But all too often, somewhere along the way, the gal simply stops responding! It would be like the gal in the club, stopping in mid-conversation and walking away. Kinda rude! I get it if she isn't "feeling it", or if she feels us as not compatible, or perhaps they are more seriously connecting to another dude. All fair reasons! But why not just make that clear? "Nice meeting you! Good luck!"

To use your party metaphor, don't think of it as you and the person you're interested in having a one-on-one conversation that she either has to continue or end. Think of it as a big group conversation, where you are one of the people talking, and over the evening, people start to pair off. You may not end up talking with the person you had your eye on, but she doesn't need to explicitly make it clear she's not interested. Maybe later in the evening you'll run into each other by the punch bowl and pick up the conversation again. Or maybe she's left with the guy who was standing next to you. Either way, she never had to go around the room and make sure everyone was clear she wasn't into them. Possibly she wasn't, possibly she just didn't really know and someone else got there first, possibly she decided to just go home and watch letterman.

f you want to think of it in 'real-world' terms, consider a girl you meet at a party. You go up to a lady at the punch bowl, start a conversation, back and forth a bit, and then go mingle with other people. If she doesn't come find you the rest of the night, then she's probably having a conversation with someone else. She's not obligated to hunt you down just to tell you that she's not interested - the fact that SHE ISN'T RESPONDING means that she's not interested.

What you're missing in your club analogy is this: you're one of ten men (or 50) standing in a circle around one woman, all jostling for her attention and each sure that when she looks at them or answers a question they're a step closer to getting her number. One of those guys is going to get her number, and two or three might get a polite demurral, but most of them are just going to end up feeling ignored.

You've got your real world analogy all wrong. It's not like someone walking away mid-sentence. It's like two people talking with lots of other people around. A third person comes into the conversation and the conversation shifts and leaves out one of the orginal people.