Does it make sense that people who can’t (as opposed to just ignore) social cues would end up being insecure? I hesitate to extrapolate using a sample size of one, even if that one is me. For some of us it’s unbelievably complicated. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that someone who is constantly uncertain can be seen as unattractive, or even creepy. If I appeared that way to anyone in the past I can’t blame them for moving away quickly.
Yeah. I’m pretty socially awkward myself. I mean I’m fine among friends, but I’m incapable of flirting, for example. It just feels so forced and awkward to me, even when my own danged husband does it, he gets crickets. I can read social cues pretty well, but I’m not very good at responding to them. Some of us just aren’t very good at the mating dance. I can empathize with some women’s desire to just have a man take over so they don’t have to do the awkward thing. And I can empathize when some men are frustrated about what feel like mixed signals. I think half the time in these situations neither one really knows what they’re doing. And that’s why I think communication is important.
Here’s how out of it I can be; my future wife approached me at a librarian keg party. When she found out I had a motorcycle she asked me for a ride. I asked “when?”, she said “how about tomorrow?” She got my number. Being the doofus I am, and having had a few beers, I told her I appreciated her asking for my number, but wasn’t necessarily expecting her to actually call. I’d had a few women show initial interest and then back off. She did call, we went for a ride, and we’ve been married almost 25 years. If I were still single, I’d be just as clueless. That would probably be even more disconcerting from a guy in his fifties. Also, I was still scared shitless to call her until we’d gone out a couple of times.
Yup. It makes lots of sense. Says the person who feels like she had to learn them, bit by bit, from the outside; taking much longer than it seemed anyone else I knew needed to do so.
Don’t know if it’s any help, but I eventually over quite a few years figured out that some people who come across as confident from the outside, and seem to be pretty good at reading social cues, nevertheless also feel insecure.
An excellent example of how women aren’t only attracted to the aggressive!
She was interested in you, as you actually were and are. Which is what works, in the long run.
I still think she overestimates the number of women who were interested. She’s still thankful that I was so clueless, because in her view that made it so I was available for her. Wherever the truth lies, I’m thankful too. Since we’ve been together I’ve heard “did you see how she looked at you” a number of times. The answer was always “no”, and I was being totally honest.
Just wanna upvote all of this.
Well, no. Your reaction to her post seemed completely at odds with what she said.
No, it comes off as “second language learner,” for lack of a better term. Some people interact socially the way some people who have had just a couple of semester of English, speak it. Some people can speak a language they don’t know well with confidence anyway, though. And some people like helping the person who is still struggling with idioms.
Of course there is. ALNOOT is not a woman, and is reporting his interpretation of statistically insignificant information gathered through assumption. That is trumped by explicit statements of actual women any day, any time.
I question the premise here, but at any rate, there is no reason whatsoever to default to the wishes of the women who want a man to do what is going to get drinks thrown in their faces by a number of other women.
Quite typically, we are focusing solely on the men, and the woman could be a blow-up doll, or a stuffed raccoon.
What is the woman doing throughout? Is she smiling and leaning toward the young guy? Is she crossing her arms and pulling away from the salesman? If so, then the audience could simply be responding to her reaction.
You need to rerun this experiment with the woman responding in an encouraging way to the salesman, and a discouraging way to the delivery man. In fact, if I were designing this, I’d run it several times, with lots of variables-- say, one where the woman is wearing a wedding ring, and one where she isn’t, one where she wears the wedding ring only with the delivery man, but not with the salesman, and versions where each man does or does not wear a wedding ring.
I would be very interested to know the results when both the delivery man and the woman have wedding rings, but both the salesman and the woman do not.
There’s someone out there for the most clueless among us. Sr. Weasel and I moved from acquaintances to close friends pretty quickly, but I don’t think he knew how to move things forward. Thankfully I’m impatient about these things, and I do know how to use my words, so I flat-out told him I was falling in love with him in an email. He responded as if I’d never said a word. When I called him on it, he was like, “Yeah, I thought that might be what you meant…I love you too!” It was also one of those things where everyone knew we were in love before we knew. I guess we were both clueless in our own ways. But we found each other. And after 18 years together we finally had a baby. Life is crazy.
I almost didn’t go to the party where we met (birthday of a mutual friend who also wanted to date me, but I wasn’t aware). I thought, “who knows, maybe I’ll meet someone if I go.” Folks like me don’t get many chances, so I’m glad I went.
No, not really.
Thanks – but I think that last sentence in the quote isn’t mine.
That suggestion is false. Men who ignore social cues and make advances are called “creepy”.
But let’s pick it apart. You are assuming:
- The guy is attractive to the woman
- She is signaling her interest
- He can’t read her, and doesn’t know that
So he has two choices, he can act as if he knows she is interested, or he can act as if he is uncertain of her interest.
On first blush, sure, of course he will do better if he acts as if he knows she is interested (since she actually IS interested in the hypothetical.) The problem is that interest isn’t binary. It’s not, “you look attractive, let’s go somewhere private and fuck fight now.” Or not very often. Much more likely the interest is “I’d like to talk to you some more” or “I’d like you to suggest a date” or “I’d like you to offer a kiss”, or …
And they guy who just assumes that the woman is interested in the next step will keep doing that until he’s wrong. And the odds of his being wrong somewhere between “meet” and “hot consensual sex” are extremely high. And once he forces himself on her when she’s signaling “no” (or “not now”) he suddenly becomes scary and creepy and unattractive. That “force” may be just holding her hand or kissing her or not letting her leave when she’s ready to go home. It’s probably not actually rape. But it’s a misguided action that makes him extremely unattractive to the vast majority of women.
Now, of course the guy who hangs back because he isn’t sure may not get the date that time, let alone the hot consensual sex. But he won’t be a creep, and he won’t be a rapist, and he will get other chances in the future. Maybe he’ll even meet a woman who correctly reads that he’s confused, and will give more obvious signals. (Like, “hey, would you like to go out for coffee sometime” or “I’d love a hug right now” or leaning in and initiating a kiss.)
And the guy who can’t read signals doesn’t know whether he’s attractive to the woman at all. The whole hypothetical depends on a lot of assumptions that are rarely all true.
No, that was Spice_Weasel, and I’ve edited the post to fix the quote. These things seem to happen from time to time.
How many people can’t read signals, but do have confidence? Surely there are people who, despite not being able to interpret social cues, are able to weather a large number of rejections until they get it right. For some of us, it’s a double whammy of not wanting to be rejected again plus not wanting to put another person in the uncomfortable position of saying no (whether directly or indirectly). IMO, giving such a person advice is difficult. Any therapist I saw during my single days can tell you that. If you have been where they are but ended up in a long term relationship despite the obstacles, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can give helpful advice. Hope for a confluence of right time, right place, and right person is the best I can do.
I think the whole “value of confidence” thing is overblown. False confidence is damaging.
Well, hopefully you can at least recognize the social cues that mean you’ve been rejected? Because otherwise it sounds like you are advocating for pressuring tons of women until you find one who is too insecure or weak to fight you off.
There are lots of social changes that would improve the situation. Teaching kids (both boys and girls who need help) to read common social signals, teaching kids (both girls and boys) that it’s okay to clearly express interest in another person, even (gasp) sexual interest, would help lots of people. Teaching boys to persist after the girl says “no”, or to confidently assume she wants to go out with them, just leads to sexually harassed women and girls, and worse.
I’m definitely not advocating pressuring. I actually got pressure from a gay man who didn’t want to accept that I’m not sexually attracted to men. I was fortunate to live far enough from him that it just amounted to a few letters. If it’s not yes, move on. In high school I felt like I’d been too persistent with a girl who wasn’t interested and apologized for my behavior; she said that she didn’t feel like I’d crossed any lines. Chances are that even as a teenager she’d experienced worse.
Our church has a comprehensive sexuality education curriculum where one of the exercises is to ask someone in the class out. It’s random, so any two teens can be paired up. I think it definitely helped our kids. It’s one of the best sexuality ed curricula out there, IMO. That said, I would have found the “ask someone out” exercise incredibly stressful unless I had been paired with another guy.
I agree that false confidence is damaging. Can it really be faked anyway? I cringe when I hear the “project confidence whether you really have it or not” advice.
I don’t think it’s possible, anyway, for people who just do not have confidence as a general proposition. For someone who usually does, but with a specific person, does not, for some reason, in that case, can draw on memory to act as though one does, but if one does not have the memory to draw on, it can be a disaster.
It’s done so much, it’s probably a meme, but frequently in a scene where a guy is giving another guy advice on asking a woman out, he says something along the lines of “project confidence,” then he closes with “but above all, just be yourself.” It always gets a laugh, no matter how often it’s used, mainly because of the facial expression the guy getting the advice pulls.
That’s why asking for or giving dating advice is a risky proposition. My friends figured that out, although they found it difficult to see me depressed and lonely. I would presume to give dating advice to either of my kids. The oldest has recently come out as a transgender woman, so even if I’d been a dating maven the best I could ever do is be supportive. The youngest met his current girlfriend his freshman year of college almost two years ago, so he’s done something right
“Fake it til you make it” is something I never considered. “Be yourself” was so important to me I was never willing or able to do anything else.
ISTM we all have a problem with a general sociocultural expectation that these life skills are “normally” absorbed just by osmosis or induction – or the belief by many that it’s even instinct-wired. That you should not need to be consciously “taught” unless there is something wrong with you.
Exactly the same in both scenes. That was the point. The script was identical in all ways except how the guy looked.
The reality is that attractive people will have an easier time getting dates and won’t have to work as hard. If that’s surprising to someone, that’s probably an indication that person doesn’t have a good grasp of how dating works. People generally want attractive people to ask them out, so the bar to meet is lower for asking someone out. In the example you provided, it should not be surprising that the unattractive salesman did not have the same success as the attractive salesman because there is a higher bar to cross.
As an analogy, imagine that someone at work asks you for a ride to the airport. Your relationship with that person greatly affects how you will react to the request. You may eagerly say yes if your good friend asks you, but you may greatly resent if some random stranger asks you. If the stranger doesn’t understand why you won’t give him a ride but you will give your friend a ride, that’s a sign that he doesn’t understand typical human behaviors and relationships.
Unattractive people can still ask people out, but there should be some reason to think that the recipient will be receptive to the request. Asking someone out out cold on the first meeting should not be done unless there are very clear and obvious signs the request would be received positively. If the receptionist is smiling, engaging, asking casual questions, etc., those are signs she would be receptive. But if she seems ambivalent, then the salesman is stepping over a line by spontaneously asking her out.