Excuse me miss, should I be ashamed?

A good of friend defied Matt Barone Logic last weekend. As he tells it, he saw a pretty face at some bar here in Hoboken and, while two shots of Everclear deep, mind you, waited for her to walk by him, grabbed by the arm, and confidently declared: "I'm taking you to dinner some night soon." Or something to that effect. It must have sounded more kind and charming and less forceful and wife-beater-ish when he said it, because it broke the ice and led to his getting her number, and they're continuous conversing still.

See, under the self-imposed guidelines I've lived by, females don't respond well to this sort of directness. It irks them, or makes them uncomfortable, or scares them, or results in a swift five-fingered slap across the man's dome. But when my friend did, it equaled some smooth, suave, charming approach, and it's truly boggled my brain since he first told me the tale the next day.

Have I been going about this all wrong? Should I just grab the next pretty girl I see and tell her, "W're grabbing dinner tomorrow night." I don't even know if I could....I'd be afraid that the girl would either smack me, or yell for help, or curse me off, amd my fragile self-esteem would surely crumble as a result. But maybe me never doing this is depriving me of possible wifeys, or dates, or girl-on-guy small-talk.

Like any other warm-blooded human male, I must walk by a minimum of 20 females day that I immediately think, "Damn, she's fucking hot!" But of course, walking by me is all they do. And I'm not the type to blatantly give myself whiplash as they pass, trading subtle glances for full-on tongue-wagging eye-fucking. I see how the dudes who do that are reacted to by the girl and those in the general vicinity, and it's not a public perception I'd want to voluntarily bring upon myself.

I often wonder, "Why can't one of these girls notice me, too, and our eyes connect, inspiring a convo on the spot?" That'd make life a helluva lot easier for yours truly. But instead, thye just stroll by, as we both go on our merry ways. No harm, no foul.

But maybe there is a foul here....maybe one of these girls passin' me by like The Pharcyde could be my future missus. Probably not, but you never know? I shudder to think about all of the wifeys I've let pass by due to my own trepidation and supposed respect for the privacy. Do girls even like when random dudes approach them? I can honestly say that I've never approached a girl I don't know...well, sober, at least. There has been a few times drunk in clubs that I've done so, and several has resulted in a new number added to my cell phonebook. But even those times, I've hesitated and deliberated. Maybe it's time I do so sober, during a lunch break or while sitting next to a Pretty Young Thing on my home away home, the PATH train.

Maybe one of these days, I'll man up and give this a whirl. Or maybe not. All I know is....if my friend ends up turning Ms. "We're getting dinner" into his legitimate girlfriend, the girls of Hoboken and NYC's West 23rd Street better brace themselves, because I'll be stopping any one of them who's even "kinda cute." Discretion won't be advised.