Lexicon ·
approach anxiety
noun
- Stated meaning
- Fear of starting a conversation with a stranger, treated as a condition that practice wears down.
- Operating meaning
- A cost booked against a conversation before it starts, estimated by the one party who has not heard the other's answer.
- Origin
- Pickup vocabulary, in use on the seduction newsgroup alt.seduction.fast by April 2006, where a forum's FAQ was quoted listing it as a topic of field reports.
By April 2006 the term was settled enough on the seduction newsgroup alt.seduction.fast (opens in a new window) to be quoted as a category. A poster reproduced a forum FAQ which said its field reports now “deal less with issues like DHV and Approach Anxiety.” A month later another poster described his own case in the tense of a recovery: “I still get a little bit of approach anxiety. But that all comes in time.” The condition later became a business address. By 2012 a coaching site was operating at approachanxiety.com (opens in a new window).
Psychology measured the same fear without the courtship. In 2014 researchers at Chicago Booth (opens in a new window) found that commuters “reported a significantly more positive commute when they connected with a stranger than when they sat in solitude,” and the paper (opens in a new window) traced the preference for solitude partly to “underestimating others’ interest in connecting.” In 2018 a study of first conversations (opens in a new window) named the error the liking gap: people liked their partners more than their partners guessed, and the discrepancy held (opens in a new window) for conversations from 2 minutes to 45.
Under load, the anxiety is a forecast with one input. The approacher prices the answer before it is given, from the only position that cannot see it, and in both studies the estimate ran low. The pickup shelf treats the forecast as an obstacle and sells repetition to wear it down. Neither the forecast nor the remedy consults the stranger, who is the one party holding the figure.