If you’re crushing it with women, and you can’t even find time to hook-up with all the girls throwing themselves at you, feel free to ignore this article.

For the other 96% of you, listen up, because I’m going to tell you how to stop making the single mistake that is crippling most of your attempts to do better with women:

Bars and clubs are (for most of you) the worst possible place to meet women.

Wait, what kind of bullshit linkbait is this? TUCKER MAX is telling me not to go to bars and clubs to meet women?

Damn right I am. I’m not telling you that bars and clubs are bad places to go. Hell no. Going out, getting drunk with your friends and screaming curses at people is awesome.

I’m telling you that if that’s your strategy to get women, it’s probably not serving you very well. And you know it. Let me explain why:

This is probably a bad assumption to make with most guys, but let’s assume for a minute that you have your shit together. You’re in decent shape and you get enough sleep that you aren’t a zombie, you have a good personality and a good group of friends, and you don’t look like you live in a homeless encampment under a freeway overpass.

Chances are, if you’re anything like the guys we hear from every day on The Mating Grounds Podcast, you are still struggling to find and meet the kind of women you would actually like to date. You’re doing everything right, and yet finding someone you could actually spend 15 minutes of non-naked daylight time with feels like the search for the holy grail, if the grail were made out of unicorns and parking spots right in front of your building. So what gives?

For most of you, it comes down to one thing: you’re looking in the wrong place.

I talk a lot more in depth about this in my new book, Mate: Become the Man Women Want, but the long and the short of it is that we have been programmed as a society to believe, especially in college, that if you want to meet a lot of single women you have to go to bars and clubs and big-ass parties. And it is true: those places can have lots of single women in them.

But you’re not going to “meet” any of them, at least not in the conventional sense that leads to conversations, then dating, then relationships. Those places are packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people who are shit-house drunk listening to music that could obscure a 747 landing on the roof.

The idea that you should be able to walk into a bar or a club, confidently approach a woman, and either seduce her into a hook-up or attract her into a conversation isn’t just a bullshit, toxic myth, it is a limiting belief that has probably handicapped your mating life and your sexual confidence for years.

Wait, you’re thinking, how can this be? If you’ve read my books, you know I did very well meeting women in dark, crowded, noisy places full of drunken rivals and tipsy women.

Guess what asshole? You aren’t me.

That’s not an insult. There is a lot of upside to not being me. What you aren’t realizing is that from a mating perspective you aren’t well suited to a bar environment–but I am. I’m very outgoing, confident, loud, funny, and verbally fluent (I talk good), even when I’m drunk, in addition to being in good physical shape. In a typical bar I’m like a lion at a crowded savannah watering hole: I’m going to drink all the water and probably take down a wildebeest.

Most guys aren’t like that. Which is why bars and clubs are so bad for them.

Men want to project their physical confidence, show off their attractive traits to women, and protect their sexual self-confidence. But what do most bars and clubs offer men?

A set of drunk, sexually frustrated male strangers, some looking for a fight, in a noisy, crowded, chaotic environment that makes it impossible to display anything other than physical attractiveness, extreme charisma, or materialistic status symbols (i.e. watches, sunglasses, designer clothes), and a set of tipsy women, already irritable about being hit on by lots of men, ready and willing to reject you in a way that everybody can see.

You couldn’t design a worse environment for men to meet women.

And it’s not much better for women either. Women value their physical safety (they don’t want violent guys), their social safety (they don’t want their judgmental friends to slut shame them), and their power of female choice (to just say no to your stank penis).

But what do most bars and clubs offer to them? A dark, exposed environment with few places to hide; little protection from stalking or harassment; a jostling crowd of male strangers, mostly looking for short-term hookups, who had to get drunk enough to approach a woman; and a set of female rivals and acquaintances competing for the same men, watching who goes home with whom, who are capable of talking mad shit to every one of their friends and her friends and your friends.

The idea that bars and clubs are good places for men to meet women goes against everything in human biology.

There are virtually no cultures in history that expected their young people to find mates by throwing them randomly together into dark, noisy, threatening environments, with no structured activities or reasons for interacting, and hoping they’d sort themselves out into couples that would last.

Bars and clubs present the exact opposite of a safe, easy, stress-free way to meet potential mates, to display your attractive traits (e.g. all that shit we assumed in the beginning that you had together), and to work your way through a normal dating process.

If you’re still not convinced, look at it like this: on a deep, primal level a woman’s worst fear is that a man will assault her, and a man’s worst fear is that a woman will sexually humiliate him. BOTH of these elements are directly in play at bars and clubs. It literally puts men and women into the worst possible situations for mating.

If you don’t like bars and clubs because you always end up going home by yourself at 2am to your sticky masturbation cave, stop thinking you need to fight this natural instinct to avoid them. It’s OK to not like bars and clubs as places to meet women. Especially women you would like to be able to talk to and be around and maybe even date.

So the obvious next question is: “okay, where should I meet women then?”

The best way to meet a lot of women you are more likely to have something in common with is to make your dating life an extension of your social life.

Imagine your house is volunteering with a sorority at a community event, like a weekend park or beach cleanup, picking up trash to make the neighborhood nicer for everybody ‘n shit. Suppose that after you’ve been working alongside everyone for an hour or so, you notice an attractive woman there who you haven’t seen out at the bars when your brothers have forced you to go out with them on Thirsty Thursdays or Two for Tuesdays. You hold some trash bags open for her, and she helps you load them onto a truck. You work alongside each other for another hour or so, just being cooperative and friendly. Eventually the cleanup is winding down, and you want to strike up a longer conversation with her.

Think about how much better of a scenario this is for meeting a woman compared to approaching a random woman in a bar: Instead of being a potentially unsafe stranger approaching her in a dark loud bar, you’re a guy who is part of a group she is also in, you have a legitimate reason to talk to her, and you have things to talk about related to your group or activity.

Furthermore, there are virtually no social consequences for her (or you) in talking in this situation, so you can be free to flirt as much or as little as you’re comfortable with. You don’t have to worry about her rejecting you, because your interactions are in the context of a volunteering event. You can interact with her in a risk-free way and get much more feedback on her attraction to you before you make a decision to actually move toward a romantic relationship. You can show her your attractive traits in this context as well.

If you’ve worked together for a couple of hours on a goal-directed activity like cleaning a park, she’s already been unconsciously judging you, and she can see the attractive parts of you far easier in this setting than in a crowded bar full of other guys vying for her attention.

Even in a simple volunteering task, you have the opportunity to show her not only that you care about something she cares about, but that you are intelligent and socially conscious and that you can lead people, talk to people, etc. This gives you the chance to shine in many ways that are not possibly in bars or clubs or at parties, all in a completely normal context, and in a way that is very low risk socially and psychologically.

You can use these conversations to learn all about her and find out if she is someone you’d like to date. She’s no longer the sweaty mysterious hot girl in the dark, loud bar; she’s just a sweaty, normal girl who’s spent her Saturday afternoon doing the same thing you did.

BONUS: The more social activities you do, the more people you meet. And the more people you meet, the more of their friends you meet, and the more friends you make and social activities you get invited to, where you can meet more women. Rinse and repeat.

The moral of this story is this: when you think about “meeting women,” do NOT imagine trying to approach a beautiful woman you don’t know in a crowded bar full of strangers. This makes you anxious for very good reasons. Instead, think about putting yourself into social groups and activities that include women, where you do things you already enjoy with people you like. When you meet a new woman in a social setting based on shared interest and activities that you can talk about, you don’t have to try to escalate all the way from total stranger to potential hook-up in just one conversation (which is very hard to do, by the way, even for the most experienced guys).

You only have to upshift from known, familiar, trusted, like-minded, socially popular guy to potential boyfriend. And if a woman in your group thinks you’re even slightly cute or interesting, she’s already anticipated that upshift in her own mind before you even say hi. She’s just waiting for you to sack up and do it.

Here’s what’s cool: once you meet those women doing these social activities, THEN you invite them to go get drinks with you that night, THEN you two can experience all the fun cool things about bars, like getting drunk and rubbing up against each other.

This turns the entire bar environment on its head. You are now a known quantity and a protector in this unsafe environment, and you look 100x better than those douches who come to the bar in large male packs with no females—you know, what you used to do.

Plus bonus: you’re both getting drunk, which is always awesome. Simply because you already know her, the bar is now working for you, instead of against you.

So, make a list of all of the things you think the type of woman you like might be into. Then make a list of the things you like to do and the places you like to spend your time.

You see those things that overlap on both lists? GO FUCKING DO THOSE THINGS…IN A SOCIAL GROUP. Then once you know her, take her to the bar.

It really is that simple..