After first arriving in Europe, I took a short vacation through Sweden and Norway before moving to Germany for work. During the trip, I crossed paths with other solo female German travelers, and ended up having some fantastic evenings. As I headed back to Germany to start work, I thought to myself that I had definitely picked the right country to move to. Visions of a land filled with vast dating opportunities entered my head. Unfortunately, my initial expectations were soon to be shattered.
For a country that has so many rules and social guidelines, there is surprisingly no standard path when it comes to dating or asking someone out. Relationships normally just slowly develop as people repeatedly meet each other via their overlapping friend groups. In Germany, there is not much of an intermediate dating stage prior to being in an official relationship. Even proposing to simply “grab a coffee” together with someone is interpreted as being a much more intimate of an offer than it would be in most other countries.
Marking indirect implications, which is a staple of flirting, is not in line with how German’s normally communicate. Germans are also a bit taken aback when they receive compliments from a person that they don’t know well. Germans take what a person says directly to heart, and don’t say things simply out of an attempt to seem friendly or polite. Once after simply complimenting a German girl on her scarf, she replied by saying that I was one of the most romantic people that she had ever met. Clearly she had never spent five minutes with a French or Italian man.
As I tried to navigate the world of German dating, I came across the following three unique ways of how Germans were trying to better orchestrate the courtship process.
Speed Dating on a High Speed Train
No, this is not an excursion trip to another city. During this event, the participants never actually get off the train. The train just eventually turns around and returns directly to the station from which it departed. While I get the concept of speed dating, I did not understand why it needed to be held on a moving platform. A stationary venue without wheels would seem just as suitable of a location. Now, if the Deutsche Bahn app let you select another single passenger to sit next to and chat with on your route to the same destination, then that would be German efficiency at its finest.
My only theory was that they wanted to increase the likelihood of interactions between people by tightly confining them together in a familiar environment. And to prevent the people from leaving the event because of nervousness or embarrassment, they needed to hold it on a vehicle that was moving at over 100 km/hr. The pain of jumping from a moving train had to be higher than that of interacting with total strangers.
Electronic Matchmaking Party
At this party, everyone registered their cell phone number upon entry and were given a sticker with a unique ID number to wear on their chest. You were then to walk around the party, and if you saw someone that you liked, you could text their ID number to a specific phone number that the organizers provided. If that person has done the same with your number, then the match would be shown in front of everyone on a big projector screen in the middle of the room. You could then go locate that other person and talk to them without an initial fear of being rejected. I guess you could consider it as being like a live Tinder event.
I personally found this whole setup to be ridiculous. If you see someone you like at a party, then you should just walk up and talk to them. But the Germans wanted to play this game by the official rules, and thus considered an on screen match to be a prerequisite to talking to someone. This structure turned what could of been a fun event into a modeling competition, where one would just walk by people and hope that they liked what they saw and wrote down their number. The whole point of a party is so that you can interact with people in person and evaluate them on more than an just an online photo. This event took the worst and most superficial part of online dating and then needlessly imposed it over an actual in person event.
Red/Yellow/Green Wrist Band Party
After walking through the door at this event. I was instructed to select a colored wrist band to wear, where the color was to indicate my availability status to others.
Red: No chance
Yellow: Maybe if you try hard enough
Green: I’m ready to go
Most of the men present picked green, while most of the women, so as not to seem too easy, picked yellow. Even though I was single, I decided to try my hand at some reverse psychology and picked the red band. I think out of the hundreds of people there, I may of been the only man wearing a red band.
Firstly, people always want more that which they can’t have. Additionally, no German could imagine that anyone would choose a band that did not accurately represent their status, and thus the red band let me sneak into interactions under the radar. With the red band, women felt more comfortable talking to me from the start, while the other men around them did not realize that I was a threat until it was too late. After already establishing a rapport with a girl, I could simply slip in a joke such as “I’m actually single and the red band is just to prevent myself from being trampled by too many women trying to get at me all at once.” At this point in the interaction, after attraction had already been established, the woman was glad to find out my true status.
I found improving my social skills in Germany to be similar to how Olympic athletes train at high altitudes. If you can perform well in such an extreme environment, everywhere else seems much easier. The good thing about Germany was that there was little competition if you actually had the confidence to approach strangers and start a conversation.
Eventually after discovering a few cultural nuances, and more importantly the overall attraction principles which are the same everywhere, I ended up going on dates with over a dozen German women.
If you are interested in learning the core skill set for attracting women that worked for me not just in Germany, but in every other country as well, then check out my book Fundamentals of Female Dynamics.
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