I guess it just sounded kind of personal. Duly noted.
So what’s the alternative? Encourage people to continue sabotaging themselves unnecessarily because it seems more “in touch”?
You’re right. They *should *worry about it. They should worry a lot.
Heck, maybe they actually do have some fundamental deficiency. Some guys really just are completely unfuckable. And to those guys, I want to say: Sucks to be you, can’t really help you. I’ll be in the next thread over.
But the elephant in the room is obvious enough, at least to me:
A lot of guys who have very little romantic success, when you look into it, are also usually very passive when it comes to finding romantic success. They are very reluctant to change potentially self-sabotaging behaviors. They are defeatist, negative, and likely to think the problem is about person, not behavior, without actually changing the behavior.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And I think those guys are completely curable.
There’s no easy alternative, and it all depends on your level of personal involvement. Ultimately, if you want people to actually stop worrying about it (which is where I think you’re going with “don’t worry about it”), they way they think about things, their cognitive structures, whatever you want to call it, have to be changed on a fundamental level.
It’s not that I disagree with you that “not worrying about X” is the desired goal, to be clear. It’s that I think that outright telling people “don’t worry about X” is the absolute worst way to make them stop worrying about it, and one that ultimately ends up hurting people more often than it helps them.
Once or twice, maybe. I was working for a small software company out west that got bought out, and a few of the employees accepted offers to move east and join the new company. The company put the word out that we were new in town and there were efforts to make us feel welcome. I really don’t think it was a case of having settled into a friendship already before the Valentine’s Day Massacre.
I’ve heard of such events, certainly, but never gone to one. No real reason, I guess; maybe it just seems like such a shot in the dark that it’s hard to give it the effort it deserves.
See, it doesn’t feel like she decided she wasn’t interested. It feels like the thought just never even occurred to her.
Well, our parents do have some influence on our lives, don’t they? When I was growing up, there were certain things that were just taken for granted that I’d do someday; learn to drive, go to college, get a job, etc. It’s not like we talked about them constantly, but when the subjects came up it was “when” and not “if”. Dating and sex weren’t “when”, and they weren’t even “if”, they just weren’t things that seemed to exist in the world I was to inhabit.
Of course, I don’t know how other people were raised. Maybe that sort of thing was normal and I’m wrong to think I missed something. If anyone wants to comment I’d be curious; did you grow up with an assumption or expectation that you’d find romantic/sexual partners sometime in your life, and can you remember how that assumption came to be?
I can see the absurdity in my tale. Thought I might write a novel someday and work that into the plot, but I’d be worried it’s not believable.
And you may say that this sort of thing happens to other people, but I also notice that everyone is trying to explain it away as something other than what I say it was.
My parents never expressed that expectation for me…probably because I never expressed it for myself. But plenty of others did. Every time I’d visit with aunts and cousins, the question was, “Have you met any nice boys lately?” And I’d always have the same stock response, “I’ve been so busy!”
I guess I always assumed my parents didn’t want to presume things that weren’t in evidence. I actually like that they took this tack.
OK, fair point.
The worst case physically possible scenario: She wasn’t keen on you, and rejected you in a roundabout way. That, plus the fact that you really wasn’t a very important part of her mental world, so she didn’t spent much time fretting over it or thinking about you. Other, more important things were on her mind. Then, she forgot the whole thing. You didn’t matter.
That is basically as bad is this gets here. And, yeah, that’s not great. No point in sugarcoating it. But I’m pretty sure that similar things have happened to other people, too. So, not just you.
Some tough love here: Most people aren’t very important to most other people. People have other stuff on their minds. That’s universally true, I think. And there is nothing really wrong with that.
There are also other less bad scenarios.
Is it just me, or are these threads getting more full of insight lately? It seems that the earlier ones devolved into the OP (usually a younger guy) being sternly lectured and predictably getting defensive. The amount of good discussion in the last couple has greatly increased. I’m not saying that talking to strangers on the interwebs is a replacement for professional help, but it’s probably better than having the same late night discussion over and over with a small group of friends (pointing a finger at myself here). I’m seeing a lot more acknowledgement that it’s an extremely complicated issue, and that everyone’s situation is different. How many of us had trouble finding a job at some point, and wondered if we were unemployable? I’m fortunate that I was able to follow the “trouble finding employment after graduation so go to grad school” plan, but I realize that it’s a much bigger struggle for a lot of people. It’s a different issue, obviously, but another where there can be a fine line between good advice and empty platitudes.
Actually, to expand on this, because it may be very important. There is already a poignant expression for this:
You have spent years turning this incident over in your mind. But for her, it was Tuesday.
Not sure what to do with that information. But it is a common human thing.
That woman who rejected me once, ten years ago, that I’ve thought about ever since, and who sometimes appears in my dreams? She hasn’t thought about me for a second after that. Not once. She doesn’t care. And in a way, it’s completely narcissistic for me to think that she would or should care.
For most people, almost all interactions with all other people are just Tuesdays. Very little matters, and very little is remembered later.
I think my parents’ assumption was that I just wasn’t trying. I mean that in an “oh, there’s no way there aren’t lots of women out there who would love to date our son”.
The best I was able to do before actually meeting my wife was “yes, there are women out there who would see me as a ‘good catch’ for them, but they are so few in number that the chances of actually meeting one of them are miniscule.” I probably improved my odds a bit by moving to a city where there were millions of people living close together. Yes, that was my main reason for moving to the big city. Hey, it worked.
You’ll never really know and it was such a long time ago. I think the takeaway is that 1) it was a very clear romantic overture and you shouldn’t feel like you need to ask women on dates differently for them to understand (but leave out the flowers)
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You may or may not have gotten too friendly before initiating the date, but in general the longer you wait the more likely it is the next woman will make up her mind about you romantically without ever going on a date. I don’t think rushing to ask a woman out is generally good advice, but it doesn’t sound like flirting comes naturally to you. I think getting into an obvious date setting would benefit you. Honestly it’s why I always asked for dates quickly and it worked well for me.
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Don’t forget it’s entirely possible you did nothing wrong and she was being flakey. You’ll never know. It’s clearly still hanging over your head but to the extent possible don’t let it influence your next date.
It doesn’t really take any effort beyond whatever you need to go through to steel your nerves. I think it would benefit you to meet a bunch of women who are unquestionably there to potentially date you. Of course there’s the possibility that you won’t match with any of the women you like, or frankly that you won’t even like any of the women. But it’s not a lot of money or time invested.
From my point of view, those earlier threads have been an incredibly defensive younger man who whose defensiveness led him to being sternly lectured, but I can see how that would be in the eye of the beholder.
I’ve enjoyed posting in this thread. I really hope it makes people feel better. I don’t think anyone who’s been posting in it is in any way a bad person or inherently undatable or undeserving of love.
Yeah, the defensiveness may have come first, depending on how one looks at it. I’ve also enjoyed posting here. I wish my story were one of experiencing some epiphany that led to me meeting the love of my life, but the reality is that I happened to be standing next to the keg when the future Ms. P arrived at the party. Maybe that’s the lesson; always stay as close to the keg as possible.
I could have phrased the question better. It’s not so much the assumption that you would be with someone, but just that you might want to. There’s a difference between being allowed to make up your own mind and never even hearing that the question applies to you.
Oh, I know; I’ve certainly got the time and money to do it. It’s just a case of being in the right headspace between risk and reward, like buying a lottery ticket for my well being.
Well one thing that I hope you could agree with me on is that once you finally find the right person, all the years of feelings of inadequacy and anxiety that every one of us has start to fade away. They don’t go away immediately or entirely, but I can’t watch a TV show or movie or talk to single friends without thinking how glad I am that’s all just a part of my life that’s in the past.
Although I did have a nightmare last night that my wife stopped loving me and was leaving me, which I attribute to this thread. Luckily in the waking world things are great.
I’ve had that dream too, although not since this thread started. It’s always reassuring to wake up with Ms. P next to me. My big thing now is hoping our teenage sons avoid my mistakes.
The problem there is that you’re looking at those other relationships from the outside and assuming that they fit your pattern which you have in your head: that the relationship exists because the woman decided that the Bad Guy was attractive and worth spending time with.
In reality, that is only one possible reason why a relationship might work out and it’s flat ignoring any agency on the part of the male half. You’re assuming that the male half is a Bad Guy (with no redeeming human qualities). You’re assuming that female half is attracted solely because of what you assume are his bad qualities. You assume that they’re together solely because of her choices - ignoring his agency (when in reality, everyone, even Nice Guys, have choices). You’re assuming that they love each other (when hell, they might not even like each other). You’re assuming that they’re together because they value each other (when they might well be victimizing each other.)
The bottom line is - you’re making a lot of assumptions about other peoples’ relationships and from those assumptions, you’re generalizing wildly about the female half of the relationship and what it is you think we’re doing.
Other peoples’ relationships never make sense from the outside. Don’t build your self-identity around what you assume other couples are like.
In my younger years and to some extent now for some reason I project that bad boy image. I go out of my way to avoid that. I have found the women who are attracted to that side of me I have no use for. If they are attracted to the nice guy side of me I am much more open.
I am genuinely struggling to understand how my attempt at a distanced, somewhat academic dissection of the “internal morphology”, if you will, of self-described “Nice Guys” (of whom I have known more than a few) is being interpreted as my personal thoughts on and understanding of these situations.
I am, in case this is still murky to anyone, describing how self-described Nice Guys I have known approach this internally, not my personal attitude to the matter. I have many demons of my own, thank you very much, but this is not one of them.
Sorry - point well taken.
The thing about “nice guys” and “bad guys who beat women” is that the nice guy always sounds like the woman is a possession without agency. “If she weren’t with the bad guy who treats her poorly, she’d be putting out for me.”
There isn’t room in the logic for concern for a woman who is getting treated poorly. There isn’t room in the logic for her getting out of the relationship and taking time to be single and know who she is. There isn’t room for her to decide she prefers women.
Its like she is an object going to a less deserving person, and should she discover that less deserving person wasn’t deserving, she should be passed to someone more deserving. All based on the opinions and logic of the person who thinks they are more deserving, not hers.
And that’s the sort of weird closeted misogyny that is common in “nice” guys. It isn’t “oh my God her boyfriend beats her. We men can be such shitheads. How can I help? - and no, I don’t want to get into her pants, I want to make sure she never comes to work with another black eye” Its “if she’d only come to her senses, she’d date MEEEEEE!”
(And, by the way, offer a place for her to sneak her stuff out to while she moves out. Over to help her move out when he is out for an evening (the cops will supervise to make sure he doesn’t show up if they can). Offer her help finding a place to stay (not your place, unless you are about to leave on a three week business trip). Offer to take her pets until she finds a spot not in the shelter - a lot of women get stuck in relationships because they won’t leave their dog behind and the shelter won’t take pets.)