urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
No bio...
User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
Oh god, please don't start the master morality vs slave morality debate again...
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
My experiences with alcohol are that it makes me a sad, weeping drunk about half the time and an utterly silly, horny drunk the other half. That roulette wheel can be fun with an intimate partner you already want to have sex with, but I don't think it would be sensible with a stranger.
Alcohol does not, however, make me more social, except with people I'm already likely to be social with. So I might be more talkative to a friend, but I wouldn't be more likely to be socially gregarious to a third party or a date I barely know. And at the point where I'd consumed enough alcohol to get to that point, I would already be so impaired that I came off as uncoordinated and slurring even to myself, which probably means other people would perceive me as mad drunk.
I also tried phenibut once, before the FDA cracked down on it, and as best I could tell it had exactly 0 effect.
Hey Rae, I took my time with this response because I wanted to get it right. February, like @OliveTapenade said, was gender month on the motte, and it seems like February won't be much different.
A Portrait of Urquan
I wouldn't say that I struggled to integrate male sexuality with my self identity, but more that I struggled to reconcile my personal sexuality and experience of the world, which I've always experienced as male or as cis-by-default, with what was expected of me by society. I've never experienced gender dysphoria, or felt that my penis and the various things which one might endeavor to do with the penis, were strange or foreign to me.
Now, I do have some personality traits that are commonly considered more 'feminine', and have created tension for me in male friendships. I don't enjoy competitive hobbies, like team sports or multiplayer video games. I'm not socially dominant, I don't enjoy teasing-as-bonding, and I tend to be more of a listener in a conversation. It's frequent that after hanging out with someone or going on a date, the other person will say, "Wow, I really talked your ears off, didn't I? I'm sorry I monopolized the conversation."
I enjoy feelings-talk as much as ideas-talk, and my preferred mode of social bonding is to be with one person, or a small group, and listen to how they tell the story of their life, what moves them, what kind of dreams they have, what they care about, what the meaning of life is to them. I enjoy deep chats about life and meaning.
It's a frequent occurrence that any time I try to hang out with male friends, they will proceed to play some kind of competitive local multiplayer video game like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros, in the old days Halo, etc. I will often be sitting off to the sidelines because I don't enjoy that kind of experience, and it's been a real tension in male friendship groups I've been a part of that I'm the odd one out, people try to include me, I reassure them that I'm enjoying watching... it's kind of like when you invite your girlfriend to a hangout with the guys and she ends up playing with the dog. That's me, but I'm one of the guys.
When I play video games, I prefer to immerse myself in the story, build a character that I give a backstory to, and use creative tools in the game to express my character's position and identity in the world. Stardew Valley (which a friend once described as "such a girl game") is one of my favorite games of all time. I see video games as interactive stories and creative expression tools, not mechanics in which to demonstrate mastery. I play games on story mode.
Basically the only social experiences that leave me with a feeling of satisfaction are one-on-one, deep chats. I enjoy laughing and having fun with people, but I just am a very intense, and very private, person, and I enjoy bringing other people into my world, and seeing what their world looks like to them.
Love According to Urquan
As I've shared before on the motte, my model of intimacy and relationships is deep and passionate. I see romance as a means of seeing oneself in the other. It's not principally about resources or even sex-qua-sex, but about being close to someone in the special way that romance brings you close. I don't know how to describe it or break it down. There's a je ne sais quoi to romantic intimacy that I can't describe to people who've never experienced it. It's not lust, it's the desire for union of the soul, where someone else becomes an extension of yourself. It's butterflies and it's the feeling that you've entered the kairos -- the special time, the appointed time, when even going to work and doing boring work things feels buoyant. Where the world feels enchanted and beautiful again, the way it always felt when I was young.
When I was a teenager I wrote this:
I believe in love. Not the altruistic compassion of the teachers and philosophers, nor the euphemistically-concealed erotic passion of sexual intercourse, but the kind of love that erupts with joy and strains the sinews of the heart — the sort of love that is held with such conviction that it disables the other functions of the mind, that is so pure and so powerful that you cannot but think about the object of the love, that makes all you do worth the struggle of life because they live, and that colors the world beautiful because they are beautiful.
Oh - and I'm also into classic poetry. Can't you tell?
The main tensions with the male social role I've had have been that I struggle to "slot in" seamlessly to male social groups, as I've suggested, and that I've struggled to find the kind of intimacy that's meaningful to me. A lot of flirting includes the very kind of social engagement that I find unintuitive or unnatural: playful teasing, inexplicit boundary testing, displays of bravado and confidence, sexual confidence. But if it's supremely creepy to begin a conversation with a woman by saying you want to sleep with her, it's massively more insane to begin a conversation by saying, "I'm looking for the kind of love that makes the world beautiful and I want to merge our souls together." But that's what I've always looked for: someone to whom I can expose the reality of my capacity for passion, someone whose eyes I can stare deeply into, someone whose vulnerability and pain I can absorb and comfort.
Because I see love as a means of intimate union and mutual vulnerability, I come into tension both with the expectations of men and of women. In general, men find that kind of thing to be 'girl-talk,' suitable for 'chick-lit,' the kind of thing you invent to reassure your girlfriend, not a mode of thought you inhabit for yourself. Women find it, in men, somewhere between "impossible to find" and "impossible to exist," and there exists few to no kinds of reliable signals that can communicate to a woman that's what you're looking for. Because establishing a relationship where those concepts make sense requires early-stage flirting and dating, I've often felt like I have to suppress the very motivation that drives me to seek intimacy in order to engage in meaningless banter and playful teasing. That doesn't feel like me.
There's also the sexual shame element, I personally am low in sociosexuality, and I find the idea of having sex with someone I don't know well to be deeply uncomfortable. I've done it, but always with regret and a feeling of emptiness and being used that made me want to scrub my body with such an immensity of soap that my skin would burn. So I feel like I've often swam massively against the current, having to compete with hookup bros in a market for lemons, and facing skepticism from women who expect from me a kind of sexual bravado and indifference to social convention that feels totally foreign to me.
I don't see any of my traits as incompatible with being a man. I just see them as incompatible with the carrots and the sticks that surround the socially-constructed model of what a man is. That kind of model is obviously based in reality -- men really do prefer playing multiplayer games together instead of talking about their feelings, as my own experiences would attest -- but what men reward in other men, and especially what women reward in men, operate according to a certain pattern which isn't necessarily my own.
Queer Theory-ing Urquan
There's a stereotype of gay men among normies that they're sensitive, moody, artistic, poetic, romantic boys who just need a well. Accordingly, I was sometimes bullied as a kid for being 'gay' in that sense. This stereotype shows up all over popular culture; one of the more absurd examples is "The Battle of Schrute Farms" from The American Office, where this purported Civil War battle is actually a gay commune, described thus:
But the Battle at Schrute Farms was no battle at all. It was a code used by pacifists from both North and South who turned the Pennsylvania farmhouse into an artistic community and a refuge from the war. You have to understand. Poets, artists, dancers – these kind of men preferred peace to war. These delicate lovely men found a place of refuge among the Schrutes at Schrute Farms. Amidst the macho brutality of war this was a place where dandies and dreamers could put on plays and sing tender ballads and dance in the moonlight. I like to think of Schrute Farms as the Underground Railroad for the sensitive... and well... fabulous.
In other words, if you're a pacifist, if you're artistic, if you like poetry, if you're not socially dominant, it logically follows that you really must want to suck cock. Seems we have some professors of logic down at the university of science who put a lot of thought into that one.
Our scripts of masculinity have taken everything found "unmanly," bundled them into an archetype, and slapped the label 'queer' on them. The Romantic poets of the past who wrote elegies about their romances with women would be labeled as the queerest queers who ever queered by our modern views of gender, even among progressives. Maybe especially among progressives, for dumb reasons.
Supposedly I'm doing "queer theory" right now, but if you actually sit in a university classroom where undergraduates try to use queer theory as an interpretive lens for historical literature, it's basically the least queer-theory interpretation possible because it consists of viewing any friendly or intimate connection between men as homoerotic. Postmodernism consists of incredulity toward metanarratives, except of course the metanarratives where everybody's fucking gay.
(I will give them the theater kids, though, the majority of the theater kids at my high school were gay or lesbian. I will also give the bisexuals Shakespeare if they wish to have him.)
Maybe such feminine traits are more common among gay men than straight men -- I don't know -- but I do suspect that whatever such traits exist are themselves ground down by the cock and the whip the carrot and the stick that gay men have to face, where intimacy is damnable heteronormativity and hookups are liberatory. You will suck the cock after five minutes of chatting and you will like it.
I'm principally attracted to women, though with a limited ability to find very femme men attractive (stereotype fulfillment?). My youthful explorations of the gay social scene gave me the impression that, there, I'd find it much harder to locate the kind of intimacy I actually find valuable. It was like looking for love in a world filled only "with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls." What I think Ginsberg missed is that the ecstatic sexual world is as much a part of Moloch as any number of demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses!, or indeed granite cocks!, to those who do not fit its rigid vision of freedom.
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
I can understand why someone with a personality such as you've described about yourself would find gender transition appealing. The default for an AMAB individual with an attraction to men is the gay social scene, which amplifies most of the very things I find discomforting about the male sexual role into almost a comedic parody. I note with almost existential irony the fact that the ultimate immoral mistake for a man to make when flirting with a woman is to send her an unrequested dick pic, while gay men treat dick pics almost as the equivalent of a hello. I'd be interested if @gattsuru has a more nuanced take -- my own experiences of the gay social world were basically college activists and horny college twinks, and they... have their own peculiar way of things.
I don't know what sensitive men like me are supposed to do, or what the world expects of us. We are strange to men, and invisible to women.
(Edited to add: Exhibit A. See what I mean about carrots and sticks?)
The Masked Urquan
Now, let me answer your direct question:
What happens if you don’t put on the mask and just stay who you are when interacting romantically or in the bedroom?
I feel like you’d be missing out on so much if you can’t be authentically yourself with your partner. Sex when you’re just acting out a persona in order to please your partner… that just means you’re both getting cheated out of real human connection, no? What’s the point then?
Well, the honest answer is, "nothing happens," and there is no "bedroom" in which sex would happen, regardless. At least in early stage flirting, I have to go outside my comfort zone to get to the point where I could be more like myself.
But as for the second part, I guess it's partway related to the fact that I've dated some more... kinky women. My imagined model of a sexual encounter is very personal, very intimate, low and slow, "I love you so much," kissing, holding each other while going at it -- that sort of thing. I've had that, and I value it a lot. That's typically the "porn for women" script, and it's what stereotypes tend to assume women want from sex.
But stereotypes often also assume that women just... don't want sex that much at all, which isn't true. In the post-Fifty-Shades era, it's pretty clear that a decent chunk of women like dirty, kinky, dom/sub, rough, dirty talking behavior in the bedroom. That's the element that felt more foreign to me when I first encountered it. I never had as much trouble as the "Yeah...you like that, you fucking retard?" guy, but it definitely was hard to adapt to it.
But I feel you, sex is for me about 'real human connection,' just like you said. I guess I've tolerated that stuff because, well, it really turned them on, and women are hard enough to please sexually that if something just does it for them, I'm happy for the opportunity to give it. In the post-orgasm-gap-discussion world, the assumption that vaginal intercourse to completion on male terms constitutes the sex act has collapsed, and you're pretty much obligated as a man to do something that isn't necessarily your #1 thing in order to please your partner sexually.
I hope that answers your question. Obviously I'm exposing some vulnerable things on the forum here, but you've been open with me and I felt compelled to return the favor. If anything stands out to you, I'm happy to elaborate to an extent.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6d ago
It isn't helped by the fact that most profiles converge on 1 of like 3 archetypes.
Do share.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
I think you're correct that most of the change has been due to ambiverts becoming introverts and the overall range of socialization going down, but I'd add to it that there's a phenomenon where increasingly women who go out socializing are not interested in meeting men during that socializing, even in traditional spots for that kind of thing such as bars. I'm not really speaking from experience here, but we've had several posters talk about how younger women tend to stick together and just spend time with each other at bars/clubs/events in a way that wasn't necessarily true in the past. I don't think that's most of the effect, but there does seem to have been a change in how people socialize in public, even when they do.
That said, I'm in the "my idea of a good night is World of Warcraft" personality cluster. I found a partner who's part of the "my idea of a good night is Netflix True Crime documentary" personality cluster. We met each other in college, and I would say our relationship pushes us both to get out of the house more, do fun things, go on a fun date, go for a road trip, although we enjoy snuggling on the couch just as much.
She sent me some screenshots from this video the other day, and texted "We're the 0.74%. I'm glad I met you in college, it was the correct time to meet someone." I think introverted people tend to disappear into the ether after college -- that's true of me -- as the structured time with a cohort of similar-aged people ends after years of school and college. What's left in terms of "obligatory situations where you can meet people" is basically the workplace, especially for the increasingly irreligious who aren't 'joiners,' and that's... fraught, even on a good day.
A big part of the argument for coeducation back in the day was that it made it possible for men and women to meet in a shared collegiate environment instead of the old tradition, where the fraternity boys would throw parties and the girls at the nearby women's college would show up. The joke in conservative Christian circles is that women go to college to get the esteemed Mrs. Degree. My mother was actually recommended by her pastor to go to a regional Christian college because she'd had an engagement that blew up and still was eager to find a man to settle down with; she took the advice, and Mr. Urquan Sr. capitalized on the opportunity.
As for how you meet people after college, that's where it gets startlingly fraught and the modern, internet-enabled attitude of "if it's not required, I won't be there" becomes destructive.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
I can't speak to the apps, but I can say that the worst time in my life was when I had a strong desire for romance in early college, and felt desperately lonely. I was already struggling socially, and I tried to go and meet people anywhere I could, and I just felt like I was getting nowhere. What you said about perseverance is very true, but another thing that I'd note is that, because the male dating strategy is inherently a numbers game, the more you put yourself out there, the more your oneitis gets sanded down. But the flipside is that this means the passionate romantic hope you might be able to experience for a new woman get sanded down as well, and if you're a romantic-type man you start to lose motivation and people start blending together into an amorphous mass. I remember when I was a teenager I could feel such passionate crushes and such intense butterflies, but by the time I made it through college I couldn't really feel much of that at all. It just felt numb.
I'm really sorry.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
7d ago
Whereas I don't think I've ever been approached by a woman when I was in a bad mood and/or "stuck in my own head".
I was, once. I was in high school, in speech and debate, and I was sitting alone at a table in between rounds staring at my phone. A girl approached me and asked for my number, and I was so surprised that I went, "uh... why?" She responded, "well, you look like you're alone over here so I thought you might want someone to talk to." I can't remember what I said next but it was basically some version of, "no thanks?" I probably came off as a massive asshole, but I was running on 4 hours of poor sleep (as all debate tournaments go) and my brain was fried.
I couldn't tell you whether this was actually intended to be a flirt or not, but if so, it... wasn't a great one. I was actually years later, after college, that I realized, "oh crap, that was possibly an approach."
To an extent, gay issues like "don't criminalize sodomy" and "gay marriage is legally defined" have won, but that's just as much due to sweeping changes in straight culture as a gay cultural victory. "Sodomy" is typically defined as both anal or oral sex, and anal sex has become aspirational in more prurient strands of straight culture, while oral sex (both ways) is exceptionally normalized to the point where I wouldn't doubt that it's more common than intercourse. Whenever our Irish friend comes out confused by the frequency of oral sex in younger generations, I have to chuckle a bit to myself. If only she knew how frequently young women demand oral sex from their partners as a feminist issue, or realized how often popular culture depicts men who don't do it well as unmanly...
It's also pretty... cheap to talk about the "sanctity of marriage" after the massive divorce-fest of the past 40 years and resulting social chaos. Young people are starting to view marriage as a legal headache rather than a social benefit, and cohabitation is skyrocketing massively. "Let's let the gays participate in the meaningless ritual that nobody takes seriously and just causes legal headaches" is incresingly the view of the young left on the issue, and most of the arguments against it stand out to the center as hypocritical.
Civil marriage hasn't even approximated the Christian view of marriage in a long time, to the extent I think it's a different institution. SSM just stands out to me as the final nail in a coffin, not a grand transgression of how sanctified marriage is in a world where the Republican president is on his third model wife after divorce. My impression is that this is generally the view of the young right, even among Christians.
That said, a decent chunk of social opprobrium continues to exist in the center, particularly oriented towards the promiscuous behavior of gay men. In a way, even out gay men understand they have to keep their full sexuality in the closet and put a face on Shoggoth. Straight men keep a respectful distance, and straight women maintain friendly relations by make-believing in their head that gay men are universally sensitive, passionate, artistic, sweet and pure love boys like in yaoi who just need a wishing well. The actual destructive elements of gay culture are rarely acknowledged except inside the LGBT umbrella, and even then usually aren't aired to outsiders for solidarity reasons.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
In other words, the outcome of nuclear war is everyone loses.
If they are a true 103 IQ country then they’ve probably hit below their weight for centuries.
IMO, I think they have.
I continue to believe the dumbest geopolitical naming change in the past hundred years (maybe secondary to the Turkish umlaut disaster) was the Iranian decision to tell the Anglophone world to call them "Iran" instead of "Persia." "Iran" just has no purchase in the Anglophone world, it doesn't mean anything, it just makes Anglophones intuitively place them in the same category as the other four-letter 'I' country, Iraq, which is not good company. The closest thing that Anglophones have to "Iran" meaning something is, of course, "Aryan," which is also not a word with good connotations for the West, however long the Persians have called themselves that. "Persia," however, calls to mind ancient empires, deep history, conquest, power, mystery, adventure, Zoroaster. Even at my not-so-great primary school in the US, we learned a surprising amount about Zoroastrianism and the Persian empire (alongside the Mesopotamians).
The Arab conquerors gained great prestige by claiming the mantle of "Egyptian." Why the Iranians don't realize how much prestige they lost from their enemies by demanding they stop referring to them by the name that carries the legacy of their ancient, powerful forebears, I will never understand.
Switching from "Persia" to "Iran" reduced the country's soft-power inheritance in the Anglosphere. That made it easier to frame Iran as a hostile "regime," rather than a venerable civilization. "The Persians have nuclear enrichment" feels iconic. "The Iranians have nuclear enrichment" sounds like a problem.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
- Scientists are serious people with important tasks; they should dress accordingly in public 2. Fanboying over latex-clad skimpy pin-up girls is sort of tolerable as long as you’re an unserious young dudebro; when you’re older, not so much; by that point you should marry some frumpy woman and throw such clothes into the garbage
I think you can collapse these two into "it's culturally a blue-collar, working-class, thing to display sexuality nakedly in a workplace setting, and it violates white collar social class expectations to do it, so it signals either utter social obliviousness (which is generally strongly discouraged in white collar settings; how you comport yourself is just as important to your job as the 'work') or an active, resolute attempt to counter-signal against the taboo on sexual display in a workplace setting, which is intensely off-putting to normie women (and therefore that the counter-signal is designed to actively and knowingly repel women).
Scientists are assumed to be basically intelligent, so a big part of the feminist debate here is to shift the overton window from the obliviousness assumption to the active, resolute counter-signalling assumption.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
Galaxy brain moment: make Miami the ruling capital of Cuba and run it as a colonial extension of Florida. Reunite the Cuban diaspora. Little Marco for Floridian emperor. I hear Florida even has a widely-recognized castle he can live in.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8d ago
It was probably the Tea Party movement that was the direct trigger.
I still don't understand what the Tea Party was angry about, except that Barack Obama was a Democrat and the Democratic Party had a trifecta.
See this Jezebel screed as one example.
That was... a read. "I'm right because I'm right, if you disagree with me it's because you're wrong." Holy question-begging, batman!
You could make a ton of really good arguments about the particular issues she discusses, like arguing that employer-provided health insurance is a standard product and it's an implicit religious test for employment to provide non-standard health insurance that doesn't include certain treatments based on religious values, which discriminates against employees who don't share the owners' religious views and thus violates civil rights law.
But you're right, this is proto-woke; instead of actually making the argument, she just assumes her argument is correct and proceeds to shame people who disagree instead of trying to build a moderate coalition. This is "the OU student who wrote a college reflection assignment on how trans is demonic"-tier writing.
In this specific case, it wasn't so much that I said something controversial as I said something that I had put some original thought into. I think she was agnostic (heh) on the question, but the point was that I was the sort of person who thought deeply and independently.
It's hard to describe exactly how this resonated if people don't know me or her personally, but I can say that she likes being the devil's advocate and challenging assumptions based on evidence. Some ladies are hot for professor, and I can be... professorial.
I can't recommend or extrapolate from this to give generalized dating advice, other than to say that standing out and taking risks can be rewarded, and at least one woman admires taking intellectual/social risks in that way that I did on that night. But I think I was just in the right place at the right time, and met someone who was looking for an intellectual companion.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
I'm so sorry. I've been fortunate to have mutual love at least a couple times. What I can say is that it's so worth it, even though it's hard to find. Dates a man can find, and relationships he can attain, but love is happenstance, sweet sweet happenstance.
In some cases they were initially ignored or rejected. Usually they were able to do something that marked them as highly skilled or high status within the social context they knew each other.
That's actually helpful. Rather than competing against every other theoretical male out there, you just have to be near the top of the local hierarchy in whichever subculture you identify with.
Yeah! That's a big advantage. It's also, like you said, a better matching mechanism: if you're both in the same subculture, committed to the same thing, have shared interests/passions/ideals... well, it's likely that your personalities are going to be more similar and compatible than a random person you'd grab out of a bag.
When my girlfriend talks about meeting me, she says what impressed her wasn't just that I said something controversial, but that I thought independently, resisted going along to get along, and did things my own way even if people disagreed. Those are all personality traits that she admires and wants to live up to. We also both like historical debates. That's something different than intimidation or game, that's social alignment: being high-status in a particular way a particular woman wants to be like. The spark of love is that someone can look at you and say, "being close to this person will bring me toward something I want to move toward." That's fire.
I don't think spouses have to have all the same interests in common (though I don't think it's a bad thing), but you do have to have that certain je ne sais quoi that makes you personally compatible in values and orientation towards life. I think about the strongest relationships I've had, and in those we forged new interests that became "things we do together," and it meant that we enriched each others' lives with new things and grew together.
The problem is they try to be both. The people who are interested in hookups are mixed in with the ones who are more serious and there's some incentive to lie and obsfuscate.
Part of the issue is that the apps take no responsibility for (lack of) filtering your matches for people who are truly interested in relationship vs. those who are idly swiping or just want a hookup. They don't even try.
And they don't give YOU the tools to effectively filter. Its a laughable abdication of responsibility.
Yeah - both men and women hate this outcome. I believe the growth in places like Bumble and... wasn't there a new one? Hinge? was driven by the reputation of Tinder as "the hookup app," which it never really could shake, and now of course those apps will be busy building their own reputations for seediness.
I think that’s fair — the instigating “this person is impressive” feeling can be after you’re already aware of someone, but not close with them. Looking back, I don’t recall any flirtations like that, so I guess that’s my blind spot.
That said, I think my point is a little more subtle; I suspect that with many of your friends in those relationships, there was some initial level of spark or interest or “this guy is attractive/high status” even before the flirting started. I’m not a mind reader, and I could be dead wrong.
If you naively look at my dating history, you’d probably say the same about mine — in all cases I knew the person for at least a bit before we started dating. But, in hindsight, it was clear that attraction existed from the beginning. It’s possible that some level of “getting to know you” was necessary — just not nearly as much as I let play out, either because I was scared or because I was ignorant.
I’m mostly picking on myself here, as my experience is that I often didn’t act on my romantic interest after signals of mutual attraction were present, either because I couldn’t read them, or felt like I hadn’t ‘earned’ any kind of attraction by doing something bold.
But what you definitely can’t do is be unimpressive, boring, standard, and ‘merely nice’, and expect any attraction to develop. Most guys who are of the “get to know someone for a bit before you express romantic interest” perspective are of that type, and often naively believe that their presence or emotional availability expresses their romantic potential. It doesn’t.
That’s my main point: impression has to come before relation.
Dating apps are definitely an unfortunate means of meeting someone, because a photo reel and a short bio does not a person make. Nevertheless some people find a great partner there, I just honestly never tried because I believed they were just hookup apps, and by the time I realized people were meeting their spouses on there I was already in a happy LTR by the grace of almighty God. Maybe telling a room full of atheists that the US is a Christian nation was a meritorious act, I don’t know.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
My preferred mode of forming relationships, particularly romantic ones, involves knowing the person in some personal level (at least 'acquaintance,' possibly 'friendship') before actually initiating romantic intent.
I'll say that this is my preferred mode too, but I also am wary that the average woman feels the same way. When I look back on my dating history, even back to secondary school, I can't remember a single time when "this person is attractive, but I want to get to know them as a person first before expressing romantic interest" ever actually worked out, or ended with a relationship. Inevitably, if I decided I liked the person and I would be interested in knowing her romantically, any expression of interest would just be rebuffed -- typically politely, but still.
You do often see women online complaining about "I thought he was my friend, but then he asked me out and he was just lying about being my friend to get in my pants," as though being friendly and engaging with someone as a person instead of immediately asking them out is a kind of duplicity that can only be understood in a prurient manner. I don't know if those exact thoughts run through the typical woman's head, but it does accord with my experiences being friends with and dating women.
I'm not always a fan of their methods, but I do think the redpillers are descriptively correct when they say that women generally have a separate mental track for "potential romantic interest" and "potential friend," and you have to behave in a certain way to be put into the first category rather than the second. Every woman I have ever seriously dated expressed -- either with their body language and flirtation (when I got better at reading this), or in hindsight, after we were dating and she would look back upon meeting me -- that I did something that impressed her the very first time I met her.
It was always something that was more than just "urquan was really nice and friendly," it had to be, "urquan was the class clown and I thought his joking was really confident," "urquan proudly said he was a Democrat when the teacher in poli sci class used him as an example of voter registration," "I liked how urquan made jokes that built upon each other when we talked and incorporated things I was saying," "the way urquan writes about what love means to him was so romantic, it makes me feel like I'm in a romance novel," or "urquan gave a lecture to a college atheist club where he made a historical argument that the US is a Christian nation because of the large influence that Christianity has had on its history," which, to use her words, "made me think you had your own independent thoughts and didn't just think what other people wanted you to think."
There was also, of course, the time in school where I was waiting for someone in the lunchroom, a girl that sat at the table and I started talking, and I absentmindedly and unconsciously started suggestively flirting with her and thought so little of it that I blacked it out of my memory. (The only thing of that flirtation I can recall is she was eating a banana, and, well, schoolboy-tier phallic jokes were made.) What a surprise when I subsequently did the, "I'd like to get to know her as a person before I express any interest" thing, having forgotten that I'd implanted the mental image in her brain that the fruit she was eating was my fucking penis, and then 3 months later she drops a note on my desk as she shuffled out of the classroom that told me she was in love with me and asked 'would you go out with me?' Man... the high of reading that note was so intense that I'd compare it to heroin, if I knew anything about what heroin makes you feel like.
You should note that, in all my examples, I did something actually impressive in some sense: I was confident enough to say something controversial, or to take a stance proudly, without reservations, or to state how I felt about something in beautiful and moving words, or to express my sexuality clearly and unapologetically. I wasn't nice, I wasn't friendly, I was confident, without fear of rejection. Confidence is the engine of attraction. The engine!
The other thing I note from my dating history is that, of course, in most of these situations I subsequently did the "I really just want to get to know this person first before I express any romantic interest", enough that multiple relationships of mine have started because I did something impressive enough, and was subsequently intransigent enough in my withholding of romantic interest, that eventually these young women took matters into their own hands and directly stated their romantic interest in me out of sheer desperation. Obviously they would have much rather preferred that I ended my sequence of impressive acts of sheer confidence by confidently suggesting something romantic. That's how you get swept off your feet.
The reality is that women want to be impressed before they do the "I just want to get to know this person" thing; it's just how their attraction works. Men are actually the same way -- it's just that their attraction is more visual, and women's is more an attraction to the gestalt of a man.
So, if you're attracted to a woman, you do nothing impressive, subsequently become her friend, and then later decide you like her enough to ask her out. The read she has of that situation is: "well, you did nothing to impress me or to trigger my attraction, and now you're springing this on me, why are you making me have to romantically reject my friend after this time knowing each other?" They see "being friends before suggesting any romantic interest" as a failed strategy -- in which case it's pathetic -- or a covert attempt to "let her guard down" before she knows what all you want out of her, in which case it's considered creepy, like espionage. I think that's a harsh judgment, but it's the kind of judgment I think is being made.
I think in most cases men don't mean it like that, and it's not so much a strategy as men just being slow to warm up to someone, even if they're attracted to them. Men's romantic interest is much more gradual, while women's is much more binary, in or out. Hence why men are more commitment-phobic than women: they escalate from "cute" to "beautiful" to "worthy of adoration" to "eternal and undying love" more slowly.
(Evopsych terms -- maybe men's up-front sexual attraction is the thing that bridges this gap ancestrally? Women ramp up sexual availability slowly, men ramp up romantic/emotional availability slowly, both are withholding something the other wants, so they have a reason to stick around with each other and try to build it up?)
I guess what I'm saying is, I feel you. But some element of the obligation to "bring that enthusiasm to the date" is that you have to impress as a man, or you've already lost. I got really lucky, in that a few times in my life I've just been being my stubborn, headstrong, fiercely intellectually independent, and paradoxically public-speaking-enjoying self, and a woman has taken note of this and found me attractive when I'm being what I consider to be the best version of myself.
So, perhaps "Just be yourself," and "be confident," really were the best pieces of dating advice, because the best relationships come from authentic attraction to personality.
It's just that this assumes that "yourself" is attractive or impressive in some way, and additionally is horribly mismatched to a world in which men and women are less and less interacting organically, in the real world, where real personalities and authentic strengths are present. The end result is, well, the Game.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
When I went to school there, there would be ads in the Pitt News advertising that you could rent a room in South Oakland for $200-300 a month. My general sense was not that it was a slum or anything, but that the general behavior of college-age people made it such that it made no sense to live there if you were older than 23 or so. I had several classmates who rented places there and would throw parties on the weekend. The general model was that you would pay $5, they would give you a red cup, there was a keg in the kitchen, and you would fit about, idk, maybe 100-150 people, into a 2 bedroom row house. The music blared and you couldn’t hold a conversation, then the neighbors, quite reasonably, would call the police. The police would show up and everyone would scamper away through a back alley.
I think I might have been to 4 or 5 parties that fit that description before deciding it wasn’t my scene and spending my weekend evenings doing other things. My general sense from walking around is that there were several parties like that per block in South Oakland on your typical Friday and Saturday evenings. The idea of actually living there as a college-age student didn’t appeal to me at all; the idea of some poor adult living amongst that, idk, it struck me as insane back then, and it still does.
Peak college town energy, lol.
I went to a public uni with a similar vibe. Partying was never my scene, but you could tell that it was the scene for the whole campus. I ended up often just going home or (after we started dating) hanging out with my girlfriend on the weekends. I really enjoyed the academics there and I met many profs I got along with well, but the social scene of campus was so draining, the mix of preppy and normie, I guess. I ended up transferring somewhere closer to home after a mental health crisis. Sometimes I joke that it was the Tale of Two Cities time in my life: the best and the worst of times. Sometimes I wish I could have the optimism of that era back.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
I'm in a similar boat to cablethrowaway. What things on a resume would help someone stand out?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
The problem that affects young people with career searches is the same problem that affects dating: the proliferation of internet matching has made automated, algorithmized, and impersonal selection not only the default, but the preference. This creates a market where you don't just have to compete with those in your social circle -- you have to compete with everyone who has access to the internet. Boomers like to talk about "meeting people in person," and "submitting your application in person," but neither works today. Increasingly employers will laugh at the idea of submitting a paper resume, just as women will increasingly give you dirty looks if you try to ask them out in person (even if its an appropriate situation in which to do so).
Both have become a selector's (read: employer's) market, and those are always immensely painful for selectees, particularly in that they're thralls to the algorithms and the AI that are used to delineate the worthy from the unworthy. And, of course, to the dehumanization that being a PDF or a set of stock photos and a bio does to oneself. But the powerful prefer it this way, where hiring can be made impersonal and optimized -- and therefore any negative feelings that come with active rejection can be minimized. Illegibility is strength.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15d ago
To some extent, although from inside my personal experience is less about who was worthy, and more about who could have a thing done, in a way that worked successfully. I haven't exactly had an easy or good time in gay dating spaces. But I don't get the same 'learn a foreign language' feeling.
Hm. I guess this is one of the lines in your posts that I find hard to parse... could you expand on what you mean, with the "who could have a thing done" thing?
you get some chasers that think that trans-femininity is going to mean a ultra-submissive barefoot-and-in-kitchen trad-wifing that doesn't seem to actually be that desired by that many trans women
Yeah - that's what I was gesturing at with the "cis women are bitches, I'm going to date a *trans-*woman" protests. I think there's some level of belief some folks have, as in the motte post I quoted, that dating trans women is a kind of Konami code to unlock "super extra real hardcore femininity mode" and get the goods that cis women aren't giving them.
That said -- I recall once reading a reddit thread where a trans person actually endorsed that framing to a degree, to many upvotes. I tried to find it, but alas I couldn't. If I recall correctly, it went something like:
We should assume that as the cis dating world grows increasingly rough, that some portion of straight men who are open to dating trans women will start seeking us out. The best relationship I've had in my life started because I met a guy on grindr who said he was a straight man only looking for trans women.
That was definitely surprising, and went contrary to my understanding of how such things tend to go.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15d ago
I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass.
I think this is the "draw the rest of the owl" kind of problem.
Another issue is that a lot of people who grow up with these sorts of traits have trouble making friends, especially in youth. I think the cause of the kind of fantasy we're talking about is a disconnect from the social world as much as from the physical one, and atypical traits make that more difficult. Motion/body disconnect is often part of a syndrome with social phobia; I myself often have experienced a kind of hyper-body awareness in certain social situations that are particularly anxiety-provoking, where you kind of move manually and are dissociated from the normal coherence of your body, like when you consciously start to control your breathing -- as you are now, that I've mentioned it. That's common among people with social phobia.
I think masculinity is fundamentally a good thing, but I think there is a real tension between the broad male phenome -- the sum of all the ways in which men are like -- and various models of masculinity. A common underlying set of traits is hierarchical competition, or resource provision, or physical strength... but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat. IMO, a great deal of the extremely online stuff we see is caused by people who have suffered (or perceive themselves to have suffered) social defeat trying in some sense to construct a social hierarchy where they can win. See, for instance, NEETs playing competitive online games.
I think the main issue with any model of masculinity is that it's typically enforced in one of two ways: the carrot of women's attention, and the stick of men's violence. You can see that, for instance, in the military, where boot camps, strict regimentation, and obsessive hierarchicalism force men into a mold. In World War I, the British government ran a program allied with prominent suffragettes in which women gave unenlisted men white feathers in a shame ritual calling them cowards. I hold that one of the major reasons the USA became unable to run a successful conscription campaign for the Vietnam War is that the military lost the support of young women, who began rewarding rebels against the system with adulation for their courage. The same I think is true of gang violence in minority neighborhoods; men enforce compliance with guns, and, often, the women from these communities reward status in organized crime with attention. You get from men what men enforce and women reward.
So any model of masculinity and positive male role models have to have women and girls on board. The issue is that, in the West, it's not clear what women and girls are on board with, and in fact the dominant social mode of discussions of masculinity are to discuss its abberations and possibility for harm, or occasionally to praise men for doing things according to what women desire of them (and not praising them for being masculine on its own terms). The people who do talk about masculinity on its own terms are often selling their own inane fantasy, like the bodybuilder RAW MEAT influencers. The social inflection behind "man" as a category is incredibly negative; it's no wonder to me that some young men are going, "well, that's not me! Teehee!"
I don't think it's just about wanting to be with women, but I also think the kinds of men we're talking about place a high premium on being seen as fundamentally good by women; the "creep" designation, in a sense the white feather of the day, carries so much stigma precisely because "being a threat to women" is considered deeply wrong by both men and women writ large, for good reasons. But I think young men feel like there's no stable and broadly-recognized way to do this. Sometimes religious subcultures do a better job at this than the secular world -- I often noted when I spent time with the young Catholics group at my college that the men and women got along much better than those outside, and generally considered each other trustworthy and worthy of respect -- but it's not guaranteed, and in a world where the Church is optional as a social institution and increasingly at odds with secular assumptions, "just leaving" is an option that many people are going to take. As, obviously, transitioners tend to do.
The grass, of course, is never greener on the other side. I never struggled with gender identity issues -- clearly I'm a man, the idea of being a woman seems nebulous and foreign to me, and has no appeal. I know enough from having female friends that women are entangled in their own thorny world of backstabbing and status competition about which I'm not jealous. Even if someone could transition perfectly, magically, I don't think that men would find women's social world astounding or grand in the way they imagine.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
If you've ever lucid dreamed (I haven't, sadly) then that demonstrates the ability to be aware and at least partially conscious during REM sleep.
I've never lucid dreamed, but I do experience vivid dreams in a REM state and would describe it as a variation of consciousness. I usually forget my dreams, but immediately after waking I can typically remember the whole narrative experience of a dream, which felt real while I was in it. I tend to think of REM as a state of consciousness where sensory input is turned off, things that would set off "this isn't normal" alarms are somehow disabled, and conscious awareness is redirected to... randomness? emotionally unprocessed experiences? fears? Something like that.
With how vivid my dreams are I do experience them as places where I am making decisions, they're just decisions that are enthralled to the content of the dream. Lucid dreaming is the ability to know you're dreaming, and thus control the content of the dream to an extent.
I don't know how that lines up with current neuroscience, but that's my impression of how my own dreams work.
Have you ever had feelings of affection or warmth for a woman? Not just “she’s hot,” but “her smile makes me feel warm.” Ever? Even in school?
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