As for empathy, I feel I can empathize with typical people of the other sex way more easily than with typical people of the same sex (though it may be partly because I am heterosexual and so I’m subconsciously more motivated to do the former than the latter).
Do you feel this is also true for typical people of the same and opposite sex? This looks consistent to me with your personality being unusually close to the typical personality of the opposite sex and empathic difficulties caused by personality distances.
I hear everyone saying that romance is hard, and yet I feel that my interactions with my girlfriend actually come out more effortlessly than those with most other people. … Me neither—but doesn’t that have to do with bodies rather than minds? Plenty of straight guys wouldn’t want to have sex with a pre-op trans woman either.
My experience has been that most of the straight guys I know would be happier dating a straight guy than a straight girl, because they would have similar wants and thought patterns and so on, but that the idea is physically repulsive (or, at least, not physically compelling).
As a gay guy, I find it hard to empathize with someone who is romantically attracted to feminine personalities over masculine personalities. To use My Little Pony examples, I would be fine dating a guy with the personality of Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, or Applejack, and can empathize with why someone else would want to, but would have trouble dating a guy with the personality of Fluttershy, and don’t have the mental machinery that generates “d’aww” in response to her. I can solve the classification problem of “will this character make a typical guy d’aww?”, but that seems very distinct.
But that means I can imagine someone else who does only want to date Fluttershy-esque people, regardless of their physical sex, and that may be true of Eliezer.
This looks consistent to me with your personality being unusually close to the typical personality of the opposite sex and empathic difficulties caused by personality distances.
That’s most likely also cause of part of the effect, though possibly not of it. (FWIW, IIRC on some online test (based on the BSRI?) I scored very slightly above average on both masculinity and femininity, and very slightly higher on the latter than on the former, which sounds kind-of right (but then again...).)
Do you feel this is also true for typical people of the same and opposite sex? This looks consistent to me with your personality being unusually close to the typical personality of the opposite sex and empathic difficulties caused by personality distances.
My experience has been that most of the straight guys I know would be happier dating a straight guy than a straight girl, because they would have similar wants and thought patterns and so on, but that the idea is physically repulsive (or, at least, not physically compelling).
As a gay guy, I find it hard to empathize with someone who is romantically attracted to feminine personalities over masculine personalities. To use My Little Pony examples, I would be fine dating a guy with the personality of Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, or Applejack, and can empathize with why someone else would want to, but would have trouble dating a guy with the personality of Fluttershy, and don’t have the mental machinery that generates “d’aww” in response to her. I can solve the classification problem of “will this character make a typical guy d’aww?”, but that seems very distinct.
But that means I can imagine someone else who does only want to date Fluttershy-esque people, regardless of their physical sex, and that may be true of Eliezer.
That’s most likely also cause of part of the effect, though possibly not of it. (FWIW, IIRC on some online test (based on the BSRI?) I scored very slightly above average on both masculinity and femininity, and very slightly higher on the latter than on the former, which sounds kind-of right (but then again...).)