Generally agree that this is important to keep in mind, but:
Asking for a number instead of offering yours. If I want to call you, I will, but when you ask for my number, I can’t stop you calling or harassing me in the future.
It’s possible my model is just mistaken here, but my understanding is that people generally expect (straight) men to ask for numbers and (straight) women to offer numbers, and deviating from this script on the male side is low-status. Something like “I can’t be bothered to take the next step here, so you do it.” Or maybe “I’m not confident enough to ask for your number, so I’ll give you mine instead and hope for the best.” Agree with the other commenters that offering fake numbers is an option.
If that’s how you actually say it, I’d be a little concerned about how you were coming across. “Let’s exchange our phone numbers” doesn’t lend itself to a polite “no” in the same way as, say, “Do you want to exchange phone numbers?”
If that’s how you actually say it, I’d be a little concerned about how you were coming across.
Replace Viliam_Bur with a pretty girl. Are you still concerned about how she’s coming across? What if it’s two people of the same gender? What if one of them is secretly attracted to the other but pretends to be a friend, yet the other knows about said supposedly secret attraction?
I think you were assuming a certain context and tone and approach that have been more closely associated with that phrasing in your personal experience, perhaps without realizing it.
Good point. I checked by visualising a selection of people in my head asking this, male and female, with various characteristics. I had the same reaction to about equal numbers of men and women. Usually some something along the lines of “erm, can we add each other on facebook first?”
...Then again, I’m probably just particularly not-keen on giving people my phone number, and as such was reading the situation exclusively in terms of “which way of asking makes the certainty of me saying “no” less awkward?”
I think you were assuming a certain context and tone and approach that have been more closely associated with that phrasing in your personal experience, perhaps without realizing it.
Yes, but I guess the OP also had that kind of situation in mind.
Since we’re talking about impressions and pressures to say yes and the like, I prefer something like “I’d like to exchange numbers. Would that be all right?” This lets you take most of the risk in the interaction and makes your intentions clearer, while the “Do you want...” version asks the other person to express their preferences first and only implies your own.
And going one step further, it’s not about getting a phone number (or shouldn’t be). It’s about keeping the conversation going. So: “I’d like to keep this conversation going / talking with you / talking about this. How does that sound to you?” and if you get a positive response, then “Let’s exchange numbers” or “how can I find you on Facebook” is perfectly natural.
That’s not dark-artsy. It contextualizes your personal request as a personal request, thereby making it acceptable to refuse. Sort of the opposite, really.
It’s a lot like introducing an idea you have for working with someone as ‘a [potentially] unreasonable request’ - by saying it, you’re almost explicitly giving them permission to say ‘no’ to whatever comes next, and if they think it was perfectly reasonable then they go along and all you spent was 4 words.
It doesn’t -sound- dark artsy, and it doesn’t -feel- manipulative to the person on the other end, but the apparent significant of the leading question diffuses the relatively low significance of the second question. The question of why you asked for the phone number in this manner distracts them from the question of whether or not they really wanted to give it to you. (This only applies while it is an unorthodox approach, mind.)
That’s where the dark arts come in.
I recommend it anyways because, as you say, it gives them a comfortable way of saying no.
I think that hardly anyone is going to be so confused by the framing that they don’t think about the object level question, especially since the object level question is most often a gut matter where most of the difficulty arises from reading yourself, not generating the judgement itself. Taking the pressure off makes it all easier.
It’s a marginal effect, not a primary one; you couldn’t get a phone number out of somebody who doesn’t like you, but you might get one out of somebody who is near the threshold. Other effects from framing the question (such as signaling that you respect their right to say no, and therefore will respect it if they later decide they’d rather not be called by you) this way probably dominate the impact; but as somebody who grew up around manipulation, and have a natural and despised tendency towards it, manipulation is something I am rather paranoid about, and avoid as much as reasonably possible.
It won’t get me in trouble for manipulating. But you misestimate what’s going on: Such a strategy isn’t manipulation-minimizing. In fact it depends on some (positive) manipulation, trying to frame the question in a way that makes the other person more comfortable saying no. There’s also some negative manipulation going on, however, in that the framing -also- makes the other person less likely to say no, even if it is just at the marginal cases.
Effective manipulation doesn’t rely on changing another person’s thought processes, it relies on subverting them. Don’t make them into a person who will do X, be the person they would do X for/to.
They can still say, “I don’t have my phone with me at the moment.” ;-)
(And as I mentioned elsethread, these days I only ever ask for phone numbers in situations where I can be reasonably sure that they are OK with giving me theirs.)
They can still say, “I don’t have my phone with me at the moment.” ;-)
Only better in the unlikely event that the other party will take it at face value and believe them; and that the other party hasn’t previously caught a glimpse of their phone at any point.
I find it very puzzling how people can get used to so much lying and casual disrespect for each other’s intelligence. I’m looking at it from the “privileged” viewpoint of someone who never entered the world of dating or sex, nor would’ve had much to offer in it, and thus didn’t bear its costs, but I expect a lot of people to consider the very fact that you feel the need to give someone a fake phone number, as opposed to simply refusing, or to pretend you don’t have your phone with you, a gigantic red flag and a sign that there are an awful lot of much better things you could be doing than being in that place interacting with that person.
Measly pieces of knowledge I’ve gathered so far:
The man probably just wants to get into the woman’s pants and to show and defend his masculinity and his status. He needs to look tough, and hence can’t let his lack of mutual trust with the woman visibly bother him; that’s why he doesn’t appear to think twice if given the chance before inserting a pretty vulnerable part of his body into an orifice whose unenthusiastic owner could’ve set up any number of nasty surprises in the way. This also probably implies he can’t afford to respect the woman very much.
The woman..., well, I have no idea what she wants in the first place. If asked, she’ll probably say she just wants to have a good time, making a point to look down on all those sex-starved men who fall dismally short of her standards, as if they don’t know there’s more to life than sex. Of course, her own sexual drive is not contemptible at all, and neither is that of the men she does find attractive. She obviously has no respect for the man she’s interacting with. She might fear him, and—unlike in a man—this fear may be high-status, since it signals her desirability and her ability to summon allies eager to mop the floor with any lowlife who distresses her.
I read the great-great-grandparent as giving your number so the other person can ring you at any time if they so wish, not as pressuring them to ring you immediately. I think this removes any incentive to give you a fake number, unless, of course, the other person wants to mess with you by getting you to call someone you really, really don’t want to call—perhaps to get back at you for wasting their time with a long interaction they didn’t dare stop?
I’m definitely not the first person in history with these thoughts, so it’s extremely likely that measures have been taken all the time to enable people to get to know one another without so many barriers to honest communication. Access to such an environment is itself a privilege, of course; therefore, if you’re not desirable enough, any difficulty to get into those environments, or even to learn they exist, is a feature, not a bug.
I had exactly the same reaction. I believe (though have extremely small data number of data points) that offering a number instead of asking for one would be taken as low-status. On the other hand, I doubt that the balance between having a proposition accepted or denied is often that delicate. Presumably in most cases, by the time you’re considering exchanging information, she or he has already made up their minds enough that such a small faux-pas wouldn’t matter much.
I feel like I’m restating the obvious, but things are nearly always more creepy when done by an unattractive person and nearly always less creepy when done by an attractive one, ceteris paribus.
I haven’t seen attractiveness mentioned in any of the examples in this topic so far.
A couple comments have pointed it out. If few people have mentioned it it is probably because it is the standard complaint against “creepiness” rhetoric.
I think there are times when it is basically used as a slur against unattractive people. But there is also a good reason to interpret a behavior from an attractive person and an unattractive person differently. This is because people generally have some idea of attractive they are.
Imagine you are an attractive women evaluating the intentions of men around you (say at a bar). A man displays some kind of body language or verbal behavior that suggests he is sexually attracted to you. You ask yourself “Why is he doing that?”. Well if he has reasoned that the two of you are similarly attractive than it is very likely that he has expressed attraction as a way of telling you he is attracted and seeing if the attraction is mutual (and could lead to a fun consensual relationship).
But if the man isn’t nearly as attractive as you are then it seems like he should know that and think it unlikely that you would want to be involved with him. Thus, you instinctively lower the probability that he is merely trying to gauge mutual attraction and raise the probability that he is just attracted to you and doesn’t care how you feel or is getting off on making you uncomfortable etc.
There are complications: like women can inflate that sensitivity to creepiness to signal high attractiveness and men who come on extra-strong (when calibrated correctly) can signal high attractiveness. But in general, I think the above is the basic reason for the phenomenon.
This is because people generally have some idea of attractive they are.
Do they? I’m under the impression that the Dunning–Kruger effect (for unattractive people) and the impostor syndrome (for attractive people) often apply.
This seems to be reifying “attractiveness”. It’s bad enough to treat it as a one-place function; this line of thinking seems to treat it as an unchangeable one-place function.
Take the “creepyness” part, which is also a multiplace function of the beholder and beholden and context, and you’ve got the same problem.
I guess I shouldn’t have assumed it was obvious that I was scope-masking both “creepy” and “attractive” under respective “as perceived by whoever is making the attractiveness/creepyness judgment at the time where this parameter is relevant” formulas.
So, to factor, unpack, inline and reiterate: Ceteris paribus, actions or behaviors or phrases always appear more creepy to a given observer or participant whenever said observer or participant finds the source of the actions, behaviors or phrases less attractive at the time of evaluation where the level of creepyness is evaluated by said observer or participant, and conversely appear less creepy when the source is found more attractive under the same circumstances.
To me, by charitable reading when taking LessWrong as context, the above paragraph and the first one in the grandparent seem equivalent. Should I not be reading others’ comments like this mentally? I’ve been doing this on every comment I read for months.
There is something to be said about being confident enough that you don’t follow the social script. Like seemingly most things in dating, the strategy doesn’t matter very much—it’s all about the way you portray yourself.
After a friend recommended giving women my number, I have completely stopped asking for theirs. With n=~10, only one has declined saying that it was my responsiblity to take hers. The others all seemed delighted that I was different, and willing to give them more of the direct power whether or not they’d like to see me again.
My general advice in this department would to be to completely forget that there is a script and simply experiment to see what works for you.
After a friend recommended giving women my number, I have completely stopped asking for theirs. With n=~10, only one has declined saying that it was my responsiblity to take hers. The others all seemed delighted that I was different, and willing to give them more of the direct power whether or not they’d like to see me again.
On the rare occasions I’ve had the testicular fortitude to ask for anything from a woman, I’ve gone with asking for an email address rather than a phone number. Like the OP, I read “can I have your number?” as “Can I have a long-term license to annoy the crap out of you in future?” Though in my case it’s just because I hate talking on the phone.
Asking for an email address seems to fit the social formula while being easily blackholeable at a future date.
Is there a reason to ask for a number at all? If you’re unsure about whether someone is interested asking if you can add them on eg facebook seems much less pushy! Then you can message them the next day saying “lovely to meet you.” If they’re interested they’ll reply.
Is there a reason to ask for a number at all? If you’re unsure about whether someone is interested asking if you can add them on eg facebook seems much less pushy! Then you can message them the next day saying “lovely to meet you.” If they’re interested they’ll reply.
The straightforward answer is that those PUA folks who do lot’s of approaches find that the chances of getting a date are higher when they ask for a number than when they try to connect over facebook.
My guess is that most of PUA techniques developed before Facebook became ubiquitous, and they just haven’t caught up with that yet.
Actually no. There much pressure in the PUA industry to sell new secrets to getting woman. I consider it highly unlikely that no one of them tried to ask women for facebook information.
Yes. I generally only actually offer to exchange numbers with people when I have already agreed (usually via the Facebook chat or in person) to meet them at a certain time and place, just in case they have to tell me at the last moment they’ll be late (or couldn’t make it) or vice versa.
I’m not entirely sure of this either, but I think that if you happen to have a business card, then handing out one is relatively high-status. And if you don’t, you can have some made for cheap.
I think our community is BADLY in need of a broad-ranging set of asessments as to when status is fragile and/or important. Like, on a scale of friends to court intrigue…
I’m not saying it’s unimportant here, and not disagreeing that it might be pretty omnipresent, but I think people have gotten into a state of always paying attention to status and ways it may be indicated.
I think people have gotten into a state of always paying attention to status and ways it may be indicated.
The implication here seems to be that people are not in this state by default, which doesn’t seem true to me. It’s certainly true that LWers have gotten into a state of frequently talking about status, which is not default.
I’ve had it described as “putting the onus on the woman to initiate contact with you”. I don’t know why my giving my phone number and requesting she call back with her number shouldn’t count as initiating contact by me, but apparently it doesn’t with some.
People expect women to offer numbers, or do they expect them to supply numbers at their discretion when asked? I’d think generally the latter, and not the former,
Generally agree that this is important to keep in mind, but:
It’s possible my model is just mistaken here, but my understanding is that people generally expect (straight) men to ask for numbers and (straight) women to offer numbers, and deviating from this script on the male side is low-status. Something like “I can’t be bothered to take the next step here, so you do it.” Or maybe “I’m not confident enough to ask for your number, so I’ll give you mine instead and hope for the best.” Agree with the other commenters that offering fake numbers is an option.
In a situation like this I usually say something like “let’s exchange our phone numbers”.
If that’s how you actually say it, I’d be a little concerned about how you were coming across. “Let’s exchange our phone numbers” doesn’t lend itself to a polite “no” in the same way as, say, “Do you want to exchange phone numbers?”
Replace Viliam_Bur with a pretty girl. Are you still concerned about how she’s coming across? What if it’s two people of the same gender? What if one of them is secretly attracted to the other but pretends to be a friend, yet the other knows about said supposedly secret attraction?
I think you were assuming a certain context and tone and approach that have been more closely associated with that phrasing in your personal experience, perhaps without realizing it.
Good point. I checked by visualising a selection of people in my head asking this, male and female, with various characteristics. I had the same reaction to about equal numbers of men and women. Usually some something along the lines of “erm, can we add each other on facebook first?”
...Then again, I’m probably just particularly not-keen on giving people my phone number, and as such was reading the situation exclusively in terms of “which way of asking makes the certainty of me saying “no” less awkward?”
Yes, but I guess the OP also had that kind of situation in mind.
Since we’re talking about impressions and pressures to say yes and the like, I prefer something like “I’d like to exchange numbers. Would that be all right?” This lets you take most of the risk in the interaction and makes your intentions clearer, while the “Do you want...” version asks the other person to express their preferences first and only implies your own.
And going one step further, it’s not about getting a phone number (or shouldn’t be). It’s about keeping the conversation going. So: “I’d like to keep this conversation going / talking with you / talking about this. How does that sound to you?” and if you get a positive response, then “Let’s exchange numbers” or “how can I find you on Facebook” is perfectly natural.
Your requests are -too- reasonable. They would make many people feel unreasonable for saying no.
Make people feel comfortable telling you no. For example, by asking first:
“May I ask you a rather personal question?”
Plus, it’s amusing. And doubly so if you freely volunteer the reason -why- you asked that question first.
A little dark-artsy, mind, but most of social interactions involve a little bit of that anyways.
That’s not dark-artsy. It contextualizes your personal request as a personal request, thereby making it acceptable to refuse. Sort of the opposite, really.
It’s a lot like introducing an idea you have for working with someone as ‘a [potentially] unreasonable request’ - by saying it, you’re almost explicitly giving them permission to say ‘no’ to whatever comes next, and if they think it was perfectly reasonable then they go along and all you spent was 4 words.
It doesn’t -sound- dark artsy, and it doesn’t -feel- manipulative to the person on the other end, but the apparent significant of the leading question diffuses the relatively low significance of the second question. The question of why you asked for the phone number in this manner distracts them from the question of whether or not they really wanted to give it to you. (This only applies while it is an unorthodox approach, mind.)
That’s where the dark arts come in.
I recommend it anyways because, as you say, it gives them a comfortable way of saying no.
I think that hardly anyone is going to be so confused by the framing that they don’t think about the object level question, especially since the object level question is most often a gut matter where most of the difficulty arises from reading yourself, not generating the judgement itself. Taking the pressure off makes it all easier.
It’s a marginal effect, not a primary one; you couldn’t get a phone number out of somebody who doesn’t like you, but you might get one out of somebody who is near the threshold. Other effects from framing the question (such as signaling that you respect their right to say no, and therefore will respect it if they later decide they’d rather not be called by you) this way probably dominate the impact; but as somebody who grew up around manipulation, and have a natural and despised tendency towards it, manipulation is something I am rather paranoid about, and avoid as much as reasonably possible.
But… this is the opposite of manipulation. How does making every effort to minimize manipulation get you in trouble for manipulating?
It won’t get me in trouble for manipulating. But you misestimate what’s going on: Such a strategy isn’t manipulation-minimizing. In fact it depends on some (positive) manipulation, trying to frame the question in a way that makes the other person more comfortable saying no. There’s also some negative manipulation going on, however, in that the framing -also- makes the other person less likely to say no, even if it is just at the marginal cases.
Effective manipulation doesn’t rely on changing another person’s thought processes, it relies on subverting them. Don’t make them into a person who will do X, be the person they would do X for/to.
Your definition of manipulation is so broad I think it loses all relevant meaning. Framing a question is a matter of clear communication.
I think the tone of voice is as important as the actual wording used.
Or “here’s my phone number, if you ring me I’ll save yours”.
Bad idea; that carries the subtext of “I won’t let you get away with giving me a fake number”. (See for example comment thread 17 here.)
They can still say, “I don’t have my phone with me at the moment.” ;-)
(And as I mentioned elsethread, these days I only ever ask for phone numbers in situations where I can be reasonably sure that they are OK with giving me theirs.)
Only better in the unlikely event that the other party will take it at face value and believe them; and that the other party hasn’t previously caught a glimpse of their phone at any point.
I find it very puzzling how people can get used to so much lying and casual disrespect for each other’s intelligence. I’m looking at it from the “privileged” viewpoint of someone who never entered the world of dating or sex, nor would’ve had much to offer in it, and thus didn’t bear its costs, but I expect a lot of people to consider the very fact that you feel the need to give someone a fake phone number, as opposed to simply refusing, or to pretend you don’t have your phone with you, a gigantic red flag and a sign that there are an awful lot of much better things you could be doing than being in that place interacting with that person.
Measly pieces of knowledge I’ve gathered so far:
The man probably just wants to get into the woman’s pants and to show and defend his masculinity and his status. He needs to look tough, and hence can’t let his lack of mutual trust with the woman visibly bother him; that’s why he doesn’t appear to think twice if given the chance before inserting a pretty vulnerable part of his body into an orifice whose unenthusiastic owner could’ve set up any number of nasty surprises in the way. This also probably implies he can’t afford to respect the woman very much.
The woman..., well, I have no idea what she wants in the first place. If asked, she’ll probably say she just wants to have a good time, making a point to look down on all those sex-starved men who fall dismally short of her standards, as if they don’t know there’s more to life than sex. Of course, her own sexual drive is not contemptible at all, and neither is that of the men she does find attractive. She obviously has no respect for the man she’s interacting with. She might fear him, and—unlike in a man—this fear may be high-status, since it signals her desirability and her ability to summon allies eager to mop the floor with any lowlife who distresses her.
I read the great-great-grandparent as giving your number so the other person can ring you at any time if they so wish, not as pressuring them to ring you immediately. I think this removes any incentive to give you a fake number, unless, of course, the other person wants to mess with you by getting you to call someone you really, really don’t want to call—perhaps to get back at you for wasting their time with a long interaction they didn’t dare stop?
I’m definitely not the first person in history with these thoughts, so it’s extremely likely that measures have been taken all the time to enable people to get to know one another without so many barriers to honest communication. Access to such an environment is itself a privilege, of course; therefore, if you’re not desirable enough, any difficulty to get into those environments, or even to learn they exist, is a feature, not a bug.
I had exactly the same reaction. I believe (though have extremely small data number of data points) that offering a number instead of asking for one would be taken as low-status. On the other hand, I doubt that the balance between having a proposition accepted or denied is often that delicate. Presumably in most cases, by the time you’re considering exchanging information, she or he has already made up their minds enough that such a small faux-pas wouldn’t matter much.
I feel like I’m restating the obvious, but things are nearly always more creepy when done by an unattractive person and nearly always less creepy when done by an attractive one, ceteris paribus.
I haven’t seen attractiveness mentioned in any of the examples in this topic so far.
(???)
A couple comments have pointed it out. If few people have mentioned it it is probably because it is the standard complaint against “creepiness” rhetoric.
I think there are times when it is basically used as a slur against unattractive people. But there is also a good reason to interpret a behavior from an attractive person and an unattractive person differently. This is because people generally have some idea of attractive they are.
Imagine you are an attractive women evaluating the intentions of men around you (say at a bar). A man displays some kind of body language or verbal behavior that suggests he is sexually attracted to you. You ask yourself “Why is he doing that?”. Well if he has reasoned that the two of you are similarly attractive than it is very likely that he has expressed attraction as a way of telling you he is attracted and seeing if the attraction is mutual (and could lead to a fun consensual relationship).
But if the man isn’t nearly as attractive as you are then it seems like he should know that and think it unlikely that you would want to be involved with him. Thus, you instinctively lower the probability that he is merely trying to gauge mutual attraction and raise the probability that he is just attracted to you and doesn’t care how you feel or is getting off on making you uncomfortable etc.
There are complications: like women can inflate that sensitivity to creepiness to signal high attractiveness and men who come on extra-strong (when calibrated correctly) can signal high attractiveness. But in general, I think the above is the basic reason for the phenomenon.
Do they? I’m under the impression that the Dunning–Kruger effect (for unattractive people) and the impostor syndrome (for attractive people) often apply.
But you’re right that those biases happen. Also, the women making the judgment may not be taking these biases into account sufficiently.
Well, of course few people in the 10th percentile will incorrectly believe they are in the 90th percentile or vice versa (or at least, I hope not).
This seems to be reifying “attractiveness”. It’s bad enough to treat it as a one-place function; this line of thinking seems to treat it as an unchangeable one-place function.
Take the “creepyness” part, which is also a multiplace function of the beholder and beholden and context, and you’ve got the same problem.
I guess I shouldn’t have assumed it was obvious that I was scope-masking both “creepy” and “attractive” under respective “as perceived by whoever is making the attractiveness/creepyness judgment at the time where this parameter is relevant” formulas.
So, to factor, unpack, inline and reiterate: Ceteris paribus, actions or behaviors or phrases always appear more creepy to a given observer or participant whenever said observer or participant finds the source of the actions, behaviors or phrases less attractive at the time of evaluation where the level of creepyness is evaluated by said observer or participant, and conversely appear less creepy when the source is found more attractive under the same circumstances.
To me, by charitable reading when taking LessWrong as context, the above paragraph and the first one in the grandparent seem equivalent. Should I not be reading others’ comments like this mentally? I’ve been doing this on every comment I read for months.
There is something to be said about being confident enough that you don’t follow the social script. Like seemingly most things in dating, the strategy doesn’t matter very much—it’s all about the way you portray yourself.
After a friend recommended giving women my number, I have completely stopped asking for theirs. With n=~10, only one has declined saying that it was my responsiblity to take hers. The others all seemed delighted that I was different, and willing to give them more of the direct power whether or not they’d like to see me again.
My general advice in this department would to be to completely forget that there is a script and simply experiment to see what works for you.
How many called you?
Three.
Edit: Interestingly, the woman who insisted I take her number was positively disintersted when I did call.
Seems like she was interested in rejecting you, and created for herself an opportunity to do it twice.
Different people optimize for different things.
Or she was trying to Enforce a Rule, regardless of whether she wanted Paamayim’s company. Some people just aren’t consequentialists.
On the rare occasions I’ve had the testicular fortitude to ask for anything from a woman, I’ve gone with asking for an email address rather than a phone number. Like the OP, I read “can I have your number?” as “Can I have a long-term license to annoy the crap out of you in future?” Though in my case it’s just because I hate talking on the phone.
Asking for an email address seems to fit the social formula while being easily blackholeable at a future date.
Is there a reason to ask for a number at all? If you’re unsure about whether someone is interested asking if you can add them on eg facebook seems much less pushy! Then you can message them the next day saying “lovely to meet you.” If they’re interested they’ll reply.
The straightforward answer is that those PUA folks who do lot’s of approaches find that the chances of getting a date are higher when they ask for a number than when they try to connect over facebook.
My guess is that most of PUA techniques developed before Facebook became ubiquitous, and they just haven’t caught up with that yet.
Actually no. There much pressure in the PUA industry to sell new secrets to getting woman. I consider it highly unlikely that no one of them tried to ask women for facebook information.
Yes. I generally only actually offer to exchange numbers with people when I have already agreed (usually via the Facebook chat or in person) to meet them at a certain time and place, just in case they have to tell me at the last moment they’ll be late (or couldn’t make it) or vice versa.
If you have a nice voice but aren’t good at chatting on the internet (such people do exist!), asking for numbers is probably a better option for you.
I’m not entirely sure of this either, but I think that if you happen to have a business card, then handing out one is relatively high-status. And if you don’t, you can have some made for cheap.
Forget business cards. Have personal dating cards printed, with intentionally bad sexual puns and innuendo.
Or hand out dating resumes. Bonus points if you include references. Double bonus points if they’re references for sexual skill.
I think our community is BADLY in need of a broad-ranging set of asessments as to when status is fragile and/or important. Like, on a scale of friends to court intrigue…
I’m not saying it’s unimportant here, and not disagreeing that it might be pretty omnipresent, but I think people have gotten into a state of always paying attention to status and ways it may be indicated.
The implication here seems to be that people are not in this state by default, which doesn’t seem true to me. It’s certainly true that LWers have gotten into a state of frequently talking about status, which is not default.
That’s also possible. But I still think we have a bias toward paying too much explicit attention to it.
From my own experience: I only ask for a number when I sense that the interaction has established a solid foundation to do so.
So nowadays in my interactions with women I very rarely ask for a number for that reason.
Another take beyond “low status”.
I’ve had it described as “putting the onus on the woman to initiate contact with you”. I don’t know why my giving my phone number and requesting she call back with her number shouldn’t count as initiating contact by me, but apparently it doesn’t with some.
People expect women to offer numbers, or do they expect them to supply numbers at their discretion when asked? I’d think generally the latter, and not the former,