How do you meet women? I'm pretty sure the only good way is to not try and to do it by accident.
Two ways.
The first way, as several others have suggested, is to meet friends-of-friends. If this isn't proceeding as quickly as you'd like, try to consciously increase the variety of your social engagements--go out with people you otherwise wouldn't from work/school/church/hobbies/whatever. Overextend yourself and plan to cut back later. In this step the object is not to meet women; it's to meet people you get along with well, eventually you will meet up with their broader social groups, and this is the wide pool of people where you are likely, eventually, to run across someone.
Note: At some point in this process you are going to run into someone who is OMGPERFECT except she will be totally taken/about to take monastic vows/not interested in you/moving across the country next month. Don't despair. Iit means you're on the right track, and also, she has friends.
The other method is online dating. This works best if you are good at expressing your personality and sense of humor in writing, and ideally if you are reasonably photogenic. You'll hear scary stories of the gender ratio being awful. That may be the case, but the ratio of
quality men to quality women isn't that bad. As a guy online dating, the difficulty you will encounter is that you'll encounter the profiles of women who seem totally perfect, but they won't write back. This will be frustrating to you unless you understand the difficulty of women online dating, which is this: being swamped by unwanted attention from low-quality men who are either flailing around desperately, or who are just there to get their rocks off by harassing women. My understanding is that being on the receiving end of this is emotionally draining--this seems reasonable--so sometimes, through nobody's fault, your heartfelt greetings fall into a pit of frustration and anger. To avoid too much pain on your own end, then, be sincere, kind, funny, and
brief. Don't invest too much emotional energy in anyone online until you've met.
Depending on your levels of enthusiasm and energy, you can try these methods in parallel.
There is a popular idea about meeting people on the street or in bars and clubs. I suppose this works for some people, but if you were the kind of person this worked for, you would know. I am definitely not one of those people.
If you have ever seen the TV show
How I Met Your Mother, do your best to forget everything in it. Ted is a tool who goes about pretty much everything completely wrong, from the idea that there is a "The One" out there to the way he meets women to the way he treats them at every turn; and then fails to learn from his mistakes, or does it painfully slowly.
