Argument from authority:
I was married longer than it appears you have been out of school.
Sarcasm is used to point out dissonance.
Lastly, keep projection to a minimum.
You will be fine at BB, ad hominems will not endear you.
11 Likes
There are just as many (probably many more) people on the internet who would really like a date. As I’m sure you’re aware, there are several sites promising to match people up for dates in exchange for money.
8 Likes
Don’t pretend that “Uh, what? Seriously, what?” was some stroke of rhetorical genius. Calling you out for such a smug, pretentious and unhelpful post isn’t an ad hominem.
Even the people who have been jumping down my throat in this thread have at least tried to make valid points. Your comment isn’t making a point, it’s just being dickish. And since this is my real life we’re talking about here you can shove it.
1 Like
That is true, but is not quite what I am saying because one does not preclude the other. The same people who want a “date” for themselves are perfectly able to believe that whomever else wants a “date” is a creep. They are able to rationalize that their motives are “pure”, while the other person’s motives are of predatory nature.
And, in any case, my point was that the conflictual idea about dates is much more present on the Internet than it is IRL. Why? I am not sure. It may has to do with the dehumanization of interactions in the written form. It may also have to do with people having far higher expectations and sense of entitlement online than they have IRL.
2 Likes
This observation is both a tautology, and makes little sense. The phrase, “colleges and high-brow industries” is… I don’t even know what to say–except I did. Wait, what? Is the appropriate response.
I understand I am being a bit fighty this morning, and I don’t ever want you to feel unwelcome.
7 Likes
My mom met her husband on the Interwebs. She got married this summer.
Here’s some helpful advice based on her experiences:
-
If someone “winks” at you or whatever the similar program feature is, do not write them a 4 page response back explaining how you are certainly soulmates based on the information you picked up from reading and re-reading their profile. It’s going to scare them away.
-
If someone tells you they are a poet and they send you a communication in ALL CAPS that means that they are not a poet, they are in NIgeria and they are trying to scam you out of all your money. Run away.
-
If their profile says they are an Argentinian, independently wealthy man who collects racehorses and likes to day trade, they are trying to scam you out of all of your money. Run away.
-
If you have a really great online connection with someone far, far away, maybe find a way to do something casual together before you spend the whole weekend locked up in a hotel room because that might be too much together time for a new relationship.
-
Know yourself. Do you think of yourself as the type who loves opera, but really you just stay up in bed most nights watching American Pickers?
And in closing, my mom found a wonderful man who we all love despite, or maybe because, she was willing to get out there and let herself be made a fool of by so many people and even though she had these fantasies of love and herself that she never let go of. She got knocked down and was willing to get out there and keep trying until she found someone where it was easy.
16 Likes
This actually is constructive dating advice.
@StrawBoss, I want to sympathize with you, but you’re not helping your case any. Like, really not helping your case. Take a deep breath, chill out, take a look around yourself, and try again.
Hint: it has nothing to do with women not being into stuff or colleges/highbrow industries. It doesn’t even necessarily have anything to do with you as a person, but more that what you’re doing is not that productive. The only advice I have is to keep trying, keep adapting, and be prepared to fail. A lot.
14 Likes
You say “Be yourself” is bullshit so you’re what, going to be someone else? People smell a phony. You can either front or be the person you really are. If that person isn’t what folks want to date, you either shift where you’re meeting folks or you shift yourself. You can say this is all crap but people have given effective advice here. Use it or ignore it.
9 Likes
This can make all the difference! Because of various obscure obligations which I am not going into, I live in a certain town. It has always seemed to me to be a stultifyingly reactionary anti-intellectual cultural vacuum. I only ever met a few friends here who I practice martial arts with, and if not for that are not the kind of people who I would imagine myself meeting and talking with. But we have some mutual respect and get along despite different lifestyles and views of the world.
But when I go to a nearby city, only fifteen miles away, it is a completely different culture. People actually talk and do things! There are maker spaces, hacking events, yoga studios, writing workshops, art galleries - countless events and activities and forums which people in this town would only gripe about. I have met more people in that city in one week than in ten years of this town.
7 Likes
Is it really? We see depictions of “creeps” like the video in question, and the insidious thing is that the creeps seem to be entirely oblivious to their creepiness. And that their creepiness is both inherent and incurable. Why should it be otherwise? No one is likely to call them out on their behavior and suggest they should act differently.
Maybe it’s okay to practice and it’s okay to fail - but if there’s no chance of anything changing, then it seems that practicing and failing is only going to produce further misery, either on the part of the practitioner or those being practiced upon. And that it’s best to give up.
I have observed before that there is a multitude of catalogs of outrageous messages people have received on dating sites, but no one bothers with messages that were composed with care, read, and then forgotten for any number of reasons.
1 Like
This is not an internet thing. My own experience with thinking I couldn’t date women because women found me creepy was firmly entrenched by the first time I tried to use gopher to find information about Magic: the Gathering.
And if someone thinks that all men are creeps then there is an easy way to escape, don’t hang around with that particular person. If someone finds that women consistently seem to think all men are creeps then they are just misunderstanding that women consistently think they are a creep because they act in a creepy way.
Being yourself is bad advice. I mean, might as well try being yourself and see how that works, but it’s not useful to think someone out there will love you for who you are regardless of who who-you-are is. I understand why people say it, just like I understand why people would say something like, “The most important thing is to have fun” when you are about to play basketball. But if you want to play basketball you should practice your free throws, not bring your iPhone on the court.
You have an underlying goal of finding out whether you get along with the someone else, so obfuscating who you are is a bad idea. You still have to learn and practice. And it also doesn’t mean that there aren’t things we should change about ourselves. At some point I was a person who simply couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be with me. “Being myself” was never going to work.
6 Likes
Stop copying my lines 
(I now know why someone would and would not want to be with me, and I gotta say, it is some cold comfort)
5 Likes
It occurs to me that there might be a certain guardedness among the women serving in our military forces when it comes to conversations outside the strictly professional realm. Even among male soldiers and sailors who publicly recognize the strengths and competencies and professionalism of the women in the ranks, many of those women may not always feel 100% comfortable allowing the conversation to get very personal, even about innocent topics like movies or hobbies or interests. All women recognize that such conversations very often have the potential to be introductory overtures to romantic and/or sexual interest, and unlike most civilian workplaces, military employment (especially at sea, I’ll warrant) isn’t just a 9 to 5 job… you spend every hour of every day in the company of your shipmates, more or less, and any interaction that alters the careful balance of professionalism and that might have even a slight chance of going south at some point is going to be approached with extreme caution, since there exist entirely too many cases, both current and historical, wherein a woman’s military career turned into a living hell because of other men who either didn’t understand or didn’t care why she didn’t behave or feel as they expected her to behave or feel.
Even if you’re the nicest guy in the fleet, women will be more cautious with you than most of your male colleagues are, and they have good reason for that caution… reasons that don’t even have anything to do with you.
If I were to offer any advice, it would be to take a passive approach. Be friendly, helpful, funny, all those elements of your own natural winning personality that make you such a prized friend. And do your job. Let people come to you if they’re interested. I myself spent a shamefully large fraction of my life pursuing girls and women who simply weren’t interested. Every time I just stopped pursuing and focused my attention on anything other than my love life, I would soon (not within minutes or days, but always within a few months) find that someone had noticed me and was expressing interest. And it turned out that what drew their interest was that I was funny and approachable and competent and possessed of skills and interests outside of the trying-to-get-laid realm… and I guess that was novel enough to be interesting. YMMV.
18 Likes
17 Likes
Stop copying my lines!
The best way to interest people is to be interesting. It’s this one weird trick…
9 Likes
“The best way to interest people is to be interesting. It’s this one weird trick…”
I’ve got interesting down pat. Still working on irritating 
5 Likes
The best way to irritate people is to be irritating.
12 Likes
I have long felt that people who cling too tightly to the concept that people need to embrace them for exactly who they are, warts and all, at any given moment are kinda missing the point. Yes, people do need to accept us as we are, but we should also recognize that there is substantial room for improvement in every last one of us. We all have value, but also we all have potential. Some parts of me work well and should be cherished and encouraged to grow. Some parts of me are destructive or wasteful, and should be controlled, minimized, altered, or eliminated. We all have parts like this, Trumps and Brainspores alike. We need to tend our gardens, particularly if we seek to share them with others.
7 Likes
