I don’t know about that 
Oh, okay, from the “I don’t have to stoop to her (his) level,” maybe. Why do I have to be the grownup? 
I learned to take people at their word. if they say they want something (and I’m willing), then give them exactly that. If they say they don’t want something (likewise, if willing), then don’t give it to them.
This has proven to be a fantastic filter. It annoys and filters away people who can’t be adult about their wants and needs, and it assures that I end up with people who ask for what they want.
It has also helped me learn better to ask for what I want, and to be clear if there is something I DON’T want.
I have also learned how to use and enjoy the Designated Control Freak system. Anyone who is sufficiently interested in offering an opinion automatically puts themselves in control of the situation. By opening their trap, they become the DCF. This way, if I want to eat a particular something for dinner, it’s my job to make that happen, but if someone else has an opinion, by expressing their opinion, they are therefore in charge. Certainly they don’t HAVE to speak up, but that’s tacit approval of my choice. They are welcome to fume about it, but it’s their own damn fault for not speaking up.
Since then, Restaurant Choice Incident Counts have dropped to practically zero (hovering right around Ain’t It Funny levels)
Probably learned a few other things, but those two are the ones that stick out the most, because they undermined a whole slew of weird and crazy “mind-reading” expectations.
Re:hair pulling
One of my friends recently told me that she just wasn’t into S&M or bondage.
“I mean, I like to have my hair pulled, and to be spanked, and to be choked, just like anybody, but that stuff is all too weird.”
Different strokes, indeed.
Another thing that I learned is that most people aren’t playing games and don’t have some evil master plan to mess with your mind and heart just for the hell of it, and they aren’t planning out all of the steps in advance with an eye to manipulating you into just where they want you. Most of the time they’re just bumbling along like you are, doing their best to figure things out and to figure themselves out and making mistakes and hopefully learning from them. Assuming that other people know exactly what they’re doing and that only you don’t makes for a lot of mistaken guesses about motivations.
Ooooh, if I had a Kruggerand for every friend of mine who swore that their last ex was an Evil Mastermind Manipulator…
I think it’s part of the deal where if a person isn’t The Magical One, then they become Crap I Wasted My Time With (which is a sucky setup, I admit). This couples with our Ego and the obvious question How Could I Have Missed Their Wickedness.
The natural result is Clearly They Must Be An Evil Mastermind Manipulator To have Fooled Me.
Which is a shame, because I agree with you – by and large, people are just ordinary folks trying to find other folks to be happy around. Everybody’s got their own personal set of baggage, and a little bit o’ chillin’ goes a long way towards accepting that.
Ummm- What?
A: what is aeramatio?
B: The only women I have found who didn’t enjoy giving fellatio, at least as a sop to their SO, were women who’d been forced as children.
You might wish to rethink your absolute.
C: Those same women were crazy awesome in the sack - so I guess my mileage is varying…
I have been forced (by my own sense of honesty) to admit that I had a relationship with myself, and I thought it was her!
She was in no sense a manipulator, but as a way to get along she’d learned to parrot back just the right parts, and then smile and nod at the rest…
Fairly average intelligence, I think, and bad life circumstance. One of those cases where ‘meet the family first’ would have saved me. Really, REALLY out there. I won’t post the details, and brother, am I willing to post details.
Well, everybody except mine. She was an evil mastermind trust-fund-baby-psycho that thought everybody was out for her money.
The only women I have found who didn’t enjoy giving fellatio, at least as a sop to their SO, were women who thought it was icky, nasty and gross, and weren’t entirely free of hangups about other sexual issues either; and most certainly hadn’t been forced as children.
You might wish to rethink your absolute.
:dubious:
I don’t have an absolute…
Certainly possible to not like giving fellatio, my response was due to the ‘those women must be gay’ bit…
is that a whoosh?
I think the nineties left scars on a lot of us men. It got pretty bad there in the belly of the beast known as “political correctness”, when somehow utter psychotics like Andrea Dworkin managed to hold sway over a lot of women by tapping into their sense of victimhood in much the same way that any facist dicator might do.
Luckily, it passed. Women regained their footing and remembered that as angry as they might get with “Men”, as a group, they still loved their husbands, brothers, fathers, male friends, and SONS, and oh yeah, they also kind of LIKED HAVING SEX and were NOT LESBIANS AT ALL. Common sense and humanity came back into the equation, and now the only real feminist is the pro-sex, pro-male, pro-sanity kind, and the Dworkins of the world are relegated to the backburner of history, curious and somewhat embarrassing relics like pro-segregationists.
But some of us are still gun-shy and twitchy. We remember when it seemed that to be male was to be a rapists in the eyes of many women. We were already guilty just for having a Y chromosome. Testosterone meant we were automatically violent, brutish, grunting, piglike trolls, just waiting for our chance to date-rape or sexually harass or otherwise violate some poor woman.
You don’t easily forget that kind of prejudice aimed at you, even when, looking back, it wasn’t for that long, and probably was not as bad as it seemed.
The anti-male feminism is still out there, just like the Nazi party and the KKK. Rationally, I don’t fear its return. It was one of those cases where the pendulum swings too far in the other direction, and people’s basic moderation and reasonableness has to kick in and pull us back from the edge of madness.
But part of me will never forget being the target of that much hate.
Wow, I don’t know where you were dating, but I was dating in the 90’s too, and I don’t remember that at all. I’d heard of Andrea Dworkin, and so had a few of my girlfriends, but I don’t know a single woman IRL who thought of her as anything other than a whackjob. An articulate whackjob to be sure, but it wasn’t like they were taking their cues from her and turning into lesbians. Basically, all they required was that I treated them humanely and gave them a fair hearing. Even the bad ones didn’t dump on me just for being a guy, let alone accuse me of being a rapist, and I dated mostly liberals. In fact, come to think of it, the only conservative I ever dated was the last girl I asked out . . . and we’ve been married for over ten years.
Yeah, asserting that Andrea Dworkin has ever held sway over the thinking of any significant number of women gives one the approximate credibility of, oh… Andrea Dworkin.
I think something that a lot of people need to learn is that any time they feel like a problem they are having is the fault of the entire other half of the species (I can’t get a date because men only want skinny whores, I can’t find a girlfriend because women are all stuck up bitches, etc.) it is a signal that you have an issue that is getting in the way of your love life (see Auto’s nice guy thread for an example…I tried to search so I could link to it but keep getting an error.)
Oh, Dworkin was just the lightning rod for the worst of it.
She didn’t have to have a lot of people follow her, she was just emblematic of a climate of fear and anger and paranoia against men.
Not many women would have been willing to say they were Dworkin-ites, but it would have been kind of like the anti-abortion people who can never quite convince you that they don’t support bombing abortion clinics on some level.
Perhaps you had to be in university at the time.
Hell, I was in a course called “The Philosophy of Love and Sexuality” at the time, and I was the only Y chromosome there. 
Sounds like we’re about the same age. I remember none of this “fear, anger, and paranoia towards men”.
Lesson Learned While Dating: We tend to find what we look for.
Great Thread! Rarely to I take the time to read through all pages if there’s more than one, but this one had me hooked.
“10. If you like her, and you think she likes you, damn it, KISS HER!”
I must quote this for truth. My only regrets in life stem from not learning this in time.
A LOT of what’s been posted, I think, can be summed up with two axioms:
- Do to the other as you would have them do to you. (No, I’m not religious at all)
- A Relationship is nothing but Interaction and Communication: If you’re having troubles, it’s probably because you’re not getting enough of those two.
Dating is inherently sexist.
Open-ended questions are always better than yes/no questions.
ex: “Are you free tomorrow?”
“No…I’m gonna be with friends after work”
“Well what about Wednesday?”
“uh no not then either.”
---->“When are you available?”
[Warning: maybe TMI]
My last relationship, lasting 1 year and ending because she was going to do a year of college in England, seems to contradict a LOT of the specific stuff posted here, like about sex. She was Christian and didn’t want to have sex until marriage, and I respected that (though it did make for some lively conversations). We did a lot of stuff that was short of the word “sex”, nevertheless. She also really likes the hair being pulled and being controlled a bit. But when I took it too far, and she started crying, I stopped immediately and told her I’d never go that far again. And I didn’t. We dated for another 9 months after that, and still talk to each other on good terms.
For the people that think sex is vital, and the ones that think it’s useless, I like to think of it as the keystone in a arch bridge. It’s the most important stone, but any stone missing is going to suck.
I’ve found that I like intelligence more than anything in my girl. I’ve found that she always winds up being super-emotional, which works with my lack thereof. And I’ve found that we will be officially “together” between 4 and 14 days after meeting (the good relationships, that is). Any longer and we’re just friends, any shorter and we’re either too different and/or intoxicated.
Lastly, I think playing the game is definitely overrated. It’s never gotten me into any good relationships. BUT it can be a lot of fun. For instance, there was an 11/10 supermodel girl at my last job, to whom I was obviously attracted. But every time I talked to her, I got shut down. So I thought to myself, “This girl has probably never had a guy ignore her. ever.” So I ignored her, I’d talk to everyone but her and it drove her mad. Shortly before she switched jobs, she was always coming over to talk to me, instead of the other way around. Didn’t get me laid, not even a date, but it was good times. 
Maybe I’m the outlier here, but it worked out the opposite for me. I’ve met several people on the Internet, gone on dates immediately, and had it not work out. With my wife, we spent several months talking on the phone and by instant messenger before we finally met in person. (We wanted to meet, but she was several states away and it just wasn’t feasible.) I’m calling her “my wife”, so obviously that’s the one that worked out.
Of course, it may also make a difference that those other people I met on match.com, whereas my wife I met on . . . um, a somewhat kinkier site than match.com.
On a totally unrelated note, one thing I learned is that sexual chemistry is far more important to a successful relationship than I ever suspected.
Then for the love of Ned, stop dating the worst!!
I’m pro choice and plenty of anti-abortion people have convinced me that they abhor violence.
I was.
One more item that I’ve learned while dating:
Alcoholics and drug addicts don’t date, they take hostages on their slow downward spiral…