You’re right, I was projecting my personal experience of being labled “creepy” as a geeky socially awkward teenager. My behaviors had nothing in common with those mentioned in the original post, but I did not realize this.
I agree that a taboo on the word creepy would help here, I missed that the word gets applied to drastically different situations and behaviors (on the part of the person being labeled so).
The same thing is happening here with the word “confidence”- you and I are using different definitions of it. I meant it in the context of someone who expects the interest level of a conversation to be symmetrical, and if the other person doesn’t seem interested they will notice this and instead talk to someone who shows more interest.
Shy geeky guys often enter conversations with women expecting them to be disinterested. Because they don’t expect the other person to be interested, they may keep talking to someone showing outward signs of disinterest which is a huge social mistake.
This is very different from an “overconfident” guy who so strongly expects a woman to be interested that he doesn’t check to see if she really is… however in both cases I think the woman would feel similarly trapped (because signs of disinterest are being ignored).
You’re right, I was projecting my personal experience of being labled “creepy” as a geeky socially awkward teenager. My behaviors had nothing in common with those mentioned in the original post, but I did not realize this.
I agree that a taboo on the word creepy would help here, I missed that the word gets applied to drastically different situations and behaviors (on the part of the person being labeled so).
The same thing is happening here with the word “confidence”- you and I are using different definitions of it. I meant it in the context of someone who expects the interest level of a conversation to be symmetrical, and if the other person doesn’t seem interested they will notice this and instead talk to someone who shows more interest.
Shy geeky guys often enter conversations with women expecting them to be disinterested. Because they don’t expect the other person to be interested, they may keep talking to someone showing outward signs of disinterest which is a huge social mistake.
This is very different from an “overconfident” guy who so strongly expects a woman to be interested that he doesn’t check to see if she really is… however in both cases I think the woman would feel similarly trapped (because signs of disinterest are being ignored).