The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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They say “the worst thing she can say is no” but I asked a woman who I’m sorta friends with on a date via text and she read the message but hasn’t responded for 11 days and that’s so much worse than “no.”
I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything wrong but I guess I just want feedback on this message as a sanity check.
My first thought is, define "sorta friends". At least in my book, "friends" is people I already talk to and get together with regularly and would be perfectly normal to ask to get together with. This feels more like this is a person who you see once in a while at work or school or something but don't talk/message with 1 on 1 regularly and have never done anything together. That's more of a loose acquaintance in my book.
A bit of a long-winded way to say that it seems like you're trying to jump too big of a gap with this message. Going from basically no direct communications to an overly fawning and formal date request is 90% chance going to seriously weird her out. If you don't already have extremely flirtatious contact in some other medium, you need to start much more casually. Something along the lines of, hey [name], want to come get [a drink / lunch / dinner / a movie / whatever is your kind of thing], or invite her to some group event that you're going to. Or send a short joke or meme or something to get a conversation started, and if there's actually a fun and active interaction, do the previous. If you actually get together, things just kind of go or don't go based on how your interaction feels, the formality of calling it a date seems out of place, and like it's trying to force her into a some kind of framework where she'll be pushed or obligated to do something she doesn't want to do.
The turn-off of fawningness is pretty hard for guys to really get. Guys don't tend to understand that until they've become successful enough at some job or hobby or something to have people fawning over them. It feels pretty weird, and it doesn't make you respect the person doing it. At best, you see them as an assistant or apprentice or something of that level. It almost tempts you to take advantage of them and abuse them a little, even if you weren't inclined to do that sort of thing. All of this is basically the complete opposite of what women are actually attracted to.
On the explicit "not a big deal", see the Frank definitely doesn't diddle kids video. That's a way over-exaggerated version, but the basic idea holds - the more time and words you spend talking about how you aren't or don't want to do something that your context implies you're going to do, the more people will disbelieve you. I understand that you're saying that because you're earnest and over-thinking things and actually mean it, but that's not how most readers, especially women, will interpret it. You communicate that it's not a big deal by writing the first part like it actually isn't a big deal, not by explicitly saying it isn't a big deal. Both of your paragraphs actually communicate that it's a super big deal to you.
I've always tended to over-think things myself as well. I've found it a good rule of thumb to chop out 3/4 of everything I write. It's probably worth a try for you sometime - write a message how you normally would, then spend some more time chopping out 3/4 of it by taking out everything that you may reasonably assume your reader already knows or understands.
But all of that said, this is all pretty normal issues to have for young guys learning how to interact with women. You're not a bad person or anything, there's just a lot of stuff to learn that seems odd and counter-intuitive at first, and is probably the complete opposite of everything you've ever been told by whatever authority figures you've trusted. You probably didn't have much of a relationship with her in the first place, and it's a tall order to build that over text when you haven't already done so in person, so you haven't really lost much. Just forget about this message entirely and don't try too hard to talk to her if you happen to run into her again anytime soon.
I like how you broke this down because I don't think I've ever heard anybody explain it so straightforwardly. It makes sense.
At the same time, I am left facepalming at the eternal incongruence between male preference for directness and female preference for a million layers of build-up and plausible deniability. If it works out and a longer term relationship forms, the not-initially-called-a-date meeting will probably end up being retroactively referred to as a date.
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I'm curious if she was actually a good friend of yours, or if the sexual tension had you more interested in her. Imagine her as a guy friend, and if you still feel it was a good friendship then maybe try to salvage it.
When I started realizing in college that many girls made for terrible friends I saved myself a lot of headaches. When I met my the woman that is now my wife, I had a mistaken impression that she was already married/taken. She was fun and interesting though and I continued to hangout with her in the same way I'd want to continue hanging out with a guy that is fun and interesting.
I also had a friend in college that I really liked talking and hanging out with. I asked her in kinda the same way you did, but in person. She said she just wanted to stay friends and not be anything more. We never talked again. It was a bummer, but it only had me feeling down for a few days.
Sexual attraction is kinda weird. I'm not entirely sure how it works for women or for men. There are some people that seem to figure out their own version of sexual magnetism. As a guy you need to work yours out. And be careful not to go after the super magnets among the women. There are some women that seem to attract a disproportionate amount of men. My sister is one of these women, she was never single for more than a month since 6th grade. It was mainly a defense mechanism for her, she just got constantly hit on by guys around her if she was single.
Find a girl the other guys don't notice. Friends of the magnet girls are a good pick. Then find your own sexual magnetism and see if some attraction occurs.
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A lot of good comments already, but hopefully I can add something useful.
Remember the story about the guy who thought his study partner was flirting with him, so he told her he was not looking for a relationship, but was dtf is she was, so she freaked out and told everyone to avoid him? Yeah. You are definitely not in the same band of awkwardness as he is, but think of him as the platonic anti-ideal.
Don't put girls you have an existing relationship with on the spot. You have actually texted her a direct question, so there's a paper trail that both of you can't pretend to ignore. @5434a has the right idea: plausible deniability. You could've tested the waters with an indirect question about "a friend" whose girl-friend-two-words asked if she could be his girlfriend-one-word and he didn't know what to answer. Or could have framed the date as totally-not-a-date and then went "haha, these people must think we're on a date together" and gauged her reaction to the idea.
Right now the best option would be to pretend you haven't written this and look for an opportunity to discuss cases like yours with a third party in a safe environment with your friend present. Ideally this third party should be your trusted friend with higher social intelligence that should bring this up with a fourth party: "Don't drink that much, Fred, or you'll end proposing to random people from your contact list! I can't be your best man if you wake up in Vegas married to 'Hannah Couch Delivery'" and then steer the conversation to convince your woman friend that a text like this shouldn't hurt an existing relationship.
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To be clear, you did not "ask her on a date". You told her you are interested in going on a date with her, and why, which is a somewhat awkward thing to respond to.
Like others have said, the key here is to just ask her to do something with you. Ideally (and this is the secret sauce) something you would have already been interested in doing, with or without her. "Hey I'm checking out xyz Saturday, want to come with?", etc. You're off on an adventure, it's up to her if she wants to come along for the ride. This framing is much more appealing to women.
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look on the bright side, she's gonna go through the same thing when you ignore her in a year after you've gotten jacked as fuck from the motivation this rejection brought you. (speaking from personal experience)
This part never usually pans out lol.
Speaking as a fellow who did the exact same thing of getting jacked out of sheer spite (at least in the early stages).
Oh it did for me, I still remember her reaction when she saw me for the first time in like 6 months: * looks at me, does a double take, eyes widen, face becomes fully red, furtive looks the whole evening *. I actually feel a little bit guilty about just how good revenge feels.
Unless you were fat or physically grotesque before (hard to believe if you got jacked in six months) I can’t see this changing much. Women can be superficial, of course, but the gap between a handsome man with an average body and a handsome man with a good body usually isn’t enough to go from ‘rejection’ to this, at least not in my experience. Physical features women find attractive are (in order of importance) face (provided average height or above), height, broad shoulders. The gym helps with 0/3 (weight loss can do it, if a man is fat enough that it shows in the face, but I presume we’re not talking about that here).
Ah, in my case it was extreme fat loss, yeah, I didn't really gain muscle, just revealed what was there. People who haven't seen me in a while tell me I got jacked out of a misunderstanding of where muscle comes from.
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Wheres the part you ignore her? This seems to me you came across her and she acted in a way that implies she might reciprocate interest, but didn't show any
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While I second all the excellent technical advice from more intelligent posters than i, it probably didn't matter. As my great aunt used to say, if you were born to be hung don't worry about drowning.
That is to say, while improved technique might have improved your odds, it probably wouldn't have made a difference to the outcome. Unless her desire to sleep with you was in perfect equipoise before the text, a bad one probably didn't ruin a good chance and a great one probably wouldn't salvage a longshot. The outcome was probably written in cards that were dealt long before you hit send.
Probably, yeah
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I think the problem is your message was so straight forward that it rushed to the objective which removed any ambiguity and plausible deniability from the interaction and explicitly cemented it into the frame of a capital D date. You were probably also too comprehensive with the if/else conditions.
"Doing anything this weekend?"
[response]
"Fancy [social activity]?"
[response]
"No big deal, maybe another time"
...and then there's nothing to have to pretend didn't happen, which is going to be challenging now because you went meta at the end.
On the plus side at least you tried, and shared it for open feedback, and now you can move past it with the benefit of hindsight and others' perspectives. Make a mistake and learn from it. That's better than passively wondering what if. Better luck next time.
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I’m sorry bro. We’ve all been there.
You now understand how completely unhinged conventional-wisdom dating advice is. You’re not supposed to tell bright-eyed youngsters, “actually the worst thing that can happen is that she becomes viscerally disgusted by the thought of being with you,” but that’s the truth. That’s not necessarily what happened here, but it is a realistic option that one needs to be aware of.
I get what you were going for here. You heard somewhere that the biggest thing women fear about dating is feeling unsafe, so you wanted to be as non-threatening as possible. Women hate this for some reason. I don’t know why, but they do. You will drive yourself insane if you try to figure out the deeper operating principles at play which cause this bizarre-seeming behavior. Just accept it.
Unfortunately I don’t have any practical advice for what to do going forward. If you wanted a sanity check, you are making the typical mistakes that a young man reasoning from male-brained priors would be expected to make, so no, you are not going insane.
Thank you. She’s not a big texter AFAICT and the most likely thing that happened was that she read this and thought about it for 30 seconds and forgot to reply because she was in the middle of something and had other more urgent messages which really isn’t that bad, but I can’t help overthinking.
It's a no from her my guy lol. One does not simply forget texts of that magnitude.
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She didn't forget to reply. She deliberately didn't reply because it would be socially awkward for her and make her feel uncomfortable.
Your best step from now is to follow through and pretend like nothing happened and you never asked her.
I'm rooting for you with future women btw. You did nothing wrong here. Her behavior is incredibly common.
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Yes, you cannot help overthinking, yes. You are spot on here. You cannot help overthinking. Or can you? Can you begin to help it. I think you can. Help the overthinking to go away.
What's your plan for tomorrow's lunch? No plan? Okay spend some time thinking about that. What are you going to eat? Why? Are you on a diet regime at the moment? Exercising? What's your BMI? When was your last health checkup, and are you planning to begin the process of sculpting or taking ownership of your body and appearance or are you just going to melt into entropic blobhood like most Americans do (No idea if you are American)?
I am not solely trying to distract your interest here, I am mostly serious. But you see my point. There are other things for you to be focusing on that have to do with your very real well-being that have zero whatsoever to do with any woman. Finally, brother, whatsoever is healthy, whatsoever gets you those gainz, what adds to your physical strength and formidableness, whatsoever clears your complexion and staves off the beergut--if there be any excellence in your life or anything praiseworthy--dwell on these things.
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It’s a very glass-half-empty way of looking at life, though. I’m often reminded of the Donald Trump mentality, like it’s impossible to imagine Trump responding to rejection with anything except “your loss!”. And while I have many problems with the Trumpian attitude to life I concede that it captures the kind of glorious nonchalance / DGAF attitude that many genuinely happy people have.
If she didn’t reply, it’s her loss, and whatever her reasons, they don’t matter (assume she has a boyfriend or something). You move on, there will be more opportunities. Believing anything except this is a recipe for self-pity and self-hatred.
One of the few comments of yours that I actually agree with.
If you think with a cool head, playing the numbers game is the best tactic for a man trying to date in today's world. There are common factors that might increase ones chances (obviously), but variability is still high enough that only way to get P(X) close to one is to have many X's.
Its not trying to maximize the number of attempts at the cost of quality of attempts (being NOT bad here is more important than being good). Its reach a sufficient quality of attempt and then maximize the number.
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If you want to recommend people purposely believe things that are false, then go ahead. Everyone copes differently. As for me and my house, we will serve The LORD.
As the adage goes, it’s cope or rope.
Hah, never heard this but I love it.
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Where is this coming from? It is always, objectively true that there will be more opportunities. That's not naive optimism or wishful thinking, it's the stark reality.
If you were talking more about the earlier paragraph (about being nonchalant) that is entirely subjective and cannot be right or wrong.
In a loose, almost meaningless sense, yes, there will always be more opportunities. The epistemic parameters that actually matter are 1.) What is the probability that my next attempt will succeed? and 2.) What is the probability that I will ever succeed? There are humans on Earth right now who's parameters are both essentially one, and humans on Earth who's parameters are both essentially zero. This means that these parameters need to be estimated empirically using Bayes's Theorem. You might object that you should "just turn your brain off bro" and ignore all this fancy reasoning stuff, but then you run the risk of ending up like this guy. Does this guy need to simply "move on" and remember that "it is always objectively true that there will be more opportunities"?
Now, this guy is not the median male. I myself have had better luck than him (I was able to get multiple actual dates!), so I'm comfortable saying that he's more than 1 standard deviation below the mean in terms of all-inclusive attractiveness. Is he more than 2 standard deviations below the mean? I'm honestly not sure. This is the buzzsaw that millions of young men are being tossed into with no warning by everyone's cheery platitudes. Enough. If we can't be honest on TheMotte of all places about what it's really like out there, then we can't be honest about it anywhere.
That guy, specifically, needs to remember that dating apps are a platform men are more interested in than women, and that he isn't going to succeed on them with whatever he has now. If you imagine every 'scene', very simply, just pairs up men and women matching in ordinal SMV rank starting from the top, in scenes with a lot more male interest than female interest, bottom-quartile men will not get any matches. He should pursue other opportunities, the kind in which most men succeed. Even very low 'SMV' men like the obese, poor, criminal, stupid, and awkward usually have sex and relationships, usually with similarly low SMV women of the same social class.
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Absolutely, yes, he needs to remember that there will be more opportunities, because that is the factual truth. Not just in an "almost meaningless sense" either. Perhaps he should change his strategy up, maybe dramatically, but to give up and say he's out of opportunities would be to deny reality.
It sounds like what you're really saying is that some people are too optimistic about their own chances. OK, sure, maybe they're too optimistic about their own chances barring major lifestyle changes, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and you can't turn around and say that this means that advice to "remember you'll always have more opportunities" is delusional.
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Paging @CanIHaveASong
To OP, look I am no professional, but one of the best bits of advice I ever read was that if you get ghosted, just move on. Sometimes no response is, in fact, a response. You're right, it isn't fun to be ignored, it sucks, it's demoralizing. But it doesn't matter.
If you want reassurances, here they are:
Without knowing you, her, or how you interact it's impossible to comment on your stated question of what's wrong with your message. It comes off to me as cloyingly sweet, which is of course no crime. But depending on how you two interact there could be a humor I'm not getting. You don't need a sanity check, but you do need to put your focus elsewhere than this particular person, at least for a good while.
Finally: Send no more texts to this person, ever, for any reason, if you do not receive a reply. If you've already done so, stop. 🛑
I found this advice to be deeply empathetic and fairly profound. Saving for the next time I need to give a friend a pep talk. Really, really good stuff George.
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Thanks for the kind response. This helped me feel less bad about it.
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I'm married and have been out of the dating pool for over a decade now, so as many grains of salt as needed, but I see a few things that I consider mistakes:
First, there's no need to frame the situation as a date. You can just say that you want to go out for dinner, or go for a hike, or go to [cool local thing that's happening]. If things go well, you can always suggest grabbing some drinks, then it's pretty obviously a date, and that'll go wherever it'll go. If not, well, you can both play it off like it was never anything more than hanging out with your buddy anyway, so no harm done.
The flattery isn't necessary and probably doesn't help. It may well not hurt either, but it does make some women feel uncomfortable. The fact that you want to hang out with her already pretty clearly informs her that you find her attractive and think she would be fun to hang out with.
Not to go full PUA, but I think you're just too damned nice in the message. The level of niceness gives off a bit of an air of desperation, even if it's not really there. I think men are better off with some degree of carefree nonchalance or making it seem like it should be exciting to hang out with them rather than framing it as though it would kind of be a favor and would be potentially embarrassing if she didn't want to go. Try something shorter, along the lines of, "hey, I'm headed to the concert on the square Thursday night and maybe out for drinks after, want to join?". Framed that way, you're already doing something, it's going to be fun, and if she just doesn't want to she can opt out without actually saying that she doesn't want to go on a date.
Thanks for the feedback. Re: The first bullet, those sorts of “dates that aren’t dates” are how I used to approach things and my experience was that it’s a good way to make friends. So I started trying to be more direct.
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I'm no expert on this, but off the bat, there are two things I believe you did wrong.
One is that you did it via text. Text might be okay for relationships that form over text (e.g. OLD or internet friends), but if she's someone you have any sort of IRL contact with, I believe finding a way to ask her out face to face would have been better.
Two is that you hedged with the last part, showing a lack of confidence in your part. If you had ended it before the "if you're interested," that alone would have made the message much better. Even better yet, remove the part that starts with "I think" and ends with "pretty and." Just state your intent and desire, and let her do the work of shooting you down if she chooses to. Preceding with compliments just screams insecurity to my eyes.
There's, of course, always the possibility of the zeroth thing you might have done wrong, which is just not being attractive. This is the biggest factor that dominates all other factors, including the content and medium of your request, which could very well have had literally zero impact on the results, depending on how "wrong" you were on this. But that's outside the scope of this post.
This is likely to be the problem if this sort of response is a common occurrence to OP. Attractive guys (who a girl has previously met in person) do not normally get ghosted because the text wasn't framed perfectly.
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Thanks for the reply. In-person wasn’t really a practical option; we meet too rarely and only in group settings.
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I agree that saying
Would have been better but I find it hard to imagine that (especially with someone she knows irl) this is ever enough to make any difference.
Yeah, fair enough, probably "much better" was overselling it, and it's not the kind of thing that would have allowed some threshold to be crossed. Like you allude to, that it's IRL acquaintance is pretty significant.
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There's a threshold of "begging for a date" beyond which the text has minimal chances of actually leading to a date, and I agree that that rewording is still past that threshold. Reword it some more though and I think the chance of success does increase markedly.
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