I have a buddy who used to be terrified of hitting on girls in bars. He had no good reason to be—he wasn’t a bad looking guy, he was pretty funny, he had a good job and was confident in just about every aspect of his life. If you introduced him to a girl at a party or something like that, he did just fine. But he would not go up to a girl he didn’t know and try to strike up a conversation that would hopefully lead to sex or at least a phone number. Just wouldn’t do it.

Like millions of other guys out there, he was afraid of rejection and ridicule, which is a really pointless, self-defeating attitude. Yes, there was a chance that he would get shot down with extreme prejudice, and it was a certainty that when he came back to the table afterwards, the rest of us would make fun of him for a while. But so fucking what? Why give some chick you’ve never even met so much power over your sense of self-worth? That’s insane.

The problem is that he took rejection (or really just the idea of rejection) personally. If a girl wasn’t interested in what he was selling, he took it to mean that something was wrong with his product. And if you believe that—Okay, wait a second. I’m starting to drift towards a sales metaphor, and I was planning on something completely different, so let me just make like a Hollywood asshole and cut to the chase: Picking up women is like going fishing.

Both require a combination of luck, skill, patience, and most importantly, stick-to-it-ive-ness. Even when you’re doing everything right, sometimes it seems like you can’t land anything, sometimes they’re practically jumping into the boat.

You’ve heard the expression “plenty of fish in the sea,” right? Take it to heart. The next time you hit the bars or clubs looking to get laid, think of yourself as a fisherman. When you go fishing, you find a good spot, put out your bait and see if anything bites. If something does, then you try to real that fucker in.

Now, say nothing’s biting. Or worse, say you get a fish on the line and then you do something stupid and it throws the hook and gets off. That shit can be pretty damn frustrating. But you don’t take it personally, do you? It doesn’t hurt your feelings, right? Of course not. You might bitch and moan about it a little while your buddies laugh at you, but then you have another beer to calm yourself down, flip off your friends and either throw your line right back out there, or you lift anchor and find another spot. Either way, you try again, and you don’t give a fuck what the fish thought of you.

That’s all there is to it.

By the way, I think I should be commended for making it this far in an article where I compared women to fish before making a cheap crack about the smell.

[Image via Shutterstock]