Talking about other girls who gave you “invalid” nos. Anything on the order of “She was flirting with me all night and then she wouldn’t put out/call me back/meet for coffee.” Responding positively to you is not a promise to do anything else, and it’s not leading you on. This kind of assumption is why I’m a little hesitant to be warm to a strange guy if I’m in a place where it would be hard to enforce a no.
Huh. When I mentioned (not complained, mentioned) to a couple friends (female friends) that a girl I had gone on one (1) date with had stopped replying to me (and added “whatevs, she’s prob’ly just changed her mind about me”), they replied something to the effect that she was a bitch. (Maybe there are cultural differences about this?)
Maybe it’s alliances in action. I’ve had a few cases where I incurred justified (social) punishment of one kind or another, and certain people close to me had very nasty (and unjustified) things to say about the punisher. So far as I could tell, it wasn’t because they’d thought through the situation and concluded I was in the right; it was just that I was part of their tribe and they were going to aggressively defend me.
And don’t get me started with the advice about women my mother would give me: it sounds exactly like you took everything people complain of about Nice Guys™ and told me to do exactly that. Fortunately it has always been obvious to my System 2 that it’s not enough for me to romantically like a woman but she has to romantically like me too, but my mother nearly convinced my System 1 otherwise.
That’s exactly why these gender relation things are so insidious! They don’t come from evil mens oppressing womens because they want to cause suffering and inequality or evil womens calling mens creepy and taking away all their status. They’re cached thoughts that well-meaning mothers and grandmothers pass down to us because they think they’re helping us survive in a cruel and confusing system. Without stopping to think that we can slowly dismantle the system to make it suck less.
Well-meaning? How in the stars can implying that so long as I’m a decent person and I’m attracted to someone it’s irrelevant whether they’re also attracted to me be well-mea… Wait. She grew up in a Guess Culture, so maybe her advice is sensible—under certain assumptions that don’t actually apply in my case.
(At least, she isn’t asymmetric about that—she also tried to shame me into dating someone who was attracted to me whom I wasn’t attracted to.)
Wait… Ain’t that backwards? I’d expect how much X is attracted to Y today to be a better predictor of how much X is attracted to Y if the two of them have known each other for ten years than if they have for ten minutes. (OTOH, people talking to one another decreases how much different Xes vary in how much they’re attracted to a given Y, but probably that’s a smaller effect.)
She grew up near a major metropolitan area, whereas there are probably less than 10^5 people within 30 km of me, so whatever effects you might be thinking of probably apply more to myself than to her. (OTOH, she did get with my father, who lived within walking distance from her, when she was 15 and never dated anyone else.)
Most of my life, except the year I studied abroad (and stuff like holidays), and including time in university (I’m still here BTW, as a PhD student). (OTOH, given that this is a university town, the fraction of these people who are the appropriate age is a lot larger than the national average.) But especially when I grew up—where (even if the population is not as small as what you probably had in mind when you said “village”) ISTM that most people only date people they have already known for years.
What would be the alternative to being well-meaning in this case—your maternal relatives conspiring to keep you single? I think well-meaning but clueless is the safer assumption.
Yes, she’s well-meaning towards me—I meant, how could that be well-meaning towards my potential partners? (Anyway, that was more an expression of frustration than literal confusion.)
While rephrasing it as the matriarchy is deeply amusing to me, I don’t think we’re even talking about some deliberate system here. I think most women just have no idea how to date women, and give men advice on how they interact with women, which is to say, behave like a friend.
Pity lesbians have been fetishized. Men could use lesbian friends.
I think women actually give men advice by telling them how they’d like to … be dated? At least, that’s what I do. Which makes me think army1987′s mother probably wanted a hypergentlemanly man to lavish her with niceness and gifts and attention. Actually, maybe she was experiencing a shortage of gifts and attention from someone she DID have romantic feelings for, and so didn’t realize what an overabundance of gifts and attention would feel like from someone she had NO romantic feelings for, which is generally when Nice Guys™ become problematic.
Maybe we need to ask the opposite question. Mens! How would you like to … be dated?
EDIT: I think it was a system back in the day when land and inheritance and dowries were important and some memes from back then are still alive and floating around confusing everyone.
Don’t ask me how I’d like to be dated. I have no idea. Historically I think women have had the most luck with...
...
Well, historically, being shoved into a preemptive friendzone after I suspected them of sexual interest, hanging out for a while, disappearing off to college, waiting eight years, and then contacting me out of the blue.
Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t give anybody advice on how to date me.
“Actually, maybe she was experiencing a shortage of gifts and attention from someone she DID have romantic feelings for, and so didn’t realize what an overabundance of gifts and attention would feel like from someone she had NO romantic feelings for, which is generally when Nice Guys™ become problematic.”
Yes, what is desired of someone who you are attracted to vs someone you aren’t is markedly different. When men ask for dating advice, they want to know how they get into that attracted-to category in the first place, whereas the question may be answered as if the man was already in that category for the woman of his affections, perhaps because the answered is not conisdering the second category of suitor at all, in teh same way that people don’t usually desire to /know how to change their desires.
I suppose that would be a bit too forward as the first sign of interest, given current cultural norms. But it probably has a grain of truth once you are dating.
99.9788% (hey, if I’m going to make up two significant figures, why not six?) of all the advice I’ve ever gotten from women on dating women has been to dial the Nice Guy up to 11.
After I decided I was bisexual, it’s really weird how much better I got at dating women, because I didn’t have all nonsense baggage in dating guys; gave a much different, and infinitely better, perspective on dating.
I think that was probably your female friends’ way of offering their sympathy. They probably didn’t mean that she was a bitch to everyone always, but that what she did was not a nice, pleasant thing to do and since you only went on one date, then thinking of her as a bitch will make the experience easier to not be sad about.
It might sound really convoluted, but I’ve done this before (though not recently). “What a bitch!” makes a much better soundbite than “She was probably not interested and she was entitled to her preferences but not replying was a little not nice but maybe she was afraid to reject you to your face, but I’m sure she’s probably a nice person, but you’re a nice person and there are plenty of other even nicer ladies, so don’t feel bad, etc.”
It’s interesting. Suppose I go on a date with a guy, after which he decides he’s not interested and doesn’t want a second date. I email him a couple of days later asking if he’d like to go on another date. If he doesn’t reply I’ll get the message that he’s not interested. I’d prefer he didn’t reply at all to an email saying “sorry I’m not interested.” I get the message both ways, but the first is less awkward.
Given my preferences, I have stopped replying to guys in the past. I haven’t been dating at all recently, but when I start again, maybe I should send “sorry not interested” emails.
It’s even worse when you start dating someone else but you want to stay friends with the guy! What are you supposed to write? “I think you’re really cool but I want to date this guy over here. Can we still hang out?!”
I feel like staying friends with someone you went on dates with should be much better than never wanting to see them again ever.
It isn’t: if you’re romantically interested in someone, seeing that person going out with someone else, or hearing about how happy/unhappy s/he is with the significant other, is extremely painful, and usually vastly more so than the benefit of a friendship.
This of course assuming that the offer of friendship is honest, which in my experience (which could be heavily biased) is almost never the case.
There’s also the not vanishingly small chance that offering friendship is a test for which the correct answer (that is, the answer that leads to a date) is “No thanks, I’ve already have plenty of friends.”
It isn’t: if you’re romantically interested in someone, seeing that person going out with someone else, or hearing about how happy/unhappy s/he is with the significant other, is extremely painful, and usually vastly more so than the benefit of a friendship.
Replace “you” with “I”. You’re probably generalizing from one example/other-optimizing.
He is generalising, but it isn’t from one example. It is hardly an uncommon phenomenon, even if it is not universal. (Inserting ‘often’ would be a suitable alternative to limiting to “I”).
You’re probably generalizing from one example/other-optimizing.
Omega forbid!
I realize the phrasing is miscalibrated, I only inteded suggesting that it’s not always the case that the friendship is much better than no relation at all.
Although I do believe that it’s often the case that friendship is the losing option...
It isn’t: if you’re romantically interested in someone, seeing that person going out with someone else, or hearing about how happy/unhappy s/he is with the significant other, is extremely painful, and usually vastly more so than the benefit of a friendship.
It depends. At university I remember having a crush on a guy. He started dating one of my friends. I was a bit jealous at first, but I got over it, we became good friends and the crush faded over time. By the time we shared a house in second year I was no longer romantically interested at all.
I guess It’s possible that I’m unusual or that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to men as much as women.
ETA: Thinking about this, I don’t think I’ve successfully ended up being close friends with a guy that I’ve turned down, though I remain friendly acquaintances with a lot of them.
It isn’t: if you’re romantically interested in someone, seeing that person going out with someone else, or hearing about how happy/unhappy s/he is with the significant other, is extremely painful, and usually vastly more so than the benefit of a friendship.
That’s not been my experience at all. Probably, people differ.
True, but in the contest for your romantic attention, there was one winner and it wasn’t him. Is hanging out a decent consolation prize? Possibly, but there’s a name for people who get consolation prizes.
I don’t think the contest model fits this situation very well. As I understand, a contest is designed to measure aptitude along only one axis (like who can run faster or play chess better) and it’s the job of the contest organizer to keep the other conditions as equal as possible. Meanwhile, things like dating or job/roommate interviews or college admissions are really attempts at selecting people you’d prefer to be around and get along with, so you’re choosing from a set of points in a nebulous region in human-qualities-space that doesn’t linearize nicely. For example, if I say that I’m going to hire the candidate that’s objectively faster and more accurate at filing papers (which is easy to measure), then according to the contest model, I’m committing to overlooking other qualities like loudness or disagreeableness or smelliness or tardiness, which are also important factors to consider when hiring someone. These are also things I might not even consider until the pool of applicants is available!
This is why rejections from these types of places tactfully say “We had a lot of promising people and a limited number of spots so we couldn’t accept all of them,” because if they write, “We thought you were too tardy,” then next time you apply and be super-punctual, that still won’t guarantee you a spot. Because other factors!
I think the contest is tempting because it’s simple and it makes you feel like you’re more in control of the outcome than you really are (“All I have to do is be less tardy!”) but generally I think modeling these blobby types of interactions as contests creates unnecessary pain, because it needlessly creates losers when there aren’t … really any. You weren’t that in control to begin with (which can be hard to accept), so don’t be so hard on yourself for the result! You might get to date Alice but not Barbara and you might get accepted to Berkeley and rejected by UCLA.
Yes, people offering me their sympathy when someone wrongs me even when I’ve pointed out that I’m not terribly bothered myself seems to be a common pattern.
(Seems like my resent-o-meter is under-sensitive; in game-theoretical terms, it’s like when someone makes me an excessively small offer in the Ultimatum game, my System 1 infers that they’re not an agent and decides that I might just as well do the CDTical thing and accept the offer anyway.)
in game-theoretical terms, it’s like when someone makes me an excessively small offer in the Ultimatum game, my System 1 infers that they’re not an agent and decides that I might just as well do the CDTical thing and accept the offer anyway.
In the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, ‘assume your opponent is a fellow superrational agent until proven otherwise’ yields tit-for-tat...
Now that you mention it, I’ve only ever used this tactic on people I didn’t know very well, so I expected their resent-o-meter to be average. And then I could use their reaction to gauge their actual resentment-setting. Meanwhile, I have a friend with a resent-o-meter that’s perhaps higher than necessary, and I always go with the “Well you CAN’T just hate people for something like that …” which led to really long, tedious debates about why she shouldn’t demonize some gentleman or another. But I think she finds reasons to resent people because it’s the only way she knows to deal with sad things. :(
“What a bitch!” makes a much better soundbite than “She was probably not interested …
And “she’s just not that into you” makes a better soundbite than either—but I do agree that this is probably what’s going on here. Flaking is not even that uncommon nowadays; regardless of anyone’s opinion about this, it does mean that it’s hard to take the female friend’s comment at face value.
Well, there’s a bunch of things it communicates at once:
Probably you are angry, and I’m your friend so I will give you a place to vent your anger, if you want.
Probably you are sad, so I will try to cheer you up by telling you that what happened is not that big of a deal, because if she’s not interested, then she is not worth feeling too sad about.
Meanwhile, “she’s just not that into you” sounds like you’re taking her side. “Well, she can do what she wants.” But if you’re my friend and I’m the one that the sad thing happened to, then I’d want you to keep the situation about me. So even if she is perfectly justified in being not that into me, I don’t want it brought up right at that moment.
Therefore! Those girls who reacted by calling that girl a bitch probably don’t actually think she’s a bitch. If they encounter her later in life, they probably won’t pounce on her with something like, “You’re that bitch that stopped replying to my friend army1987! We totally hate you!” They are instead most likely just comforting you in a confusingly aggressive-sounding way.
Probably you are angry, and I’m your friend so I will give you a place to vent your anger, if you want.
Actually they were more like ‘Huh, you don’t seem to be very angry.’ [And indeed I wasn’t.] ‘How comes??? If a guy did that to me, I’d be FURIOUS!!!’ (That’s a paraphrase, of course, but not a terribly loose one.)
Huh. When I mentioned (not complained, mentioned) to a couple friends (female friends) that a girl I had gone on one (1) date with had stopped replying to me (and added “whatevs, she’s prob’ly just changed her mind about me”), they replied something to the effect that she was a bitch. (Maybe there are cultural differences about this?)
Maybe it’s alliances in action. I’ve had a few cases where I incurred justified (social) punishment of one kind or another, and certain people close to me had very nasty (and unjustified) things to say about the punisher. So far as I could tell, it wasn’t because they’d thought through the situation and concluded I was in the right; it was just that I was part of their tribe and they were going to aggressively defend me.
I found the behavior incredibly frustrating.
And don’t get me started with the advice about women my mother would give me: it sounds exactly like you took everything people complain of about Nice Guys™ and told me to do exactly that. Fortunately it has always been obvious to my System 2 that it’s not enough for me to romantically like a woman but she has to romantically like me too, but my mother nearly convinced my System 1 otherwise.
That’s exactly why these gender relation things are so insidious! They don’t come from evil mens oppressing womens because they want to cause suffering and inequality or evil womens calling mens creepy and taking away all their status. They’re cached thoughts that well-meaning mothers and grandmothers pass down to us because they think they’re helping us survive in a cruel and confusing system. Without stopping to think that we can slowly dismantle the system to make it suck less.
Well-meaning? How in the stars can implying that so long as I’m a decent person and I’m attracted to someone it’s irrelevant whether they’re also attracted to me be well-mea… Wait. She grew up in a Guess Culture, so maybe her advice is sensible—under certain assumptions that don’t actually apply in my case.
(At least, she isn’t asymmetric about that—she also tried to shame me into dating someone who was attracted to me whom I wasn’t attracted to.)
Have you considered not thinking of X being attracted to Y as an immutable property of X?
Yes, but IME there’s usually much more variation among different X than among different time slices of the same X.
This was certainly less true in your mother’s day when post people probably didn’t go far from their village.
Wait… Ain’t that backwards? I’d expect how much X is attracted to Y today to be a better predictor of how much X is attracted to Y if the two of them have known each other for ten years than if they have for ten minutes. (OTOH, people talking to one another decreases how much different Xes vary in how much they’re attracted to a given Y, but probably that’s a smaller effect.)
The point is you have fewer potential mates, so it makes sense to devote more effort to changing preferences.
She grew up near a major metropolitan area, whereas there are probably less than 10^5 people within 30 km of me, so whatever effects you might be thinking of probably apply more to myself than to her. (OTOH, she did get with my father, who lived within walking distance from her, when she was 15 and never dated anyone else.)
Right now, or throughout your life, e.g., did you go to college?
Most of my life, except the year I studied abroad (and stuff like holidays), and including time in university (I’m still here BTW, as a PhD student). (OTOH, given that this is a university town, the fraction of these people who are the appropriate age is a lot larger than the national average.) But especially when I grew up—where (even if the population is not as small as what you probably had in mind when you said “village”) ISTM that most people only date people they have already known for years.
What would be the alternative to being well-meaning in this case—your maternal relatives conspiring to keep you single? I think well-meaning but clueless is the safer assumption.
edit: oh right. lost the train of reference
Yes, she’s well-meaning towards me—I meant, how could that be well-meaning towards my potential partners? (Anyway, that was more an expression of frustration than literal confusion.)
While rephrasing it as the matriarchy is deeply amusing to me, I don’t think we’re even talking about some deliberate system here. I think most women just have no idea how to date women, and give men advice on how they interact with women, which is to say, behave like a friend.
Pity lesbians have been fetishized. Men could use lesbian friends.
I think women actually give men advice by telling them how they’d like to … be dated? At least, that’s what I do. Which makes me think army1987′s mother probably wanted a hypergentlemanly man to lavish her with niceness and gifts and attention. Actually, maybe she was experiencing a shortage of gifts and attention from someone she DID have romantic feelings for, and so didn’t realize what an overabundance of gifts and attention would feel like from someone she had NO romantic feelings for, which is generally when Nice Guys™ become problematic.
Maybe we need to ask the opposite question. Mens! How would you like to … be dated?
EDIT: I think it was a system back in the day when land and inheritance and dowries were important and some memes from back then are still alive and floating around confusing everyone.
Don’t ask me how I’d like to be dated. I have no idea. Historically I think women have had the most luck with...
...
Well, historically, being shoved into a preemptive friendzone after I suspected them of sexual interest, hanging out for a while, disappearing off to college, waiting eight years, and then contacting me out of the blue.
Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t give anybody advice on how to date me.
“Actually, maybe she was experiencing a shortage of gifts and attention from someone she DID have romantic feelings for, and so didn’t realize what an overabundance of gifts and attention would feel like from someone she had NO romantic feelings for, which is generally when Nice Guys™ become problematic.”
Yes, what is desired of someone who you are attracted to vs someone you aren’t is markedly different. When men ask for dating advice, they want to know how they get into that attracted-to category in the first place, whereas the question may be answered as if the man was already in that category for the woman of his affections, perhaps because the answered is not conisdering the second category of suitor at all, in teh same way that people don’t usually desire to /know how to change their desires.
This may be helpful.
Oh, that’s easy.
I don’t think I follow. This is what you want from every lady in the store/library/train who thinks you’re cute?
I suppose that would be a bit too forward as the first sign of interest, given current cultural norms. But it probably has a grain of truth once you are dating.
99.9788% (hey, if I’m going to make up two significant figures, why not six?) of all the advice I’ve ever gotten from women on dating women has been to dial the Nice Guy up to 11.
After I decided I was bisexual, it’s really weird how much better I got at dating women, because I didn’t have all nonsense baggage in dating guys; gave a much different, and infinitely better, perspective on dating.
I think that was probably your female friends’ way of offering their sympathy. They probably didn’t mean that she was a bitch to everyone always, but that what she did was not a nice, pleasant thing to do and since you only went on one date, then thinking of her as a bitch will make the experience easier to not be sad about.
It might sound really convoluted, but I’ve done this before (though not recently). “What a bitch!” makes a much better soundbite than “She was probably not interested and she was entitled to her preferences but not replying was a little not nice but maybe she was afraid to reject you to your face, but I’m sure she’s probably a nice person, but you’re a nice person and there are plenty of other even nicer ladies, so don’t feel bad, etc.”
It’s interesting. Suppose I go on a date with a guy, after which he decides he’s not interested and doesn’t want a second date. I email him a couple of days later asking if he’d like to go on another date. If he doesn’t reply I’ll get the message that he’s not interested. I’d prefer he didn’t reply at all to an email saying “sorry I’m not interested.” I get the message both ways, but the first is less awkward.
Given my preferences, I have stopped replying to guys in the past. I haven’t been dating at all recently, but when I start again, maybe I should send “sorry not interested” emails.
It’s even worse when you start dating someone else but you want to stay friends with the guy! What are you supposed to write? “I think you’re really cool but I want to date this guy over here. Can we still hang out?!”
Give him a big L-shaped “I’ve been friend-zoned again” bumper sticker.
Why is wanting to hang out with a cool person so loserly for the cool person* ?! Noooo!
I feel like staying friends with someone you went on dates with should be much better than never wanting to see them again ever.
It isn’t: if you’re romantically interested in someone, seeing that person going out with someone else, or hearing about how happy/unhappy s/he is with the significant other, is extremely painful, and usually vastly more so than the benefit of a friendship.
This of course assuming that the offer of friendship is honest, which in my experience (which could be heavily biased) is almost never the case.
There’s also the not vanishingly small chance that offering friendship is a test for which the correct answer (that is, the answer that leads to a date) is “No thanks, I’ve already have plenty of friends.”
Replace “you” with “I”. You’re probably generalizing from one example/other-optimizing.
He is generalising, but it isn’t from one example. It is hardly an uncommon phenomenon, even if it is not universal. (Inserting ‘often’ would be a suitable alternative to limiting to “I”).
Omega forbid!
I realize the phrasing is miscalibrated, I only inteded suggesting that it’s not always the case that the friendship is much better than no relation at all.
Although I do believe that it’s often the case that friendship is the losing option...
It depends. At university I remember having a crush on a guy. He started dating one of my friends. I was a bit jealous at first, but I got over it, we became good friends and the crush faded over time. By the time we shared a house in second year I was no longer romantically interested at all.
I guess It’s possible that I’m unusual or that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to men as much as women.
ETA: Thinking about this, I don’t think I’ve successfully ended up being close friends with a guy that I’ve turned down, though I remain friendly acquaintances with a lot of them.
That’s not been my experience at all. Probably, people differ.
True, but in the contest for your romantic attention, there was one winner and it wasn’t him. Is hanging out a decent consolation prize? Possibly, but there’s a name for people who get consolation prizes.
I don’t think the contest model fits this situation very well. As I understand, a contest is designed to measure aptitude along only one axis (like who can run faster or play chess better) and it’s the job of the contest organizer to keep the other conditions as equal as possible. Meanwhile, things like dating or job/roommate interviews or college admissions are really attempts at selecting people you’d prefer to be around and get along with, so you’re choosing from a set of points in a nebulous region in human-qualities-space that doesn’t linearize nicely. For example, if I say that I’m going to hire the candidate that’s objectively faster and more accurate at filing papers (which is easy to measure), then according to the contest model, I’m committing to overlooking other qualities like loudness or disagreeableness or smelliness or tardiness, which are also important factors to consider when hiring someone. These are also things I might not even consider until the pool of applicants is available!
This is why rejections from these types of places tactfully say “We had a lot of promising people and a limited number of spots so we couldn’t accept all of them,” because if they write, “We thought you were too tardy,” then next time you apply and be super-punctual, that still won’t guarantee you a spot. Because other factors!
I think the contest is tempting because it’s simple and it makes you feel like you’re more in control of the outcome than you really are (“All I have to do is be less tardy!”) but generally I think modeling these blobby types of interactions as contests creates unnecessary pain, because it needlessly creates losers when there aren’t … really any. You weren’t that in control to begin with (which can be hard to accept), so don’t be so hard on yourself for the result! You might get to date Alice but not Barbara and you might get accepted to Berkeley and rejected by UCLA.
Sorry, I meant the guy is the loser.
I did too! Edited.
Yes, people offering me their sympathy when someone wrongs me even when I’ve pointed out that I’m not terribly bothered myself seems to be a common pattern.
(Seems like my resent-o-meter is under-sensitive; in game-theoretical terms, it’s like when someone makes me an excessively small offer in the Ultimatum game, my System 1 infers that they’re not an agent and decides that I might just as well do the CDTical thing and accept the offer anyway.)
In the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, ‘assume your opponent is a fellow superrational agent until proven otherwise’ yields tit-for-tat...
Now that you mention it, I’ve only ever used this tactic on people I didn’t know very well, so I expected their resent-o-meter to be average. And then I could use their reaction to gauge their actual resentment-setting. Meanwhile, I have a friend with a resent-o-meter that’s perhaps higher than necessary, and I always go with the “Well you CAN’T just hate people for something like that …” which led to really long, tedious debates about why she shouldn’t demonize some gentleman or another. But I think she finds reasons to resent people because it’s the only way she knows to deal with sad things. :(
And “she’s just not that into you” makes a better soundbite than either—but I do agree that this is probably what’s going on here. Flaking is not even that uncommon nowadays; regardless of anyone’s opinion about this, it does mean that it’s hard to take the female friend’s comment at face value.
Well, there’s a bunch of things it communicates at once:
Probably you are angry, and I’m your friend so I will give you a place to vent your anger, if you want.
Probably you are sad, so I will try to cheer you up by telling you that what happened is not that big of a deal, because if she’s not interested, then she is not worth feeling too sad about.
Meanwhile, “she’s just not that into you” sounds like you’re taking her side. “Well, she can do what she wants.” But if you’re my friend and I’m the one that the sad thing happened to, then I’d want you to keep the situation about me. So even if she is perfectly justified in being not that into me, I don’t want it brought up right at that moment.
Therefore! Those girls who reacted by calling that girl a bitch probably don’t actually think she’s a bitch. If they encounter her later in life, they probably won’t pounce on her with something like, “You’re that bitch that stopped replying to my friend army1987! We totally hate you!” They are instead most likely just comforting you in a confusingly aggressive-sounding way.
Actually they were more like ‘Huh, you don’t seem to be very angry.’ [And indeed I wasn’t.] ‘How comes??? If a guy did that to me, I’d be FURIOUS!!!’ (That’s a paraphrase, of course, but not a terribly loose one.)
ETA: In other words, it seems that’s another instance of a pattern I noticed before.