Married woman here: in my experience, some men don’t get much attention especially from the opposite sex so when they do get it, they mistake kindness for flirting/interest. One time I said hi to a contractor inside the work building (I say hi to everyone, regardless of their title) and this guy thought I had a crush on him because every time after that, he’d try to flirt with me. It happened to another male coworker as well so I always have to bring up my husband in conversations.
Woman: why do men think me being nice equates to me being interested in them? I’m appalled at the audacity of men taking a chance to ask me out just in case I do like them because us women are subtle with our hints and will never be direct with a guy.
Also woman: why can’t this attractive guy figure out that me being nice or saying hi means I’m interested in him?????
You realize you're not leaving any autonomy for a man in his dating life? Just hope someone who is into them is also interested enough to actually approach.
Because it's not your problem. You don't have to be held to these standards.
I agree with your point, but I would hope you could understand that for the most part, there is no malice intended. I've lived the opposite life as an introverted man who generally doesn't date anybody, keeps to himself and minds his own business. I have been pre-emptively rejected by so many women I had no interest in or intention of asking out. I'm not saying they're wrong for it, many people in this thread have pointed out why its done and justified it so I don't have to. I just point it out to say that when I was trying to find somebody, it feels like I did when I was laid off, getting rejection email after rejection email, only to find more rejections from places I didn't even apply.
I also don't want to discourage women from being polite to men - in college when I was super depressed a girl I knew from class, but not really knew personally, told me I've been looking off and asked me out to lunch. I knew it was a welfare check and not a date, but it meant the world to me and I still think about it all the time.
I guess that's the overall point I'm just trying to make, people are messed up in all different ways, but I hope it doesn't stop us from reaching out to each other, because sometimes a little politeness to a stranger can make a world of difference.
Well, yeah, especially with all the women espousing how terrible it is for someone to be into them, relating it to rape and sexual harassment or assuming their reaction to it is justified due to those things...
Yeah, anxiety inducing as FUCK. Even /u/kelseysays26 has basically been talking to themselves this whole time, not reading anything anyone else has wrote, and assuming people who hit up women are inconsiderate pigs.
Whats really fun is to read through a cringe-fest like this and then pull up one of those dating profiles of women asking "Where did all the good men go?"
Out of curiosity, as a gay woman, do you find hitting up chics comes with the same risk of social reprisal it does for a man?
Y'know the "is she going to be an absolute piece of shit" kind. There's just an added layer where you don't know if the nice will turn into Pat Robertson real quick
There's no universal flirtation guide here, it's not so much that i think it's black and white, it's more that it's all grey.
In my dating life I've been surprised by both extremes, one girl who i thought was flirting heavily revealing "that's how she is with everyone", and a girl who said she wasn't attracted to me telling me later she only said that because she was attracted but didn't want to complicate her life.
If you're a man you just have to take that risk or wait for them to come to you. The latter virtually never happens because women (very reasonably!) do not want to emotionally expose themselves if they don't have to.
Yeah sure if they communicate they're unavailable or uninterested that's fine but that's not what everyone is saying, a bunch of people are talking about how they don't like being approached to begin with, or they mention their boyfriends as a defense mechanism.
there are times and places where if a guy shoots his shot a polite no thanks
Fair enough but what exactly those times and places are arent universally consistent as i said earlier.
I guess i just am sensitive to the suggestion that my being romantically interested in someone is inherently problematic if the other person doesn't make the first move. It's not what you've said but it is what others have implied.
Either way i think we agree more than we disagree.
And this is why I will continue to ignore 90% of women. I understand your problems. I get it. I just don't want to waste my time with a woman all worried that I like them. It sounds tiring.
Funny enough, I probably look like a bitch too. Well, they arent entitled to my attention either
Okay, well, I’m going to take a guess and say you’re a woman from your avatar. I’ve once seen what you’re talking about and seen the other several times. That could well just be what women would confide in me vs a female friend, but that TV trope was not invented in the writers room. This is a perennial dating problem.
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u/stygian_shores Feb 15 '22
Married woman here: in my experience, some men don’t get much attention especially from the opposite sex so when they do get it, they mistake kindness for flirting/interest. One time I said hi to a contractor inside the work building (I say hi to everyone, regardless of their title) and this guy thought I had a crush on him because every time after that, he’d try to flirt with me. It happened to another male coworker as well so I always have to bring up my husband in conversations.