:dubious:
Guys don’t generally do the “let’s just be friends” thing.
Unless maybe you run in the same social circle and they want to break up with you, but not cause problems for the larger group.
Og want fuck Jane, but Jane too needy. So Og be “just friends” with Jane and hope Jane not say bad things to Og’s other friends.
But why? I mean, boyfriends can be delightful things, if they happen naturally. But the way boyfriends happen is that you’ve been seeing this guy for a while, and one day you realize that you like him so much that not seeing *other * guys anymore is a sacrifice you’re willing to make for him. Because, you see, having a boyfriend has it’s rewards, but it’s also by definition a rather restrictive situtation that can sometimes be a job of work. And actually setting out to find one, at 23, seems a little backwards. At this point in your life, you should regard men the way an 8 year old regards Pokemon. Collect them all! (With special note of the excellent advice offered earlier by BlinkingDuck. Dating is supposed to be fun! Enjoy it!)
Getting a guy is easy. For the most part, smile at one and he’s yours for at least the evening if you want him. Keeping him shouldn’t be much harder, if you’re doing it for the right reasons. The right reasons are that you genuinely like him, and he genuinely likes you, and the two of you agree on how people you like should be treated, and behave accordingly.
It happened to my Cheatin’ Ex, who seemed to want to rush things with one or two guys she went out with after finishing with me. She more or less got exactly that from some fireman guy she’d been seeing for a week or so, tops, and he found it necessary to say she was getting too serious too quick. Not sure about the social circle, I’d not seen him before and didn’t again.
How did I find out the story? She told me herself. I wasn’t good enough to stay engaged to or fuck casually, but as a self-flagellating shoulder to cry on whenever her latest fling wasn’t working out (including the one she denied she’d been involved with when she dumped me), or she’d been caught literally with her pants down by some guy’s wife, I was just beans. File under ‘Shit I would not put up with if I had a do-over’, although that file’s way too thick already.
Hey Chimera , that was exactly it. Same social circle. So in your case would it be forever, or if the girl still seemed cool, retained her attractive traits, etc, would your interest be piqued again?
I’m also asking this more as an academic question . . . not really interested in this guy.
Gestalt
I just wanted to add that I did the whole “having a boyfriend just for the sake of having a boyfriend” several times when I was an undergrad and that it never ended well. Although I suppose my situation was the opposite of the OP - I ended up with guys way more into the relationship than I was. This was back in Korea, though, where casual dating was not an option. I’m much happier here, where I can just meet guys and have fun and not have to commit to anything right off the bat if I want to get to know them better, unlike back in Seoul.
I’m 25 and I’ve never had a serious relationship (by serious I mean lasting more than a few months). Not that I’m against the idea; it just hasn’t happened yet. And that’s fine with me. Maybe in a few years I’ll want something more stable, but at the moment I don’t mind “collecting Pokemon,” as DianaG so apty put it. People can smell desperation, and it’s rarely a turn-on. Go out, look nice, and have fun.
And
“Dated very briefly” and blow jobs do not go together.
Maybe it’s sexist and prudish and all the rest of it, but it is still true - why buy the cow if the milk is free? Sex comes after the relationship has reached a certain point. For a lot of men, if the sex comes earlier than that, there is no reason to continue to develop the relationship. And so they don’t.
My advice is that you don’t have sex with anyone until after you find out that he does not have some deal-breaking flaw like a bad temper. If he dumps you because you won’t put out on the third date, then that is a deal-breaking flaw. Sure, it could happen that you find out he is actually a crack addict after the birth of your second child, but that is a lot less likely than finding it out two months into the relationship.
And 23 is a little early to start getting desperate, don’t you think? More like Prime Dating Years than Pending Spinsterhood.
My $.02 worth. Consider that it is coming from someone who hasn’t gone out on a first date in over twenty-seven years.
Regards,
Shodan
It is (sexist and prudish), and it isn’t (true). People don’t buy unsampled milk. In my experience, people buy the cow when they realize they no longer want other people drinking what they’ve come to regard as their milk.
Okay, by “very briefly” I mean dated for about two months, hooked up for one . . . does that change things? It seems quite brief to me . . .
Gestalt.
Well…what have you got going for you other than your looks?
Yes, but will they be seen riding a cow in public? Eh…
You two are torturing a metaphor that was never a particularly good one to begin with. Dating is not similar to, and does not really parallel, yanking on some farm animal’s bloated teat.
Welcome to the 21st century, Shodan, where women don’t have to withhold sex to keep men interested or risk loosing their respect.
What she said. Oh, I’m sure there are guys who just want to get in a girl’s pants, but I don’t think having sex (or giving blow jobs) early on in a relationship (or even before an established relationship) is necessarily going to ruin the chances for anything long term.
Or, on preview, what Waverly said as well.
You’re not trying hard enough.
That’s pretty much it. If a guy thinks I spend too much on my appearance, that’s fine, it just means we have different priorities. Some guys are extremely frugal and want a woman who shares their values. Other guys don’t care what you spend your money on as long as you’re not looking for a sugar daddy and spending your way into massive debt.
The point is, people are different. And the OP shouldn’t need to drastically change her lifestyle and her tastes just because the change might possibly please some hypothetical guy. Find a guy that fits your life.
Gestalt, kudos to you for wanting to understand and make things work well.
Some observations from a 50 year old male, for whatever it’s worth.
Some of us are attracted to the “share every neurotic thought” thing. I am. I don’t think it’s healthy to be attracted to this, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Correction, it thinks it wants what it thinks it wants. Beats me why this tugs at me the way it does, and I am also not exactly sure why it seems like a bad idea, but there it is.
My biggest regrets in relationships have generally been a mate that is mean to me. I hate getting yelled at and criticized and so forth. And it never, ever, ever happens in my life except in romatic relationships.
Also, since you seem to be up for the brutally honest, I have a weird one to share, which is not very modern in its mood but is honestly what I think I am observing. Little boys generally play with toys that do things, like little bulldozers, and they’re fantasizing about what the toy is doing. Little girls gravitate towards dolls, and while I don’t know, I speculate they are imagining things the doll thinks or says or ways it interacts with others, or else maybe the little girl is filled with whatever her own interaction is with the doll. And now that I’m, well, approaching old, I see men focussed on things and women focussed on interaction. And when “we need to talk” comes up, what scares me isn’t talking about a relationship issue, it’s that I’m about to mix my bulldozer skills with a girl’s interaction skills, and if we were going to grade a driveway I’d be leading the way, but what’s going to happen instead is that the flavor of the whole conversation is going to get worse and worse until I’m very unhappy. And I never quite know why, and never feel like I could have steered things any better.
In fact, I think this might be part of why there are so many abusive men. We are physically stronger and more violent, generally, and so some of us may try this as a compensating thing. I don’t; I don’t have a violent bone in my body. And I certainly disapprove of it. But we’re not that different from 100,000 years ago, and social standards have certainly moved around a lot in that time. So please don’t get me wrong, I think assault should land anybody in jail, I’m just wondering about how gender relations have evolved over the eons.
Well, there it is, weird and perhaps impolitic, and with not the slightest whiff of a guarantee that I’m on to anything useful.
Long story short, please be kind to people - and FWIW I never ended any relationship with somebody that seemed kind to me.
Maybe.
My experience is that it often is.
Again, to my certain knowledge, this is not always true.
Doesn’t seem to be working out so well for the OP, does it? No matter what the century.
And by not letting them in, you weed these guys out.
Necessarily? No. Often? Yes.
And I rather doubt if withholding sex until after some kind of relationship is established is going to ruin your chances either. YMMV, but I think guys who are after only a one-night stand are more common than guys who refuse to marry anyone who won’t fellate them on short acquaintance.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, the old saw is true in a sort of Anthropic Principle way – if you want someone interested in a long term relationship rather than sex, the ones that still pursue you are the ones that are interested in a relationship. It doesn’t mean that if you hadn’t “given in”, that the one night standers would have been magically transformed into long term love interests.
The problem of course is that it also weeds out those that are interested in a relationship and sex.
You are confusing correlation with causation. In other words, you disagree with what you interpret as promiscuity, and assume it must be the source of the problem.
I think this has been said about a dozen times.
Be honest - in that you need to be honestly yourself. And he needs to be honestly himself. You can’t pull off being someone you aren’t for fifty years of marriage (and WHY would you want to).
And you don’t try and change a guy - if he is too angry for you he is not for you. If he spends too much time with his friends for your taste, he is not the guy for you. If he calls you every two hours and you are a “can skip the constant attention” girl, he is not the guy for you. And you don’t try and change yourself for a guy (sure, picking up the socks, but that isn’t a fundamental change) because if you like who you are, no guy is worth changing that (and if you don’t like who you are, fix that first - change yourself for yourself).
You attract a guy generally because he likes how you look (or a conversation you’ve had or something else). You keep a guy because you are compatiable individuals (with sex, with what you enjoy, with how you spend money). If you aren’t, all your efforts to change - or to change him - will come to naught.
Again, not in my experience. It is rather like dating for a while to find out if your potential mate has some character flaw that you can’t stand in the long run. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure” is another old saw with a lot of validity, and it applies to doing the horizontal hula right off the mark as well.
My experience is that those who are interested in a relationship and sex are willing to wait for the one before pushing for the other. And the Madonna-whore complex still operates in some (not all) men. Groucho Marx’s famous line
resonates for a reason. Some (not all) men are not willing to have a long-term relationship with someone they class as a slut, and they class as a slut a woman willing to put out on the first date. Yes, I know it is hypocritical to condemn a person for doing something you do yourself. That does not mean it never happens. And do you really want to f*ck that kind of a hypocrite?
My experience is that men fall into the following categories -[list=A][li]Those who just want to get laid[]Those who want a relationship but no sex[]Those who want a relationship and sex[]Those who don’t know what they want[/list]If you fck on the first date, you eliminate B. If you f*ck on the tenth date, you eliminate A and B. [/li]
The interested reader will have to decide what their goals are, and how large the respective groups are expected to be.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, if the girl is not necessarily looking for a long-term relationship, it really doesn’t matter. I won’t sleep with a guy on the first or even the third date (or at least, I haven’t yet), but just because I sleep with him doesn’t mean I want something long term. It just means I want to sleep with him. If that’s all he was after and doesn’t call me after the first fuck, then, you know, whatever. I might feel hurt or stupid for a day, but such is life.
IF you are exclusively looking for a long-term relationship, then maybe it makes sense to not have sex right away. But my advice to the OP is to not get her panties in a twist over it. (I mean this in a good-natured way 
) You meet guys, you have fun, maybe you like them enough to sleep with them, maybe they end up being good for more than that, or maybe they end up being jerks, and then you bitch to your friends and move on. 23 seems rather young to be shopping exclusively for what one considers long-term material.