with sufficient attractiveness, confidence, and charisma, you can get lots of things to work.
Yes, exactly!
That doesn’t make such behaviors optimal, even for men who have those qualities.
Optimal, in this situation, is probably just kissing without hesitation. My point was that if you really want to ask someone’s preference about something in general, you can do it in a confident way, and you probably won’t lose points for it.
Furthermore, confidence and charisma take time and experience to build, so it’s problematic to require them for what should be very basic dating tasks.
Yes, but the only way to build them is to practice doing things (like asking how someone wants to be kissed) with confidence. Also, you don’t have to be George W. Bush, you just have to be able to ask a question confidently.
I’d be surprised if you disagree, based on your other posts.
I would hypothesize a nontrivial subset of women who would be turned off by such a question even when asked charismatically. Maybe I just view this is a more unattractive question than you do, though it do acknowledge that it will work just fine with nontrivial subsets of women also.
My point was that if you really want to ask someone’s preference about something in general, you can do it in a confident way, and you probably won’t lose points for it.
I think this depends on the wiring of who you are dealing with. With some people, the best you will be able to do is partially mitigate the loss of points.
Yes, but the only way to build them is to practice doing things (like asking how someone wants to be kissed) with confidence.
We seem to agree that it’s possible to surmount this barrier to entry with practice (and often lots of failure). I’m just pointing out the problematic nature of barriers to entry for men in the dating market that women are not subject to. The primary way for non-intuitively attractive men to efficiently learn to navigate the dating world is to go through a period of practice when they make lots of women uncomfortable, and forge their own emotions in a crucible of rejection until they can satisfy women’s greater selectivity for behavioral traits and play the role of initiator.
The fact that some individual men (including myself) can triumph over this system does not make it not broken. What didn’t kill me made me stronger, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 years down the line I run into emotional damage that I’m incapable of recognizing now because I buried it so deeply out of practical considerations.
I’d be surprised if you disagree, based on your other posts. If you’re asking for actual studies, I can cite studies that show the dominance of non-verbal over verbal communication though some famous ones have been criticized on the grounds that they don’t accurately reflect normal social interactions.
(Also see this applied to cryonics.)
Yes, exactly!
Optimal, in this situation, is probably just kissing without hesitation. My point was that if you really want to ask someone’s preference about something in general, you can do it in a confident way, and you probably won’t lose points for it.
Yes, but the only way to build them is to practice doing things (like asking how someone wants to be kissed) with confidence. Also, you don’t have to be George W. Bush, you just have to be able to ask a question confidently.
I would hypothesize a nontrivial subset of women who would be turned off by such a question even when asked charismatically. Maybe I just view this is a more unattractive question than you do, though it do acknowledge that it will work just fine with nontrivial subsets of women also.
I think this depends on the wiring of who you are dealing with. With some people, the best you will be able to do is partially mitigate the loss of points.
We seem to agree that it’s possible to surmount this barrier to entry with practice (and often lots of failure). I’m just pointing out the problematic nature of barriers to entry for men in the dating market that women are not subject to. The primary way for non-intuitively attractive men to efficiently learn to navigate the dating world is to go through a period of practice when they make lots of women uncomfortable, and forge their own emotions in a crucible of rejection until they can satisfy women’s greater selectivity for behavioral traits and play the role of initiator.
The fact that some individual men (including myself) can triumph over this system does not make it not broken. What didn’t kill me made me stronger, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 years down the line I run into emotional damage that I’m incapable of recognizing now because I buried it so deeply out of practical considerations.