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Notes -
Time for some good old fashioned gender politics seethe:
https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11of65g/i_21m_asked_my_friend_21f_to_be_fwb_and_now_she/?sort=confidence
A clearly very socially awkward nerdy literal virgin (despite being 21 years old) guy thinks a cute girl in his study group is flirting with him. He takes her aside privately after a study session and asks her… does she want to be his FWB (friends with benefits)? He reasons that he wants to have fun like many young men and isn’t looking for a relationship right now.
The girl is shocked and taken aback. She turns him down flat and appears uncomfortable. He feels uncomfortable too and apologizes to her and leaves.
Over the next few weeks, she doesn’t say anything to him at study sessions. He tries to make contact again, not to proposition her, but just to resume their friendly acquaintanceship. She tells him directly that she doesn’t want to speak to him. He is hurt but understands and leaves her be. Soon enough, he learns that she has told her friends and extended social circle what happened, and he is widely reviled as a creep. He feels hurt and violated. He laments that he has lost a friend, and now feels like he’s being lambasted for an innocent error, and he wishes the whole thing would just end and go away.
My take on OP is sympathetic. He comes off as extremely awkward and clearly isn’t well versed in the endless myriad of opaque and seemingly contradictory rules of modern dating. He wanted an FWB, and he didn’t understand that the socially acceptable way to get one is to ask a girl out on a date (usually through Tinder), then hook up with her, then either stay as vague as possible for as long as possible about your intentions while continuing to periodically fuck, or to sort of half way shrug after a fuck session and say, “yeah, I’m just really not looking for anything serious right now.” OP genuinely thought he was being upfront and honest with another person, and assumed that he was proposing something mutually beneficial.
Yes, it’s not a good idea to outright proposition a girl to be an FWB in a library. It’s awkward and weird and I can see how it made her feel uncomfortable. But all signs point to OP making an innocent error. He didn’t know any better. When he became aware of his mistake, he immediately apologized, gave the offended party space, and only later attempted to reestablish contact in a friendly, non-threatening manner. He made an innocent mistake and responded in the best possible way.
And Reddit’s response to OP is… calling him a massive piece of shit in every conceivable way.
What I find interesting about the overwhelming criticisms of OP is that they split in two completely opposite directions, but seemingly from the same critics.
On the one hand, OP is relentlessly slut shamed. He is accused of treating this woman like a “flesh light,” of feeling “entitled” to sex, of creepily trying to fuck an acquaintance, of pursuing sex with a girl instead of trying to date thine lady like a proper Victorian gentleman.
On the other hand, OP is relentlessly virgin shamed. He’s an incel, a fool, a creepy moron. He’s daring to try to have casual sex when he hasn’t even lost his virginity because he is SUCH A MASSIVE FUCKING LOSER. OP doesn’t understand that casual sex is only for chads who have fucked a bunch of girls, FWBs are an unlockable perk, not a privilege of the sexually unworthy.
Fortunately, there is a minority of Reddit commenters backing OP up, but it is a small minority. Meanwhile, many more posters are saying that OP is well on the way to becoming an incel or Andrew Tate fan, and unfortunately, they’re right, just not in the way they think they are.
I don’t have a larger point for this post, only that it’s incredibly frustrating that a significant portion of mainstream culture has erected these standards for the dating marketplace where one false step not only does, but should result in social and moral annihilation.
I feel some sympathy for OP that he's so clueless and has had so little experience or advice that he thought "Hi, we've had some positive interactions in class so... wanna fuck?" would be an acceptable approach.
But my sympathy is limited - unless he's literally impaired (i.e., autism spectrum, and even then, most folks on the spectrum are able to learn some baseline rules, particularly when it comes to asking people for sex), this was just unbelievably stupid.
I've seen a number of posters suggest that he was done in by bad/disingenuous feminist dating advice, implying that women will tell men "Yes, we like to fuck just as much as you do!" and that means you can approach a woman for sex the same way you wish a woman would approach you for sex. But I don't recall ever seeing dating advice, even from feminists, suggesting that any woman wants a proposition like "How about being my no-strings-attached fuck buddy?" That's a relationship that usually develops from mutual attraction and having hung out together enough that clearly there are some sparks, but neither one (claims) to want a "relationship."
(Do I think "FWB" is generally a stable kind of relationship? No, and I believe that very few women really want to be someone's FWB, it's something they settle for while trying to secure a real commitment.)
So this poor guy wasn't ill-intentioned, but he made an absolutely horrible social blunder, one that anyone, man or woman, could have told him was a blunder, and unfortunately he's suffering the effects people usually do when committing a massive faux pas. It sounds like the consequences for him are that she's told all her friends (and realistically, would you expect her not to?) and he's probably sunk what dating prospects he had at that school. This is sad, but unless this becomes a story of him being charged with actual sexual harassment and academically punished (which I'll grant is certainly within the realm of possibility), I don't think he's suffering more than you'd expect. He fucked up, and fucking up has consequences.
I have more sympathy than this, because while I am very aware of how weird it would be to ask a female friend to have sex with me, I am also very shy and have remained single for many years because everything that might lead to any kind of romantic relationship seemed very weird and overly forward to me at first until I forced myself to do it, with my heart beating out of my chest and every instinct telling me not to.
Because of this, the first time I had sex as an adult was at 25 and I had my first serious girlfriend, who I met online, at 28. The only relationship I've had with someone I met in person started when I was 31. So while I always have a strong reaction to these stories where I think the guy was obviously doing something really weird, I also recognize that I am really bad with women and that I really should be doing a lot more things that feel wrong to me. So who am I to judge people who make these mistakes? At least they're trying.
The thing is, no one ever sits you down and tells you how dating works. Almost everything I know comes from TV, the internet, and experience, and experience is really the most important one that allows you to figure out what from the first two sources is bullshit and what is not.
It sounds like he thought that's what happened.
And this is probably where my evolved instinct to never take any risks comes from. But I had to force myself to overcome those instincts and when I started trying to date, I made some mistakes which may have resulted in my ostracization from a group of friends in my late twenties, which was very difficult, especially since it happened right before covid. Finding the right level of risk aversion to maximize social success is very difficult when you are fundamentally just not good with people. It's not enough to recognize what you shouldn't do. You also need to be able to recognize what you should do. Telling the difference is the hard part.
I empathize with this more than you might think, and I agree that the poor OP probably did misread the signals he thought she was sending.
I hope his life and future dating prospects are not destroyed by this, but he suffered a painful (and appropriate) lesson which hopefully will be a learning experience for him.
If real I dont think transferring schools to reset his reputation will be a bad call given a fair number of people meet their partners in college and given how retarded he is, he should probably optimize for that.
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