Certainly don’t go around moaning about your personal problems, whether it’s an inability to attract women or get laid or anything else. Women want you to be paying attention to their problems, they don’t want to have to spend time listening to yours.
There are four other key mistakes to avoid making:
Being interested when she doesn’t want you to be
Not being interested when she does want you to be
Acting as if her “no” means “no” when it doesn’t
Acting as if her “no” doesn’t mean “no” when it does.
The fourth is the big one to avoid, as it can earn you a spell in the hoosegow and the mark of Cain for life.
All clear? Right, you’re on your own now. Good luck.
There seems to be a continuum of men’s views of women. Some men view women as lower animals, objects put on earth for their personal sexual gratification (sometimes it’s not entirely their fault, they might have been raised that way).
Other men view women as goddesses, and nothing in the world matters as much as what women think of them. They depend entirely on validation from women for their self-esteem.
Type A doesn’t care about rejection from women, because he doesn’t think much of women in the first place. It would be comparable to being rejected by a potted plant. So he asks lots of women out, talks them into doing things they might not have otherwise done, and in general gets lots of ass. But this pattern does not exactly make for healthy relationships.
Type B knows that if he goes for a woman and gets rejected, his world will fall apart, he’ll be depressed for days, feel bad about himself, etc. So he approaches women only very rarely, after agonizing deliberation, and when he does, the woman senses that everything is riding on her, and it scares her off. This also does not make for healthy relationships.
The lucky men fall somewhere in the middle, where they respect women and treat them as humans, but have independent personalities and don’t rely on women to validate them.
Incubus may fall closer to the ‘B’ side of the continuum. I say this because he wanted to touch this woman, she put the kibosh on that, and yet he continued to go on dates with her, instead of saying to himself “Our goals for this relationship are incompatible, maybe I should end this and look for someone who likes to be touched by me.” I’m not accusing you of low self-esteem, Incubus, I’m just recommending that you think about your motives in continuing to see this woman when she made it clear she couldn’t give you what you wanted.
Real-life Nice Guy here…according to my fiance…
Boy, do I ever relate to this. I was the guy who always opened doors, even back in high school, treated women with respect, was never mean or pushy…you name it. It was the way I was raised.
As a consequence, I didn’t have a date until I was out of high school. I found a lovely, sweet, SEXY lady that I thought I was hitting it off well with.
Until I came home from college one weekend to find her engaged to another guy.
Then I found another lovely, sweet SEXY lady. We were an Item for a couple of years.
Until I went to her house one day to find her with an ex-boyfriend that she was “getting back together with”.
Then I found another lovely, sweet SEXY lady that I ended up marrying. We had two sons and a great life together.
Until I came home from work one day to find her heartily fucking another guy in our bed.
Then I found another lovely, sweet SEXY lady that I fell wildly in love with. I helped her open her own business , developed a great relationship with her daughter and thought everyting was just peachy.
Until…well, you get the idea. (This one still hurts a little and takes a long time to explain).
I have a wonderful sweet sexy lady that I am engaged to right now (August 17). I never thought that I would be here again. I was telling myself that I did not have the strength for this anymore. But the human heart has an infinite capacity for love and wonder. Just go ahead and be yourself, do the things you love to (because you love to do those things, not because you are trying to meet someone) and sooner or later Cupid will be there with that little bow and arrow of his.
I’ve been around the block enough to know better now- I certainly wouldn’t stand for something like that presently.
Like I had said, I was younger, and that was more or less my first real realationship. I never said I had wanted to touch her- she told me she didn’t want to be touched.
As for finding me unattractive- almost all the guy’s she’s dated look nearly identical. That’s right, they all look extremely similar to me, so much so that one of them could pass off as a twin brother as mine. So apparently she found someone who looks like me but with less personal hygene more attractive than me. Its not so much about the touching thing, its about being treated differently. As if she was embarassed to be dating me or something.
Women talk about spineless men and how they whine about what they don’t get because they don’t do anything about it. But I myself have seen plenty of spineless women who lead men on, afraid of hurting their feelings. Someone who sits and does nothing because they are too concerned about how the other person will feel, nevermind the fact that the more they delay the more they are hurting the person’s feelings.
In too many case it’s sad but true, yes. If you want to quickly find a representative sample start with the single mom’s. Somebody fathered those children and for a reason they are no longer around. In many cases, not all cases, these are women that got hooked up with a jerk and had to unload him before he ruined their children’s lives. Many of the women are otherwise fine people who, for some reason, made bad partner choices.
Ludovic hit it - would any of you "nice,’ well-adjusted guys who treat women with respect want any of these crazy women with no self-esteem who are attracted to psycho nut-job abusive men?
I have a wack theory about women/jerks:
(warning: severe gross generalizations ahead)
Women like jerks because deep down in our animal souls, humans are programmed to fuck and run. Men are supposed to impregnate as many women as possible, women are supposed to get impregnated as much as possible, with as much high quality sperm as possible. Here’s where it gets weird…Women like jerks because thay don’t care about them (the women). This indifference implies that the guy won’t get all torqued up and come too soon, resulting in a not-so-big load of inferior sperm, but instead will last longer, resulting in bigger loads of higher quality sperm. Plus, jerks are usually aggressive, which is another trait women select for in breeding, so a guy who’s patient enough to wait around for sex is deemed inferior for lack of aggression.
Wow. It’s like listening to myself 15 years ago. Very scary that I used to have this exact same attitude. Good thing I decided to do something about it. I have been with faithful and loving women who yearn to be touched (only by me) for the past 11 years. And all that bitterness is gone.
I’d tell you how I got from point A to point B, but it never ceases to amaze me that people would rather wallow in self pity than do a little work on themselves.
I’m not wallowing in self-pity. I’ve moved on. Every single relationship I have had is bad, and I am far happier being single than going through it again.
And yet you posted to the Pit. And continue to post about your horrible past. Doesn’t sound like you got past it to me. It sounds like it’s formost in your mind.
I understand that you don’t want to go through that pain. No sane person would. But did you really post here to tell us how happy you are?
Ah, good tdn said it much better that I was thinking about. (My responce was, “Oh yea, that’s mature clear thought right there…”)
You’re still reeling, which is fine, bad things happen and it takes time to get over them. I did the jerk boyfriend thing. At this point I’m still not very clear on why, but I’m sure I’m never doing it again, if I can help it. (Perhaps in my youth I mistook “crass arrogance” for “powerful confidence”?)
I made that choice for similar reasons, it hurt and I am not interested in ever hurting that much again in my life. However, I’m also pretty determined that I will not let anyone destroy my ability to love. I like to think of myself as a “quality woman”, and taking that away from some sweet, confident, funny guy because of some jerk is not an option I’m fond of.
So, don’t let the bitches get you down. Find girls of substance who are attracted to you and don’t play games and date them. The solution is not to never date anyone, its to be more selective and confident that you are worth respecting.
If Incubus wants to stay single that’s his business. It’s possible that it really is the answer for him, we don’t know the circumstances of his life.
But Incubus, I know you said you only have ever had bad relationships, and that’s your perfectly valid experience. However, you must know that many people have good relationships, right? So it is possible to have a good relationship. It is possible for you to have a good relationship. If it were a choice between being single and being in a bad relationship, I would agree that singlehood is the better option. I hope you can acknowledge to yourself that those are not the only choices. If you had a choice between being single and being in a good relationship… well, I don’t know you, but from your posts to this thread I suspect you’d pick the good relationship. If I’m wrong, then I wish you well in your singlehood, but if not, then don’t give up trying to find that good relationship, because you can have it.
Umm, sometimes the fact that a woman doesn’t want to be touched means that she just doesn’t like people she’s not especially close to touching her. I’m that way to a certain extent myself, and I was a lot worse when I was younger. I didn’t want anybody but my family and very best friends so much as laying a hand on my forearm during a conversation.
In a dating situation, especially a first date, not wanting to be touched would have had NOTHING to do with chemistry or attraction, and everything to do with my personality. As a relationship progressed, physical contact would increase.
To a large extent I’ve gotten out of that. I no longer have to fight the urge to slap someone’s hand away after some casual contact. Something in my head has changed over the years, which might be the case with the young woman in the OP.
Mods, I hope it’s okay for me to quote a few lines from Waiting to Exhale (book, not film):
“You’re looking for a guy who will make you feel fireworks. And he may very well be out there. All I’m saying is, sometimes you have to work a little harder at starting the fire, and it may burn a whole lot longer.”
Also, CanvasShoes, if you’re still wondering what an “RRRR girl” is, that’s not what Incubus said. He said “Why the RRRR do girls do this?!”, with RRRR in lieu of profanity. Apologies if you already divined that.
Incubus , I agree with the others who opine that the lady in question just didn’t want to be touched by you. It was immature of her to use the “don’t want to be touched” excuse. Many years ago, when I was much less mature, I did the same thing. It wasn’t so much an “attractiveness” thing, as much as the guy wanted to paw at me a lot more than I wanted, and he had some “social repellants” that just kind of turned me off.
I find that “nice guys” tend to think just being nice is enough, and tend to pout if women don’t actively seek them out. I have known too many “nice guys” who don’t think they need to make themselves look nice (I don’t mean like a supermodel, I mean brush your hair AND your teeth and for heaven’s sake, take a shower) or have anything interesting to say, and they blame all women because they are lonely.
I had posted this in the pit because it was something that happened to people besides myself, and the concept had been bothering me. I figured the conversation might be pit-material, and so posted it here.
Personally, I’ve never seen a moderator take a post OUT of the pit and move it somewhere else
Incubus, I had a thread taken out of the Pit. I don’t remember the subject matter, and it was long ago, maybe even during the Winter of Our Missed Content, but I clearly remember a mod saying, “This is so civil it doesn’t need to be in the Pit.” It was moved to MPSIMS, and dropped like a shot goose.
