You can keep poking at that strawman but it still doesn’t make your behavior any more justifiable.
Stranger
Let me tell you a story about why I’m beet red right now, it’ll help explain my point. See I spent the winter inside doing inside things. I learned some Spanish. I got two computer certifications, got good grades at college, and completed all but one of the classes I need to graduate. In addition I read so many web comics. I love those things. Also discovered I enjoy line dancing despite hating country music. All in all a lot of indoor stuff, that, thanks to the portion of my ancestors who were freake’en crackers, left me completely at the mercy of the sun.
Well today I figured it might be fun to take my bike to work. That’s no easy task. 14 miles with an obligatory detour for a pop. It was great. The country is really beautiful this time of year. Plus I brought my headphones and phone for tunes! Did you know I have an mp3 of some kind of death metal about cereal mascots? I didn’t until random shuffle found it. I don’t normal like death metal, but that freak’en ruled.
After work I really wanted to take a ride to other side the county. However the burn from my previous ride was already showing up. Anyway it was so beautiful, plus the random function picked this wild mix of Tool, Yoshida brothers, and some kind of Jazz. It really left quite an impression. I ended up doing like 40 miles on my bike. I feel great!
Anyway I figured out a wild idea for a speech in public speaking class. I have to do an informative speech, but the rules are a little lax. I’m thinking of writing how vile I found Earl Grey tea to be in HP Lovecraft’s style. However I’ll prolly go with something a bit easier like how to use computers to find information quickly.
By the time I got home I looked like a lobster marinated in cranberry juice, but lucky not all my ancestors were crackers. Who, by the way, left me with such diminished gluets that my pants only stay up from white knuckle belt buckling and sheer force of will. Any way I have enough Native ancestry my burn will quickly turn to tan, and it doesn’t really hurt. So no worries.
Now what does this live journal entry reject of a post have to do with dating? Fuck all, that’s what. This isn’t the Chebacca defense. The point I’m making is maybe worrying about every detail misses the greater picture. There could be Squirrels! Might be better to forget dating for a bit and go find out!
So you have people like even sven, now you know and as GI Joe sagely informed us: “knowing is half the battle”.
So what do you with that knowledge? You could become resentful with it, but they sell a lot more twinkies then bitter almonds. Better to use it simplify your game plan. You know there’s women out there who want different things. Be on guard. Don’t take red herrings, but find the woman who does the things the others don’t.
even sven could be sending mixed singles, but I think a healthier way to look at is noise. Random things that don’t really mean anything. what you want is signal. Things that do have meaning.
How do you figure out what’s signal? Time. Trust is to be earned slowly. Even then more often I’d bet it’s simply not being compatible. Dating is sorting through all the right-nows to find the right-forevers.
Also I think a bigger part is learning how to be social. I was smart in school. I’m smart now, atleast for my peer group, but smart is irrelevant. What gets dates is learning to be socially smart. I have some ways to go, but I’m getting there, and since I’m inherently awesome it should only be another 2 days, tops. Maybe 5 or 6 hours if I don’t slack off too much.
Also think about where you’re looking. Nothing inherently wrong with online dating profiles, and you even have to state what you’re looking for! However always remember text doesn’t carry chemistry well, so those will have a lot of first dates.
Let’s try this: "One day this skanky girl came all the way to my house from two hours away just to hook up- she’d never even met me before! She climbed into my bed at night and I’m single so I figured hey, wrap it up and why the hell not? She was decent in bed, but she wasn’t that cute and our conversations were lackluster. The sex was nice, but it all seemed kind of sleazy.
So then there is the big party before the end of our study abroad program. Skanky girl showed up and was trying to get in bed with me. But there were some hotties there that I’ve had my eye on for a while- if it’s ever going to happen, that night would be the night! Anyway, I got shot down by the hot girls, and was feeling kind of horny and didn’t want the night to be a loss, so I flirted a bit with the skank. But in the end I was tired and she was looking pretty gross. So I just went home alone."
Not so bad, huh? About what you’d expect from a single guy.
I don’t lie, I don’t cheat, I don’t make promises that I’m not going to keep. I am leaving the country soon and would like to have some good clean fun with the hottest guys I can before I get home and start looking for something more serious. Any guy in his 20s could say the same thing without raising an eyebrow. I don’t feel bad about knowing what I want and going for it.
Anyway, I think the take-home fact here is that just because we hooked up once, that does not mean I owe you sex for eternity.
I figured giving some insight into what women are thinking (or at least one woman) when they give mixed signals might be useful. But if you’d prefer to speculate what women must be thinking rather than listen to one, go ahead. I’d really appreciate it if some other ladies could spell out what was going on in their heads when they have given mixed signals.
FWIW, this thread is pretty revealing. A meaningful number of guys say that having sex on a first date - while certainly welcome- renders a woman “not girlfriend material.” And men say THEY get mixed signals!
Aaaaannnnd Even Sven is now officially having a conversation with herself.
Tao’s Revenge too.
It’s really weird, you two, how nothing in either of your last posts has anything to do with anything Stranger has said. Out here from the third person perspective, the blatant projection I’m seeing is almost comical.
Rizzo? Is that you?
I don’t understand what’s wrong with what even sven is saying. If she has mixed or undecided feelings about someone, she will act in an undecided way and “send mixed signals”. I think that’s true of most people. What can a people take from these “mixed signals”? That the person sending them is undecided about their feelings. They are communicating the truth of their feelings perfectly clearly. If they were sending 100% come-on or fuck-off signals, that would be lying and closer to the mind games some people in this thread are talking about.
Receiving undecided signals when you are hoping the other person has decided they fancy you is disappointing, but I don’t see how you can accuse an undecided/ambivalent person who is sending undecided/ambivalent signals of being dishonest or playing mind games.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I still consider the guy’s actions to be scummy if he knew the skanky girl was taking it the wrong way. And while I’ve seen it happen with men, it’s usually not from any guy I’d actually want to hang around. There really do seem to be a lot of men in the "tell a girl straight out if you like them’ category.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the explanation, just that I’d rather believe a woman was unsure that she liked someone, or didn’t realize she was leading him on, than one who knowingly participated in the manipulation.
What actually bothers me is that I see men called out for this stuff all the time, but women seem to think it’s acceptable. While a lot about women and men are the same, there are some general differences.
If a man asks a woman out, it means he’s interested; he has expressed his interest directly already.
If a man asks her out, it means he’s interested. If a woman says she can’t make it for a plausible reason, it could be because she doesn’t want to or it could be because she can’t.
While I’m not the type who would grab a woman’s chest within a few minutes of learning her name, the diversity of personal preferences and the ambiguity of signals put me out of the first category of men you described. Anything useful I should know about to be able to work my way up without getting explicit info from her?
For example, when you try to read men’s emotions, how do you always get it right (which is the equivalent of “a man who knows how to gradually work his way up to the “fondling of your body” stage without having to be explicitly told what to do and when to do”)?
Blaster,
You have to ask yourself how much you want to be with a woman who plays hard to get. If you don’t like that type of game, leave it to people who do and let them have all the fun they want circling around each other. For me, that’s a non-problem.
Not really. The point I was making apparent screwball behavior can only affect you as much as you let it. Especially given my earlier point that people have different goals out there, so there will be apparent screwball behavior. Better to keep yourself guarded until you know what they want, and fill your life with so much other stuff that dating is relegated to a side project at best.
And this is very much like what Stranger has said as well. (He probably wouldn’t describe the appropriate attitude as “guarded” but his idea and your idea are in the same section of the same ballpark.)
Yet for some reason you seem to think you’re correcting him in some way.
You’ve got some preconcieved idea as to what Stranger must be saying, such that you attribute that idea to him no matter what it is you actually are reading from him.
I am not sure I think there’s anything wrong with what she describes herself as having done. (It seems less than ideal to me, but I wouldn’t go so far as to morally condemn the actions.) But I don’t think you’ve characterized her actions consistently with the way she characterized them. According to her, she knew exactly how she felt about the guy: She was interested in him only as a last resort. But, of course, she didn’t signal that she was interested in him only as a last resort. Rather, she signaled at times that she was interested, and signaled at times that she wasn’t.
Even Sven is arguing that it’s a mistake to attribute deep and mysterious motivations to her because of her mixed signals–rather, her motives are mundane and easy to understand. I agree, but I’m not convinced anyone here has said that they look for deep and mysterious motivations when faced with mixed signals. Some have registered that they think it’s useless to try to make sense of mixed signals–but that’s not at all to say that mixed signals show that there’s some profound puzzle to solve.
Given what I said above, I can understand how someone would characterize what Even Sven described as dishonest. If she’s interested in the guy only as a last resort, then by signaling interest, she lies by ommission, and by signaling disinterest, she also lies by ommission. The only honest thing to do is to walk up to the guy and say “I’m interested in you, but only as a last resort. So stick around for a while, okay, and let’s see what happens.” Of course, by doing this, she practically would guarantee she has no chance with him even as a last resort–but this just goes to show that you sometimes have to be dishonest to get laid ;), not that she’s not being dishonest.
I say “dishonest” but let me be clear I don’t mean it as a strong condemning term. Sometimes it’s alright to be dishonest, depending on your purpose and the social context and so on. But even if it’s alright, it is dishonesty. Call it what it is!
Have you read his posts? The ones where he finds women’s reactions to things to be confusing? He reads like someone deeply frustrated with dating, and is taking it too personally, and putting too much emphases on details having significant meaning, instead of looking at the bigger picture.
Maybe I am projecting, and I’m fully open to the idea of that, but maybe not.
If I’m wrong, well 10 minutes on a post that preaches to the choir. No harm done, and maybe it’ll be useful for someone else.
…
I’ve known some folks who could pull that off.
Citing myself rules!
I’m not sure how your response addresses the post you quoted from me, though. The question I raised to Blaster was pretty simple. If he’s confused about a woman’s intentions/feelings, how long does he go around bumping into walls and fumbling around before he asks her to clarify her mixed signals? If the answer is that he never asks, he just hopes she’ll be nice enough to send him a sign that he can finally read, then to me it seems he needs to take some responsibility for his own confusion. It’s like me going to Spain and being mad that I can’t understand what people are saying to me, but never asking them to speak in English.
Like even sven’s guy. If I were in his shoes, I don’t think I’d be confused about her intentions, because it’s clear by her description of things that her flirty signals are not “I like you and want to be in a relationship with you”, but rather “We can flirt and fool around, but I don’t want more than that”. But if he were confused, there’s nothing stopping him from picking up the phone and asking her what’s what. “Hey, even, it was nice bumping into you the other night. Just checking in to see where we stand. I really like you and would enjoy taking you out again, but if you’d rather just be friends, that would be cool too. How you been?”
Getting stuck on how to interpret an “I can’t make it” is behavior you need to avoid. Always assume the worse case scenario and then leave the ball in her court. Seriously. Do you think a Brad Pitt type is parsing microliters of hope from a “I can’t make it” response? No, a Brad Pitt type makes an offer and then walks the hell away, taking the attitude that it’s her loss if she doesn’t accept, not his.
Without knowing more about the problems you’re having, it’s going to be hard for me to answer this.
A lot of this depends on your personality and the personality of who you’re with. What type of conversations do you have with women? If you only talk about light topics (e.g. the weather, favorite foods) it’s probably going to make building chemistry more difficult, which means reaching out and pawing someone is more likely to go wrong. What type of women are you attracted to that would most likely be attracted to you? The loud party girl at the club may have no problem with a chest grab early on but probably won’t be trying to hook up with a shy, socially clumsy guy. The nerdy woman who hangs out at the bookstore on Saturdays may love shy, retiring guys, but may lose respect for you if you try to unhook her bra too soon. But these are loose generalizations. The bookstore girl could actually like if you moved fast. That’s why you have to be cued in on the signs she sending.
I don’t always get it right. And any women who says she always gets it right is probably delusional. But we also feel less compelled to be grabbing at a man’s junk, so I’m sure that has some relevance to the conversation.
A man who knows to how to gradually work his way up to things is simply keeping pace with chemistry and the spoken (and unspoken) terms of the relationship.
She’s signaling some interest. It’s up to interpretation as to what the scope and extent of that interest actually is.
Just because a woman is flirty with you, doesn’t mean she want to get married and have 10 kids with you. But using your interpretation, someone could very well characterize even’s behavior as “dishonest” because she’s flirty despite not wanting to marry the guy.
It’s been a while since I was in the dating pool (thank God and Sonny Jesus), but herewith a serious question.
You can do the above, or you can do this -
“I have tickets to see the National Cow Chip Throwing Championship on Saturday night. Would you like to go with me?”
ISTM that these two statements are asking almost-but-not-quite the same thing. Perhaps I’m wrong, but so it seems to me.
Asking someone if they would like to do one specific thing is somewhat less ambiguous in one way, and somewhat more in another. It is less ambiguous because it is about something specific. It is more ambiguous because it doesn’t address the subtext of “will you bear my children and let me die in your arms?”
As I say, it is thirty years or more since I asked anyone out on a first date, but have things changed all that much?
Because the way I dealt with games like playing hard to get was not to respond to them. I was told, more or less, that the best strategy was to hit on everyone who was even vaguely interesting but not take rejection personally (to the extent possible), and not spend too much time or effort on any one prospect.
Thus I would never ask a woman “do you think we will ever date?” as it sounded like you were suggesting. Not that it is a bad idea, just that I would give it one shot, and if I got shot down, move on.
I don’t know that it saved games-playing, but it saved time and effort. If she wanted to say No as a form of flirting, fine, but the ball remains in her court - she would have to make it clear that she had changed her mind, and also be ready to back off if I hadn’t.
Regards,
Shodan