women like to shop and a mall is already a place where people drift around and stop.

The coach in the rainy-city question also guessed at an indoor mall, or at least an outdoor one with lights, where you can see when the rain lets up and the stores are inside. A common space like that is useful for a reason one coach spelled out on another call. A mall has shops and also shared areas, and nobody in a clothing store knows what happened in the shoe store down the hall.

One of our coaches has taken weekend students to the same large mall on two days in a row and stayed for hours at a time with no trouble. That is fine in a mall. It is not fine in every building, which is the next section.

If a single company runs the whole building, the staff are one team. A man who gets noticed talking to a woman in a huge department store can be noticed by everyone in it, because it is all under one management.

Our coaches' advice is to treat a flagship store as a place to use occasionally, not for hours every day, or you will get asked to leave. A mall with public areas gives you more room.

Train stations come up the same way. Commuters wait there, and waiting people are easier to talk to than people hurrying through the rain.

How well this works depends on where you live. On the East Coast of the United States and in much of Europe, trains are used a lot, so a station can be very good. On the West Coast, not so much. If you live somewhere with little rail, skip it and use another venue.

On one of our coaching calls, someone asked for favorite places to meet women in bad weather, and the list was indoor venues of every kind:

• Shopping malls and train stations.
• Indoor parks or places of amusement, if your city has them.
• Art galleries. The coach had not used one himself, but he knew a well-regarded person in the field who takes his students to galleries. The idea is simple. A gallery is indoors, people are there, and it is believable that you are too.
• College campus centers, if you are young.
• A downtown area where people mingle at lunch, if you are a bit older.

His rule of thumb was that any place with an indoor gathering of people could work.

For some men a bar is not what they came to do. The same coach pointed out that bars, lounges and clubs are places where women have already gathered, so if you are comfortable there, a rainy evening is a fine time to go.

This is a choice, not a requirement. Plenty of men would rather stay in daytime venues and accept a smaller number of conversations.

Indoors, the rain still shows up in the room. People are shaking out jackets, drying their hands, looking for a place to sit. That gives you something real to say that is not a line.

Keep your opener ordinary, the same one you use anywhere. If a woman is still folding her umbrella or looking for someone, give her a moment and open once she has settled. Rushed people say no more often, and a short no is easy to respect.

A man who only approaches when the sky is clear has made the weather his coach. Our coaches' view is that a rainy day is a venue change, like any other. You pick a new building, you go there, and you do the same thing you would do in the park.

One city built an underground system so people can reach their buildings without going outside, and the coach used it as an example of how cities adapt. The weather is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to move indoors.