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Notes -
This is something I've been mulling over for a while: if you aren't lucky and fairly determined, as a man - maybe as a human being - you need to decide where you want the ambulances and the tragedy if you want a relationship.
This is a stage that many people pass through at one point or another, and it is admirable to have strong enough personal or religious convictions to attempt it. Maybe that means being stoically resigned to being sexually assaulted or raped because you're a somewhat awkward but physically attractive mildly autistic 17-year-old girl who wants to experience life and have a family someday. In that model, you accept that you are going to need to kiss some frogs to find your prince. And you have an immune deficiency, so you genuinely make your peace with the fact that those frog kisses are likely to lead you to a couple of hospital stays that hopefully don't give you permanent damage. Maybe it means accepting that your girlfriend might stab you because you stuck it in crazy to get whatever wisdom comes from sex or relationships; maybe it means being maimed at 48 by your wife and the mother of your three children and winding up nearly dying, losing a limb, and spending three weeks in the local ICU.
I think that this is admirable and respectable, that in ages past men and women endured similar dangers in order to be worthy, and that war for men and childbirth for women have been how these tragedies played out until very recently.
What's your take on this?
Skookum doing Skookum things.
But I'm going to salvage this as an antidote to what I believe to be layer nineteen recursion trolling.
"The pain of regret is far greater than the pain of rejection." I may have messed up the exact wording here, but this is a common old-school PUA / red (but not black) pill / modern male self-improvement scene saying. It's aimed at the early stage guys who still get so worked up about a woman turning down a request for a number, an invitation to a date, or even just an engagement in conversation. The slogan implores young single guys to go up to their paramour, give it a shot, and take the rejection with grace if it occurs. You'll spend a lot more time being in pain thinking "what if!" as opposed to the sharp but short pain of "Oh, no thanks."
I think it's not only useful advice within and without a dating context, I'd say it's close to necessary for the progression of stable dating norms. I've written before on here about how things as innocuous / innocent as High School dances (at least as they were up until maybe the 2010s) are really models for acceptable social interaction and dress rehearsals for unsupervised courtship. Asking a girl or guy (sadie hawkins style) to a dance is a very binary yes/no situation without any ambiguity and you, the asker, are socially pressured to accept the response. Maybe you pair it with some pre-messaging and try to get a feel for what the likely outcome is, but you still abide by that final outcome. Now, in your mid 20s, you can pattern match well enough that when you're chatting with someone at a bar, you can read the mood well enough to see a yes or no coming. Maybe you think there's a shot worth taking and escalate to a firm yes/no inquiry. "Take you out for a drink sometime?" A little heartache is the risk, but everyone goes home, sometimes together.
The loss of these progressively more ambiguous, complex, and unsupervised rituals is, I think, part (though far from the whole or even primary) cause of some of the hyperventilation over ambiguous sexual encounters in the popular mind. In the infamous Aziz Ansari piece, the author's primary contention was that Ansari should've sensed her discomfort and terminated the encounter. (Nevermind that this was after she had willingly performed oral sex on him. Hmmm, maybe she likes me?) Leaving that particular case, mixed messaging and hypoagency aside, there is something to the idea that both parties in a romantic situation ought to have some ability and experience with gauging mood / human emotion / etc. Normal caveats apply to issues with autism, drunkenness, sociopathy.
Returning to "The pain of regret is far greater than the pain of rejection," a massive pillar of old-school PUA was learning from even the worst of encounters. It's actually basic hypothesis testing and iterative development. The more times you do something, the more information and patterns you have on which to base your decision making. If you want to get good at talking to girls, go talk to a lot of girls about anything you want. More importantly for society; this will probably mean that all parties involved start to become far more aware of the intentions, feelings, and boundaries of all other parties involved. Part of me gets really nervous thinking about some PMC marriages I've seen where I know the wife is the first person the husband had sex with. Does he have any ability to understand subtle communication? Does she feel like she has to be 10/10 overt at all times to prevent misunderstandings? How many of their sexual encounters end with a raised-voice "No!" from her that is genuinely surprising and unexpected to him?
I'm not calling for all young men to be Don Juans or young women to be ultra-flirt coquettes. In fact, I'm calling for a lot more social pressure (read: shame) and additionally a lot more social interaction practice.
If you fail to provide models of adulthood and pro-social behavior, don't be surprised when you're dealing with anti-social children in 25 year old bodies with 25 year old hormones, 25 year old rights (alcohol, drugs, firearms) and a creeping chaos in society. Yet this is now close to the norm, and I say that because of the far less dramatic but far more insidious ways it has manifested itself. "You can be anything you want when you grow up!" Cool, thanks, but what is something good to shoot for? Is fireman better or worse than lawyer, or boy-robot who can turn into a jet? Please just give me a shove in the right direction. "Never let anyone say you can't do something!" That cop said I can't shit right here in front of the Apple Store. Am I being oppressed? "You're perfect just the way you are!" Good, because I wasn't planning on showering today anyway.
I mean, hell: I think that people should freely choose to endure hardship and misery - up to and including death - rather than be awkward. Basically: the ideal man would sincerely prefer, in the absence of any compulsion, to be dead rather than have done his utmost to have become graceful. Something vaguely akin to the Spartans' conception of military honor, basically shaming a guy who was absent under orders from the Battle of Thermopylae into committing suicide-by-Persian, or the Samurai's conception of bushido, applied to social grace and to a lesser extent physical fitness, conscientiousness, and general life skills. And yes - if someone is not doing their utmost, occasionally they may need to follow the fate of Admiral Byng. But only occasionally, and even then I don't like the State participating in it that much. If some awkward guy gets killed for being awkward around a volatile bully and the bully gets a slap on the wrist, however...I think that is a good thing if it happens very rarely.
It is entirely reasonable to expect our young people to prefer being dead to failing to do their utmost to become fit, graceful, productive members of society, and I also think that in this country it is necessary for a lazy person to be killed from time to time to encourage the others. Better yet is that they freely choose to embark on a course of action that will make them graceful or dead. Although - again - I think that this should be very rare indeed; Byng was the only admiral executed by the Brits.
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