I think I care about the consequences too much to be confident. It bothers me to put people on the spot, or embarass them or make it hard to interact with them afterwards. Its not alot of fun to have that effect on some people and being confident, to me at least, means ignoring the consequences of your actions which I am not able to do.
This is probably the best advice, and more than anything I need to be able to pick up signals of interest to avoid embarassing myself or alienating people.
Hmmm. I’m not really stressed about it I am more worried about alienating these women. Usually when I make a post about women people usually assume things about me that are not really on the ball (no offense, its partially my fault for not being clear enough), that has been my experience ever since I started doing that. Let me try to explain things from my perspective.
Yes I do lack self confidence. I worry about the negative effects that my liking of women will have on them. That is an obvious sign of lack of self confidence IMO, if you think that you liking someone is somehow a threat to them or offensive to them then yeah you lack self confidence. A self confident person would be comfortable enough with themselves to accept themselves and the views others have on them.
I am trying to work on fixing that, but its not something that happens overnight. Its not as bad as it used to be and I assume it’ll get better but for now that is where I am mentally.
On another note, I do fear talking to women, but not prohibitively so. If ‘all’ I feared was talking to women or getting a ‘no’ then there wouldn’t be as many problems. But my main fear is alienating people, not rejection. If anyone has advice on how not to alienate people while still showing sexual attraction to them I am open to advice. I do not like it when women avoid me or avoid eye contact or I put them on the spot. That is definately not worth a handful of dates and this is the main reason why I don’t try. If all I feared was asking women out I wouldn’t have asked out 3 in the last 2 days. One was face to face, 2 were online but had I been in person and in private I would’ve asked the other 2 out face to face too.
And yeah, self confidence attracts women but it sometimes seems like people are implying that self confidence and a lack of personal foibles is some kind of unchangeable deal breaker with women instead of something that will make them like you a little better. I do not want to attract women who I have to purify out all forms of weakness in myself in order to make them like me (it sometimes seems/feels like that is what people are implying at least). I’m not perfect, and If I were a woman I wouldn’t want to attract the men who had 10-20 physical traits they ‘required’ and work on obtaining all of them, and it works both ways. I don’t mind being more attractive to women mentally by being more comfortable with myself, more outgoing, or more self confident but purifying and reforming myself mentally until i am not offensive to anyone who (it feels like at least) would reject me out of hand at early signs of weakness or abnormailty is not something I want to do. I’m going to make mistakes, embarass myself and look stupid, its just a question of how much. Everyone does.
As far as not alienating, here is where the cafefree and off the cuff thing works for you. A woman who has rejected you will look to you to see if she needs to avoid you afterward or not. If you can pull off the carefree, yeah, so what, that never happened, she will happily play along. If you act all weird and avoid her, she’ll do the same. Because she rejected you, she won’t act like it didn’t happen first because then she thinks she looks cruel.
Women don’t want perfect men. We want men who can roll with the punches and laugh at themselves, because life is less stressful that way. Someone who dwells on the negatives or gets worked up over mole hills is an energy drainer and no fun whatsoever. The dance goes that everybody puts their best foot forward at the beginning of a relationship, then you let your dirty laundry (foibles, faults, etc) out a little at a time. If you don’t play the game that way, people will think your dirty laundry IS your best foot, and they will think that if this is the best you’ve got, they don’t want to see the rest!!!
So don’t be perfect - just be carefree and if you do make mistakes, laugh them off and let it go. We like that crap. It makes you cute. But making a mistake and getting all mad at yourself is uncomfortable and creepy.
I think about it best like a job interview. This is an interviewing process - you don’t have the job yet, so you need to sell yourself. I give the best job interviews when I don’t really need the job because I am not nervous. I don’t know how/if that helps, but that is how I see it anyway. If you can convince yourself you don’t care because it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to act.
Thats good advice and I do by and large laugh at myself as evidence by alot of this thread. I don’t want to alienate people. Should I email one/both of these women to try to smooth things over? I don’t want to leave on a bad tip because I have to take classes with one and I enjoyed the company of the other. I was thinking something like
“Well, I figured it was worth a shot. Insert pablum about school/life/etc…”
I don’t have any advice. I was where you are now once (we even had the rudiments of email), and all I can say is I think it’s admirable that you made the effort. It takes king-sized brass cajones, every single time, to work up the nerve to ask somebody out and face possible rejection, so hat’s off to you. I wish I could tell you something erudite and wise that would make all your doubts and concerns about the ramifications of some-or-other overture vanish into thin air, but I got nothing. It never made my anxieties go away when people told me to forget about it, so I won’t try to bullshit you with the usual laundry-list of meaningless platitudes. Just pat yourself on the back for having the guts to do what you did.
As far as smoothing things over how about this. I’d write these after I go to the event so I have something to talk about.
To the AI
"lol, it was worth a shot. The exhibit wasn’t bad and some of the paintings were pretty interesting since they tried to express some very dark aspects of life. I thought you were a good teacher and I really enjoyed talking to you in class, I hope your career and your life work out the way you want them to
Name"
I dont know what to say to the student right now.
Alright rough drafts, the goal isn’t a date its to smooth things over at this point. Tell me if they come across as creepy or fake or anything like that (assuming someone other than me replies to this thread, which may not happen since I am the main replier to my threads half the time)
To the AI sent after the art exhibit
"lol, it was worth a shot. The exhibit wasn’t bad and some of the paintings were pretty interesting but blah blah blah about art. You were a good teacher, and I enjoyed talking to you. You are also really easy to talk to and get along with, which is an ability which i’m sure will come in handy throughout the rest of your life. Your teaching skills and ability to simplify complex subjects are pretty good but Inorganic is pretty copious so adding more detail might help the people you have to teach next since one of the main problems in inorganic in my experience is you might not even know that you don’t know something until its too late, its not like other classes like organic where what you don’t know is obvious, in inorganic you may not even know you don’t know. Aside from that, you were a good AI and I enjoyed the class, I hope your career goals work out the way you want them to
Name"
To the student, sent before the art exhibit
“Its no big deal to me either way, I just wanted to ask. I am not sure what kind of curve the class will have but I am hoping it’ll be pretty good. If you go to (website) they show you the grade distributions of all the different professors and the grades they give in each class, and our professor gave about 72% of the class an A or B last time he taught it. I don’t know if an A or B is important to you (i’m assuming your pre-graduate school since about 2/3 of chem majors are pre-graduate school) but I know alot of people in class were terrified of failing. Hopefully we will all be ok. Do you know who is teaching A314 in fall? I hope its Dr. Robinson, she is a good analytical chemist. Or Dr. Peters. They both give good explanations and good grades in exchange for effort.”
No!
If you must send the rest of that email, then by all means go for it. But do not end an email like this. Regardless of your intentions, it implies bitterness!!! Please don’t say anything even remotely similar to that statement. Or anything like:
“I hope you live a happy and fulfilled life”
“I hope your career goals are met”
“I wish you all the luck and happiness for the rest of your life”
Just trust me.
Is this one sentence? Your standing there again with your hands in your pockets staring at your feet.
And about the anal with words thing. Well… yes. Words are very important, IMO. But once you get used to saying things a certain way, then it isn’t so much “anal” as it is “natural”. But my buddy and I will still Moday Morning Quarterback ourselves and discuss things we said and how we should have said it better. I don’t remember the last time I did anything by email, so it’s all face-to-face for us.
But even if I end up with a number, or if I’m on the phone or something and even if it seems she’s being very receptive. As soon as the conversation is over, my buddy would be like, “Dude, you should’ve said…” or I’ll be like “Man, I should have said (whatever) but I didn’t think of that until it was too late.”
Or whatever. We do that with each other all the time.
Or we’ll say “that was awesome” “Good call, I would never have thought of that”, “How did you pull that out of your ass” or “That went well. I’ll remember that one”. It’s kind of a big game to us. But the exact words you say and the way you handle the situation, the way you come off and all that. It’s all VERY important.
RE: The Student.
She didn’t decline yet, did she? She still might say Yes, right?
Dont say this. It will be IMPLIED if you make NO MENTION of it. If you say it’s “No Big Deal” then it must be because you’re still talking about it. If you don’t say anything about it, it must not have been a big deal since you’re not even bringing it up.
Make sense?
Good luck!!
Oh and costumes. If I were you, I would have a couple friends dress up as different Ninjas. With lasers, swords, guitars and all the things Ninjas have. And one friend dress up as a Hippo!!! This is what my buddies and I are doing in a January!!!