It’s hard to believe that Shakester isn’t misreading signals at least some of the time. Of course I wasn’t there for any of the times, so I can’t know for sure. However, very few people are as adept at misreading signals as I am. I acknowledge that I have been out of the dating world for decades, but I know what it’s like to be rejected numerous times. I also acknowledge that I have also no doubt been clueless when women actually had some interest.
It’s a relief that someone actually gets what I’m talking about. Thank you.
Maybe it is something peculiarly Australian. Thinking about what you’ve said, the nasty reaction does seem more common with women who were born or raised here; I do not remember ever being treated that way by a woman with an accent.
Foreign-born women aren’t necessarily any more receptive, but they do seem more polite about it. Damn. That’s a really interesting insight, thanks again.
I thought that you were talking about death stares from single women who were repulsed by your looks. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, where a woman expected you to be interested in her.
I’m not understanding all what is supposed to be going on.
She thinks he will be interested in her. She isn’t interested in him. She glares at him to keep him away. I think she is being rude, but I don’t think it’s some strange, unheard of behaviour. Is this a uniquely Australian thing to do?
Yeah, if that were to happen in the States, where I’m from, or Japan, where I have lived for so many years, it would be really incredibly rude.
Normally women give off signals they aren’t interested and generally men respect those. You see men (either clueless men or those who just don’t care) who push past that and women give off increasing stronger negative signals, but someone preemptively going straight to a nuclear option, especially in the case of a friend of a friend.
If that’s the case and is not unheard of Australian behavior, then the death stare is more about Australian customs rather than a unique personal rejection of @Shakester.
There’s a recurring thread on Reddit’s Ask Men subreddit (as in a new one seems to be made every few weeks) asking for stories of being told “I have a boyfriend” as the first response to any interaction. The humor, of course, comes from when said response is entirely inappropriate to the question or when the man is trying to say something important to the woman. Like asking if she knows where the restroom is or trying to tell her that she dropped something.
I might have some insight. The anecdote I’m about to relate is about a guy i used to work with, and may or may not be relevant to Shakester, whom I’ve never met.
Anyway, I used to work with this guy I’ll call Sean Donnell. Sean was a little guy, with okay features, but too small to be obviously attractive. His physical appearance wasn’t unattractive, though, what was unattractive was his intensity. He was obviously sexually frustrated. (Hey, a single, religious young man…) He also had an anger issue. Like, i remember him once blowing up verbally on the elevator because there was something wrong about the layout of the buttons. And you know, he was right that they were inconvenient, and could have been better. But it’s not the kind of things most people get angry about. He’d get angry when he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be doing on the job. He got angry enough that another married woman he was friendly with told him to calm down his rhetoric because otherwise, if something happened, she would feel she’d have to tell the police.
Sean was also kinda stalkerish. Not in an obviously mean way, but for years after i left that job, he’d send me an email on my child’s birthday. I mean, who keeps track of that kind of thing?
Anyway, he commented that married woman were much friendlier than single women. And i didn’t have to guts to tell him it was because single women were afraid of him.
So maybe it does tie back tangentially to the men bear women thing. But while I’m sure he felt he was a good guy who had never hurt anyone, Sean was the kind of “good guy” tottering on the edge of melting down and committing a murder-suicide. Or at least, we were afraid he was.
But Sean wasn’t going to get close enough to a married woman to take us with him. I’m fact, he was pretty traditional, and he respected our husbands enough that he’d never have done that. And he was obviously needy, and pleasant enough in small doses. So a lot of married women did hang out with him. Me included.
We used to walk together on our lunch break and talk about religion. He was a believer, but i knew more about Catholicism than he did. I (accidentally) convinced him that a lot of what the church taught didn’t make any sense, and he lost his faith. I still feel kinda bad about that.
I still see him from time to time at professional events. He’s mellowed a lot. Probably just because old men aren’t as horny and sexually frustrated as young men. He’d probably be okay relationship material now, if he’s still interested. But he was pretty self-absorbed when he was young, and not really aware of what other people wanted. So maybe not.
Anyway, this story doesn’t have any useful “pointers” for how to find a partner, but maybe it explains why some men might be more approachable for married women than for single women.
Pretty much every woman I am friends with, including my exes, describes me as “kind”. I think that’s probably the most common word used to describe me, which is interesting because I’m not trying to be kind, particularly, I just try to not be mean.
I try to be a good person. Turns out that’s great for making plenty of friends* and terrible for impressing single women. I’d rather be good looking.
- Just to be clear, I love my friends dearly and I am constantly grateful to have such truly excellent people in my life. I appreciate them more than I can say, so I’m sorry if I seemed flippant about that.
Yep, that’s happened to me a few times too.
I expect that’s coming from women who have had a high percentage of cases of being approached by strange men in public turn out to be sexual advances of one kind or another.
Yeah, sounds pretty stupid taken in isolation. But they’re not living in isolation.
What @thorny_locust said. I’m old enough and fat enough that i don’t get randomly hit on in public, but when i was younger and hotter, that happened enough that yeah, “do you know what time it is?” or “do you know where the nearest rest room is?” were reasonably likely to lead to an attempted pick up.
Hell, I’m not a woman and I haven’t been randomly hit on, but if a random person approached me with a greeting that was a bit more generic than a specific question, my assumption would be that they’re trying to sell me something (a product, a political candidate, or a religion) or to otherwise ask me for money, and depending on my mood odds are good I will respond with “No thanks” off hand.
Which is why, even when I was single, it never occurred to me to try and meet women by walking up to them at random times and introducing myself.
Wow! Thanks for explaining that. Yeah, that is definitely not a dynamic I’m familiar with (and that would really bug me, because I like talking to men as well as women). That explains a lot. Sorry @Shakester that you have to deal with that. I can see how that would put you off.
This! This would be so rude in the US!
I have some recollection of that dynamic in some groups in the USA in the 1970’s. (I was twice told by a coworker, in two different workplaces, who I’d been having interesting conversations with, that we had to stop having them because others were assuming this was a prelude to sex and their wives were getting upset. I had no sexual interest in either of them and don’t think they had any in me; and if we had, they were married, I don’t do that.) It seems to me to have gotten a whole lot less common; and wasn’t ubiquitous in the USA even then. And yeah, if there’s a general attitude that the only reason a single man would have to talk to a single woman is that he hopes to lay her: that’s a general societal fuckup, and hard on both the women and the men.
Well…it’s ok to be a little bit one of those guys.
There seems to be a lot of discussion around men “doing better” and following some sort of feminist agenda behavioral guidelines so as not to appear “toxic”.
How about just “don’t be toxic”?
I was never particularly comfortable with that super-aggressive style of hitting on girls. It always seemed counter-productive to me. In my younger days when I was single, what always worked for me was just kind of being my normal funny and charming self and reading a woman’s reaction. If she seemed disinterested or ambivalent, I’d move on. But the important thing in my mind was “just be cool”. We’re just having a conversation and if it leads somewhere, great. If not, meh.
But in all fairness, I would also see these guys who for whatever reason couldn’t make anything happen and would get really frustrated and angry. And then they would start acting like shitheads, acting rude to the girls, getting way too drunk, starting fights, or otherwise engaging in cock-blocking activities.
Like I can’t imagine why the women wouldn’t want to get with that!
I feel like this old SNL short about sexual harassment in the workplace is still relevant. I think it’s important for men to do their best to be Tom Brady instead of Fred Armisen.
It’s possible they were actually hitting on you or they felt the conversation was leading down a path of eventual sexual activity. Because as a man, I’ve had that happen on several occasions.
It goes something like this:
- You’re at a work or other function with a mixed group of people and end up in an interesting conversation with a woman.
- After awhile you lose track of time and realize everyone else has left.
- The night is still young, so you decide to go somewhere else.
- A some point you end up sharing a cab, or have one last nightcap in the hotel bar
- Then BOOM!! Sex!
Apparently it’s actually a strategy pickup artists use to create a sense of excitement and interest or whatever. For me, it was just something I noticed tended to happen naturally as I like to keep the party going if I’m having a good time.
The point is, I’m perfectly fine having a nice conversation with a woman I just met or know from work. Maybe we’ll go to the next “after party” event if everyone else is going. But anything after that starts to feel uncomfortably like were on a magical evening.
This is an attempt at irony, right?
Now I’ve gotten the death glare from women for having stimulating conversations with their men. There’s definitely a feeling like, “You must only be talking to this guy because you want to bang him.”
One of the more amusing times this happened a coworker invited me to go swing dancing in NYC. I worked there but lived in NJ and didn’t get out much.
I presume she wanted me to understand how cool she was. We had that kind of dynamic.
Well I sucked at swing dancing and sucked at talking to people because I’m shit at small talk and those sort of surface-level interactions. But afterward she told me we just had to go up the apartment of her rich, ultra-cool guy friend.
So we went.
He did in fact live in a penthouse in NYC, notable because of my fear of heights (don’t work in NYC if you’re afraid of heights.) It was very clear my friend wanted me to be super impressed by her friend’s wealth. I am not particularly impressed by wealth, being up to my ears in it with my husband’s family. Well in all honesty I was never impressed with wealth before I met my husband’s family, either. So it’s like, cool, you sure do have a friend with a big apartment. Neat-O.
However, her friend had a bookcase on which he’d carefully arranged his favorite philosophy books, so suddenly I have something in common with someone for the first time that night. Me and this guy proceeded to bond over how much we hate Ayn Rand. We started to engage in meaningful discussion about our general views about life.
My coworker was not happy.
I mean I was married and not interested in this guy at all, I was just having a conversation. But she took it as a huge threat.
I still remember it vividly because the difference between my actual intent and what she assumed was my intent was staggering.
So those attitudes do exist here, on some level.
(ETA: I have very little issue with jealousy myself. My husband has always had mostly female friends. When my husband was applying for clinical internship he stayed the night with other women we knew in the area, many of them single, and it didn’t occur to me until much later that some women wouldn’t like that. So any time my husband hits it off with a woman, platonically, I’m happy for him.)
What really came up for me around 30 is that I had less dating experience than a lot of high schoolers. Not that I was immature, just that I felt lost. It also made me act needy, which probably ended the first relationship I was in after a dry spell that lasted most of my twenties. Not that it would have gone on that much longer, but it would have likely gone a little longer and had a better ending. I think it also came into play in my relationship with Ms. P; it took work from both of us to get past it. All’s well that ends well, but I was really afraid that when dating history came up it would be a death knell. Like, what’s wrong with him?
In one case, all we were doing was talking at lunch at the workplace. Nobody was going anywhere except back to work at the end of lunchtime.
In the second case we were also effectively talking at work, and not going anywhere afterwards. I think in the second case I wound up talking outside his house once, because he lived in one of the houses in the vineyards owned by the company we both worked for and I’d been working in that vineyard; but I’m pretty sure his wife was in the house at the time.
The only way anything about the conversations was “leading down a path of eventual sexual activity” was if it was assumed that conversations between a man and a woman would all lead down a path of eventual sexual activity. I certainly wasn’t assuming it; but it’s possible that the men were – though if so, I don’t know why they would have started talking with me when they didn’t want to go there. So I think it was what they told me, which was that they’d been bugged by other people about it.