Men Choosing to Disengage from Emotional Involvement with Women (... and Bears)

In My Humble Opinion
252

I get that men who aren’t conventionally handsome, and aren’t conventionally high-status, and aren’t conventionally “financially successful”, as the saying is, are often at a disadvantage in seeking relationships with strangers.

The history of patriarchal society centered on male-dominant heterosexual marriage has saddled relationships with a lot of transactional baggage that it can be hard to see past. People take it for granted that they’re supposed to be striving for a partner who’s considered a “good catch” by some conventional metric. And sometimes they’re just baffled by the prospect of considering a relationship with a different sort of person, because they aren’t sure where to find the script for that, so to speak.

So if you feel you are currently shut out of relationships (I stress “currently”, because every such situation can be transformed in an instant, if that one chance-in-a-million person happens to cross your path), I’m not going to argue with you about that or advise you on increasing your appeal. What I will argue with you about is this:

This, ISTM, is the part you’re doing “wrong”. We all have the capacity to work toward happiness in the lives we’ve got (with compassionate exceptions for invalids in constant pain and disaster victims and so on).

We don’t get to choose whether we’ll find love, because that’s a crap shoot, but we do get at least a large measure of choice in whether we’ll find happiness.

I get that it’s not easy at first to be happy in singlehood if you’ve had it drummed into you all your life that happiness is dependent on romantic success. But suppose you tried telling yourself that you have a basic human right—and, arguably, even something of a duty to the world—to be happy just as you are?

There is no mysterious gift or ability involved in being happy with one’s activities, interests, friends, life, even if single. All it really takes, IMHO, is being able to believe that you’re allowed to be happy even if the Relationship Fairies haven’t stamped you with the official “This Individual Is Deemed Loveworthy” seal of approval.

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Well there’s a label for you, and it does indeed describe high school where the boys were looking for a dick-slave and the girls were looking for the guy who’d make the other girls jealous. But that was high school. These are mature men and women who might stand to look at the situation outside the metrics of “dating capital.”

On Reddit, when lonely men voice themselves, in chime the angry women with “men suffering from the system they themselves created. Well tough shit.” You’re not like that @Kimstu, but that message is what’s getting through out there.

And it drives the men into the arms of the Andrew Tates. The mens’ responses on Reddit to the angry women are direct quotes from him and his stans. Me, I’ve wasted too much my time cutting and pasting this into various threads:

Don’t value yourself as just a commodity, and don’t treat anyone else as just a commodity; and avoid those who do. Allow yourself to be disappointed, because it’s going to happen sometimes anyway. Accept that you can be disappointed in yourself and in the eyes of others. Every era in history has its unique challenges, and yours is its placing of resentment at a premium. Your challenge is to find happiness in resisting resentment, not in nursing it.

254

QFT.

That’s really what I was trying to get at. We can’t control the hand that we’re dealt, but if we’re dealt a hand we don’t like, we can control how we orient ourself to that fact of our life, whether we just perpetuate our own misery or find a way to make our lives meaningful without conditions. This isn’t an easy process. It’s not a short process. But if you can get to a point where you can find meaning and things you value regardless of the hand you were dealt, you win at life.

When I hear people trying to fix others’ loneliness problem for them if sends the message, “You’re just not trying hard enough,” and for some people they just lose out in that department no matter how hard they try. We want to avoid acknowledging that painful reality but it comes across as simply invalidating. So I say let’s look at it. Let’s acknowledge the fact that not everybody finds somebody, not through any particular fault of their own but because life is unfair sometimes.

But that doesn’t mean that person is condemned to misery no matter what. Because that’s where the hard work of accepting your life begins.

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Well, of course. But my point is that we all to some extent got socialized in that high-school version of social norms. So even when we’re mature, we often go into dating situations with some degree of unconscious stereotyped expectations still guiding us. And that can cause people to be narrow-minded and unappreciative of others who seem to be not meeting those expectations.

Whoa, apologies, I did not intend the term “patriarchal society centered on male-dominant heterosexual marriage” to imply “ha ha serves men right if their sexism is coming back to bite them in the ass”, or anything like it.

For the record, I think that patriarchal society centered on male-dominant heterosexual marriage is perpetuated and normalized by women just as much as men. That’s how broad-based societal norms work, after all: it’s not just one group forcibly imposing the norm on another, it’s (large subsets of) all groups taking it for granted that “this is just the way things are”.

And everybody in all groups suffers from those limitations, though admittedly the advantages and disadvantages aren’t equally distributed across all categories.

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No apologies needed. Your thoughts in no way resemble some of the stuff I’ve read. Thanks to our mods it would never be seen here.

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I don’t think the problem is who’s initiating. I think the problem is the assumption that there’s no reason for men and women to talk with each other except because they want to have sex with each other. For one thing, writing off half the species as not worth communicating with except for sex means missing out on a whole lot of interesting conversation. For another, if we’re talking about relationships lasting at least some time instead of just one night stands – those are a whole lot more likely to last if the people involved do have additional reasons to talk to each other. The women (and often the men) aren’t just weeding out the ones who aren’t full of shit. They’re weeding out the ones who aren’t interested in anything about them other than their primary and secondary sexual characteristics.

Have you gotten to know any of them anyway, in time? If so, could you ask them why that was their initial reaction? Or if not, could you ask your women friends who think you’re a catch to watch some similar situation and see if they can tell you what’s going on?

And are your friends introducing you specifically as someone who’s looking for a sexual/romantic partner, or as ‘here’s our great friend Shakester, he does this and is interested in that, we think you might want to be friends with him too’? Because there are a lot of women (and, I expect, men) for whom sexual interest that isn’t there at first glance may build as they get to know the person better, if everything else seems right.

I think part of the problem is ‘people say awful things on Reddit! that must be the way the world is!’ Of course people say awful things on Reddit; while that’s not the only thing it’s set up for, it’s certainly one of the things it’s set up for. Try getting off Reddit; or at least off those particular reddit groups.

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Definitely, whether you’re talking about men or women, cis or trans, gay, straight, or whatever. I found my wife of twenty something years, or at least she found me. Some of us are wired in a way that it’s a lot harder for us to find somebody. It wasn’t helpful for people to say “you shouldn’t have any problem finding someone” or “there are plenty of women who would want to date you.” I have personality quirks that made it harder. I couldn’t tell the ones who did from the ones who didn’t. My quirks and insecurity made women uncomfortable, and I don’t blame them for that. Here’s something that I’ve noticed; these threads never seem to be started by women. I’m sure there are plenty of women in the same boat; perhaps they handle it differently?

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In my limited experience as one woman who is not single, women get a lot of the same stuff, well-intentioned though in some circles I think we are more likely to be set up with guys and pressured to put ourselves out there.

I have a cousin who is a woman in her 30s who never found a guy she wanted to marry, so she had IVF and conceived a child, and she still gets a lot of “Are you dating yet?”

But there are also cases like with my friends where we are just accepted for where we are at in life no matter our relationship status or anything. We just like to be around each other. And so we don’t have to fix each other’s problems. And this is a kind of friendship I like.

As for me, there’s no reason in a just world I should have found The One at age 19. I’m an extremely weird person and at that time in my life I was total headcase, just bleeding unresolved trauma, and also my standards for a prospective man, in terms of character, were very high. There’s no good reason it should have happened for me. I just got lucky.

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My wife considers “weird” as a complement, which is fortunate for me. She’s got the trauma in her past as well. Somehow she immediately felt comfortable with me, which was surprising since I had a history of making women feel uncomfortable. Guess we both got lucky. That’s why I’m hesitant to judge those less fortunate. There, but for the grace of G_d, go I.

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Well, I think it’s an important skill to be able to talk to women without there having to be an underlying sexual agenda.

That said, I don’t think it’s particularly weird for single people to engage in conversations where the ultimate intent to determine whether they might want to sleep with or date the other person. Don’t women sometimes also want sex?

It seems to me like there’s this entire population of men out there who don’t really know how to talk to women at all, let alone find a mate or sexual partner. And these people are being driven out of frustration to rapey psychos like Andrew Tate and the Manosphere ( the collective online convergence of INCELS, PUAs, Mens Rights Activists and other disenfranchised men who can’t find a date).

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Well yeah, but isn’t that kind of self-defeating?

I mean, as one of the normal, good guys who any woman could trust meeting in the woods, making that point to me strikes me a lot like telling a law-abiding gun owner about how many guns are used in crimes and how dangerous they are. That may be true, but you’re not talking about/to me.

That’s the problem - I’ll wager that the men that are actually problematic are never going to read it or never going to understand or internalize the message. And the ones that do are not the ones that anyone ever had to worry about in the first place.

But it does feel like those of us who aren’t part of that problem are being tarred with the same brush, and I’m not sure that’s entirely fair.

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Of course it’s not fair. But the ones to blame are the ones who perpetrate the crimes, not the victims of them.

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Exactly. It was just a conversation and maybe if things went well, a cup of coffee. For me, the hardest part was that initial request for a date, and that initial date. By making them both low-stakes, it made me a lot more confident, which started a sort of virtuous circle.

The thing is, you have to be at least a little socially adept, and not just cruise up like a weirdo. Maybe if you’re at a bookstore, and someone’s looking at a book you’ve read, you could comment on the book and see how the conversation goes from there, for example.

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My opinion is that women like the results of that confidence… but they don’t really want to know about how you got it. They like the results, but are less supportive of PUA strategies or suggestions to incels as to how they might fare better, that practice conversations might help. Because perhaps they still want to choose for fitness and knowing about any such practices ruins the illusion.

I have read the anthropological studies about what percentage of genes get passed on by gender, and if you want to pass on your genes, in primitive societies, I’m going to take my chances being a woman. 80% versus 40%. I think most men would take on childbirth if they were actually capable of doing so. They don’t get to. I don’t see a lot of sympathy for the fact that a man would want to carry a child but he can’t.

When the violent aspects of men are discussed, I wonder why attempting to treat men with testosterone reduction isn’t mentioned. Men may not be able to help a tendency towards violence any more than a mountain lion or a polar bear might. So why not try to change it?

Personally, I think that many people, women included, find testosterone attractive in men and want to keep it. Even with the negative effects of violence.

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That’s spot on.

Playing the piano fills me with joy (making some good progress on that Chopin Nocturne, and I managed to play all the way through the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for the first time yesterday).

I’ve made a travel bucket list for the next 10 years and I’m actively preparing my trip to New York with my daughters.

I’m just about to go on a bicycle ride with some friends that’s going to take up most of the day.

Find something you’re good at, or that you enjoy, and life will have meaning, even if only to you at least.

As for dating apps… Well, be very wary. See what I wrote above. Yes, in theory the women you’ll interact with there are single (I’ve had some nasty surprises) and really looking for a relationship (ditto, even more). Brace yourself for some highly unpleasant experiences but it’s still probably the surest bet in the (potentially very) long term.

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Now that is a more useful reply than most. You’re not wrong, and as it happens I’m not unhappy with my life in general. Without going into detail, things are going pretty well for me in most areas.

That’s actually the cause of my current unhappiness: the other horrible stuff that’s been blighting my life for many years is resolved, or as resolved as it can be, and my quality of life has improved greatly over the last six months. So I’ve had time to recover and to count my blessings and now I find myself overwhelmed by loneliness.

The hierarchy of needs kicked in. The bottom levels are actually fixed now. Or as fixed as they can be for a non-rich person. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but the existential threats have been overcome.

So, if I was able to disengage and just be happy doing the things I do and following my interests, I would do that. Sadly I cannot do that. Why not? Biology. I need touch. You know about the experiment where they deprived babies of touch and they died? That. I’m like that. It’s not just horniness, it’s that I am deprived of touch and it’s breaking me.

I envy the guys that can just disengage and not ever have to deal with this shit ever again. I wish I could do that.

No, I’m not getting a pet. I like animals and they like me, but for me that is no substitute for human touch. I’m not going to take up wrestling and I have zero interest in massages. Not from strangers. Absolutely not from prostitutes. I have zero interest in paying anyone to pretend to like me. However broken I am I do not have that level of self deception.

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Another helpful post. Thank you.

I’ve thought about this for a while, and I can’t really recall getting to know anyone who’d started off that way. I mean, where’s the motivation for me to want to know someone whose first reaction to me is sneering contempt? If you set out to humiliate me, I don’t want to be your friend.

I don’t think people do the matchmaker thing any more. The apps killed that too. So if I’m out socially - and I am, quite regularly - people will usually just say “Oh, this is X”.

The most common reaction I get is the death stare. Full Basilisk.

I’m trying to remember the last time I got a reaction from a single woman that seemed genuinely receptive to me. Probably a couple of decades back.

Taken women are often quite friendly to me, for whatever reason. If I meet a woman that seems friendly I assume “taken” and I’m rarely wrong.

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I had a Japanese friend who was single for a long time, and then signed up for a “match making” service and just nothing was happening. For months and months, every time the woman indicated she wasn’t interested in anything further.

Finally, he asked me and some other friends to give him some pointers. It was obvious that he was coming across as desperate, which is not attractive at all. I think he got some coaching from a friend, and he finally met someone and they got married.

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Well it might be helpful to know why total strangers are having such an adverse reaction to you. Or whether your perception is even accurate.

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Pro tip:

Read up on the “nice guy” and identify 66 things you posted in this thread that identify you as such.

Then knock that shit out.