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For a man, it's hard for him to develop confidence with taking the lead with women unless he gets to practice it in an environment with plentiful women. As a short, conventionally unattractive man, I had to work hard on improving my body and conversational skills to speak to women. This involved trying and failing many times. Women thought I was weird. I mean, I'm commenting here on the Motte so you know I'm already at least a bit autistic, and talking to women did not come naturally at all.
Homeschool would have been the social death of me I think, but I can't say that with certainty. If I was tall and/or more conventionally good looking, it wouldn't have mattered because I would have had more easy chances to socialize with women anyway. Women are easy to talk to with practice, but the opportunities to practice depend on your social environment (home schooled or not) and your physical looks (can be innate or self-improved).
So, my recommendation is that short, somewhat autistic boys should not be homeschooled unless you want them to have little chance for them to be seen as a suitable mate for women. If they are tall or good looking though, then homeschool is perfectly fine because the women will come naturally later.
It didn’t feel like school was very helpful for the short autistic guys I knew either though. Or for the tall autistic guys. High school is probably the worst environment to learn how to flirt (after your workplace), you’re stuck with the same people year after year, and any cringey attempt at practicing your ability to flirt risks becoming gossip that the whole school learns about.
My high school was relatively packed at 2500+ students, I never got the chance to know most of them. I had about 5 or 6 classes and different people each semester, so YMMV. For guys, there's always a fresh crop of freshman girls for the incoming class each year. There were at least 3 junior high schools feeding into my high school.
I agree high school isn't great, but the alternative is college with no practice or hard lessons learned before that. College for me was a "whew, this is a chance to start fresh" opportunity that I did much better in after applying the failures in high school. Sexual access for men is competitive, why hamstring ugly sons for no reason.
Maybe I’m a romantic but I find it a little sad if you don’t get the magical experience of a spark spontaneously forming between you and a classmate you’re sitting next to, doing what you can do group projects with them, and stumbling on a romance that way. Your first romantic experience should be one without practice, with butterflies in your stomach, awkwardly holding hands for the first time, leaning your head on their shoulder, both of you discovering everything for the first time together. You can’t get that with someone that’s just flirting practice, like you can’t pick the first person you fall in love with.
Early romances like you describe, which start out fiery but often end quickly are exactly the kind of experience you can't get while being homeschooled until college. It's practice in romance. Separately, flirting practice is important too.
There are also fiery romances in college, but the expected social knowledge about romance is higher as everyone is older and usually more experienced. Women can get away with being completely inexperienced, in fact many men prefer an innocent maiden. Inexperienced men are just seen as clumsy, like a partner leading a dance who keeps stepping on your foot and elbowing you in the face.
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I don't think homeschool would've been the death of you. It's not like you don't get to talk to girls. I saw plenty of young ladies my age when I was in high school, even if we weren't going to school together, after all. I do agree that it's a practice thing, the biggest problem in my experience was that in this arena, success begets success and failure begets failure. You need to go into that interaction with an easygoing self confidence, but at least for me that self confidence was destroyed by past rejections and it took me a long time to try to figure out how to build it up. I truly don't think anything would've been different for me in this regard if my school situation had been different.
You were in high school but also homeschooled? Wouldn't that make you not homeschooled?
I do agree that success begets success, assuming you were aware of the real reasons for success and not misattributing success to other reasons like "being a nice guy". But failure does not always beget failure. There is a type of crippling rejection failure that can be damaging, but it can also be viewed as a learning experience, like "that which does not kill me makes me stronger".
I would not say that "high school" means "went to a school campus and studied there", but rather it is a generic term for that level of education no matter where you get it. That is what I meant at any rate.
I did not fully flesh out my idea that success begets success etc, but what I meant was in terms of self confidence. When you succeed, you feel confident that you can do it again. Conversely, if you fail, you feel less confident that you will succeed in the future. And because people find confidence attractive, I believe that someone who gets off on a successful foot has a significant edge in terms of future success attracting mates, versus someone who gets off to a start with a couple of failures under his belt. I think that the guy who succeeds a time or two can more easily brush off future rejections, because he knows "I did it before so it's not impossible", whereas the guy who gets shot down a couple of times starts to believe "I guess I just can't do it", and that his lack of self confidence hinders his future prospects. In that way, it seems to me like romantic success and failure can be a vicious (or virtuous) cycle, where your past performance can influence your future performance. Obviously exceptions exist, but it seems like a decent general hypothesis to me.
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I think discontinuing homeschooling in late middle school or early high school is a strategy concocted in order to make getting into college easier.
t. was homeschooled through 7th grade
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