I have not said otherwise (and I think no one else in this thread has said this either)
This I agree with.
This though, I disagree with.
If I am attracted to a girl because of her looks and her character, I don’t give a damn about her social status.
Also, if I find a girl ugly, no matter how assertive she is or how high her social status, that will never be able to make her attractive to me.
I assume most, though not all, men think the same.
On the other hand, most, though not all, women do consider the guy’s social status as part of their (conscious or subconscious) calculus whether the guy is attractive or not.
BTW, on a fun note, here is an exchange that I had with my girlfriend a while ago, that I think is the distillation of the differences in what men and women look for in the opposite sex.
We were looking at a magazine and we saw a guy that was considered hot at the time, and whom my girlfriend hadn’t seen before.
I ask her “Do you think he’s attractive?”
She says “I don’t know, I have to hear him speak first”
There are plenty of guys that would get a kick out of bedding a cheerleader or the homecoming queen. A google image search for cheerleading team or homecoming queen don’t turn up a lot of outright dogs, but plenty of average to somewhat-goofy-looking young women mixed in with a few real hotties. However, nobody gets worked up about dating someone in the Model UN. although the pictures for that turns up have plenty of cuties.
If a girl is not attractive, she can be a cheerleader, a homecoming queen, and a fashion model all at once, but that would still not make her a more attractive sex partner to me.
As to whether guys would get a kick out of bedding one of the average looking cheerleaders, I think most single guys would get a kick out of bedding (almost) any girl.
Wow, sven, I am sure there are cases of guys with unrealistic expectations, but there are also plenty of damaged-goods single moms who want Brad Pitt crossed with Warren Buffet. The broad brush is not helpful.
Yes, the OP also used a broad brush of a sort, but it was not such a put-down as the one you posit.
Without trying say who is a fat loser, etc., let me give you a personal example that supports the OP, sort of. When I started my job, I was fresh out of school, energetic, optimistic. I read a lot (no friends in a new city). I worked out about four nights a week at my all-night gym (no friends in a new city). I went home and ate chicken breasts and hard boiled eggs and wheatgrass shakes (part of the working out regimen, and living alone in a new city with no friends). I had what one calls a “spiritual life.” I was optimistic, considerate, patient, and always up for a social outing with anyone who (rarely) asked – including some kind of annoying or not-my-type people as to whom I bit the bullet and said, well, going to a String Cheese Incident concert or Kansas State basketball game can’t be that boring (these are not, to put it mildly, my true interests). If a girl asked if I was seeing anyone, I would truthfully respond, “No,” thinking that would make me more attractive because of the lack of complications. There was no danger of my dogging a girl’s footsteps, even due to my lack of friends, because I was working a fair amount (though not a crushing amount).
And I dated . . . 1.5 women in two and a half years.
It’s not that I wasn’t putting myself out there. I went out every time I could. With the few casual acquaintances I had, I went . . . not to anything you would call a “singles function,” but we/I certainly did not spurn any function at which single women would be present. But they certainly never wanted to seek me out, and when I sought them out, were politely lukewarm, for the most part.
Fast forward to now. The important thing I need to emphasize is that, unlike in the late '90s, when I was 155 pounds of reasonably well-hewn sinew, today I am something of a desk jockey with far less lean muscle. Several years of subsidized gorging and swilling have made me physically and morally (if gluttony is a sin as we’re told) more degenerate. Work has made me impatient and sometimes harried. My spiritual outlook is significantly more jaundiced and less charitable or idealistic. Life in my city and my business has left me jaundiced. I’m kind of cynical. Sometimes harsh. Certainly more impatient. More likely to decline an invitation to hang out with people I don’t have much in common with. In sum, it could be argued that I am an objectively worse and less attractive person than I used to be.
And . . . women in the past five years are an order of magnitude more interested in me than in the late 1990s. A few women have spontaneously approached me and tried to strike up conversations even when I’ve had/have a GF. Others, when I was single, responded at a fairly high rate to my conversation and invitations to join me on outings.
What’s changed (other than the negative changes I chronicle above)?
*I have male and female friends. A pretty fair number, and they are pretty cool or could be seen as having a decent level of status.
*At any given point over the past five years, I’ve been likely to be dating or seeing at least one woman.
*I make more money than I did 8 years ago.
*I’m more established in my career.
*I guess I have more confidence in the fact that if one woman doesn’t like me, another eventually will.
That’s it. So this is not the situation of the self-proclaimed nice guy bitching that some hypothetical jerk getting the girls. This is the case of the comparative jerk/slob who used to be a nice guy and who can objectively testify that he’s enjoyed a lot more female receptivity since getting a circle of friends/inamorata and other indicia of status, even at the same time some of his “inner qualities” or things that would seem to have made the old me a better friend/BF have deteriorated or gone sour.
None of this is a condemnation of women or a gripe (I’ve got things pretty good now, so the system works, right?). It is just testimony to the fact that I think the OP has some truth to what he’s saying.
You seem to be invested in insisting either that men and women have identical, commensurable problems, or that there is absolutely no basis for generalizing about “women’s approach” or “men’s approach” (even though you then fall back into positing a pattern of fat slob guys seeking swimsuit models, which is a generalization in itself). Women and men have, I think, generalizable, but distinct, patterns of behavior/misbehavior, biases, and expectations/preferences, in the dating marketplace. The one the OP posits on behalf of women seems not implausible to me.
Well from a strictly evolutionary psychology point of view (hi Sven), picking a mate is alot harder for a woman as she has to find someone who is not only good genetic stock (aka attractive) but is reliable, considerate, trustworthy, loyal, a good provider, will not run out on them, etc. so she isn’t stuck with 3 kids and two sticks to rub together while zog is on the other side of Africa by now with another woman. There is a book called ‘the cliff walk’ about a professor who doesn’t get tenure and can’t get another job. His reaction is to collapse into a suicidal, drug addicted mess for a year or two. He had I think 5 kids at the time. Women have to be able to predict if a man will collapse and destroy himself or fight if something happens down the road (hence the fact that women obsess over relationships and whether the guy remembers dates more than men do, it is a subtle test to see if he is reliable. I saw all this info on national geographic and reading ev. psych. books). They need to predict if he will run out on them and hte kids or not (even today women who are single and have kids are one of the biggest impovrished groups in the US with one of the lowest escape rates). Men just need someone who will get pregnant easily and this is obvious by a woman’s appearance.
On some level it is based on that because men don’t really think about this stuff. I have no idea how though. I can pull something out of my ass though. Because women have a hard time figuring out if a man is ‘good’ or if he will fall to shit 5 years down the road with 2 kids they rely on the opinions of others far more than men do to determine who to mate with. A woman will care more than men if other people find someone respectable or likeable, or attractive. I read a study saying the same thing, that women find a man more or less attractive based on the opinions of others, whereas men do not care as much. If you want to use this trait women have to your benefit (caring what others think, outsourcing their research on who is a ‘good’ man) next time you try to meet women surround yourself with beautiful women. The women will think you actually have something to offer because you are surrounded by pretty women, imagine the suprise on their faces when it turns out that nope, not the case.
Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, sorry if I am, but it sounds like you are saying not being annoying to people you barely know is more important than liking yourself and enjoying yourself. That is really bad advice.
You became comfortable around women. You got used to spending time with them. They stopped being this mysterious monolithic “women” and started become your friends, co-workers and aquaintances. Approaching women stopped being some big thing, and started being natural. Conversation started to flow as freely as it does when you are among your guy friends. You found your groove. And you grooved.
And, well, people arn’t always the best judge of their own good qualities. Your “optimism” might be someone else’s “hopelessly naive”. Your “patience” might be someone’s “squishily passive”. You give it away when you say :
I bet you now invite your friends out to the stuff you think is fun- and I bet you are in a far better mood and more engaging than you were at the String Cheese Incident. Inviting people out is a great way to make friends (and girlfriends). Waiting patiently for them to invite you out is a good way to spend a lot of time at home upset that your friends don’t like you. And this isn’t related to gender at all.
I seem to hear a lot that people ought to be able to get dates even if they have poor social skills (and this goes for men and women). It’s just not true. Skills are skills, and they have to be learned. Just like sports or business or anything else. People want to be around other people that make them feel good, and making other people feel good is what social skills are all about.
I’m not on the outside here. I was mercilessly bullied as a kid, and as a result never learned much in the way of social skills- something that’s haunted me at various points in my life and has been a constant learning experience. I got the full brunt of the all the girl-drama that goes on in schools, and always felt like my social options have been unjustly squashed by the popular girl clique. To be prefectly honest, I still don’t get along with girls much and I’m a lways scared they are going to turn on me- I thank god every day I’m not a lesbian, because I suck at interacting with girls. I’m scared to death of them.
And so as a girl, I guess I have a lot of perspective on both sides of this subject.
And it pisses me off when people frame this as a “I have trouble with girls because they are shallow/evolutionary autometons/money grubbing/unfair” thing instead of a “I have trouble with girls because I’m not so good at interacting with girls”. It’s really not fair to us. Nor is it fair to paint as universal holders of this great sexual power that we can use to get anything we want. A lot of women feel a lot of genuine heartache and lonliness, and it’s not right to negate them like that. We’re all humans on this planet, sharing for the most part the same fragile hearts. A testicle and an ovary arn’t so different. A penis and a clit have the same nerves. We’ve got a different mix of hormones and different life experiences, but we share a lot more than we don’t. We should feel united in our lonliness, our need, not at war.
Especially if our goal is union with each other.
And I really want to help people, because I see so much of this in my friends and it tears them apart. It always amazes me how many guys who can’t get girlfriends will come on and tell me what women want. I’ve been there, man. And I’ve turned down a lot of guys knowing they’d go home and cry about it for a week (and plenty of guys have made me cry for a week.) It’s tough and sometimes it’s inevitable.
But a lot of it could be avoided if we stopped thinking “Cargo” and “Cosmo” represent the realities of gender relations. If guys took the time to learn what really goes on when a woman has her period and women stopped getting all heated up when guys look at porn. Frankly I don’t think women know enough about either men or women- most women would be hard pressed to draw a picture of their vulva. We’ve had threads with actual debate about which hole women pee out of. It’s increadable. All this energy is spent on mystifying each other and then we spend more time reinforcing those beliefs (or facts, whatever you believe) instead of tryiing to work through them.
I guess I should get off this soapbox. I hope all you guys find love, or whatever it is that you are looking for. And I hope the same for all those lonely women out there, too. It’s a tough world, but honest self-examination and communication go a long way towards making it a little easier. And I hope that you heed my advice as at the least an example of what one woman thinks, and can draw something meaningful from that, whatever that may be.
Boy, reading all this makes me glad I finally accepted and settled on being single for a good long time. I no longer have any interest in playing the game, only self-improvement and independence. I have friends I love, and family too, but I have no expectation of getting married or having kids at this point (28), I don’t expect to date a whole lot, and I am wrapping my head around all that and getting okay with it. I now firmly believe that you cannot rely on others to complete you or make you happy – you either have to make yourself happy, or just shoot for contentment. That’s where I am right now, and it feels like a major load off.
Yeah, same here. 25, never had a girlfriend. And I don’t really want one. (If the right girl fell into my lap, so to speak, I might appreciate it. But I’m not spending any energy looking.) It seems that the more I learn about dating and relationships, the less I like the idea of them. All that work, and for what? A close friend that you can fuck? I’d rather have several close friends that eventually go home so I can download porn. Best of both worlds.
No, I just wasn’t as clear as I could be is all. My bad!
It was two seperate concepts that I let get muddled.
The first was I just hate the phrase “love yourself” with a passion. I think it gets grossly overused and trotted out as a panacea for all ills. Also, I think that it is inherently useless as advice. Being comfortable with who you are and happy with that person is probably one of the single most important things a person can do for themselves. However, people don’t ever phrase it that way. They just throw out “love yourself, man!” and trot away in to the sunset, secure that they’ve given the bestest advice evah! Makes me want to smack them.
The second was that if you aren’t comfortable and happy with the person you are - if you’re angry and bitter and filled with self-pity and a martyr complex big enough to eat Toledo, the only people who will be comfortable enough around you to want to spend copious amounts of free time with you (i.e. form a relationship with you) are people with a similar mindset. Not the best foundation for a healthy relationship.
Yes, the best of the world of an angry loner and an antisocial hermit.
I don’t know about you folks, but I get kind of depressed if I spend all day sitting around playing videogames and watching TV. I don’t mind wasting the day by myself, but I like being able to look forward to doing stuff with my friends at some point.
The question is why do women (really all people) find having no friends to be such a turnoff? Well the answer should be self-evident from the various responses of people in this thread who have elected to more or less quit life. What do you bring to the table that someone would want to hang out with you?
Here’s the Bottom Line. Be comfortable no matter who you are. Approach as many people as you can. Some will not like you, some will consider you an acquaintance, yet others friends. Some will consider you romantically, others will classify you as “other”. It’s all good, just take joy in community, however you might do it, or how it comes to you. Everybody has a connection, nobody is isolated. I do know that if you judge people on the superficial and dismiss per “quantities” and “convienience” , you will miss many friends and lovers in life.
Really, I haven’t heard anybody here talk about anything but their “prerequisites” and fears.
To the OP:
You can play this bullshit game that all these neurotic and sociopathic Dopers are trying to get you to play, or you can be yourself and be happy regardless. Trust me, if you don’t have any friends and are happy, you don’t want to become some template for perfect “boyfriendship” out of desperation. It’s plastic and it’s all bullshit. There ain’t no rules to dating, and anybody here who tells you otherwise is bitter and controlling. They are just trying to Stepford you…conform you to every misconception they hold about people and themselves. Don’t let them preflect their bias on you. Don’t let them fool you, nobody really knows anything about relationships except what they preconceive and put their own spin on. That’s not Love, it’s exactly what has kept them from a real and lasting relationship, and it’s all selfish.
The love advice around here is like a lemon tree and a salt lick in the desert. It’ll just make for bitter and salty on top of your thirst.
It’ll all come together…just make an effort to meet women. That’s the only secret.
I’ve been dating a woman for about two months and she said that she liked that over the last month I’ve made road trips to spend time with old friends. The fact that I’ll drive a couple of hundred miles to spend time with friends from high school impressed her (I’m 45).
Of course, it might also have helped that those trips were to spend time at a hot springs resort and drive through Yellowstone National Park. She’s already making plans for us to do the same.
I wouldn’t say that, either, and I’m female. Come to think of it, I don’t know many women who’d say that. If you’d asked “Do you think he’s boyfriend material?” that’s another matter.
(Mind you, a guy can do a lot to ruin the first impression of attractive by saying ugly things.)
