Thanks. Didn’t mean to take you to task specifically. Listening is just where a lot of people stumble when they’re nervous. Which is especially unfortunate since listening is key to breaking the ice.
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I met Mrs. Faffenreffer before online dating was really a thing. Love@AOL existed, but no one took it seriously. OKCupid? Tinder? Match? Not even a gleam in a developer’s eye. So, take my comments on this with a grain of salt- I haven’t been out there in the sturm und drang that passes for dating today.
rant/
Vida’s business model is revolting and the people using their services are idiots. If you are so socially inept that you can’t navigate the conventional niceties required to strike up an acquaintance (online for god’s sake), how on earth do you expect to survive even the first few minutes of a face to face interaction? I’m reasonably sure that even the blink-and-you-missed-it hookup these assholes have in mind is going to require being there in person at some point. Will they rent a stand in for that next? Save your money, delete your dating profile(s). Spend some time alone. In that alone time, work out who you are and make peace with that person. I’m not saying spend 10 years in analysis, but you know, reflect a little, build a general map of the territory; this part of my personality is like a pristine beach in Curaçao, over here it’s a stinking fen full of rodents of unusual size. If that bar is too high, no one is going to want to be with you anyway.
And FFS, stop treating other people like objects that you can arrange to better meet the needs of your Instagram feed.
/rant
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I am pretty sure the point of the service is to sift through volume. It’s not even necessarily about social awkwardness - unless you look conventionally attractive, as a man you will receive little to no attention on online dating platforms. So you need to go through a large number of potential matches before you find someone willing to meet you in person. If you don’t have much time and have money, this service allows you to trade the latter for the former by “automating” a large number of intros.
(This is not an endorsement - nor a denunciation - of the practice.)
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FWIW, all the birdlike courtship behaviors in the first three panels are pretty creepy and inappropriate, and are the sorts of “grand gestures” a socially maladjusted man would do to “deserve” a woman’s attention based on what he’s seen in crappy movies and video games. Panels 1 and 2 show a deeply disturbing obsession with someone they’re just flirting with, and panel three is pretty much an unvarnished illustration of the toxic concept of “kindness coins.”
It’s a kind of funny comic, but as relationship advice, it kind of perpetuates the kind of problems it’s ostensibly criticizing.
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To my continued amusement, nobody ever passes the wokeness test…
In real life, nobody gives women houses as a method of flirting. But if you take it less literally, unless you have achieved a social position and/or gathered sufficient resources to make a home - you are not going to be particularly enticing partner material. (Also, the birds don’t do it for a specific female. Any one will do.)
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This is quite right.
There was something I was reading a few months back about why – as a general matter – adults have a hard time making new friends and often men especially. The notion was that one makes friends by having recurring, but random, interactions with people. If you think about school – where most folks make friends – there’s almost endless opportunities for this. It lets one, the theory go, interact with people briefly but through a whole range of emotional states. Everything but endless friendly conversations when you ought to be somewhere else to panicked moments of “dude, love to talk but some shit is going down.”
This, the theory goes, allows the emotional connection to build slowly and safely. And pretty soon you have a friend.
Work offers some of this but less.
Romantic love isn’t much different. And the folks who are having a hard time finding it are too focused on finding a person, instead of building themselves into situations where the situation instead gradually reveals that person…
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I don’t know. I guess there’s some value in providing employment to incels.
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From what I’ve seen, not being able to do this with women is the core problem with MRAs, PUAs, incels, schmoes who get recruited by religious extremists, Libertarian guys who reduce all relationships to economic transactions, etc.
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Liked, but needs a /s or #sarcasm tag, especially after Toronto. 
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Oddly enough, I’ve found the real challenge to be those situations where people don’t want to be treated the way you’d like to be treated in their situation.
It’s when “putting yourself in their place” leads to total failure that the mettle of a relationship is truly put to the test.
And it takes two to survive: one willing to do the hard work of trying to understand, but even more importantly, one able to do the even harder work of trying to find the analogies that _can_be understood while fighting the part of one’s brain that says that “no human being could fail to understand my pain”.
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How long before someone develops a skill for Alexa to do this?
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And to make it worse…the pay is abysmal and exploitative. $1.45 per session for 10 minutes per session…
Well, unless said “writer” is multi-tasking like crazy, realistically only 5 sessions per hour could be done. That comes out to less than minimum wage. Welcome to the gig economy.
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This bit I don’t find particularly puzzling - you just treat other people like they have actual free will. You check with them to see how they feel about your ideas and then you respectfully act accordingly. If you misread, you stop and apologize. I have the opposite problem of coming off as too robotic as a result of never acting spontaneously, since I’m always checking for everyone’s agreement.
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OMG, you are on fire today! Spot the fuck on!
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I can’t believe no one thought of this guy:
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No-one apart from the guy who wrote the original post.
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He really knows how to charm the birds.
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It’s possible that I got the wrong end of the stick; my read of the post and the linked article was that VDAs go beyond “sifting” potential matches into active engagement, and use what I consider to be ugly techniques like negging.
But sometimes I just get in a bad mood for no good reason and fly off the handle without warning. That’s one of the ROUS filled fens of my personality.
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Well I expected a little large-nosed discussion.
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