Before I tell you this story, I want you to imagine the version where I never stood up.

It happened in a Starbucks on 7th Avenue, the nice two-story one near Penn Station. There was a girl a few tables over. Petite brunette, very pretty, mouthing lines from a dog-eared script. I’d noticed a film crew blocking off 31st Street earlier.

She wasn’t looking at me. I wasn’t looking at her, exactly. I was scribbling in a notebook, though really I was using the notebook as a shield so every few seconds I could glance up at her.

In the version where I never stood up, I pretend to work, finish my coffee, and walk home.

In that version, the walk home is fine. The rest of the day is fine. Later that night I probably microwave something, watch a movie, and don’t think about her at all, because my brain already knows what to do with girls I notice but don’t approach. It files them in the rolodex.

Then maybe a week later, maybe a month, I’m waiting for a train or standing in line at Duane Reade when a flash of brunette hair goes by, and for a few seconds I feel something I don’t quite have a name for. Not regret exactly. But close. An odd mix of déjà vu followed by a sad little aftertaste.

Then, it passes. And I’m back in line.

That’s the version I almost lived. It’s the version most men do live. Thousands of times. Over decades. And I was one of those men until that day in Starbucks.

At the time, I didn’t think of myself as a guy who approached women. Hell, I didn’t really believe men approached women at all. Not in real life. It seemed like an urban legend. Something you’d see in a movie, or hear happened to a friend of a friend’s cousin.

What I actually did, for years, was what every guy I coach does now: I saw women and did nothing. I had a rich inner life about it.

That day in the notebook, I started writing the word IF.

IF I knew what to say.

IF I were better looking.

IF I had more courage.

The IFs stuck in my craw, so I tried WHEN.

WHEN I know what to say.

WHEN I’m more confident.

WHEN I’m older.

The WHENs felt better for about six seconds. Then they felt worse than the IFs, because at least the IFs were honest. The WHENs were just IFs in denial. An excuse in a bowtie is still an excuse.

Years later, after I’d approached thousands of women, I realized something: the fantasy of a future approach is the same drug as the fantasy of the girl. It gives you a little hit. It lets you stay seated. It allows you to keep scribbling in a notebook so your coffee never goes cold.

And if you let yourself keep taking it, you’ll still be sitting in that chair at sixty, with a different coffee, a different girl walking by, and the same notebook full of WHENs.

I didn’t know any of that then.

What I did know was that somehow, incredibly, I managed to close the notebook and stand up, even though my hands were shaking.

I want to be clear about what happened next, because when I tell this story people expect something cinematic.

Nothing cinematic happened.

I slunk over to her table. I stuttered through whatever line I’d rehearsed in my head, only getting out about half of it before my brain vapor-locked. Instead of finishing the sentence, I pulled out my pen, scribbled my phone number on a piece of paper, dropped it on her table, and ran.

Not walked briskly.

Ran.

Imagine the optics: a grown-ass man sprinting out of a Starbucks in midtown Manhattan.

If you’re waiting for the part where she “saw my soul” or “felt my masculine presence,” that’s not this story. That’s the story I used to tell myself back when I was still scribbling IFs and WHENs and living in my head.

The real story, in the real world, is that I did something clumsy and embarrassing. And it worked anyway. She called me. Her name was Monika and she became my girlfriend for six months.

You never know what reality is going to give you until you step into it. You cannot plan your way to that outcome from the table. There is no version of sitting in the chair that leads to the girl calling you. The chair only gives the rolodex another entry.

The reason I’m a coach, the reason I have a wife, the reason I’ve spent fifteen years teaching men this stuff — all of it traces back to getting up from that chair. Not because the approach was good. The approach was terrible. Atrocious, really.

That’s not what mattered.

What mattered was that I acted on an impulse I normally ignored, and the act itself was the reward. The girl was a bonus. The real payoff was realizing I could get up. That there was a version of me I hadn’t met yet. And here’s the inverse, which is what I want men reading this to understand:

Then it rots a little more the next time. And the next. Every time you sit and do nothing, your brain adds another data point: This is who I am. I’m a guy who sees and doesn’t move. Do that long enough and the identity hardens.

I’ve coached hundreds of guys like this. The pattern is so consistent it’s almost boring. They come to me fixated on one woman — the coworker, the ex, the one who pulled away — and they want a play. The right text. The right move. They want me to hand them the key.

But the real problem is almost never what they did with that one woman. The real problem is that they’ve been not-getting-up for twenty years. Sure, I can give them the text. Give them the game plan. Give them the temporary fix. But that’s all it is: temporary. A Band-Aid. The only way to really stop the bleeding is to start getting up. To start living in reality instead of imagining how it might—how it could be—from the goddamn chair.

So here’s what I want you to do, whether you’re forty-five and divorced and haven’t approached anyone in fifteen years, or you’re thirty and stuck on a woman who went cold, or you’re twenty-three and convinced the whole thing is rigged against you:

Next time you see her — whoever her is that day, in whatever form, at the gym, at the coffee shop, at the work event where you’re both pretending to enjoy the same mediocre pinot noir — notice the exact moment your brain starts negotiating.

Notice the IF.

Notice the WHEN.

Notice the little voice that says…

“She’s on her phone.”

“I’ll do it next time.”

“This isn’t the moment.”

That voice is the rolodex, asking for another entry. Fuck the rolodex. Don’t give it one.

You don’t have to know what to say. (I didn’t.) You don’t have to be smooth. (I certainly wasn’t.) You just have to get up. That’s the lesson. The whole lesson. Everything after that is for reality to decide. And, spoiler alert: reality writes better stories than the bullshit fiction writer in your head ever will.

The girl on 7th Avenue isn’t really the point of this. The point is the guy who never stood up. The guy who’s still in that chair in some parallel life, still writing IFs and WHENs, still filing women into the rolodex, still confusing fantasy with action, still becoming a little less himself every year he stays seated.

I could have been that guy. You still might be. But you don’t have to stay him.