In today’s article you’re going to learn everything you need to know about how to be comfortable around girls.
You know the moment. She walks over, says hi, and your brain quietly leaves the building. Your hands suddenly feel borrowed. You say something about the weather, and then you replay it in bed for three nights straight.
If that sounds familiar, you have plenty of company. Gallup’s May 2025 analysis of its World Poll data from 2023 and 2024 found that 25% of American men aged 15 to 34 felt lonely for a lot of the previous day, compared with 18% of young women and a median of 15% for young men across OECD countries. Loneliness and nerves around women aren’t the same thing. They do feed each other, though. The more awkward it feels, the more you avoid it, and the less practice you get.
The hopeful part? Being at ease around girls (or women, depending on your age) is a skill you can learn. Like most social skills, it improves with practice and with some honest data about how other people actually see you.
Below are 13 ways to build it, each grounded in research, plus what to do on the days it doesn’t go to plan.
1. Assume she likes you more than you think
After a first conversation, most people walk away convinced it went worse than it did.
Psychologists call this the liking gap. Erica Boothby and colleagues first described it in a 2018 paper in Psychological Science: strangers chatting in a lab, first-year students getting to know their dorm mates, and adults meeting at a workshop all underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them. Among the dorm mates, the gap lasted for months.
It has held up since. In a November 2025 paper in The Journal of Social Psychology, sociologist Susan Sprecher of Illinois State University pooled data from pairs of strangers meeting for the first time and found that the liking gap was robust across the individual studies and conditions she examined. Put simply, the version of the conversation playing in your head is harsher than the one playing in hers.
That matters because assumptions drive behavior. If you’re sure she found you boring, you’ll cut the chat short, avoid her next time, and never find out you were wrong. A shaky read on yourself turns into a real problem. Learning to stop underestimating yourself is half the battle here.
Your move: after your next conversation with a girl, jot down one thing she did that signaled interest. Maybe she laughed, or asked you something back. Then remind yourself that your gut leans negative by default.
2. Warm up with low-stakes conversations
The fastest way to lower the stakes with girls is to lower the stakes everywhere.
Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, tested this with Erica Boothby and Gus Cooney in a 2022 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Participants played a week-long scavenger hunt that required them to find and talk to strangers again and again. Compared with a control group, they ended the week less pessimistic about rejection and more confident in their conversational ability. The change was still there a week after the study finished.
The numbers are what stay with you. As psychologist Marisa Franco summarized in Psychology Today in 2023, participants predicted strangers would be open to talking about 40% of the time. The real figure was 87%. And 41% of those who talked to strangers swapped contact details with someone. Sandstrom’s 2026 book, Once Upon a Stranger, describes a larger study of nearly 200 people and over a thousand attempted conversations; according to a published summary of the book, only about 13% of those attempts were turned down.
Say you’re in line for coffee and the girl ahead of you is wearing a T-shirt from a band you like. “Did you catch them on tour?” takes four seconds. Worst case, she gives a short polite answer and you order your drink. Best case, you’ve just had a free practice rep.
Start small: aim for three tiny conversations a day for one week, with anyone at all. Keep a tally on your phone. If you blank on openers, these small talk tips give you a few to keep in your back pocket.
3. Build a ladder and climb one rung at a time
Think about how you’d get stronger at the gym. You wouldn’t load the bar with your max on day one. You’d add a little weight each week, let your body adapt, then add a bit more.
Confidence around girls follows a similar logic. Pick the easiest step that still makes you slightly nervous, repeat it until it feels boring, then move up a rung. The comparison works because both rely on repeated, manageable stress followed by adaptation. It breaks down in one place, though. Muscle grows on a fairly predictable schedule, while social fear tends to drop in jumps, with bad days mixed in. Don’t expect a straight line.
The research behind this comes from exposure therapy, which sits at the center of cognitive behavioral therapy for social anxiety. A March 2025 meta-analysis by Kuleli and colleagues, published in the Journal of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy, compared real-world exposure with virtual reality exposure and found that both reduced social anxiety symptoms, with moderate effect sizes and no meaningful difference between them. What they share is graded, repeated contact with the thing you fear, without bailing out halfway.
A ladder might look like this:
- Say hi to a girl in your class or office by name.
- Ask her a question about something you share, like a lecture or a project.
- Join a mixed group conversation and add one comment.
- Ask a follow-up question about her weekend.
- Suggest grabbing food with a group that includes her.
Here’s a simple way in: write your own five-rung ladder tonight and do the first rung three times before Sunday.
4. Ask the second question
Most people ask one question, get an answer, and then wait for their turn to talk.
The data on this is surprisingly specific. Hinge’s 2025 Gen Z D.A.T.E. report, published in November 2025 and based on surveys of about 30,000 users, found that 85% of daters are more likely to want a second date when they’re asked thoughtful questions. Yet there’s a mismatch the company calls the question deficit:
| Gen Z daters (heterosexual) | Share |
|---|---|
| Feel they ask enough questions on a first date | 62% |
| Feel their date asks enough questions | 30% |
| Rate a follow-up to something said earlier as a thoughtful question | 61% |
This is a company survey, not peer-reviewed research, so read the exact percentages with some caution. The pattern matches the science, though. In 2017, Karen Huang and colleagues at Harvard reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that people who asked more questions, especially follow-ups, were better liked by their conversation partners. In speed-dating data, people who asked more follow-ups got more agreement to a second date.
A follow-up does two jobs at once. It proves you were listening, and it moves the spotlight off you, which is exactly where a nervous person wants it. For more on keeping a chat going, these conversation tips are worth a read.
Next time, do this: when she mentions anything specific, like a trip, a class, or a dog, ask one more question about it before you change the subject.
5. Listen like her answer actually matters
Good listening calms the other person down. Researchers have actually measured it.
Guy Itzchakov and colleagues reported in a 2018 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that across five experiments, high-quality listening, meaning attentive, empathic and non-judgmental, reduced speakers’ social anxiety. More recently, a December 2024 study in Royal Society Open Science by Tia Moin, Netta Weinstein, Itzchakov and colleagues randomly assigned pairs to high-quality or ordinary listening after a short video training. The high-quality listening pairs reported more positivity resonance, a shared sense of warmth felt by both speaker and listener. It didn’t change anxiety or felt authenticity in that study, and the authors call the findings early. Still, the direction is clear: when you listen properly, the moment feels better for both of you.
There’s a selfish benefit too. Attention is limited. Every bit you spend on her words is attention you’re not spending on monitoring yourself, and self-monitoring is what makes you stiff. Real listening is also most of what it takes to be an understanding person.
In one conversation this week, put your phone face down, keep your eyes on her, and repeat back one thing she said in your own words before you add a story of your own.
6. Drop the safety crutches
Safety behaviors are the little things you do to feel protected: rehearsing lines in your head, keeping your answers short, avoiding eye contact, holding your phone like a shield. They feel helpful. They mostly aren’t.
Psychologists David Clark and Adrian Wells laid out why in their 1995 cognitive model of social anxiety, and the mechanism runs in steps. First, you fear coming across badly. Second, you lean on a crutch to prevent that. Third, the conversation goes fine, but you credit the crutch instead of yourself, so the fear never gets tested. Fourth, the crutch eats attention, which makes you look distant or uninterested, and that raises the odds of the very reaction you feared.
That last step has experimental support. In a study published in January 2023 in Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, Grishma Dabas, Karen Rowa and colleagues at McMaster University had 29 adults with social anxiety disorder and 40 students without it hold a get-to-know-you conversation with trained partners. The socially anxious group was rated as less likeable, and the statistical link ran through inhibiting behaviors such as staying quiet to avoid attention. The sample was small and the mediation analysis is correlational, so it doesn’t prove cause on its own. Combined with earlier experiments that manipulated safety behaviors directly, it points the same way.
Test it this week: pick one crutch you rely on and drop it for a single conversation. Then notice what actually happened, not what you predicted would happen.
7. Go first, just a little
What if she’s waiting for you to open up, and you’re waiting for her?
That’s roughly what Hinge’s November 2025 report suggests. Among heterosexual Gen Z daters, 49% of women said they hesitate to start deep conversations on a first date because they want the other person to go first; only 17% of men said the same. And 42% of those women believe the men they date don’t want meaningful chats early on, while 65% of the men say they do. Meanwhile, 48% of Gen Z men hold back emotionally because they don’t want to seem “too much.”
So both sides stand at the door, politely waiting.
One more figure from the same report helps. 52% of Hinge daters said they’d felt ashamed after being emotionally open, yet only 19% said they felt uncomfortable when someone opened up to them. You judge your own openness far more harshly than the other person does. Again, this is survey data from a dating app, not a controlled study, but it lines up neatly with the liking gap from point one.
Going first doesn’t mean unloading your life story. It means a small, honest detail: a real opinion, a mildly embarrassing story, something you’re looking forward to. Warmth plus a bit of openness is a big part of being charismatic.
Give it a go: next time a chat stalls at surface level, share one honest detail about yourself, then ask her the same question.
8. Call the jitters excitement
Your heart is pounding, your palms are damp, and your mind is racing. Is that fear or excitement?
Physically, it’s nearly the same state. Both involve a faster pulse, adrenaline and heightened alertness. What differs is the label you give it, and the label steers what you do next. Read the pounding heart as danger and you start scanning for exits. Read it as a sign that this matters to you and you lean in. Telling yourself to calm down asks your body to drop from high arousal to low arousal in seconds, which it rarely manages. Relabeling keeps the energy and changes its meaning, which is a much smaller jump.
Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard showed this in experiments published in 2014, where people who said “I’m excited” before singing or public speaking performed better than those who tried to calm down. The newest synthesis is more measured. An April 2024 meta-analysis of randomized trials in Scientific Reports by Michel Bosshard and Patrick Gomez pooled 44 effect sizes and found a small overall improvement in performance (d = 0.23), somewhat larger for public performance tasks (d = 0.34). The authors are clear that this isn’t a silver bullet, and none of the trials tested dating specifically. A small edge is still an edge.
If your body is running too hot to relabel anything, a few quick nervous system resets can bring it down a notch first.
A quick experiment: before you walk into the party, quietly tell yourself you’re excited, out loud if you can manage it, and see whether the evening feels any different.
9. Get on your own side
Self-esteem asks whether you’re good enough. Self-compassion asks a different question: can you be decent to yourself even when you’re not?
That second question seems to matter a lot for social nerves. In an October 2024 scoping review in the journal Mindfulness, E. T. Slivjak, J. J. Arch and colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder mapped the research on self-compassion and social anxiety. Nearly all the correlational studies found medium-to-large negative links: the kinder people were to themselves, the less socially anxious they tended to be. Interventions built around self-compassion improved self-compassion, social anxiety symptoms or both, often more than waitlist or inactive controls, though not more than other active treatments.
Most of that evidence is correlational, so it can’t prove that kindness toward yourself causes calmer conversations. The practical logic is easy to see, though. If every awkward pause sets off an internal lecture, talking to girls becomes something to dread. Take the lecture away and the stakes drop. If your inner critic is especially loud, this guide on how to stop hating yourself goes deeper.
When you catch yourself replaying a stumble, ask what you’d say to a friend who did the exact same thing, and say that to yourself instead.
10. Swap some scrolling for rooms with people in them
On 30 June 2025, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection released its first global report. It found that 1 in 6 people worldwide is affected by loneliness, a problem linked to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted at the launch that rates are especially high among young people. Commission co-chair Chido Mpemba argued that technology should be strengthening human connection rather than wearing it down.
Why does this belong in an article about girls? Because comfort is built in the same places connection is: in person, in shared spaces, over and over. Texting and social media can be a useful bridge, and there’s nothing wrong with getting to know someone through messages. But you can’t get used to being around girls while mostly being around a screen. The reps have to happen in real rooms, at a class, a club, a volunteer shift, a friend’s birthday.
If your phone keeps winning that tug-of-war, a dopamine detox done properly can loosen its grip.
One small change: choose one evening this week when your phone stays in your pocket and you go somewhere with people your age.
11. Move your body, ideally with other people
Exercise won’t make you smooth. It does make you less anxious, and that helps more than you’d think.
The strongest evidence so far comes from a 2026 umbrella review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine by Neil Munro, James Dimmock and colleagues. They pulled together 81 meta-analyses covering 1,079 trials and 79,551 participants. Exercise reduced anxiety symptoms (standardized mean difference −0.47) and depression symptoms (−0.61), with aerobic exercise showing the biggest effects. For depression, the largest benefits showed up in emerging adults aged 18 to 30, and group or supervised settings were linked to bigger improvements. For anxiety, shorter and lower-intensity sessions worked best, so you don’t need to destroy yourself to get the benefit.
Keep the limits in mind. These are symptom measures, not a test of comfort around women. But less background anxiety means more room to be present in a conversation. And a running club, a climbing gym or a dance class gives you something no gym session alone can: a mixed crowd and a built-in topic. It’s one of the most useful good habits to have for exactly that reason.
Your move: sign up for one group activity that raises your heart rate and commit to four sessions before you decide whether you like it.
12. Do things side by side
Ever noticed that some of the best conversations happen in the car, or around a campfire?
Nobody’s staring at anybody. Eyes stay on the road or the flames, and talk drifts into the gaps without pressure. Shared activities work the same way. When you’re both focused on a task, the conversation becomes a side effect instead of the main event. The comparison has its limits. Eventually you’ll want face-to-face connection, and an activity can turn into a hiding place if you never look up from it.
Why does it help? Because self-focused attention keeps social anxiety going. Freda McManus, Carla Sacadura and David Clark at the University of Oxford showed in experiments published in 2008 that when socially anxious people focused inward and used safety behaviors, it made things worse in several ways. An activity pulls your attention outward almost automatically. You’re thinking about the puzzle, the recipe or the next trivia question, not about how your face looks.
It’s also an easy way to practice being friendly without forcing anything.
Next time, do this: instead of asking a girl you know to “hang out”, suggest something with a built-in focus, like a trivia night with friends, cooking something together, or walking her dog with yours.
13. Learn to take a “no” well
At some point, someone will say no. Hearing it usually means you’ve finally started putting yourself out there.
Logan Ury, director of relationship science at Hinge, framed it bluntly in the company’s February 2024 Gen Z report: “If you hide from rejection, you’re also hiding from your dreams.” Her argument is that rejection resilience is a skill you build, not a thick skin you’re born with. The same report found that 56% of Gen Z Hinge daters said worrying about rejection had stopped them from pursuing a potential relationship. That figure comes from the 2024 edition; the 2025 edition didn’t repeat the question, so treat it as the latest available number rather than a fresh one.
How you take a no matters as much as how often you hear one. A short answer, a polite exit or a plain “I’m seeing someone” is information. Accept it warmly, don’t push, don’t argue, and don’t make her manage your disappointment. Being someone who handles a no gracefully makes you safer and more pleasant to be around, and people notice. Reading those signals well is a core part of emotional intelligence.
When you hear a no, say something kind and simple, like “No worries, it was nice talking to you,” walk away, and count it as one more rep done.
What to do when you slip
You’ll have weeks where you freeze up again, dodge a conversation you meant to have, or say something clumsy and want to vanish. That’s normal, and the research says so.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in PeerJ by Wake and colleagues notes that exposure-based therapy helps with social anxiety but often doesn’t lead to full remission, and relapse after treatment is common. If even structured therapy has setbacks, a self-guided project will too. A bad week doesn’t erase your progress.
What you do right after the slip matters. In a 2018 study in Mindfulness, Rebecca Blackie and Nancy Kocovski had 98 socially anxious students give an impromptu speech. Those guided to respond with self-compassion afterward ruminated less the next day and were more willing to face future social situations than those who ruminated or got no guidance.
So, when it goes sideways:
- Name it in one sentence (“I panicked and left early”) and skip the three-hour post-mortem.
- Ask what a kind friend would say about it, then say that to yourself.
- Step back down one rung on your ladder from point 3 instead of quitting.
- Book your next rep within 48 hours, before avoidance hardens.
Sandstrom’s 2022 participants grew more positive and more accurate day by day, which is the whole point: it’s repetition, not one perfect night, that changes how this feels. If a rough evening knocks your mood flat, here’s how to turn a bad day around. And if the anxiety is intense, constant, or stopping you from living your life, a therapist trained in CBT can help you work through it faster than any article can.
Final thoughts
Nobody becomes comfortable around girls in one heroic leap. It happens slowly, through dozens of small and slightly uncomfortable conversations, and through the gradual discovery that people like you more than you assumed.
Pick one item from this list and do it this week. Just one. Then pick another. If you want more on building friendships and connection, browse the Relationships section for your next step.
