Social interaction can be “trained” I can thank my ex-wife for a ton of object lessons in dating and perceptions of how men act from a womans perspective.
My dating life after her has been night and day different from before her. Granted I am also 15 years older and wiser with the confidence that comes with more life experience.
I would always assume anything besides “yes” meant no. Also, the obvious signs of interest or lack thereof never registered. Reading subtle, and I assume sometimes not so subtle, signals is right up there with higher math and putting together things with more parts than I have fingers on one hand. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a disability to the degree of, say, dyslexia. It can have a profound effect on a person’s life. If flirting, reading signals, ect. comes easiliy to someone (or even if it doesn’t but they eventually figured it out) it can be hard to understand how someone can just not get it. I’m not just talking about someone on the autism spectrum who has trouble with social cues. It’s not easy for me to see how a person who appears reasonably bright can’t learn to skim material, pick out main points, and provide some basic analysis. Most people can improve to a degree, but I’m sure there are those who never get there. Is it a chemical problem, lack of proper socialization, or something else? Beats me. If I were a psychologist I’d research it. If I hear of a study, I’ll volunteer.
No, don’t say it that way. This is not some psychological or genetic thing.
Women, in general, shy away from the potential for physical violence. They have less upper body strength, are accorded less respect, and often just don’t run as fast. Women, in general, are more likely to get killed by frustrated suitors.
Women say, “Not now” instead of “never” because they fear physical assault, not Great Grandmamma’s “Tsk, tsk, child, where are your manners.”
(And Great Grandmamma knew what was going on, she just didn’t want to scare anyone.)
I don’t think so. Even disregarding the issue of violence, rejection usually isn’t fun for either party involved. It isn’t fun to be rejected, but it’s not fun to be the one doing the rejecting, either. (That is, assuming that the rejector isn’t a sociopath – I’m sure there are some egotistical folks who get a kick out of rejecting suitors, but they’re in the minority.) .
Yes, I think the thread has crossed over a little bit because many of the behaviours and issues people are complaining about here apply to both genders.
For example I can relate to the person complaining she couldn’t get out of a relationship* (because her partner wouldn’t accept that it was over).
Higher math and putting things together; I kick as at that kind of stuff.
As someone who successfully broke out of the “nice guy” mold, here’s what I think.
First, “nice guys” don’t relate to women as people. They’re thought of as some kind of vaguely mysterious beings who live in our world, but aren’t quite of this world. And they treat them accordingly- in the abstract, with a calculated set of behaviors engineered to try and lure them in for sex or a relationship or whatever. Not quite a mechanistic expectation, but pretty close to it.
A good example, would be a “nice guy” actually getting a first date and fucking it up. The guy would ask the girl out, get a ‘yes’, and then proceed to set up a far too elaborate first date- expensive dinner, drinks, etc… which likely would make the woman uncomfortable because she’s feeling like there are expectations involved. Then later, when she turns him down for a 2nd date, he thinks 'WTF is wrong with that chick? I just spent $150 on a date with her, and she won’t even go out a second time!" and the woman is thinking something like “That was weird… he spent $150 on me… on a first date? What’s he about?”
The trick is to make yourself seem pursuable to the woman. Someone they’d like to get to know better. A way to do this is to have a very low pressure first date. Like a cup of coffee somewhere earlier in the evening- talk for an hour or two, then end the date there. Leave her wanting more, or if you’re not interested, then you didn’t waste much of your time or money, or hers. Then, the second date can be something a little more elaborate- dinner or something like that.
It’s probably different if you’re already friends with the woman, but in that case, the real trick is not to change the way you behave; that’ll seem really weird if you go from being a friendly sort to someone who’s obviously angling to get in their panties.
Probably the single worst thing that “nice guys” do is to put way too much emotional weight on a first date. This plays into the whole doing too much thing I listed above- beyond trying to elicit some kind of stimulus response, they’re coming across as super-desperate, which is about the least sexy thing possible in most women’s minds. That’s one more reason that a low-key first date that you end is good- you come across as more confident, and maybe a little like you don’t need them, which is paradoxically (to the nice guy) an attractive thing to women.
And to reference what P-Man was saying about “Not Yes = No”… I used to think that way as well. Eventually I decided to flip it around and work it the other direction (Not No = Yes), under the assumption that I trust the woman to actually say “NO” in a coherent way. And it worked! I’d been terrified from one of the early college “NO means NO” indoctrinations that we all had to attend, and never really realized that it didn’t really mean that “Not Yes = No”, but rather literally that No = No, and that No doesn’t mean maybe.
I don’t think anybody should underestimate the extent to which a “Nice Guy” who faces constant, repeated rejection from women can really start to get fucked up mentally. I mean, look, this is me.
I’m nearly 25 years old, and I have never had a girlfriend; I’ve made out with two women while inebriated in the past (they were both friends of a friend), but neither were any woman that I would want to date under normal circumstances. Sadly, that’s the extent of my prowess in the relationship arena.
The few times that I’ve gone out with women on a first date (the last one was about a month ago) nothing ever came of it beyond that. One of the women, incidentally, turned out to be a lesbian - or at least started dating another woman - though I only found that out much later after the fact.
It just really messes with your head after a while, especially if you’re somebody who just generally doesn’t put himself out there very often, and when you do you just get turned down or never make it past the first date. A lot of the “omg wtf is wrong with me?” thoughts naturally start to spring to your mind, and collectively it just makes you less likely to ask anybody out in the future and to be more broadly cynical towards women in general.
I at least partially know what my problem is: I don’t get out very often (read: at all), but I am a monumentally busy college student who also works outside of school. So basically, all I do is study, study, study, and work, work, work. If I got out more - which would mean that I’d need some good clubbing mates, which I don’t have - then maybe I could use the alcohol to be more willing to approach women.
It also doesn’t help that I have a friend who is less physically attractive than me who slept with at least two dozen women, many of them supremely attractive. I can only attribute that to his supposed “aura” of confidence, but beyond that I dunno.
So, in closing, anybody who says that it’s impossible for guys to get through college without getting laid has obviously never been to college. Trust me, it happens.
Of course that happens. I had very dry college years, with a few awkward exceptions. I place the blame firmly in two areas:
Oh, and
3) I was a coward about flirting, so afraid of rejection that, well, see #1.
people like that just can’t comprehend the fact that people are different and have different experiences. I went to a local (but well-regarded) engineering-oriented university, so I wasn’t hanging around on campus or in the dorm all day. but even if I was, I’m not the “go out and meet people” type so I still wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. and all through high school and college nobody showed any interest in me, at least none I picked up on. At this point in my life, the ship has long since sailed and I’ve come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t on it.
This. Success breeds success, failure breeds failure. It’s ruthless truth, but it’s true. This applies towards many other things in life, too.
It’s like some Newton’s Law of inertia in relationships; people that experience dating success tend to get better; people who experience dating failure tend to get worse.
um, actually, you’ll probably have more success if you stay out of the clubs and just look around you. Most relationships occur between people who meet in their daily lives. When I was in college, study groups, organized extracurricular activities, and meeting people at or through part-time jobs were where romance was found, not the bars, frats, or clubs. You want to find someone you are compatible with, which means someone that fits neatly into your current lifestyle, which clearly doesn’t include clubs.
If all you want is sex, not a relationship, just go pay a sex worker.
My advise in that situation, with shy introverted folks, is typically to get involved in things you are passionate about. This solves three problems:
(1) I find that self-consciousness and being deeply into something can’t co-exist: to an extent, you ‘lose yourself’ in what you really care about, and so the barriers to interacting with people tend to fall away;
(2) being passionately into something makes you more interesting to others than if you aren’t into anything - and people have to have some reason to be interested in you to want to hang around you - it is no good looking for dates because you want them or feel lonely, you only get dates because other people think dating you, or being around you, is fun - and who wants to hang around someone who is moping about being lonely?
(3) If you are into something, you have more reason to hang around with like-minded people, and you have something in common with them.
The only caveat, or element of “gamesmanship”, in any of this is to choose something likely to be of interest to your choice of romantic partners …
I’m not sure why you’re considering talking about ‘constant’ rejection or blaming women for your situation. By your own post, you don’t often engage socially with women much at all, and a good chunk of what you do with them is alcohol fueled makeouts with women you don’t really like. So there’s no ‘constant’ rejection, there’s actually just ‘occasional’ rejection. There’s no mystery about why women aren’t in your life much, spend your time and effort on things other than making friends, meeting women, and learning how to play whichever game you want to engage in (whether it’s picking up chicks or forming relationships).
Women as a collective don’t owe you sex or relationships, but your attitude seems to be that women should be all over you because you’re some nebulous ‘nice guy’. Maybe spending all your energy and time on work and school right now is a good decision for the future you want - but it’s not the fault of women that you made the choice. (And there’s plenty of women who give up on sex/relationships to pursue school and/or work too, it’s not something unique to you or unique to men). If you want to get laid or date (it’s not really clear which or both you’re looking for from the post), you have to actually show up to the game, you can’t just sit at home and expect the league to hand you a trophy one day.
There’s absolutely nothing nice about deciding not to put time or effort into meeting and interacting with people that you want to meet, then blaming and growing cynical to the people you aren’t putting in effort to meet for not putting in effort to meet you. And frankly, a number of things that you said are also really offputting:
So you make out with women who you wouldn’t want to date. You object to a woman being into other women. You get cynical and blame women for the results of choices you made. You make a point of how much more physically attractive you are than your friend, and covet his ‘sex number’. Now, the meat of the ‘not nice stuff’ is in the subtext and implications of this, so it would take a bunch of back and forth to sort out how much is phrasing and how much is misogyny, objectification, hypocrisy, blame shifting, and other unpleasant stuff vs just off the cuff phrasing or coincidence, but the fact is this stuff is actively unpleasant to me, and would be to a lot of women I know.
If a male friend revealed an attitude like this to me, I would be immediately, viscerally turned off. In addition to being an unattractive sentiment, it’s not nice.
PS - Also unattractive on a female.
Huh? How is this “an attitude”? He’s just describing what happened to him.
@iljitsch, There are a lot of ways one can take “I’ve made out with two women while inebriated in the past (they were both friends of a friend), but neither were any woman that I would want to date under normal circumstances,” but I’m hard pressed to think of a positive one. Is it a ‘good enough to fuck but not good enough to date’ thing? Or maybe ‘they’re too ugly for me without alcohol involved’ (and maybe ‘they’re ugly so don’t really count as women?’ tossed in on the side)? Maybe because they had a drunken makeout, they aren’t good enough to date? I don’t know exactly, but it is a really, really jarring ‘not nice’ statement to me, and I think to Barrett.
Not even an “and I felt really bad about it” disclaimer. I felt bad about dating my first girlfriend, whom I dated out of desperation. Turned out she was desperate for a husband, and soon started telling people we were getting married. I ended it, and she was dating someone else within a couple of weeks. It may have been karma, but it would be almost 6 years before I had sex again. At 25 I was in the midst of this dry spell. If no one was interested during that time, who was I to blame them? As an adult I found I hard to blame anyone besides myself.
To play devil’s advocate here, it may simply be a question of phrasing, and he may simply have meant that he ended up making out drunkenly with two women who by no means were his normal “type” - i.e, he may normally be into pot-bellied, ill-tempered dwarves with Marfan’s Syndrome but inadvertently kissed two knockout All-American blondes - something that does not necessarily pass normative judgment on any on the women in question. The statement does not necessarily lend itself to an unfavourable interpretation, although the wording is at best clumsy and certainly does invite such.
That said, @2ManyTacos, I can already tell you that part of the reason you’re still single at 25 is that you appear to be looking for a girlfriend while bar-hopping. I’ll echo what others have already said: you’re not likely to meet the mother of your children at the local dive bar, and cynicism, however comforting it may be to resort to, is not getting you anywhere.
To be fair, I did meet the mother of my children at a keg party.