TBH I wouldn’t swap the burden of having to reject for the burden of having to ask, though both can be unpleasant.
And any set of rules can work fine as long as everyone is on the same page. But people are never all on the same page, so we have these misunderstangs. It’s not narcissistic to ask again if that’s the social rule you know.
It’s not necessarily a matter of swapping, unless you are a straight person with rigid ideas about gender roles, but yeah, I guess there’s a lot of those.
It is outright narcissistic to think, as I wrote, that by asking I’m providing her another chance to have a date with me.
And if it stays open, that’s fine too. I am good either way.
It’s not your own ideas that matter, but the societal consensus. You can work to change it, but it’s likely to hurt your dating prospects if you don’t follow the rules.
I don’t see why it’s more narcissistic than asking in the first place, if the assumption is that she may actually be busy.
Like I said, I don’t understand how this discussion is still going. I don’t understand how you can fail to see that it’s a different, additional, burden to ask a second time after being told a flat no, and that it’s narcissistic to justify it by thinking of it as providing her with a second chance to go on a date with you.
I’m not sure why I tried again. It seems so not-complicated to me.
I thought we were explicitly talking about asking again after not getting a flat no, but am ‘I’m busy that night’. If we’re discussing different things then we’ll never agree.
A form of no with no encouragement or invitation to ask again is a flat no in my book. Or, put another way, it is a lack of consent to ask again.
And that seems an excessively doctrinaire position to me.
You are free to never ask twice. Absent very clear “No, not ever, period.” feedback in plain English I will assume that “not now” with no further elaboration means only and exactly “not now”. Therefore in those cases I will always ask twice. So be it.
Gosh I wish everyone would use their words and behave like grownups, not like snowflakes or aggressive jerks.
I hate sports so much, that living and breathing for them is a deal breaker. I have dated, and was even in a relationship for a couple of years, with someone who really liked to watch basketball, football, and auto races on TV, but did not live for sports, would not, say miss my birthday to go to a game, and did not know her other friends exclusively through her interests in sports. She was a volunteer flagger at auto races, but that was something that came up maybe once a month during racing season.
And we had a VCR. There was never anything I wanted to watch so much I couldn’t tape it while she watched a game. And she only liked watching them live, so she never wanted to watch one and tape one.
She didn’t try to discuss them with me.
We had plenty else in common. We both liked theater, a lot of the same much, stand-up comedy, and movies. She was in AA, and I just don’t drink. For me, it’s not an AA thing, but it was nice being with someone who also didn’t drink. We already had a lot of mutual friends before we started dating.
To be honest, I was kind of feeling this guy out for what kind of sports fan he was. If he reacted with shock to me not going to me school’s game, he probably wasn’t someone who would fit into my life. But if he said “Oh, I’m just going because I know someone with an extra ticket,” that would probably be fine.
Also, FWIW, I did end up becoming friends with this guy, but we didn’t end up dating. Our plans after graduation just didn’t mesh.
I’m not unreasonable, either. I actually played women’s D league softball for several years and really enjoyed it. And when a friend of a friend wanted to go to a hockey game and invited us, I went. I didn’t hate it-- in fact, it was better than the Ice Capades. I also enjoyed going to the university’s women’s basketball games, but mostly as a social event.
Yes.
Well actually, the main idea of the OP was “Why does hollywood show that pursuing over and over and over as romantic when IRL women dont care for it, and find it creepy in most cases?” But it has morphed into dating mores. And that’s Ok, too.
I played College Football, but I despise professional sports. Too commercialized.
And I appreciate that that is how you prefer it.
But some women were taught to say no to the first offer as to not appear too eager. Other posters have said just that.
Not at all. I pretty much expect to be asked again. Let me explain.
But first, this actually brings up another rom-com trope-- asking out someone who actively hates you, or for whom you have expressed animosity. People just don’t do that in real life.
I have never rejected a man (or woman, for that matter) with a zinger like “Not if we were the only two uninfected after the zombie apocalypse,” because no one I felt that way about has ever asked me out.
Well, I once was being pursued (semi-stalked) by a guy who really and truly did have brain damage (serious closed-head injury about 10 years earlier). He wouldn’t have gotten a zinger, though. I went to the agency that helped him live independently (he was nearly independent, but had a caseworker check in on him six times a year, and he had an emergency number he could call), and got a meeting with me, his caseworker, and his caseworker’s supervisor where I told him to leave me alone, and it was not negotiable.
Anyway, save for that one instance, I have never had to tell a guy off. Very few people have attempted to pick me up, and I have been fortunate enough that not giving the men (it was always men) any information has kept them out of my life.
Everyone else has been a friend wanting to go a little further. I legitimately did not want to hurt their feelings. I gave the “I can’t, I’m busy,” and hoped the second ask was also for a specific event, and not an open invitation.
However, I remember one guy very specifically whom I hadn’t known long, when I happened to be in the middle of some personal crap, and had no room for a relationship. I knew him from campus Hillel, and we shared a bentsher one evening. He stopped by my door later to ask me out. His second ask was open-ended.
I said something like "I’m so busy with school right now-- I’d have to look at my calendar and call you-- and honestly, right now, it looks like a page of Talmud. But I’ll see you next Shabbes at Hillel. I always sit with Julie and Mike.
That response was crafted on the spot as best I could to communicate “I don’t want to go out with you, but I value your friendship.”
He was there the next week, and sat with us.
And that was very wisely done.
And some were not, and I would be burdening them by asking again. Why burden some women on the chance that the woman you’re asking really meant something different from what she said?
Do you acknowledge that declining a first invitation so as not to seem to eager is a changing or limited cultural expectation? It’s not part of the culture I grew up in. In fact, I think letting a guy down easy by using an excuse when you mean “no” is a far, far, more common pressure and expectation in society than saying no when you actually want to say yes. And making women say no twice under those circumstances is a far greater burden than the burden of a woman needing to say yes the first time or have to follow up with an invitation if she is actually interested.
And I have been harassed by men who wouldn’t take no for an answer, under circumstances where it did not feel safe to give a flat no.
That was a well-crafted piece of emotional work.
That’s some world class doublethink on your part when you convert "she said ‘Not now’. " to mean something other than “not now” while claiming to respect what she “really said”.
Not sure what you mean-- is that good, or bad?
It’s a very good skill to have, and you showed proficiency at it. Emotional work is a social good. It’s also something that is part of all the extra work women do in our society. A whole lot of it is about women finding subtle ways to take care of men’s egos, and communicate information without seeming to say the thing itself, because that would be threatening or ego-damaging.
Like everything in life, people make decisions based on their values and morals, not always what is most effective for getting a result based on the behaviors of others. And a lot of us pretend what is most moral actually matches up with how people work. Then we make judgments and moral declarations and “do as we say not as we act.”
In my experience and observation dealing with my own life and women and countless conversations and observing the dating lives of platonic female friends, the #1 trait that I see resulting in a man being rejected and deemed a “loser” with the ladies is not being sexually aggressive enough. The women I know are turned on by the “man who knows what he wants and takes it” approach. Very good looking men who have other attractive traits often “lose out” by having a passive “asexual vibe,” being too polite or whatever. This is just being real and honest. The whole “confidence is sexy thing” basically plays out in this way. This is not in any way condoning non-consensual behaviors from men, but I think the level that we generally cut off to be “on the safe side” errs on the side of being less attractive. I know I’ve personally turned down dating/“dating” opportunities (usually not even realizing it) because I didn’t make some aggressive move at the exact right time. A lot of this comes down to the subtlety in communication and general awkwardness and social difficulties of a large percentage of the population. There are certainly nuances in “yes vs. no” because that’s just how people operate regardless of social controls or the morals people wish to impose. The reason why you can joke about stuff like “sex contracts” and very explicit consent is because I think deep down everyone knows in 99% of cases that sort of thing ruins the mood and kills attraction. People seek to be desired on a primal level and want to be shown that with passion and intensity not appointment sex with boxes checked off.
Consent is not that clear to a lot of people in many cases because the communication is difficult to understand and navigate and how to tell whether she doesn’t want it or wants it, just not from you. And I think a lot of men have a hard time understanding the hows and whys of all that because it doesn’t seem logical at all.
The fantasy vs. ‘real life’ stuff seems to be taken as a given, but a LOT of people want that fantasy stuff in real life. I’ve been told about it, seen it, and asked to do it. Some people are blown away by that while others shrug because they do it and expect it themselves.
So circling back to what I said in the beginning of my comment, I probably err on the cautious side but I don’t pretend that doing the “right” thing is the same as doing what actually “works” and I don’t tell those pretty lies to others. Women are not all the same and are into different things just like men. And plenty of them don’t need or want a loving relationship with an attractive gentlemen and explicit consent to get down to it.