I was the oldest of three girls and our mother was a strict disciplinarian about our behavior. I was an amenable child, and quite anxious about making mistakes and getting in trouble. Boys seemed pretty much like wild animals to me much of the time. Adults usually liked me but I think the boys were having more fun!
Adults tended to like me as well; despite my gender. Young me could have been described as a “respectful smartass”.
For boys maybe it comes a bit later. When I was about 15 I had a crush on a girl so strong it amounted to an obsession.
At least I wasn’t alone in my torment. I remember years later one of my high school classmates told me, “My brother was so obsessed with you in high school,” and I don’t think we ever said two words to each other. The only reason I remember him is that he wore a dress on 70s Day and got in trouble for it. Which is pretty cool, IMO.
Up into college, boys seemed, not socially backward as much as a different species, with a rudimentary grasp of human language and concepts, primitive tastes, and violent pastimes. I did not understand them in any way whatsoever. All my male friends were gay. I didn’t quite get them, but they didn’t frighten me either. Later I managed to find weird enough straight guys to date.
I’ll bet they thought of me as such. As an old man what makes me smile or cringe these days is the many times I recall how girls in high school and even college tried to sound me off, one even kissed me offhanded since I was too dense to pick up what she was implying. And I just stood there too dumb to react.
Some guys are truly clueless. My husband took the cake. We met when we were 18 years old. After an intensifying friendship of about six months, he was not making any moves, and I am not a patient person, so I sent him an email that said, “You have to know you can’t say all these wonderful things to a girl and not have her fall for you.” Then I made a big production, in the email, about how nervous I was to send it. And I sent it.
And he ignored it. He said he was really looking forward to seeing me again. And I said, “About that email.”
“Well what does it mean?”
“It means I’m falling in love with you.”
“Ohhhh. I thought you might mean something like that. I’m in love with you, too.”
Kinda adorable. I can see why he is a keeper.
He is the best.
First time I’ve heard tell of a guy more clueless than me. Lucky four us we both found someone not afraid to be direct.
I always noticed the boys who had sisters especially older ones were really good with girls and vise versa.
I have noticed something similar as well. When I think of guy friends that struggled the most in real interaction with women, they were usually in an all-boy family or had much younger sisters.
Note that attracting women is not the same as interacting with women.
You clearly are a patient person! At least more patient than any of the girls I dated as a teenager. I figured out pretty quickly that if I didn’t make a move by the first or second date they’d be like “what the fuck is wrong with this guy?”
I was pretty clueless up until around…well…now I guess. But especially as a kid and definitely before I could drive a car. Probably missed out on a fair amount of casual dating. It’s not like there was some guide book to dating as a teenager. And I don’t mean in some creepy Mystery Method pick-up artist sort of way. I mean just basic shit like “how and when do you ask a girl out?”, “Where do you go?” “When is the appropriate time to make a move?”
Yeah, no kidding - I have an older sister and interact with women just fine. I treat them like humans and everything! But Lothario I’m not. I’m about as good at courting women as I am at courting my older sister.
My sister is five years younger than I am, so that may have been too big a difference. Anyway, I always (and still do) had plenty of female friends. My issue is that I could never tell who was attracted to me and who wasn’t. Ms. P has told me several times that women were giving me a “look”, and I didn’t see it. It’s rare that I can even see it in retrospect. I suppose that mean that I’m still socially backward in that way.
Growing up, I had an older sister and a twin sister. That didn’t help me any in the anxiety / shyness / awkwardness / lost-for-words conundrum I experienced when trying to communicate with girls I liked.
Yeah but didnt you guy’s who had sisters, didnt they give you some tips or clue you in?
Not even once. Not that I’ve asked for tips.
I have to ask, why didn’t any of the girls make the first move? Or was this pre-Helen Gurley Brown?
Even post-Helen Gurley Brown, women have been discouraged from making the moves on a guy. It’s rarely depicted in the media except as something awkward, desperate, or comical. Women’s magazines often implicitly discourage it by giving flirting tips that offer plausible deniability to allow women to save face if he’s not interested. There was that book “He’s Just Not That Into You” from the mid-aughts that explicitly told women not to ask guys out, because if a guy was interested, he would inevitably do the asking, so you were just setting yourself up for rejection by making the first move. It’s hard to overcome that conditioning, and even if you do, you still have to deal with that same awkwardness and fear of rejection that men do.
I thought I was being very obvious in flirting with my now-husband in law school. Most guys would have picked up on my interest, in my experience. I certainly could have just asked him out. But I thought if he was interested in me, he would have made a move, or at least acted a little more flirtatious instead of just being friendly and professional. Turns out we were both making the same mistake. It took months, but I finally suggested a friendly group outing, hoping it would become more than friendly, and long story short it did.
That was in my twenties, though; the OP was about the pre-teen years. I will say that there was a time between about ages 8 and 13 when I and most girls I knew were keenly interested in boys, but most of them didn’t seem interested in girls. I agree about the realness of the Tina and Jimmy saga. But we didn’t perceive it as the boys lagging behind us socially, even if that’s what it was. We mostly perceived it as personal rejection, and it hurt.
I’ve noticed that a lot of boys/young men who struggle with dating, and adult men who remember struggling, seem to think that all this stuff was easy for the girls. It wasn’t. For those of us who put ourselves out there, boys could and did reject us just as cruelly as we rejected them. For those cowed into waiting for the boys to ask us out, it was usually a very long, painful, and fruitless wait. For those of us who did get asked out, it could be thrilling (if we liked him), painfully awkward (if we didn’t), and occasionally terrifying (if he didn’t respond well to being rejected.) There was no book for us either, and most of us had social skills that were average or below. You couldn’t pay me to relive even one day of that horrorshow.