A term I have become accustomed to is Plausible Deniability. It is originally a term emanating from government and military.
As related to this thread - I have experienced this concept in play with the women all to often. By sending subtle and couched signals, they leave open the option of denying their intent. “Oh no! You thought I was flirting with you? I’m just a friendly person!” In this they always retain the right of refusal. Granted, I’ve known a number of flirts, and that’s colored my perception, but I’ve also seen the same behavior with women I’ve been successful with. They just like to leave their options open…and in their minds remain in control.
So, as a personal defense mechanism, I learned to be wary of the signals I did detect. I suspect there are other men who have the same experience.
Non-socially inept dudes pick up women before they start sending signals, which is why socially inept dudes are constantly wondering why they can’t get a date. I learned this the hard way, but learn I did.
I know several women who like to play this game, to great effect. Ususally the rug gets pulled right after the guy gave her a discount or did her some kind of favor that she insinuated she needed help with.
No, no, you have the wrong idea. Remember, I doubted this girl was interested in me that way, so I all I asked her to do was hangout at a friends house. We were just hanging out at my friend’s house with some other friends of mine.
And while we’re hanging out somehow strippers come up, so I’m like “let’s just hire one” and we look on craigslist, and we hire one. Then call a few other friends over to watch the show.
The girl didn’t really get upset until the stripper rang the bell. I guess she didn’t want me watching a stripper while I was on what she considered-and I didn’t realize she did- a date with her.
So it wasn’t anything weird like I have a fetish where a women who likes me must watch me drool over and feel up other ladies, who are letting me do that for money, before I will date her. And certainly nothing like I was paying a whore to have a threesome with us.
I apologize in advance if I presume too much by offering unsolicited analysis and advice.
I get the impression that your unavoidable lack of socialization in HS and Uni has handicapped you to the point that so far as dating goes you’re like a 1st level character trying to hang with 18th levelers while they storm the Tomb of the Lich King.
Have you considered a dating coach? Not like a shrink, someone more like Mystery from that ridiculous TV show. They could teach you to pick up on and send the subtle cues you didn’t get a chance to learn in your youth.
All that hinges, for an individual’s perspective, on the dice being rolled before life even begins.
If there is nothing cripplingly wrong with a man, a man can change his situation.
If I understand Sunspace correctly, his problem is he can’t recognize faces immediately because his brain isn’t as massively optimized for that as most people’s brains are. That does explain why childhood was so rough, but he’s grown now.
Blind people can handle dating. I am sure, if he is as otherwise sound as he seems, he can learn now what he missed out on in his youth.
I don’t know what you think I meant by crippled, but if you’re smart enough to form that quip then you’re probably not what I actually meant in this context.
Here’s how I [del]snagged[/del] [del]coereced[/del] seduced my current boyfriend.
We were working together at the same English academy in Seoul. I’d taken note of him long before he noticed me - tall, cute, funny, polite, Irish accent.
Want.
1st encounter - faculty end-of-term dinner. Had a chat and bonded over Eddie Izzard.
2nd encounter - co-worker’s birthday party. Both of us were amongst the last lingerers. He waited for me to catch a cab and we had one of those “are we going to kiss?” moments but nothing happened.
3rd encounter - another co-worker’s birthday party. Got drunk, he escorted me to my taxi at the end of the night, I entwined my tentacles in his flesh, and we made out.
Repeat 3rd encounter ad infinitum. I mean, you’d think a girl making out with you would be a pretty good sign that she’s interested right? :rolleyes: It took a while for it to make through his thick skull that I was interested in more than kissing, but here we are, over a year later, living under the same roof. I think I’ve managed to convince him that yes, I do have a thing for him.
I spent much of the early Zeroes learning how to be socialble. Er, more socialble than I was, at least. Part of this was through group therapy.
The facilitators in the group therapy helped me to understand social cues and body language in situations that were as emotionally real as any outside in the ‘real world’, yet where I always had support and help. This was important, because I was terrified of emotional intensity. I was literally afraid that it would destroy me. (I was the kid who would run upstairs wheever two people started to argue on TV.) But during the therapy, someone supported me, touching my back, while I endured a woman’s very real anger. I came through something that I was sure would kill me. And I did it while staying in contact with a centre place inside me, a centre place that enabled me to find my own voice and even my own anger instead of just reeling and reacting to what the world hands me.
This group therapy was the most difficult thing I have ever done.
Much of my recent life since then has involved gradually training myself to withstand intensity of all sorts–tastes, textures, confusions, all sorts of things. But that’s another thread.
The upshot of it all is that a lot of this stuff can be compensated for and trained around–but you have to know that there’s a problem, and that there are solutions.
I knew there was a problem, alright, from high school. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, but, when I was outside my depression, I thought it was just a matter of changing my clothes or something: top-level cosmetic adjustments. I had no idea of the depths of the work that I needed to do, and it took major family crises to set me on that path.
Now I know I need to work to remember names and identities. I’ll never be a smooth social animal, but I can find a place for myself.
And yet I keep wondering whether there could have been a shorter way. What if people had told me about face blindness when I was in high school? What if there were social-skills coaches then? My life might have been very different.
I wouldn’t want to walk across a frozen lake, either. Too scary! The entire time I was walking across the lake all I would be able to think about was “I’m going to fall in and die!” Not romantic or sexy.
Hey! I know those thoughts! What are they doing in your head instead of mine? :dubious:
So, how you doin’?
Now that I have read her signal, yes, I believe I would get a hint that something was up.
I know that for years it was self-esteem issues that caused me problems. After a couple of relationships, I had those pretty much handled, but then I got badly burnt by a woman and backslid a bit, plus was not real big on taking chances again. Since I have been willing to try again, I have not successfully read any hints or indicators from women, assuming any women have tried to give me any.
I can remember when it was pretty straightforward. It was always the girl who made it clear that she was interested in somebody and she selected from the somebodies on offer, or sometimes made it clear that she was interested, but still had the right to back off. But now there’s been a swing against equality for a couple of generations that if they respond to a girl behaving to them as they’d want her to behave to them acting the same, she’ll have them for sexual harassement, and we are all back to a 1950s kind of world where she can act as sexy as she likes but he mustn’t respond as if it means anything for fear that she will invoke ‘feminism’ against him as trying to ‘degrade’ her as *‘sex object’ *for assuming she meant equal as he would.
That’s everything real feminism was against, but how what calls itself ‘feminism’ now commands women to feel men dominate them and they are not sexual people equal to male ‘superiors’ in their own right. Treat a woman as a sexual equal instead of a sexless inferior and a man risks prosecution.
I’m sympathetic towards your views - I definitely think that many sexual double standards are now in place that work against men.
Nevertheless, I wonder whether this sort of view could be a paranoid overreaction. Is there any rigorously gathered evidence that the scenario you just described is really common?
Then what did you mean? I probably fit the criteria, what with heavy social anxiety aggravated by general anxiety aggravated by OCD aggravated by depression (not sure whether it’s unipolar or bipolar) with possible Avoidant Personality Disorder.
I don’t know, I’d probably absolutely freak out if someone just started making out with me, even if I was lovestruck. Huge violation of personal space (and this is from someone who regularly plays “hit each other over the head” and will hug anything that moves). I can’t even imagine kissing someone until after 3 or 4 dates. Granted, see above.
