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Notes -
Well, if roystgnr nominated me for an AAQC, I nominated you. While I'm not certain the difference between players and connectors is completely discrete, they probably do cluster bimodally. And of course players aren't immune to long-term commitment for the right person, though I do worry about the foundation that game playing lays for the future of a relationship.
Perhaps that goes to explain my own experiences at the party school. Where, of course, I ultimately met my match (that sounds more ominous than I intended), but not before feeling confused and played by the young woman I talked about in my first comment. When I look back on things, I think she was surprisingly honest, but presumed physical closeness without an invitation of intimacy functioned as one. You could think of this as a shit-test, but perhaps more truly it was a Type-B signal that my Type-A brain read correctly as loading all the risk in my direction, because that's how the Game is played according to the Rules.
On the other side of the fence, one of the strange problems of being a geeky Type-A man dating geeky Type-A women is that, through whatever correlative associations (autism, neurodiversity in general?) drive it, geeky women are often not merely demisexual but asexual. Or they may be confused about their sexuality, which may be a little weird, in the same way in which male geeks are just a little weird.
But an "I'm totally autistic, I have way too many hours in Baldur's Gate 3, my life goal is to pet as many cats as I can, my hobbies include making my own cosplay, I geek out over anime and manga" girl who decides the cutest pic of herself consists of her in a piano-keys themed skirt -- yes I'm thinking of someone I know in particular here -- well, that kind of girl exists, and sometimes she would like a man to have sex with her. (And sometimes girls like that write tentacle porn fanfiction, but we're not going to talk about that right now.) And if Skulldrinker could become legible to her not just as charming bartender but as geeky charming bartender, I'm hopeful.
Often a girl like that is chubby, though. It comes with the territory. "Doesn't get out much, plays video games all day, not outdoorsy, not into foreign travel"... this kind of person would be described as "having a sedentary lifestyle," and the medical literature describes that as a pretty strong correlate of metabolic disorder. The only people I know like that who aren't at least a little chubby have a medical condition or some kind of eating disorder. So it really, really narrows the pool to focus on weight to the exclusion of personal compatibility, and bland dates with thin people who do nothing for you can often be the result.
And yeah, they're often politically liberal. But sometimes not. The more common configuration is politically moderate, doesn't like Trump, cares more about treating people well than solving political problems. Liberal women are what they are, and it is humorous if a little alarming to hear a date say "I would never trust a white man" while she's staring into your white-ass eyes with longing, and even funnier when she subsequently makes a joke about something looking like Trump's hair and then apologizes for getting too political, as though making fun of Hair Force One is more controversial than racial bias.
For what it's worth, I think the tension between Type-A women and Type-B men is what contributes to a lot of the "I'm trying to avoid the redpill creeps" stuff you hear from young women nowadays -- it really is not a fun time to end up attached to a strategically withholding seducer as a basically honest person looking for a meaningful connection.
But the challenge, as always, is that people with a large enough amount of power -- and the attractive, dashing, and beautiful have a great deal of power within their sphere -- are always tempted to play by the rules of the game by which they win, and it strikes me as a real fact about the dating world that the most attractive cohort of people are more likely to withhold and hold out for a 'better deal.' I've never had specific interest in the 'hot girls', but maybe my impression that they're not looking for something meaningful says more about my place in the looksmatch pyramid than any inherent fact about the attractive.
Every piece of relationship advice suffers from survivorship bias. "Just be yourself" became such a big piece of advice for two reasons -- first, that putting on an act, while possible, is extremely psychologically expensive, and if you're trying to reassure someone nervous, telling them to stop looking at themselves from the outside and instead try to inhabit the moment from the inside is a much more fruitful piece of advice that might actually result in chemistry and charisma. And second, because the best and happiest relationships result from connections where "just be yourself" really is the method of making an impression. Someone who finds you charming for who you are is far more likely to find you amenable over the long term, and history is written by the winners.
Unfortunately, women like that who are still single are the sort who made my 20s miserable by constantly complaining that men speak to, look at, or exist near them, and every second sentence they speak makes it clear they have absolute contempt for all the men they supposedly share a subculture with.
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