I’m finished with face to face rejection. It’s very uncomfortable for both parties, but epecially for the person being rejected, which is always me.
So the new idea is to send an email explaining this, that I find her attractive but don’t want to put us both through an awkward scene if she isn’t interested in going out with me. If she is interested, reply to the email or give me a call to say so.
If she’s not, I tell her just pretend she never got the email. Don’t respond. There’s no need to explain why, I’ll make up the reason why she’s not that is most comfortable for me. I promise never to bring the matter up again, by email or in person or any other way.
I’ve tried it once. I didn’t get a response. I choose to believe she’s a lesbian.
I don’t think I have ever cringed as hard as I did after reading this post. I can only imagine the reaction that your email recipients are going to have.
Are you sending these to people you know? I mean, this is basically how OKCupid/Match works, but it’s the norm. You send someone an email, they either reply or they don’t. If they do, you email back and forth until the emails die off or you meet in person. If you hit it off, you email the other person to attempt to set up another date and they either reply…or they don’t.
Getting a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ email on those sites is out of the ordinary, IMO. Some people send them but IME those are the ‘I reply to everyone’ type people.
Women detest a lack of confidence. Just be confident. Rejection is going to be part of it. Get over it. Look at telemarketers. They get rejected the majority of the time. When you get rejected just move on to the next one. There are lot’s of women in the world, roughly half of the population are women. Stay confident and keep trying. Trust me it will work out.
Don’t do this. It’s weird and will make women less likely to be interested. Rather, expect rejection. Assume that any date you go on will probably only be a pleasant hang-out between two people. Just relax and have a nice time – talk about what you like to do, and your aspirations. And at the end, if you had a nice time, say “I had a nice time and would like to do this again sometime. Is it okay if I call you?”
And if she says “no”, or “I just want to be friends”, it’s no big deal because it’s what you expect.
The key to happiness is to lower your standards until they’re already being met.
It’s not really even a dating strategy. It’s more of a strategy to be weird and make women feel really uncomfortable. One could argue, Boyo Jim, that it qualifies as a dating strategy because you’re technically asking for a date. I would argue that a dating strategy by definition has to include some possibility that some woman would find it appealing and want to date the creep that sent her the e-mail. I don’t think your creepy e-mail passes that hurdle.
It doesn’t exactly work that way. People expect to succeed or fail at things based on their track record and abilities; I don’t know anyone who can brush all that aside and just suddenly decide to be confident. There’s the fake-it-until-you-make-it school of thought, but fake confidence is not the same as real confidence.
Thanks for the idea of using telemarketers as role models.
I have no factual basis to be confident. I have loads of historical data that suggests pessimism is the most … accurate? … if perhaps not the most appealing attitude.
I feel devastated when I’m rejected. I can’t pretend that women are different ice cream flavors and just move on to the next if the present one tastes bad. If there is any chance at all of me moving from woman to woman like a fuckin’ bee, it would be with an email like this because I’m certainly not going to do it in person.
Based on my dating history, it would seem I’m weird and make women feel uncomfortable in person just as much, at least in the circumstances of trying to start a relationship. I think I’m a nice guy and very funny, and I’ve never had any sense that I creep women out in general social or business situations UNTIL I ask them out. Perhaps they quickly put me in a “friend zone” and are shocked when I try getting out of that, but that’s a guess.
Fake it isn’t the right way to think about it. We can’t control how we feel inside, but we can certainly control how we behave and to a lesser extent how we think.
Behavior is easy - don’t do things that reek of desperation and cowardice. If you’re someone whose instincts are so bad that an e-mail like this sounds like a good idea, then run your ideas by close friends or strangers on the Internet.
Likewise, I have a friend who obsesses about new romantic partners for hours and hours everyday. He likes to pretend he’s thinking about possible things she might dislike about him, so he can hide them or change them. In reality he’s cripplingly insecure and uses ruminating as a crutch to make himself feel better.
He can’t stop being cripplingly insecure, but I’m convinced he could force himself to not spend hours a day thinking of problems if he accepted it’s actively harming his romantic life.
This is true, but it’s not a reason to go out of your way to advertise lack of confidence and that you don’t deserve anything and are looking for charity.
“Hey you probably won’t like me, but just in case there’s a slight chance you do, maybe we could possibly have a date or something” doesn’t do much to tell someone YOU are even interested. And it communicates to the other person that she shouldn’t be interested and there’s probably something wrong with her if she is.
Just as I’m not going to ask my boss for a raise by saying “Yeah, I know I’m not that good at my job and you don’t like me… I’m kind of a screwup, but… hey, just say no if you need to. Can I have a raise? You’re probably going to say no anyway, and you might not be able to afford it, but let me know. Or don’t…if you can’t do it. Thanks.”
It’s hard to succeed when you sabotage yourself right off the bat.
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but “friend zone” is a euphemism men came up with for “romantic rejection”. A woman putting you in the “friend zone” is exactly the same as a woman rejecting you.
You may make women uncomfortable in person too, but the big difference is that someday you’ll meet a woman you don’t make uncomfortable. Or you’ll mature and get better at it with all women. Or maybe you never will, although I think that’s very unlikely. But we can say with an extremely high degree of certainty that your e-mail approach will not ever stop being creepy.
You see the difference?
By the way, a lot of women I dated I got to know pretty well by communicating online. In my case it wasn’t about being more comfortable online, rather just because me and women have busy lives and chatting on Facebook or texting is a good shortcut to get to know people once you’ve met them at a party or however you met.
You don’t have to call women on the phone or ask them out in person anymore. For every woman who thinks being asked our via text is horribly unromantic, there’s another woman who just hates fucking talking on the phone so much she would rather text.
Do YOU think you are a good person? Do you have good qualities? Does someone else think so? Parents, friends, siblings, pets, co-workers, teammates, schoolmates, someone?
