Where to meet people

In my last post, I tried to cover the general mindset and attitude of meeting new people.  I'll do my best here to cover the places I've had the most success meeting women.  Reflexivity would suggest that these are also places to meet men, but the only proof I have is that these would be places to meet me.

First off are the places you commonly go.  You probably shop for groceries, occasionally buy clothes, go to the drugstore, electronics store, etc.  I suppose the music store and video rental shop have fallen out of favor recently.  You may work out in a gym or go running in a park.  Perhaps you take your recycling somewhere (Atlanta still has huge areas without curbside pickup).  In any case, you can probably name 5-10 public places you go to semi-frequently.

Think about your attitude in these places.  Are you in-and-out or do you socialize with people?  If someone were trying to pick you up, how easy do you think it would be?  Also, what time do you go to these places?  Are you doing grocery shopping at 8pm on a Friday night (or 3am on a Tuesday?)  Are the people you're interested in meeting going to be there?  If you've ever worked in a retail, you know that different times of day have different clientele.  During the workday you're looking at mostly housewives doing the shopping.  Rather than running out over your lunch break to pick something up, go first thing after work.  Making this change once probably won't change your odds, but if you make it a general choice, you end up around a lot more people with similar life situations.

Secondly, what do you do for fun?  If you're part of any clubs, sports teams, if you're a regular at bars or restaurants, start looking around.  Of course, you may not want to be dating in your pool of acquaintences, but keep in mind these people all have different sets of friends.  You can very quickly meet a large group of people.  The same goes for your coworkers.  Enjoy being single, enjoy dating, and always be willing to try a blind date.  The worst that can happen is you lose a couple hours of one evening and you learn a bit more about people.

As far as getting set up goes, your friends know you well, and many love to try to match people up.  I've had the highest success rate this way-- ask your good friends.  Friends in relationships often want their friends to be in relationships as well.  Girlfriends of my friends have given me many, many dates.  Nearly all of them were fun to at least go on a first date with.  I don't come anywhere near that number with the women I randomly meet and go out with.

So then there's the public social areas.  Bars, coffee shops, bookstores... they're all fantastic places to spend a couple hours when you'd like to be social, but don't have any other plans.  A general rule of thumb I go by is only get one date per location per visit, for obvious reasons.

Finally, a good place for sheer quantity is the internet.  I've done a fair amount of blind dates set up over the internet.  While they're fun and I've met a number of cool people, it's definitely the lowest success rate I've seen.  Nevertheless, I do encourage people to go out and try it.  Plentyoffish.com or Craigslist are good places to start, as they're both free and get pretty good traffic.  If there's interest, I'll do a post some time exclusively about internet dating, as it seems to be getting more and more acceptable as a way to meet people.