I meant the fact that apparently certain interactions which would be considered to be sexual advances if performed by/on jocks will be considered to be platonic if performed by/on nerds.
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men of which you are not a member and don’t want to be a member. This is not something to mourn—the odds are high that you wouldn’t enjoy a relationship from that population—because your emotional needs were not being met. But not all women are like that.
A couple women (when I asked them why they were single) told me they didn’t even know how to send such signals . . .
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being completely open with you. Possibly pointless digression: I realized my wife was interested in me because she was using my watch to time a competitive debate round, refused to return it to me, and denied having it when asked by the team captain—while not showing any other signs of hostility towards me. (Yes, I agree that flirting is weird).
Back to topic: Talking about implicit social signals is taboo in modern Western culture. So everyone but your very very close friends will lie to you about signals. The lies are applause lights intended to avoid hurt feelings or causing you emotional distress, but they aren’t useful in figuring out appropriate social moves.
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men of which you are not a member and don’t want to be a member. This is not something to mourn—the odds are high that you wouldn’t enjoy a relationship from that population—because your emotional needs were not being met. But not all women are like that.
I completely agree. I can’t see the relevance of that with what I was talking about, anyway. (EDIT: And BTW, I don’t enjoy the company of people of either gender from that population. My threshold of tolerance does seem to be more lenient with women than with men, but that might be due to women having a narrower bell curve so that the 20th percentile man is dumber than the 20th percentile woman.)
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being completely open with you.
In at least one case, I’m pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other stuff as well).
In at least one case, I’m pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other stuff as well).
Thus, you need to find someone with higher social competence to get advice from. Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
I once used to play chess for a while, and the skills involved in chess didn’t feel particularly related to the skills involved in reading people. (In particular, chess against a human doesn’t feel much different from chess against a computer to me unless I take the game too seriously and resort to Dark Arts, which makes me feel awful.) Poker seems much closer to me, and I’m indeed practising with it (online and with fake money for now).
I see I was a bit unclear. Simply playing a game involves social interactions, even if social skills are not relevant to playing the game. This is especially true in a game with more than two players.
Those interactions are low risk, socially speaking, because the focus of the interactions is playing the game—that’s what I meant by structured interactions. But the interactions still give you an opportunity to collect data about others’ behavior and practice your social maneuvers.
By adopting effective techniques from others and considering the reactions of your techniques, you can improve your social skills without seriously risking losing a status contest—it’s quite rude to initiate a status conflict during the play of a board game, so you can expect far fewer conflicts that the average social setting.
So what? Hanging out drinking/eating/chatting/whatever with a group of friends none of whom I’m particularly romantically interested in also involves social interactions that are low-risk. Why would the information gathered during board games, of all things, be more relevant than that gathered the rest of the time?
Yes, it had occurred to me that you might have been assuming someone with little experience in interacting with peers at all, rather than just romantically, and I was going to edit my comment to point that out but you replied before I got a chance to do so.
In case someone else is reading: I think that attempting to go straight from having no life to having sexual success skipping the intermediate steps is a bad idea, unless 1) you’re mainly interested in one-night stands, 2) you have very lenient ethics about that kind of stuff (in which case, why don’t you just pay prostitutes?), and 3) you’re living in a city so big that there’s a negligible chance that someone you meet today knows someone you meet tomorrow (>10^6 inhabitants). Unless you’re very good-looking (>90th percentile for men or >50th percentile for women) and/or something, I think it’s unlikely that someone who wouldn’t enjoy being friends with you would enjoy being in a relationship with you, either.
(The numbers “10^6”, “90” and “50” in the paragraph above were pulled directly out of my ass, though I guess they’re in the right ballpark.)
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men of which you are not a member and don’t want to be a member. This is not something to mourn—the odds are high that you wouldn’t enjoy a relationship from that population—because your emotional needs were not being met. But not all women are like that.
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being completely open with you.
Possibly pointless digression: I realized my wife was interested in me because she was using my watch to time a competitive debate round, refused to return it to me, and denied having it when asked by the team captain—while not showing any other signs of hostility towards me. (Yes, I agree that flirting is weird).
Back to topic: Talking about implicit social signals is taboo in modern Western culture. So everyone but your very very close friends will lie to you about signals. The lies are applause lights intended to avoid hurt feelings or causing you emotional distress, but they aren’t useful in figuring out appropriate social moves.
I completely agree. I can’t see the relevance of that with what I was talking about, anyway. (EDIT: And BTW, I don’t enjoy the company of people of either gender from that population. My threshold of tolerance does seem to be more lenient with women than with men, but that might be due to women having a narrower bell curve so that the 20th percentile man is dumber than the 20th percentile woman.)
In at least one case, I’m pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other stuff as well).
Thus, you need to find someone with higher social competence to get advice from. Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
I once used to play chess for a while, and the skills involved in chess didn’t feel particularly related to the skills involved in reading people. (In particular, chess against a human doesn’t feel much different from chess against a computer to me unless I take the game too seriously and resort to Dark Arts, which makes me feel awful.) Poker seems much closer to me, and I’m indeed practising with it (online and with fake money for now).
I see I was a bit unclear. Simply playing a game involves social interactions, even if social skills are not relevant to playing the game. This is especially true in a game with more than two players.
Those interactions are low risk, socially speaking, because the focus of the interactions is playing the game—that’s what I meant by structured interactions. But the interactions still give you an opportunity to collect data about others’ behavior and practice your social maneuvers.
By adopting effective techniques from others and considering the reactions of your techniques, you can improve your social skills without seriously risking losing a status contest—it’s quite rude to initiate a status conflict during the play of a board game, so you can expect far fewer conflicts that the average social setting.
So what? Hanging out drinking/eating/chatting/whatever with a group of friends none of whom I’m particularly romantically interested in also involves social interactions that are low-risk. Why would the information gathered during board games, of all things, be more relevant than that gathered the rest of the time?
If you have more advanced social skills than my advice is aimed at, feel free to ignore it. Sorry for misjudging your concerns.
Yes, it had occurred to me that you might have been assuming someone with little experience in interacting with peers at all, rather than just romantically, and I was going to edit my comment to point that out but you replied before I got a chance to do so.
In case someone else is reading: I think that attempting to go straight from having no life to having sexual success skipping the intermediate steps is a bad idea, unless 1) you’re mainly interested in one-night stands, 2) you have very lenient ethics about that kind of stuff (in which case, why don’t you just pay prostitutes?), and 3) you’re living in a city so big that there’s a negligible chance that someone you meet today knows someone you meet tomorrow (>10^6 inhabitants). Unless you’re very good-looking (>90th percentile for men or >50th percentile for women) and/or something, I think it’s unlikely that someone who wouldn’t enjoy being friends with you would enjoy being in a relationship with you, either.
(The numbers “10^6”, “90” and “50” in the paragraph above were pulled directly out of my ass, though I guess they’re in the right ballpark.)