There’s freedom in playing pretend

By Eliza Feffer

The night that the Eliza Go Talk to Someone Game was created started with a vodka shooter procured from the inside of a purse and, spoiler alert, ended with me throwing up in the Union Street Ale House bathroom. I met up with my friends for cocktails, and girls’ night soon devolved  into free green tea shots and Coronas from our favorite bartender. That night, pre-vomit, I told my friends, “I’ll talk to anyone right now. Tell me who to go up to and I’ll talk to them.” Thus, the Eliza Go Talk to Someone Game was born. 

I approached my friend’s elementary school crush and his friend who we spotted across the bar, thinking my friends would come in for backup after. They did not. The two men stared at me blank and disinterested. The interaction was so painful I stopped talking mid-sentence and receded swiftly. It was embarrassing, but I survived. Fast forward to the aforementioned vomit and me nursing a Gatorade in bed until 2pm the next day. Thankfully, I was entertained by texts recounting the silly interactions of the night in my bedridden state. That was what the Game was all about at the time, mining for entertainment from idiot boys and often, my own absurdity. 

After a few years of practice, I’ve reflected more on what the Game really represents. Sometimes when I approach, I tell the guy that this is my whole schtick. I even tell them the title of the Game. No one has ever questioned why I call it a Game. The novelty isn’t lost on them, proving that the Game is in fact a subversion of social norms. It’s never about the way I approach, but the fact that I’m willing to do it at all. Ninety percent of the time I just say “Hi, how’s your night going?” It usually does the trick. Here’s this random girl hitting on me. It gets most of them curious enough to keep talking because they’re not used to it. Straight women have become socialized to “play hard to get”, to be submissive, while men are meant to go after what they want, to win the prize. If it were normal for women to approach men, then it wouldn’t be a game at all, it would just be my life. I doubt any men have gamified hitting on girls, at least not in the same way.

At the risk of sounding like another person saying “those kids and their damn phones,” it’s apparent that the lower stakes of checking out whose single on an app have outweighed the risk of potential face-to-face rejection: we’ve become horrible at talking to each other. If I wanted to have a drink with my friends, I could do so in the comfort of my own home, for a much lesser cost. I go to bars to talk to people, whether they’re potential romantic partners or boys who make me cringe so hard that I have to rehash the conversation the next morning just to make sure it really happened. I assume that’s why we’re all there. Which is why when men tell me they’re nervous to approach women, I challenge them to ask themselves why I’d choose to go to places that unironically play “Mr. Brightside” and charge thirteen dollars for a gin & tonic if my intention were not to find a potential mate. I think there can be a happy medium between being creepy, which men have told me is a reason they don’t want to interrupt girls’ night, and striking up a good old-fashioned conversation with a cute stranger. We can probably all get better at communicating with one another. This could be where Stare at a Guy From Across the Room strategy comes in. I didn’t invent that one, but this is how we give men the signal that it’s OK to come up and chat without actually initiating the conversation. Baby steps. 

Once on a date–a happy consequence of the Game is that it sometimes results in first dates–the guy asked me if I’ve always been like this, or if something clicked one day that got me started. I told him the story about Jacob from my summer before my senior year of college, when I worked in San Francisco as an intern. The story goes, I saw this really hot guy at dinner (apologized to my date for talking about another guy like that in front of him but he understood it was relevant). I saw him at the bar later that night and I thought “OMG, it’s the hot guy from dinner and this is my one chance.” And so I went up to him and just said, “I saw you at dinner.” Easy, he was intrigued. We talked. He asked for my phone number, and we went on a date the next week. 

I had never experienced “adult” dating before until the summer before my senior year of college. Growing up, I was a “boys are just intimidated by you” girl. I was always the tallest in the class. I felt awkward. I stuck out. No one had a crush on me. Even in college, I always thought I was not the type of girl that the hot guys liked (no offense to anyone who had a crush on me in college). This is not an attempt to feign humbleness about my appearance or sex appeal, just a genuine result of compounded lack of male attention for my entire adolescence. No matter how much work I had done to accept myself, it was impossible to manufacture the validation of romantic or sexual attraction.

But here I was, a girl who didn’t go on many dates or even feel like men showed interest in me in general, and I had pulled the hottest guy in the room. It had been as simple as counting down from three and taking a chance. I had the power to choose. And even more than that, I had disproved my long-held belief that guys like that don’t find me attractive and never would. 

Outwardly, I know that approaching men makes me look outgoing and self-assured, but the truth is that I’m just as scared as everyone else. I tell people I’m able to do it because it’s pretend. Getting rejected would just exist in the bubble of the Game, not real life, and I can just laugh about it after. When I’m flirting with a stranger, I feel like I’m taking on a persona. I’m entertaining my friends, I’m putting on a show. For some reason, I’m able to separate the two in my head: who I am during the Game and the Real me.

I was explaining this to my friend and she made a good point: “Don’t you think after doing that so much that actually is you?” “Oh,” was all I replied, stunned into silence. I’d never thought about it like that before. If you pretend to be confident enough, maybe you just… become confident. Was I confident when I approached Jacob to tell him I was gawking at him at dinner? All I felt was fear. Was I confident when I was dancing on a table in a Vegas club, pointing to a group of boys wearing yarmulkes, and mouthing “I’M JEWISH TOO,” while gesturing to myself and then the top of my head? (One of them lived in San Francisco and we went out a couple of times). I justified it as humor. Was I confident when I had approached my date at a bar because my friends told me to “go talk to the guy with the mustache”? I’m not sure, but he did ask for my number in the end.

When I think of the people who I find confident, I wonder if they feel the same. How much of confidence is simply a performance? Arguably, this Game was born from insecurity, but the act itself is perceived as a confident one. I started doing stand-up around the same time I started dating, and I once said during a set that people tell me I must be confident to be able to stand-up. The punchline was that it’s quite the opposite: I do it because I need external validation. Laughter is instantaneous feedback. The Game is just as much of the literal performance that is stand-up comedy. Assuming I can make a crowd laugh just by speaking into a microphone is arguably delusional. I’ll admit, that takes confidence. Or at least guts. In stand-up, I talk about being Jewish and neurotic, hating my body, and going on bad dates. I’m airing my deepest insecurities and secrets to a group of strangers. Even when I’m standing up there, talking about dieting since the 7th grade or feeling ugly, the act of doing so conveys confidence.

I’ve read that confidence is built when you make promises to yourself and keep them. Over time, as you set small goals and achieve them, you have proof that you can trust yourself, and from there, confidence and self-esteem are established. I’m wondering if the Eliza Go Talk to Someone Game is a sort of chicken-or-egg situation. I set up the challenge: talk to the tall guy in the corner. Then, in a small act of courage, I complete my challenge. Regardless of the result of the interaction, I proved to myself I could do something scary. That’s where the real confidence comes in. Maybe it was never about the male validation in the first place. I get validation from my attempt at seeking out male validation, or something like that. Stand-up is the same. Just going up there and putting myself out there is a brave act, regardless of how the jokes land.

Is there really much of a difference between who we are and how we act? I don’t know where Game me starts and Real me ends. Does my willingness to put myself out there make me inherently confident, despite my inner self screaming that I’m uncool? Or is the Game no more than a pressure valve, allowing me to release some of the angst that so readily builds up inside of me? Regardless, the more I force myself out there, the more I’ve begun to feel my two selves blend together into a Frankensteiny combination. Mutant, belligerent, perhaps slightly deranged, I keep going up to men in overpriced bars and try to make pleasant conversation. Maybe one day it will finally pay off.

Eliza Feffer is a writer living in San Fransisco.