You have to put yourself in environments where you’ll be able to interact with a lot of women. College is in a lot of ways set up perfectly for this: if you’re not in college right now, consider joining a class or an activity group. Try to make it one where the gender balance will be in your favor. Book groups are one example—they’re wildly tilted towards women (I suspect men just, you know, read books, and don’t tend to see the value in sitting around sipping coffee and talking about reading books). But if you like girls who wear glasses, try finding a congenial book group. You’ll probably be the only man.
Even better than book groups, though, are dance classes. Swing and rockabilly aren’t super trendy anymore, but the scenes still exist in a quieter way, and these classes are great for single men: a) they’re filled mostly with women; b) dance is an inherently flirtatious activity, and the physical leading/following dynamic is one that many women find very sexy; c) even if you don’t find a date in that class, you’ll have learned an attractive skill, and you’ll be able to participate in events that will introduce you to more women; and d) physical exercise is good for building both confidence and sexiness. Yoga classes might work too, or if you can find a martial arts practice that attracts significant numbers of women (maybe check out your local aikido classes?).
The SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) is also a surprisingly good choice for geeks who want to hook up. Wearing princess dresses is enough of a draw for women that the gender balance, while tilted towards men, isn’t too awful, and so many relationships get started in the context of SCA events that there’s a joke about it. (The joke is that “SCA” actually stands for “Society for Consenting Adults.”)
There are of course singles bars or activities like speed-dating that are specifically designed to let you meet single women, so you could try those too. A lot of people find those environments stressful and frustrating, which is why I’d suggest finding a social scene that is not specifically about dating.
Lastly, let all your friends know that you’re interested in meeting women. Ask to be introduced to their friends who are single. This is how people used to meet each other and it is still an important avenue to keep open.
You have to ask women out on dates. This part, I know, is hard, and I’m sorry to admit that many women don’t even understand how hard it is. You will be rejected and it will suck every time, but this part is a numbers game. You just have to keep doing it until you find the girl who says “yes.”
The pre-reqs for asking a girl out are fewer than you might think. It’s best if you have already been introduced and have interacted a bit in a friendly manner. When I say a bit, I really mean just that you’ve spoken a few times. It is far, far more common for geek guys to err wildly in the opposite direction. Don’t do this. If you like her, ask her out, and make your intentions unambiguous. The sooner the better.
If you’re following my advice and meeting girls in activity classes, you would do this by approaching her just after one of the classes, maybe as she’s getting her things together or as she’s heading out the door. Make eye contact and smile. Start with a compliment that references the interactions you’ve had—”Hey, I’ve really been enjoying dancing with you [or “sparring with you,” or, “I really liked what you said about the book”] and I wonder if I could take you out to a movie next week.”
Be really clear about the fact that you’re asking her for a date. Try not to say something like “I wonder if you’d like to meet for coffee and talk ” because she could interpret this as merely a friendly gesture on your part, and you don’t want that. A lot of inexperienced guys think they should establish a friendship before they ask a girl out, but you really don’t want to sink a lot of time and energy into a girl who is never going to see you “like that.” (It is true that established friendships can make a wonderful basis for romance, but never, ever count on that happening.)
Also, propose a specific activity and a specific time. Don’t just say “I wonder if you’d go out with me some time” because a) it sounds a little desperate and b) a lot of women have trouble saying “no” directly (we’re socialized not to). Leave her a face-saving way to refuse. If she says “I’d love to but I’ve been really busy with work/school/life recently,” that means no. Move on. (If, on the other hand, she says “I’m going to Guatemala next week, but I’ll be back by the end of the month, maybe then?” that means yes.)
Dealing with rejection: When you are rejected, try to be gracious about it, even if she is not. Like I said above, a lot of women truly do not understand how much gumption it takes to put yourself out there by making a pass. If she seems annoyed or condescending or whatever, try to shrug it off; just smile and say “okay, no problem” or something along those lines. Do the same thing if she says “I’d rather just be friends.” (But for the love of Pete, do not spend a lot of effort trying to actually cultivate a friendship. Moooooove on.)
It does get easier the more you do it. Just remind yourself that it is a numbers game. The worst thing that can happen is not that you ask ten girls out and they all say no. The worst thing is that you ask ten girls, they say no, and then you stop asking. Because whether it was Girl #11 or Girl #83 who would’ve fallen head over heels for you, you’ll never find her now. Keep looking to meet women, and keep asking them out; these are the two steps that lead to relationships.
Troubleshooting: If you do find that you are consistently rejected, there might be something going on with your self-presentation that is offputting to women. Make sure your basic hygiene is good: that you are wearing clean clothes that fit you, that your hair is cut and that you are clean-shaven. (Facial hair is Advanced Fashion for Men: if fashion is not your ballgame, just shave, trust me.) Ask your friends if there’s anything going on with your looks or demeanor that might be getting in your way.
If you are overweight, start an exercise regimen, but do not wait until you are at your ideal weight to start asking women on dates. It is perfectly possible for big dudes to find love, they do it all the time. It IS more important to make sure that you wear flattering clothing that fits you well—a baggy, threadbare tee-shirt and Hawaiian shorts may not cut it. Use Google Images to find pictures of some of the heavier celebrities (like Sean Astin, or Seth Rogan before he slimmed down). Check out what they are/were wearing, and use those pictures as a style guide.
You may also be acting in ways that indicate you don’t value yourself, which can make women (and other people in general) instinctively shy away. You will probably need the help of people who actually know you to diagnose these kinds of problems and help you fix them.
In general, though, from my observations, most geek guys are able to get dates so long as they go where the women are, and ask them out. The most common mistake by far is simply failing to execute one or both of these crucial steps.
Depends on your interests. Can be as simple as grabbing a cup of coffee. Could be going for a walk on the beach. Take some sandwiches and go hiking. Pick a shared interest and enjoy it—go to an art gallery, or go ice-skating. Something active is good—and/or something where you get to sit down and chat…
This is excellent advice, and I up-voted it. However:
If she seems annoyed or condescending or whatever, try to shrug it off; just smile and say “okay, no problem” or something along those lines. Do the same thing if she says “I’d rather just be friends.” (But for the love of Pete, do not spend a lot of effort trying to actually cultivate a friendship. Moooooove on.)
I may just be reading too much into things, and I acknowledge that this comment is written primarily as a response to the question “how to get into a relationship”. Nevertheless, this bit bothers me a bit, as the “for the love of, don’t try to actually cultivate a friendship” part seems to imply that there’s no point in being friends with women if you’re not going to have a relationship with them. That strikes me as a bit offensive.
Even if we’re assuming that you’re purpose is solely to get women, I don’t think befriending lots of them is as useless as you seem to suggest. You say yourself that one’s friends may introduce one to somebody one might be interested in. People tend to have more same-sex friends than opposite-sex friends, so being friends with lots of women will increase your chances of one of them introducing you to a friend of theirs. I also suspect that women are more likely than men to do this.
I do admit that this may not be the most efficient approach if you’re optimizing purely for finding a romantic relationship in minimum time. But on the other hand, it can wield you rewarding friendships that persist long after the end of your relationship with whoever it was you eventually found, so personally I’d find it worth it.
I should also mention that my experience somewhat mirrors MBlume’s, and I find the notion of becoming involved with someone before being good friends with them a little off-putting. Which is not to say that it would never have happened to me, though. (Without going to details, suffice to say that I’ve both had relationships with women I was friends with from before, and with women where that wasn’t the case.)
Befriending women is sometimes useful for becoming attractive to other women. (Allow me to skip the obligatory part where friendship is good in itself, of course it is, but I want to make a different point.) For example, you can ask them to help you shop for clothes, relying on their superior visual taste. Most of my “nice” clothes that I use for clubbing etc. were purchased this way, and girls seem to love this activity. Also they can bring you to events where you can meet other women; help you get into clubs; offer emotional support when you need it; and so on. If you make it very clear that you’re not pursuing this specific girl sexually, being friends with her can make quite a substantial instrumental benefit.
That said, of course I don’t mean the kind of “friendship” that girls offer when they reject you. That’s just a peculiar noise they make with their mouths in such situations, it doesn’t mean anything.
Sorry, that line wasn’t clear. If you’d truly like to be friends with a particular woman, then by all means, be her friend! What I’m specifically counseling inexperienced men to avoid is the pitfall where they befriend a woman when they really want to be her boyfriend, and then spend a lot of time pining after her fruitlessly.
And I did mean it when I said, “It is true that established friendships can make a wonderful basis for romance...” My husband was my friend first, so I’m not knocking these kinds of relationships at all. However, it’ll either happen or it won’t; if there are strategies for making it happen, I don’t know them; and I don’t think hoping it will happen is a good strategy at all for men specifically looking for a relationship. My impression is that ending up in “the friend zone” with a woman you want to date is a fairly common failure mode for inexperienced men, so I advise SilasBarta to take some care to avoid it. I may have stressed that part too heavily.
There’s a big difference between “If I approach someone for a date, and s/he rebuffs me, it’s best not to spend a lot of effort cultivating a friendship with that person” and “It’s never worth cultivating friendships.”
Yes, making friends is worth doing. Agreed. And if it so happens that the person I’m making friends with is someone I’d previously wanted to date, great! I have numerous friends in this category, and some of them are very good friends indeed.
But even with that in mind, I mostly agree with siduri.
Mostly that’s because I know very few people who can make that decision reliably immediately after being turned down. Taking a while to decide whether I’m genuinely interested in a friendship with this person seems called for.
I also meant the “spend a lot of effort” part to act as a qualifier, since for me true friendships tend to develop spontaneously and easily, in contrast to a situation where I’m actively courting the other person and they’re kind of pulling back. In my own life, I’ve learned it’s better to just let those second kinds of friendships die in the bud.
However, I recognize on reflection that for more introverted people, developing any friendship probably takes significant effort—so advice along the general lines of “if you have to push it, it’s probably not meant to be” is actually probably bad advice for a lot of people. Instead, I think the question should be “would you be satisfied with friendship alone, if nothing further ever developed? Would the friendship be a source of happiness to you, or a source of frustration and pain?”
I just don’t think guys should spend the time and energy being friends with women if friendship isn’t truly what they’re after. In a case like that it’s much better for them to focus their attention on other women, who might reciprocate.
I believe the point is that if you want a romantic relationship with a woman, cultivating a friendship with her in the hopes that romance will develop is almost always a bad idea. Occasionally such romance sparks “out of the blue”, but more likely nothing will ever happen, and it is a huge investment of time and emotion that basically never pays off. So if you aren’t interested in the woman for the sake of friendship alone, it is better to just forget about her and move on.
If you find a person interesting and worth being friends with, by all means don’t reject such an opportunity just because the person is a woman. That’s idiotic. It’s just a terrible dating strategy, that’s all.
sark hit upon a good point here: think of meeting many women as a special case of meeting many people.
How good are you at generally meeting people? Improve that and you’ll meet more of the half of them you’re interested in. General social skills are good to exercise.
I think there’s also the question if the “I’d rather just be friends.” said in the context of rejecting an invite to a date actually means “I want to be your friend.” or is just a polite way of saying “I don’t want to go on a date with you.”. In the former case trying to cultivate a friendship will be more useful than in the latter...
Valid point. Though I think people generally understand refusals even in this case.
“I’d love to but I’ve been really busy with work/school/life recently,” that means no.
is a little extreme. Though this could be an very ambiguously worded “polite” refusal, it can also be honesty from someone who actually is interested. Whereas “I’m sorry, I can’t, I’ve been really busy with life” is a clear refusal, “I’d love to but...” isn’t always and is worth at least a follow up.
Whereas “I’m sorry, I can’t, I’ve been really busy with life” is a clear refusal, “I’d love to but...” isn’t always and is worth at least a follow up.
Your experience may differ, but I disagree. Unless she suggests another time, this is meant as a polite brush-off. For most women, pursuing potential mates is a very, very high-priority activity, and no matter how busy their schedules may be, they can clear out an evening for a guy they’re truly interested in.
In the few situations where the woman really is booked solid (such as the example where she’s going out of town, or maybe if she’s studying for a very important upcoming exam) she’ll let you know when she expects to have some time free.
I think that there are cultural differences about that, too: where I am, ISTM that (assuming it’s unambiguous that you’re asking for a date, which is what siduri was recommending) “I’m not interested in dating at the moment” is perfectly socially acceptable.
I used to have trouble with this. (I was a geeky male at the time.) I knew perfectly well to accept No as an answer, but I never quite seemed to get that answer. (There were other problems too.)
This is not strictly true from my experience. I’ve had three girlfriends thus far and in all three cases, we were basically just friends who eventually realized we wanted to date one another. Of course, all three were also housemates, so I may be an odd case.
I’ve tried the “ask women out on dates” approach from time to time, but keep coming back to the impression that I’m the sort of person who just slides into romantic relationships with friends, and that if I want more romantic relationships, I need to make my social circle—not my circle of acquaintances, but my circle of folks I see on a daily basis—more generally co-ed (kind of a problem since it’s mostly folks I know from Singinst/Less Wrong these days).
Or become bisexual. If anyone posted a procedural comment on how to become bisexual, I would upvote it immediately =)
The way to become bisexual is to regularly extend your exposure to erotic stimuli just a little further than your comfort zone extends in that direction. I’ll use drawn pictorial porn as an example erotic stimulus, but adapt to whatever you prefer: start with Bridget. Everyone is gay for Bridget. Once you’re comfortable with Bridget, move on to futanari-on-female erotica, male-on-futanari, then futanari-on-male, paying attention to your comfort levels. You’ll run across some bizarre things while searching for this stuff; if any of it interests you, just go with it.
By now, you should be fairly comfortable with the plumbing involved, so it’s just the somatically male body you need to learn to find attractive. Find art featuring bishounen types, then pairing them with other male body types, and pay attention to what feels most comfortable.
It may take a while to go through this process, but I believe it’s entirely achievable for most people who don’t view heterosexuality as a terminal value.
The Bisexual Conspiracy commends your insidious efforts at propagating memes advantageous to us and has sent you several HBBs of assorted gender orientations by overnight delivery.
I wonder how much this would work for a homosexual male.
I’ve actually been trying this essential thing, although with less persistence as it requires a certain amount of effort to attend to something that just seems so immediately boring to myself. Perhaps living in a hetero-normative culture ensures that when a man decides that he’s gay, he is more likely to have discovered a roughly immutable biological fact?
One is that male anatomy is more familiar, and therefore presumably less intimidating, to straight men than female anatomy is to gay men.
Another is that in a heteronormative culture, men who aren’t strictly monosexual are more likely to identify as straight than as gay. If what this technique actually does is make men who aren’t monosexual more aware of their non-monosexuality, then I’d expect it to get more noticeable results on men who identify as straight. (I’d also expect there to be a wide range of effectiveness among straight-identified men.)
Despite subcultural normativity being strongly biased against bisexuality, really quite a lot of gay-identifying men have experimented with heterosexual behaviour, but are—ha! - closeted about it.
Alas the benefits of being open about a very slight sexual curiosity are probably not often great enough to make complete honesty seem worthwhile. Also such curiosity tends to signal a lack of self-knowledge and thus to an extent lack of trustworthiness, probably hence the vague stigma that many people have against dating bisexuals.
If you’re finding it boring, you may be trying to go too straight too quickly, or you may not be using your preferred form of erotica—I used hentai as as example, but I could’ve used textual fiction, videos, etc.
Or you could just be immutably gay; I am generalizing from just a few examples.
I suspect how well this works probably depends on exactly how hetero- or homosexual one was from the beginning. (I’m basing that on personal experience with regard to both bisexuality and various fetishes.)
Instead of a strict straight/bi/gay split, I prefer to think of it as a spectrum where 0 is completely straight, 5 is completely bisexual and 10 is completely gay. I’m guessing it’s possible for you to shift yourself a couple of points towards the middle of the spectrum, but not an arbitrary amount. E.g. if you started off at 0 you might shift yourself to 2, or if you started off at 8 you could shift yourself to 6.
I’d also note that there’s a difference between sexual attraction and emotional compatibility. I’m rather mildly bisexual and using these techniques, could probably become a bit more so. But my main issue with pursuing same-sex relationships is not the sexual attraction as such, but the fact that I find it a lot easier to relate and connect to women on an emotional level. These techniques probably wouldn’t help in that.
Instead of a strict straight/bi/gay split, I prefer to think of it as a spectrum where 0 is completely straight, 5 is completely bisexual and 10 is completely gay.
Hah! You’re trying to squish two axes into one axis. Why not just have an “attraction to males” axis and an “attraction to females” axis? After all, it is possible for both to be zero or negative.
I would say there are more than two axes which could be meaningfully considered, here. Male and female body types, personalities, and genitals can exist in a variety of combinations, and any given combination can (in principle) be considered sexy or repulsive separate from the others. For example, there are those who prefer [feminine/curvy/penis] having sex with [masculine/buff/vagina] over all other thus-far-imagined pairings.
In a similar spirit, many discussions of sexuality separate “attraction” from “identity” from “experience” onto different axes to get at the differences between a man who is occasionally attracted to men but identifies as straight, vs. a man who is equally often attracted to men but identifies as bi, or various other possible combinations.
Something related is common in the asexual community: Many asexuals identify as hetero/homo/bi/pan/a-romantic. I could certainly see someone being hetero- or homosexual and bi- or pan-romantic, or bi- or pansexual and hetero- or homo-romantic.
I would be surprised if the kinds of gradual-exposure techniques khafra endorses here for making same-sex partners more erotically compatible didn’t work equally well (or poorly) for making them emotionally compatible.
Of course, in that case you wouldn’t want to use erotic stimuli.
I’m not exactly sure what stimuli you would use, because I’m not exactly sure what you mean by relating and connecting to people on an emotional level… but whatever it is, I suspect you could test khafra’s approach by identifying specific activities that qualify, and then looking for the closest thing to that activity involving men that you find easy, and attending to that thing.
Let me stress here, though, that I’m not asserting you ought to change anything. There’s nothing wrong with being heterosexual, and there’s no reason you should feel like your heterosexuality diminishes you in any way.
I would be surprised if the kinds of gradual-exposure techniques khafra endorses here for making same-sex partners more erotically compatible didn’t work equally well (or poorly) for making them emotionally compatible.
Umm, no. To make erotic stimuli more attractive, it’s enough that you think about the stimuli often enough and learn to like it. It may be slow, but there’s relatively little risk. Learning to bond and relate to the kinds of people you’ve always had difficulty bonding and relating to requires you to open yourself up to them in an attempt to connect with them. At worst, you can end up embarassed and hurt and have an ever harder time trying to connect to them in the future.
It’s also a lot more complex, since it’s not enough to modify your own reactions. You also need to learn how to get the right responses out of other people.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, or that you couldn’t apply similiar techniques as you would to developing an erotic attraction. But those are techniques are only a small part of it, and it’s a lot harder.
Agreed that learning to get the right responses out of other people, and risking social penalties, are eventually required for this sort of social conditioning. (Though not necessarily initially required.)
It seems to me the same thing is true of erotic conditioning of the sort we’re talking about. That is, if I want to train myself to respond erotically to X, sooner or later I have to stop exclusively interacting with pictures or books or whatever and start actually interacting with X, and that can be difficult, and risks social penalties. But I don’t start there.
That said, I’m pretty much speaking hypothetically here; I’ve never actually used this technique. So I could easily be wrong.
That shouldn’t be as much of an issue, because there’s so much variation in emotional compatibility with men. If you’re sexually attracted to penises, it shouldn’t be hard to find at least someone you’re emotionally compatible with who has a penis. The main problem is getting attracted to the “other” set of genitalia. If you’re attracted to one penis, you’re probably attracted to all of them, whereas emotional compatibility is more complicated and subtle.
There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all emotional compatibility with men, the way there is with sexual orientation.
If Kaj_Sotala tells me that emotional compatibility is more of an issue for him than sexual attraction, I’m prepared to accept that… I don’t see the value in challenging his observations about what “the main problem” for him really is.
That said, like you, I don’t consider it likely that this describes very many people. Then again, I also don’t find it likely that “If you’re attracted to one penis, you’re probably attracted to all of them” describes very many people.
Then again again, the world is full of unlikely things.
Well, think about it like this. I also get along better and generally find it easier to get closer to women than to men. But there are some men I can connect with as well, because there is so much variation in men’s personalities. So the problem here is just finding the right ones.
Now compare this to sexual compatibility, which requires the right sex organs. This is a much bigger obstacle. I’m attracted to female genitalia and not male ones. Unlike with personality, this is a binary issue: you either like male genitalia or you don’t, and if you don’t, this rules out half the population.
Then again, I also don’t find it likely that “If you’re attracted to one penis, you’re probably attracted to all of them” describes very many people.
Really? Why not? I would think it obviously describes everyone. You may not be attracted to the person attached, but you’re either sexually attracted to male genitalia, or you’re not.
Well, the short answer to “Why not?” is “Experience.”
The longer answer is, I suspect, longer than I feel like giving, since it’s clear that you and I have very different models of how attraction works.
Suffice to say that there are various attributes along which individual genitalia vary, to which I expect different people assign more or less value, resulting in different judgments. For many people I expect that this list of attributes includes the contexts established by the attached person.
I may not have spoken clearly. Let me try again, and tell me if this makes sense to you.
A lot of people are strongly monosexual: that is, no matter what a person looks like, what their personality is, or how emotionally compatible they are, if the other person has the “wrong” genitalia, this will preclude any possibility of dating, sex, or a relationship, because they won’t be able to sexually connect.
If you think about dating as going through a series of hurdles, the first and most important hurdle is having the “right” genitals. After that, there are other attributes, like looks and personality, which I think is what you’re talking about. But if someone has the “right” genitals, there is at least the potential for a sexual connection. That doesn’t mean there will definitely be sexual attraction.
I think you’re being clear; I just don’t agree with you. Yes, I think you’re missing things.
For one thing, you treat gender as equivalent to having particular genitalia. It isn’t. Even people exclusively attracted to men sometimes find themselves attracted to people without penises.
For another, you treat all genitals of a particular category as being interchangeable for purposes of attractiveness. They aren’t, any more than all voices or all hands or feet or all eyes are interchangeable. You may not care about individual differences in a particular category, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t.
For a third, your whole structure of “the first hurdle” and “the most important hurdle” strikes me as arbitrary. The idea that someone to whom I am not attracted is someone I have a “potential sexual connection” with simply because they are a particular gender, or have the proper genitals, is a perfectly legitimate perspective… but to privilege that dimension over the myriad other parameters that allow or preclude attraction is not obviously justified.
For one thing, you treat gender as equivalent to having particular genitalia.
No, I was thinking of gender as a separate hurdle. For instance, a straight cisgender male is most likely primarily attracted to persons with vulvas, whether they identify as men or women. He might secondarily prefer women, but that’s a lesser “hurdle”. that is, there would be a possibility of sexual attraction to a FtM (gender = man, bio-female) but not a pre-op MtF (gender = woman, bio-male) because of genital incompatibility.
I don’t think the attraction is “exclusive to men” as much as it is “exclusive to people with specific genitals.” Though this is probably very variable, and monosexuals may well be divided on whether genitalia or gender is more important to them. I’d be curious to know the breakdown.
For another, you treat all genitals of a particular category as being interchangeable for purposes of attractiveness.
to privilege that dimension [genitals] over the myriad other parameters that allow or preclude attraction is not obviously justified.
I was thinking like this. Suppose you are a monosexual on a desert island with one other person. You will likely want sexual contact. At least for me, the most important quality of your island-mate (for purposes of sexual contact, that is) is that they have the “right” type of genitals; while other qualities may be unattractive or undesirable, they can be overcome if you want sexual contact enough, but having the “wrong” type of genitals can’t. To put this another way, as a straight male, someone I am not attracted to who has a vulva may be less than ideal, but still sexually satisfying; someone without a vulva couldn’t possibly be.
I had thought this would be universal for monosexuals; your comments lead me to think I was wrong, and it’s more complicated than that. I’m curious how common my view is, and the specifics of other views.
(BTW, I wish I could upvote you several times just for using ‘myriad’ correctly.)
a straight cisgender male is most likely primarily attracted to persons with vulvas, whether they identify as men or women. He might secondarily prefer women, but that’s a lesser “hurdle”. [..] I don’t think the attraction is “exclusive to men” as much as it is “exclusive to people with specific genitals.”
Huh.
So George, a straight cisgender male, walks into a dance club and sees Janey dancing. He can tell she presents as female from the way she dresses, her hair, her body shape, etc. He talks to her for a while, and he can tell she identifies as female—or at least claims to—from the things she says.
But her pants are still on.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying George does not know at this point whether he’s sexually attracted to Janey, because the “primary hurdle” hasn’t been crossed yet?
If so, you and I have very different understandings of how sexual attraction works. It seems relatively clear to me that George makes that determination within the first few minutes of seeing her, based on a variety of properties, many of which are components of gender.
If not, then I’m not really sure what you’re saying.
It seems relatively clear to me that George makes that determination within the first few minutes of seeing her, based on a variety of properties, many of which are components of gender.
Yes, he does. And you’re right: he is attracted to her even though he doesn’t know what her genitalia are like. He’s probably making an assumption that might or might not be correct, and this assumption is based on the gender properties he observes. If he’s not correct, this may change his attraction. Or not.
My mistake was using the word “attracted” in the quoted portion of my comment. What I should have said was “capable of sexual satisfaction with,” “sexually compatible,” or “genitally compatible,” which aren’t the same thing. While he may be initially attracted, he still doesn’t know whether or not he’s sexually compatible with her (though he assumes he is, which inspires the attraction).
I think you are also right that genitalia is not the most important thing for all monosexuals. I would bet it is for most, though. And at some point this is just a matter of how we define ‘monosexual’ (or ‘straight’, or ‘gay’). We could think of a 2-D version of the Kinsey scale, similar to what you discuss in an earlier comment, where gender is one axis and genitalia is another.
What I should have said was “capable of sexual satisfaction with,” “sexually compatible,” or “genitally compatible,” which aren’t the same thing.
I’m not sure that helps. Many people, even entirely monosexual people, are perfectly capable of sexual satisfaction with one another despite injury to or loss of their genitalia. So I would similarly object to defining “capable of sexual satisfaction with” and “sexually compatible” primarily in terms of genitals the way you do.
I’ll agree with defining “genitally compatible” that way, though.
If you’re willing to define people for whom genital compatibility is not primary as not-really-monosexual, then your claim is trivially true. That said, at that point you have also defined a lot of people as not-really-straight who would disagree vehemently with you.
I think that given that not all traits are observable, we make assumptions about common ones. Someone who doesn’t know that a female-appearing person has a penis is attracted to a false image of what that person’s like, said false image not completely matching the real person.
It seems unjustified to claim that in this case, they are attracted to that person because of their (false) belief that this person lacks a penis, or that they are attracted to that person because of their (false) belief that this person has a vulva, without further data.
I think “genetalia” is being used as shorthand for all sexual characteristics, both primary and secondary. Otherwise the idea of slowly going from women to futnari to men would be nonsensical, right?
I don’t know how to make that interpretation compatible with, for example, Blueberry’s claim that a straight cis male would not be attracted to a pre-op MtF, given that many sexual characteristics typical of women are present in a a pre-op MtF. (And, indeed, my understanding of the real world is that straight cis males are not infrequently attracted to pre-op trangender MtF people.)
But I would certainly agree that the claim that the “primary hurdle” for sexual attraction is the set of all sexual characteristics, both primary and secondary, is a much more sensible claim than the one I understood Blueberry to be making.
Blueberry’s claim that a straight cis male would not be attracted to a pre-op MtF, given that many sexual characteristics typical of women are present in a a pre-op MtF.
Did they actually make that claim? I saw you say it followed from their claim...
Well, whatever. As you say, it’s a more sensible claim regardless of whether anyone was actually making it :-P
For instance, a straight cisgender male is most likely primarily attracted to persons with vulvas, whether they identify as men or women. He might secondarily prefer women, but that’s a lesser “hurdle”. that is, there would be a possibility of sexual attraction to a FtM (gender = man, bio-female) but not a pre-op MtF (gender = woman, bio-male) because of genital incompatibility.
I’m pretty sure “a straight cis male would not be attracted to a pre-op MtF” is reliably implied by that quote, though of course I could be wrong.
This is precisely why I asked them to clarify the claim in the first place.
(Well, you can—just create multiple accounts for the purpose—but I’d rather you didn’t.)
As I understand it, there are many cases of men who identify as heterosexual but who, in all-male environments, nevertheless participate in sexual encounters with other men.
That suggests to me that for many heterosexual men, having the “right” genitals isn’t as singularly definitive a property as it is for you.
Granted, another possibility is that such men aren’t actually heterosexual, they merely think they are, and your description is accurate for genuine heterosexuals. If so, it seems genuine heterosexuals are noticeably rarer than people who identify that way.
One theory is that there is a difference between sexual orientation and relationship orientation, so that there are men who prefer romance and relationships with women, but are sexually bi. Since our language and culture don’t typically make this distinction, such people might just identify as straight.
Another is that sexuality is flexible, so in the desert island example, or in all-male environments, the men adapt over time to become capable of getting sexual satisfaction from other men in a way that they weren’t before. This is similar, in a way, to the gradual-exposure techniques khafra talked about.
But—and this was my main point—before such a shift in sexuality occurs, a straight man would be out of luck even if he had 100 males to choose from. But once such a shift occurs, all he has to do is find one out of the 100 he’s emotionally compatible with (assuming he’s looking for emotional compatibility). This is why I said the sexual shift was the hard part: males are not an emotional monolith and out of 100, at least one should be more or less emotionally compatible.
I very frequently find someone attractive, or not, long before seeing their genitals. Indeed, there are dozens of people in the world whose genitals I have never seen, and yet I am still able to find them either attractive or not.
Compatibility of genitalia is surely important for answering the more specific question “am I going to have sex with this person or not?” but that’s not the same thing as attraction. For most of us, there are plenty of people in the world who are very attractive but with whom we will never have sex. Many people choose to have sex with people they find not all that attractive (e.g. because they are in some sort of long-term relationship, and either their tastes or the appearance of the other person have changed over time).
Instead of a strict straight/bi/gay split, I prefer to think of it as a spectrum where 0 is completely straight, 5 is completely bisexual and 10 is completely gay. I’m guessing it’s possible for you to shift yourself a couple of points towards the middle of the spectrum, but not an arbitrary amount. E.g. if you started off at 0 you might shift yourself to 2, or if you started off at 8 you could shift yourself to 6.
By this metric, I started at a zero (unable to find other males sexually attractive,) and ended at a zero. My attempts to influence myself to have a sexual interest in men achieved null results.
I have no problem finding other men attractive, but they’re still about as sexually appealing to me as plants.
The scale you are talking about when used by psychologists and others when discussing sexuality is the Kinsey scale. Under the standard scaling it goes from 0 to 6 with 0 being complete heterosexuality and 6 being complete homosexualty.
It should be 0 for female-attracted and 6 for male-attracted (or the reverse, but I’ll go this way since Kinsey used it first on men). The idea that homo- and hetero- are the basic orientations is asinine, but surprisingly common.
I’ll admit to being a 2 on the scale that I just described, but I refuse to be placed on Kinsey’s scale at all.
Or become bisexual. If anyone posted a procedural comment on how to become bisexual, I would upvote it immediately =)
Within the nearby cluster in personspace: I think Robin Lee Powell has said that he chose to become bisexual, if you want to ask him to elaborate on that process. :)
(I’ve gotten a bit more bisexual over time, and I occasionally wonder if I actually pushed myself in that direction (since I remember wishing that I could be, as early as 14 or 15), or if that’s just the direction I was drifting in anyway and I happened to be open to it in advance. But it’s probably hard to tell in retrospect.)
Or become bisexual. If anyone posted a procedural comment on how to become bisexual, I would upvote it immediately =)
Beware that if you manage to become bisexual somehow, this can significantly damage a man’s prospects with many women. For a huge percentage of women, bisexual men are not as attractive (manly) as strictly heterosexual men.
I have heard from some people that having a reputation as bisexual has increased their prospects with women. I suspect this is dependent on location, social circle, and attractiveness.
It may also be that a large percentage of women are no longer interested, but enough of the women that remain are significantly more interested- and so you go from, say, 20 women who might date you to 10 women who might date you, of whom 2 want to. Overall prospects down, but easy prospects up.
(I will comment, though, that this probably has to do way more with the masculine/feminine balance of the people in question than their sexual history or orientation.)
For the foreseeable future, I’m going to be exclusively dating poly or poly-friendly girls anyway. I don’t think being bi would hurt me within that subpopulation—does that seem wrong?
(One data point: my girlfriend has only-half-jokingly claimed that if I really want to make her happy, I ought to make out with one of my male friends and send her photos)
Well, it would likely prevent a guy from running for political office or becoming a CEO of a major corporation, for instance. Or at least make it very difficult. There are only a few openly gay politicians, and even then they have to fit certain social ideals.
Okay, I cross that off then.
How about naturism? In east Germany its a trivial part of the culture. In the US it seems to be a highly stigmatized lifestyle.
I didn’t select my friends from (a conservative Christian) college for lgbt-friendliness or non-conformist dating styles or really anything at all, besides maybe an enjoyment of genre television or some connection to friends I already had. And yet it turned out that at least a third of the women in my social circle share my love of hot bi guys and m/m in general. Also, m/m fanservice for the benefit of female fans seems to be rather a common thing for hot young male celebrities to do in certain cultures, such as Japan.
Beware that if you manage to become bisexual somehow, this can significantly damage a man’s prospects with many women. For a huge percentage of women, bisexual men are not as attractive (manly) as strictly heterosexual men.
I’ve found that just meeting more people solves this one nicely. The percentage difference is not overwhelming, and you really won’t want those people anyway.
I disagree with the “you really won’t want those people anyway.” I suspect the loss of attraction many women feel if they hear a guy has been with another guy has marginal ‘conscious choice’ in it.
But anyway, I’ve followed this thread too long. I don’t really have any expertise on bisexuality—I’ve just heard lots of straight women tell me it turns them off.
I think the reason for that is that so many gay men go through a phase, as part of their coming out, where they claim bisexuality for a while. This, combined with the fact that there seem to be relatively few numbers of truly bisexual men, means that a significant percentage of the pool of men presenting as bisexual are actually gay. So going out with a bisexual guy is really risky from the woman’s point of view.
I’ll admit, when I run into people who talk like this, I generally assume that they are weighting the costs of a relationship ending badly due to a boyfriend turning out gay significantly higher than the costs of a relationship ending badly for other reasons.
But perhaps that’s unfair of me; perhaps, as you suggest, it’s really just about probability estimates.
Would you mind putting some numbers around “really risky”?
That is… if S is the chance of a relationship ending badly with a partner who identifies as straight, and B is the chance of it ending badly with a partner who identifies as bi, what’s your estimate and confidence level for (B-S)?
That is… if S is the chance of a relationship ending badly with a partner who identifies as straight, and B is the chance of it ending badly with a partner who identifies as bi, what’s your estimate and confidence level for (B-S)?
Well, my numbers would be a bit skewed by the fact that I quite happily date bisexual women (I am one myself). Should I put the non-straight women in S or B? Or make a third category L?
Your skew is fine… I’m just interested in clarification of your original claim, however skewed it may be, that going out with a bisexual guy is really risky because a significant percentage of the pool of men presenting as bisexual are actually gay.
That said, given that your original claim was about men, I should have said if S is the chance of a relationship ending badly with a male partner who identifies as straight, and B is the chance of it ending badly with a male partner who identifies as bi. Point taken.
Well, for S, most relationships end “badly” (in a breakup, at least), so I guess I’ll ballpark that at 90 percent.
For B, I estimate that 34 percent of men presenting as bi are actually gay (going from this study.) I’ll assume that a relationship with the other 66 percent of bi guys would have the same 90 percent failure rate as the S group, but that a relationship with one of the 34 would have a 100 percent failure rate. So B overall is 93.4.
It’s only a few percentage points higher, yes, but the fact that S is already high doesn’t do much to change the fact that if you have one (small) dating pool where fully a third of the dudes are essentially just looking for beards, a straight woman loses little by excluding that pool, and improves her prospects overall.
For a more extreme position, Rieger, Chivers, and Bailey (ETA:here) find that 75% of self-identified bi men get erections from gay porn, 25% from straight porn, though reported arousal is bisexual.
ETA: that is a quote from press coverage. It pushes a bit farther than the paper and does not match the data. The direct quotes in the press coverage suggest to me that the fault is the authors, not the reporters. The text of the paper is more cautious, but I think also misleading.
Eyeballing the data, I would say that 1⁄2 of bis respond only to gay porn, 1⁄4 only to straight porn, and 1⁄4 uniformly. Also, 1⁄4 of straights and gays respond uniformly. (this is after removing 1⁄3 of all orientations that have no genital response)
What is more interesting is that reported arousal to the porn fits self-identification pretty well. It would be interesting to how the gap between genital and reported arousal varies across individuals. Some patterns would suggest that people are lying to themselves while others that the gap is due to sexuality being complicated. I was amused that straights admitted to being aroused by gay porn, while gays did not admit to being aroused by straight porn; but I suspect that the sample of straights was pretty biased.
One of the things that amused me about that report when I read it was realizing that while I am often aroused by actual women, most mainstream straight porn does nothing for me.
I can only assume that many straight men find porn more arousing than actual women, since the whole point of porn is to be a superstimulus, so there seems to be a difference there.
while I am often aroused by actual women, most mainstream straight porn does nothing for me.
One of the numerous problems with that study. I consider it completely worthless.
I can only assume that many straight men find porn more arousing than actual women, since the whole point of porn is to be a superstimulus
Wait, what? No! Not at all! The point of porn is to help you when you don’t have an actual woman to have sex with. It’s never as arousing as an actual woman. It’s like a microwave dinner when you’re hungry but don’t have the time or money to cook or go to a restaurant.
I didn’t mean ”...to have sex with.” I meant actual women. Who can sometimes be arousing even if I’m not having sex with them. As can men. Others’ mileage may, of course, vary.
I suspect mileage varies a lot here. But I’m a little confused. You’re comparing porn, which depicts people without clothes, in explicitly sexual positions and acts, with people in general? With clothes on? Do you mean just someone walking down the street? Obviously someone without clothes, or in a sexual position or activity, is generally going to be more arousing than a person in a non-sexual situation: this seems like it would be fairly robust across all genders and orientations.
Do you mean arousal from women in non-sexual situations? Or do you mean arousal from women in sexual situations but not from photos or videos or textual depictions of women in sexual situations? Or is this just about “mainstream” vs. alternative depictions? I’m curious what you mean.
I’ve noticed that people critical of porn (I don’t mean you) have a very narrow view of what “mainstream” porn is that doesn’t match my experience; it’s very common for someone to complain about porn in general because they object to a few specific things that are only in some porn.
Yes, I was saying that I often find actual women, even those in non-sexual situations, even those wearing clothes on, more arousing than women in porn, depicted without clothes, in explicitly sexual positions and acts.
I hope that clears things up.
I can easily see where this might be an artifact of a relatively narrow porn sample; I’m not especially a connoisseur of porn.
The point of porn is to be as arousing as possible so people want to watch and hopefully pay for it. I doubt that nobody finds it more arousing than having an actual partner, because it can depict things they’re unlikely to be able to see or do with a partner. I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone claiming to find live action porn more arousing than real sex, but 2D complexes appear to be a real thing.
I doubt that nobody finds it more arousing than having an actual partner, because it can depict things they’re unlikely to be able to see or do with a partner.
True. Also, sexuality is one area in which...your mileage may vary. It’s a big world. I’m pretty sure that if you looked hard enough, you could find someone for whom X is more arousing than Y for quite a few values of X and Y.
I think I’d split the difference. Porn can’t give you interactivity or a lot of partner stimuli, so it attempts to compensate by superstimulating what it does have access to. It would of course be good for porn producers if they came up with something that was better than actual sex for most people, but thanks to the format’s limited sensory bandwidth that’s probably impossible.
If the Rieger/Chivers/Bailey results are reliable, this might suggest that male bisexuality’s associated with a preference for sexual stimulation other than what straight porn gives you. This ought to be testable, but I don’t know of any studies that have made the attempt.
In the study, 1⁄3 of the men, uniformly across all orientations, had no genital response. Also, 1⁄3 had no subjective response, though I don’t see any indication in the paper whether they were the same people.
(nods) I would also be interested to see what the correlations were between response-to-porn and response-to-people. Lots of interpretations of studies of this sort seem to treat the former as a proxy for the latter, so if it turned out that they were not strongly linked the interpretations might be misleading.
I would say, speaking from other bisexual men I know as well as myself, that if bisexuality turned someone off that would in fact reduce their attractiveness, in the general case.
But yeah, we both only have anecdotes at this stage :-)
I’m reminded of coming out as bi to a high-school friend of mine, who allowed after some consideration that he was pretty squicked by the notion, but he saw no particular reason why either one of us should pay much attention to that reaction.
Which I can respect, actually.
Though admittedly it would turn me off in a prospective partner.
Beware that if you manage to become bisexual somehow, this can significantly damage a man’s prospects with many women. For a huge percentage of women, bisexual men are not as attractive (manly) as strictly heterosexual men.
Nobody is required to signal their sexual preferences far and wide. That is personal information, to be revealed if and when you deem it appropriate or beneficial. This means that becoming bisexual merely gives you more options, without interfering with your existing options unless you choose to let it change your signalling strategy. That said, humans are notoriously bad at making decisions when burdened with extra choices!
Also, a lot depends on whether the people I am approaching for dates share a social community.
If they do, then if I want to keep control over who becomes aware of my sexual preferences, I need to expend additional effort to prevent that information from traveling through that community… that is, it stops being “private” and starts being “secret.”
This is otherwise known as “being in the closet” in some communities.
This is otherwise known as “being in the closet” in some communities.
Fortunately it is a closet full of beautiful women who you find highly attractive. Such a better closet to be in than the one homosexuals have had to hide themselves in at times. :)
Sure, given a choice between having to keep all of my sexual attractions secret, and only having to keep half of them secret, the latter is far better. Agreed.
Of course, even better is to not have to keep any of them secret, and to instead be able to reveal whatever information about my sexual preferences I choose to reveal without fear of negative consequences.
All of that said: perhaps I’ve lost track of context.
MBlume’s parent comment framed bisexuality as an improvement, and lukeprog warned that there were costs to it. You countered that those costs can be averted by keeping one’s bisexuality secret. But that seems to completely subvert MBlume’s original point… if I’m in the closet about being bisexual, how is that an improvement over being heterosexual?
Sure, given a choice between having to keep all of my sexual attractions secret, and only having to keep half of them secret, the latter is far better.
It seems the choice is, instead, between having your attraction and sexual appreciation mechanism biologically crippled so as to halve the potential partners or to give yourself the option of specialising your signalling as to optimise your chances within a specific target niche or of seeking more diverse experience.
But that seems to completely subvert MBlume’s original point…
Neutral returns as a worst case makes the point a good one. :)
Well, in my own life, the additional option of living in a social context in which honest signaling about gender-selection with respect to attraction and sexual appreciation doesn’t have especially negative consequences became available, and that has worked pretty well for me.
I’ve lived the “specializing my signaling” lifestyle before; I don’t prefer it. The returns of such signal-specialization can be worse than neutral in some cases.
Alas, a process by which I can modify myself to broaden the scope of those to whom I am sexually attracted is not available to me—I can’t give testimony either way. But I can always wish for it.
if I’m in the closet about being bisexual, how is that an improvement over being heterosexual?
You don’t have to be in the closet with everyone. Just treat it as something personal that you only tell people once you know them and trust them enough, and you’ve gauged their reaction to casual mentions of bisexuality.
Agreed that avoiding keeping just most people from knowing about my relationship preferences isn’t as difficult as keeping everyone from knowing about them.
Of course, as above, even better is to be able to reveal whatever information about my relationship preferences I choose to reveal without fear of negative consequences.
I’ll note that I have personally tried to become bisexual, and it didn’t work. If anyone else has had success in this endeavor, I’d be very interested to hear it.
Is it purely a numbers game though? Most people have this thing nerdy academics call a ‘mate value sociometer’ and they use it to help decide how hot a female to pursue. Of course, this sociometer has to be calibrated, so you really want to be rejected often enough to know where you stand. My point is, it might be better to keep this sociometer in mind (especially since non-neurotypicals tend not to have this instinct), to at first target your proposals to be as informative as possible, and then later on target those girls your mate value can buy. (this is in fact what studies have found neurotypicals to be doing)
It’s not purely a numbers game. However, it really helps if you can interact with a number of people that’s at least in double digits.
Get used to meeting new people. It’s good for you. You grew this great big brain to do chimp-chimp interaction better, after all—you have an aptitude for this sort of thing. MEET MORE PEOPLE!
If someone takes my point as an excuse not to meet people, that person is wrong. Because that is not what it says at all. And also, meeting girls and meeting new people are not quite the same. Though the point does apply to the latter.
Perhaps you are saying people already adjust their expectations in light of their successes and failures, in which case my pointing out that sociometer point does more harm than good.
Sorry, I was speaking more generally of “dating as numbers game”, not disagreeing with you. I find many people who worry about the idea of a “numbers game” see that as a problem rather than an opportunity.
I must note that I am almost pathologically gregarious and outgoing myself, and have an unfortunate habit of offering unhelpful advice on such to those who aren’t—and if I seem to you to have done that, I most sincerely apologise.
Ah ok. I was puzzled I guess as that didn’t seem otherwise very relevant. Yes, thinking of meeting many girls as a special case of meeting many people does make it seem less daunting to me!
Yes, thinking of meeting many girls as a special case of meeting many people does make it seem less daunting to me!
I do believe you’ve hit upon an important perspective trick. It’s meeting people. This also allows you to do the “don’t think about it” Zen mind trick.
I’m approximately 97% sure that at least one of the next five people I’ll meet will be a woman.
97% seems high. Same sex groups are relatively common. Even if the expected number of women out of the next five people is 2.5 there is probably more than 3% chance of the next five being male.
But then again, more of the people I meet are female than male; I guess those two effects roughly cancel out. Trying to remember when the last few times I met five males in a row were seems to confirm that the number is roughly in the right ballpark. (OTOH, the probability that none of the next five people I met is a man probably is a few times larger than the naive binomial model would predict.)
I mostly agree with this, although I suspect it might be more complicated than a single hot-or-not scale. Like, indie rock chicks are looking for a different kind of dude than cheerleaders are. Both the indie rock chick and the cheerleader might be blazing hot, but they’re going to pick out different boyfriends. So if a guy is making a lot of passes at certain kinds of girls and getting nowhere, perhaps he should consider targeting girls who are closer to his own “type.”
This seems like very good, thorough, general advice. However, I wonder how many of us (heterosexual males reading Less Wrong) have romantic preferences that are as general. I realize that the “reading Less Wrong” part of that descriptor wasn’t specified in the question, but it seems implied.
In general, a heterosexual man might describe the set of his potential romantic partners in the following way: a woman whom he finds physically attractive, with whom he shares interests, and with whom his personality is compatible. (That the woman is currently single is also important for many, including myself, but I recognize that it’s less general than the former three, given the existence of polyamory/fidelity.)
However, for myself, I would add to this a fairly strict qualifier, that the woman is an atheist. I simply don’t feel that I would be able to be emotionally intimate with a woman who holds an irrational, i.e. religious, worldview. Atheist doesn’t necessarily mean rationalist, but religious almost definitely means irrational, i.e. P(rationalist|atheist) >> P(rationalist|religious), and even more so for P(would be open to rationality|atheist). I find it to be a sound heuristic that prevents me from embarking on relationships very likely doomed to failure. I doubt that I am alone among LWers in taking this into account.
Unfortunately, I have found it really damn hard to meet atheist women. I can count on one hand the number I have met in college. A large part of that is that I attend a science/engineering university which has a student body comprised of only ~30% women, but even then, my expectation before entering the university was that a population self-selected for interest in science/engineering would have a larger proportion of atheism than the general population. That expectation was not met by reality, and I recognized that I was confused, but trying to resolve that confusion (see below) didn’t appreciably help my goal of meeting atheist women.
Studies have shown that women tend to be more religious than men. I also hypothesize that women who do select a science/engineering university are more likely to have gone to a private high school (76% of private schools are religious). As women tend to be socialized away from an interest in science, a stronger educational program than exists in the average public school might qualify as a “push” to counter that trend. I have met a fair number of women at this university who went to a religious school, but the sample size isn’t large enough to confirm that hypothesis.
In any case, the problem remains: atheist women seem to be hard to find. The types of general activities you’ve suggested are good for socializing, but unlikely to have a larger-than-average atheist population. Are there activities similarly strong in socializing that would have a larger atheist population?
(Note: I don’t mean to slight the obvious effort you put into this post; it’s just that my own issues on this subject, and I suspect some others’ issues as well, are more involved than just social awkwardness/inexperience.)
So this is an interesting challenge. My first thought is that it’s actually a challenge shared by theists—Mormon men who want a Mormon wife, for example—but these people share a whole social structure (their religious community) that is already working to bring them together. Without this, atheists do face a special hurdle.
Studies have shown that women tend to be more religious than men.
Wow, those numbers are high. Yes, when you’re limited to 14 percent of women, general dating strategies become a lot less useful.
Other groups faced with numbers like these have to create (and advertise among themselves!) special spaces for meeting and flirting. (I’m thinking about gay bars now.)
The types of general activities you’ve suggested are good for socializing, but unlikely to have a larger-than-average atheist population. Are there activities similarly strong in socializing that would have a larger atheist population?
I hope others can suggest more, but the only one I’m coming up with is political activism. If you are in the U.S.A., you could look for events put on through http://secular.org/ or any of the Member Organizations. Even though men are more likely to be atheists, women are more likely to be volunteers, so you may find that the gender balance evens out.
From what I recall, if you filter for “active in atheism/rationalism/secularism” you get an even stronger male skew than if you just filter for “atheist/rationalist/secular” =(
In-person groups too, not just talking about online advocacy?
In that case, I wonder if it might not be worth it to date in the wider pool, with the aim of finding a woman who is open to deconverting. Generally it’s a bad idea to enter a relationship hoping to change the other person, but religion has long been a sort of special case: a lot of LTRs do involve one party or the other converting or at least modifying their religious views.
Otherwise, the numbers on this are just really daunting for atheist men.
I have a dear friend who loves rationality, reads Methods rabidly, quotes ‘That which can be destroyed...’ at the top of her FB profile… and still identifies as Christian. She’s young and has had the kind of sheltered upbringing that makes it possible to actually believe your religion without lots of doublethink.
I expect to have her deconverted within a year or two—I’d have managed by now if we weren’t half a state apart.
In that case, I wonder if it might not be worth it to date in the wider pool, with the aim of finding a woman who is open to deconverting. Generally it’s a bad idea to enter a relationship hoping to change the other person, but religion has long been a sort of special case: a lot of LTRs do involve one party or the other converting or at least modifying their religious views.
This strikes me as a very high risk strategy, and probably a low reward one as well. Deconversion tends to take a long time, and even gentle attempts could strain a new relationship. Going by my own experience observing religious deconversions, it’s likely to take months at the lower end, which you could have spent looking for someone else, and there’s a high probability that it simply wouldn’t work out, in which case your time investment is wasted.
The numbers for atheist men aren’t very good, it’s true, but keep in mind that a rationally minded intellectual is filtering rather strongly for atheists simply by looking for partners they’re compatible with.
I recently began dating an old friend with conservative Christian religious beliefs. Obviously, I don’t have the rationalists-only filter that DA has, and I don’t want to deconvert her. (Her personal relationship with Jesus—that is, the mental feelings that she’s constructed around the idea of Christ—are important to her, and I don’t want to destroy that.) Nevertheless, here’s what’s happened:
In conversation with me, she quickly clarified some nagging doubts about the inclusiveness (and other characteristics) of her old, conservative church. She’s started attending a Congregationalist church instead. (For those unfamiliar with Christian denominations in North America, this is as liberal as you can get and still be explicitly Christian). For a while, she even considered attending the Unitarian Universalist church, since I would be willing to join it with her, but in the end she decided that it didn’t fit.
When we started, I expected the relationship to founder on religious differences, but I agreed to give it a shot anyway. And I seem to have affected her religion instead. I’m not sure what this proves, even when restricted to the one example, but it’s been a surprising few months for me.
In my view the ideology matters surprisingly little. Do not make the mistake of choosing your partner for having the right convictions.
Emphasis added to point out the non sequitur.
Also, my “atheist qualifier” is intended to prevent me from choosing a partner with the wrong convictions, not to encourage me to choose one simply for having the right convictions.
If that’s not something you care about in a relationship, by all means don’t concern yourself with it. But if you feel like you have to decide not to care about your partner’s convictions, then it’s a significant issue, and one that’s likely to surface in the future however you try to suppress it.
I meet many people were their religion has little or no practical influence on their daily lives. If you limit your partner search to the LW/similar cluster you might find it problematic to get a suitable partner. And even then ideological similarities are no guarantee for a happy relationship.
Might be interesting to poll what people look for.
Of course ideological similarities aren’t a guarantee of a happy relationship; for me and for many others, they’re necessary, but I know of nobody for whom they’re sufficient.
Dating a person with religious beliefs which do not have a practical influence on their lives, I have tremendous difficulty respecting them. This is not a hypothetical matter, it’s a mistake I’ve learned to avoid. I know people for whom it does not seem to be an issue, but anyone for whom it is is better off taking it seriously than following advice to exercise tolerance.
That sounds like a fair idea for discussion post. I’ll make one later today, unless you feel like doing it first.
In that case, I wonder if it might not be worth it to date in the wider pool, with the aim of finding a woman who is open to deconverting. Generally it’s a bad idea to enter a relationship hoping to change the other person, but religion has long been a sort of special case: a lot of LTRs do involve one party or the other converting or at least modifying their religious views.
That sounds like an exhausting process without a way to judge openness to atheism quickly. It seems like converting from one religion to another would be less jarring than dropping religion altogether, so I’m not sure how much better the numbers would actually become. Also, that sort of pressure seems like it could make the initial uphill climb of a relationship (getting to know the other person) into cliff-scaling.
That sounds like an exhausting process without a way to judge openness to atheism quickly.
I think you could suss it out on the first date. You might have to use some trial-and-error—and conversations with other atheist men—in order to come up with the perfect line that raises the question without coming off as overly aggressive, but you can get a pretty good picture of how committed a woman is to her religion just by asking her.
The general advice to people with specific requirements (I admit I’m getting this from Dan Savage’s advice to people with particular sexual fetishes) is to disclose early, but to present it as a bonus rather than an onerous hurdle that must be overcome by potential prospects. So instead of “Just so you know, I have a foot fetish, so being with me means you’re gonna have to be into that” the foot guy would say something like “Your shoes are super hot. I kind of have a thing for feet. Do you like footrubs?”
Following that formula, I think the thing to avoid would be lines like “Just so you know, I don’t date religious wackos.” Maybe something like “I’m an atheist, so I’m always looking for ways to celebrate earthly life on Sunday mornings. Do you like strawberries and mimosas?” That’s just a stab at a formulation that could start the conversation without killing any romantic momentum you’ve got going at that point.
At the least, that advice presents a reasonably positive strategy, which is appreciated. My attempts to be realistic about this issue are certainly prone to drifting into the sort of pessimism that comes from spending my entire undergraduate career single.
Your situation is harder than the norm, it’s true, but it’s not impossible. There are atheist women out there, and you’ll meet them if you’re diligent about being social. It may just take you a little longer. I wish you luck!
But then you don’t actually have to really make real plans for Sunday mornings… just ask if they’re available then and see what they say when turning you down. “Sorry, I’d prefer the afternoon” is different to “Well, if you’d like you can come along to my church group” :)
Not necessarily. There are a fair number of Christians who strongly self-identify as Christian but don’t go to church that regularly (in the US at least there are some very weird patterns. People claim in surveys to be going to church much more frequently than church attendance rates suggest.) This also won’t rule out other common religious groups, such as semi-religious Jews.
The reason to go into environments where you interact with a lot of women isn’t only an issue of having a lot of opportunities.
It’s also a matter of practice.
Even if you don’t like to date the woman at a dance class the class will still teach you basic skills about interacting with women.
If you don’t have the practice with regularly interacting with women than you are unlikely to have success when you find a woman who would be a good match because she fulfills your criteria.
Even if you don’t like to date the woman at a dance class the class will still teach you basic skills about interacting with women.
But the skills about interacting with women platonically aren’t all of the skills about interacting with women romantically. The infamous so-called “friend-zone”, anyone?
(How comes I’m making a point nearly diametrically opposed to what I said 21 hours ago, anyway?)
But the skills about interacting with women platonically aren’t all of the skills about interacting with women romantically. The infamous so-called “friend-zone”, anyone?
The point is a good one. That said, as far as interacting with girls platonically goes dancing is rather far from the most emasculating influence.
I don’t think it makes much sense to seperate skills into platonically/romantically.
If you look at some PUA who goes for a one-night stand “romantic” isn’t the label I would use to describe the interaction.
On the other hand it’s a word that I could reasonable use to describe an intimite Bachata dance between two people who just meet.
The ability to be physically intimite with the opposing sex without getting tense is valuable.
In dance the man leads the woman. For a shy male that’s a valuable skill to learn.
Dancing doesn’t teach you everything. It doesn’t teach you having good conversations. The things that it teaches you are still valuable.
On the other hand it’s a word that I could reasonable use to describe an intimite Bachata dance between two people who just meet.
In that context, I meant “romantic” as ‘leading to romance’, rather than the colloquial meaning. So I wouldn’t call a dance between two people who aren’t looking to sleep with one another “romantic”.
The ability to be physically intimite with the opposing sex without getting tense is valuable.
As was pointed out before in this thread, physically intimate while dancing != physically intimate while having sex. (And ISTM that the latter is the more common meaning of that phrase.)
In dance the man leads the woman. For a shy male that’s a valuable skill to learn.
Does that transfer to domains other than dancing? (And anyway, IME it’s more accurate to say that the more experienced partner leads the less experienced partner. There are certain moves where from the outside it looks like the man is leading, but that’s not necessarily what it feels like from the inside.)
Dancing doesn’t teach you everything. It doesn’t teach you having good conversations. The things that it teaches you are still valuable.
In my scale of “platonic” vs “romantic”, having good conversations is even more platonic than dancing.
Disclaimer: I have taken extremely few dancing classes in my life, extremely few of which were partnered dances. OTOH, when I improvise people often ask me if I’ve been taking classes (but I’m not sure they are serious).
As was pointed out before in this thread, physically intimate while dancing != physically intimate while having sex.
Getting good at sex and getting good at the things that lead to sex are two different things. The problem of nerds isn’t that they have a lot of one-night stands but are bad at sex and therefore the girl doesn’t want to see them after they have sex.
And ISTM that the latter is the more common meaning of that phrase.
No, I don’t think that many people think that sex is the only action that can be described as physically intimite. While sex is more physically intimite than dancing you can’t conclude that dancing isn’t physically intimite.
You might be right that the stuff that you dance in your first dance lesson isn’t intimite. At the beginning you have to learn to move.
When I dance I do have to be aware of the level of intimacy that the girl I’m dancing with is comfortable with.
On the one hand you do have girls that find a lead where the hand of the guy touches their hips too intimite for them. On the other there are girls with whom I can dance in a way where both of our arms are wrapped around each other and the whole body from face, chest, hips and legs touches each other.
I don’t think that you can reasonably deny that dancing with full body contact is intimite.
Does that transfer to domains other than dancing? (And anyway, IME it’s more accurate to say that the more experienced partner leads the less experienced partner. There are certain moves where from the outside it looks like the man is leading, but that’s not necessarily what it feels like from the inside.)
The man chooses which moves happen at which time. If you are at a beginner class where the techer calls the moves, you know nothing about a dance and the girls who are there haven’t yet learned that they aren’t supposed to lead.
It takes some time for a girl to learn to follow just as it takes time for a guy to learn to lead.
As was pointed out before in this thread, physically intimate while dancing != physically intimate while having sex.
Getting good at sex and getting good at the things that lead to sex are two different things.
I meant A != B as in “A doesn’t imply B or vice versa”. IOW, my point was that dancing doesn’t necessarily lead to sex and sex isn’t necessarily preceded by dancing—especially the kind of dancing taught in classes, as opposed to the kind of dancing people improvise in night clubs. (Let me see if I can find the previous comment about this… EDIT: here.)
No, I don’t think that many people think that sex is the only action that can be described as physically intimite.
I said “more common”, not “only common”, but… [googles for physical intimacy] Fair enough. But then again, stuff like hugging is also described as physically intimate, so it seems an overly broad concept to use in this context. (For example, I have no problem with being “physically intimate” in this sense with men even though I’m straight; or, women are often “physically intimate” with me in front of their boyfriends/husbands. (OTOH, I realize that there are cultural differences with this kind of stuff and what applies here in Italy needn’t apply in (say) Canada—but these are probably more about where the thresholds are than about the qualitative differences between the ends of the spectrum.))
I don’t think that you can reasonably deny that dancing with full body contact is intimite.
The point is not whether a given English word can be used to label a given behaviour, but whether skills learned in one domain (dance classes) transfer to another (trying to start a relationship). To some extent they do, but they are nowhere near either necessary (I know people in LTRs who pretty much can’t dance at all) or sufficient (see the comment I’m going to link above).
The man chooses which moves happen at which time. If you are at a beginner class where the techer calls the moves, you know nothing about a dance and the girls who are there haven’t yet learned that they aren’t supposed to lead. It takes some time for a girl to learn to follow just as it takes time for a guy to learn to lead.
And most women (I guess) haven’t taken many dancing classes, so if you’re taking dance classes to “basic skills about interacting with women [outside the class]”, you can’t rely on a random woman knowing whether or not to lead. (Nor can I see what the big deal about this is—indeed because they don’t know that, they probably won’t particularly care if you follow rather than leading.)
IOW, my point was that dancing doesn’t necessarily lead to sex and sex isn’t necessarily preceded by dancing—especially the kind of dancing taught in classes
That’s not something I argued.
If you take the average nerd and put him into physically intimicy with a girl he tenses up. It takes time and effort for him to relax.
Romantic chemistry that created in a dance context doesn’t lead with the same probability to sex than the same chemistry outside of a dance context.
It’s still romantic chemistry and when your brain learns to become comfortable with it in one context it can also handle it in other contexts much better.
I said “more common”, not “only common”, but… [googles for physical intimacy] Fair enough. But then again, stuff like hugging is also described as physically intimate, so it seems an overly broad concept to use in this context.
You can learn the same skill through hugging. Basically you run around with a free hugs sign and do 15 minute hugs with the people who are willing to hold the hug that long.
The point is not whether a given English word can be used to label a given behaviour, but whether skills learned in one domain (dance classes) transfer to another (trying to start a relationship). To some extent they do, but they are nowhere near either necessary (I know people in LTRs who pretty much can’t dance at all) or sufficient (see the comment I’m going to link above).
Dancing isn’t the only way to learn the useful skills that you can learn in dancing. The fact that someone doesn’t dance in no way implies that he hasn’t learned the same skills in other context.
That said a billionaire won’t have much trouble getting into a long-term relationship even if all his skills relating to attracting woman are awful. There nearly nothing that is a necessary condition for getting into a relationship with a woman.
you can’t rely on a random woman knowing whether or not to lead.
I don’t advocate to rely on anything.
There are woman who might lead. If you have however inhibitions to leading yourself you won’t have success when a woman doesn’t lead.
indeed because they don’t know that, they probably won’t particularly care if you follow rather than leading
People don’t feel emotions because of the knowledge that they have. Successful leading demonstrates power and power is sexy for evoluationary reasons.
It’s still romantic chemistry and when your brain learns to become comfortable with it in one context it can also handle it in other contexts much better.
Does it? IME, dancing with someone doesn’t magically make me that much bolder in non-dancing situations than I already was (I can even remember at least one case when it actually made me more awkward), and I’d expect the effect to be even smaller if we were made to dance together in a class than if we did so on our own accord. I guess YMMV.
You can learn the same skill through hugging. Basically you run around with a free hugs sign and do 15 minute hugs with the people who are willing to hold the hug that long.
That would mainly teach me resistance to boredom (and it would likely kind-of make me look silly, though that’s not necessarily a negative because counter-signalling). Probably not the best use of time.
Dancing isn’t the only way to learn the useful skills that you can learn in dancing.
Then why learn them by dancing (and in dance classes, rather than (say) night clubs), of all things? If it isn’t the only way, it’s unlikely a priori that it’s the most efficient way.
That said a billionaire won’t have much trouble getting into a long-term relationship even if all his skills relating to attracting woman are awful.
(I was going to say “if a billionaire won’t have much trouble getting into a long-term relationship, then making money is a skill related to attracting to women”, but the billionaire might just have inherited it or something.)
IME, dancing with someone doesn’t magically make me that much bolder in non-dancing situations than I already was (I can even remember at least one case when it actually made me more awkward), and I’d expect the effect to be even smaller if we were made to dance together in a class than if we did so on our own accord.
You only had a few lessons and that alone doesn’t have much of an effect on your interaction with woman in general.
That would mainly teach me resistance to boredom (and it would likely kind-of make me look silly, though that’s not necessarily a negative because counter-signalling). Probably not the best use of time.
If that’s true and you actually would find it boring you lack in the ability in the realm of perceiving the other person.
Dancing helps with the perception part.
For most people with asberger there a lot of anxiety that comes up during the process that can be worked through.
I know multiple guys who thought that a single 15 minute hug with another guy was an experience that was very worthwhile to overcome some of their anxiety.
(I was going to say “if a billionaire won’t have much trouble getting into a long-term relationship, then making money is a skill related to attracting to women”,
The point I want to make is that two people who are both successful with woman might be successful due to different skills.
One very strong skill allows you to succeed even if you have some weak points.
Then why learn them by dancing (and in dance classes, rather than (say) night clubs), of all things? If it isn’t the only way, it’s unlikely a priori that it’s the most efficient way.
Is you dance something like Salsa, Bachata, Tango or Swing as a man you need to take dancing lessons before you go into night clubs where you can dance those dances.
Once you moved actually can dance, I would advocate to go to the night clubs to also dance outside of lessons.
Why structured partner dance over a regular nightclub with pop music?
Approaching in a nightclub enviroment is more likely to lead to stressful rejections. Those rejections tell your brain that it’s right to show anxiety in those situations.
Why do I recommend it over the hugging route? Signing up and going to a dance class is relatively easy compared to print a free hug sign and go around with it. People have more resistance to doing the free hug exercise.
Getting a stranger to practice a 15 minute hug isn’t as straightforward either.
You only had a few lessons and that alone doesn’t have much of an effect on your interaction with woman in general.
I wasn’t talking about dance classes, I was talking about ‘improvised’ dancing—as I expected the second part of the sentence to make clear (but on re-reading it I can see it wasn’t as clear as I thought). Why would lessons have more of an effect than improvisation? I’d expect it to be the other way round, especially given that you mentioned the “chooses which moves happen at which time” thing before.
If that’s true and you actually would find it boring you lack in the ability in the realm of perceiving the other person.
Or maybe I have other things to do with 15 minutes than hugging a random stranger. Opportunity costs, anyone?
Dancing helps with the perception part.
Yes, but wouldn’t that apply more to improvised dancing than to beginners’ dancing classes?
For most people with asberger there a lot of anxiety that comes up during the process that can be worked through.
My AQ as measured by the online test linked to in the latest LW survey (FWIW) was 25, and still I usually feel little to no anxiety while dancing; if anything, I usually feel less anxiety while dancing than the rest of the time.
Why structured partner dance over a regular nightclub with pop music?
False dichotomy. Those aren’t the only two places you can dance.
Why do I recommend it over the hugging route?
So, when you said “the fact that someone doesn’t dance in no way implies that he hasn’t learned the same skills in other context” you were thinking of going around wearing free hugs signs? That sounds even less plausible to me.
Or maybe I have other things to do with 15 minutes than hugging a random stranger. Opportunity costs, anyone?
That’s a completely different objection than saying that the activity is boring. If you change around your objections in that way it’s likely that you are in the process of rationalizing some fear of intimicy.
Yes, but wouldn’t that apply more to improvised dancing than to beginners’ dancing classes?
What do you mean when you say “improvised dancing”? Do you already have the skills to spend a significant amount of time dancing closely with a women in nightclub settings?
That’s a completely different objection than saying that the activity is boring.
Isn’t the feeling that you could do something more fun with your time what boredom is?
If you change around your objections in that way it’s likely that you are in the process of rationalizing some fear of intimicy.
For such a broad definition of “intimacy” as yours, I’m pretty sure I have very little fear of intimacy itself.
What do you mean when you say “improvised dancing”?
e.g. this (I’m the tall guy with glasses and a black T-shirt). (That was over a year ago, I may have gotten better—or worse—since.)
Do you already have the skills to spend a significant amount of time dancing closely with a women in nightclub settings?
What amount of time would you consider to be significant, and are you talking about women I already know or about strangers? (Also, “in nightclub settings” isn’t a terribly homogeneous category IME, women tend to be fussier in some of those than in others.)
Isn’t the feeling that you could do something more fun with your time what boredom is?
I don’t advocate doing it primarily for fun but to learn something. Sometimes good learning experiences are boring.
e.g. this (I’m the tall guy with glasses and a black T-shirt). (That was over a year ago, I may have gotten better—or worse—since.)
At the beginning of the video you are touching the hand of a girl but expect for the part where you spin her it doesn’t look like you have much contact with her.
When it comes to the girl on the end you have a bit more contact but not much more.
If dancing like that feels like you aren’t leading the girl it’s because you actually aren’t leading.
Most of the time that this video goes you aren’t touching a woman. If you are taking a dancing lesson you are basically all the time touching.
Let me give you a link to a beginner kizomba lesson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbYChD5b9VE
Watch that video and compare the amount of physically intimacy that you have in your video with the women and the amount of physical intimicy that you see in that beginner kizomba lesson.
Some beginner kizomba lesson might be a bit less intimite but that level of intimicy can exist in beginner kizomba lessons.
If you do a lot of that kind of improvised dancing that you showed in your video, I would recommend you to take Bachata lessons over Kizomba lessons. Beginner bachata lessons are a bit less intimite than beginner kizomba lessons but you learn a bunch of things that will improve your improvised dancing.
(I often do have more contact than that (depending on what the music is like, who the woman is, and my mood), though I’m not sure whether anyone has shot any decent videos of that. OTOH, I’m pretty sure I’m a lot clumsier than the people in your videos.)
Thanks for the feedback (people usually say that I am doing great, but probably they just say that in order not to discourage me—or maybe in a few cases because they can’t tell the levels above theirs apart¹) and for the pointers, anyway.
Try improvising something on the E♭ minor pentatonic scale (aka “the black keys of the piano”) in a room full of non-musicians, look at their faces, and you’ll know what I mean.
Thanks for the feedback (when I ask people (and sometimes even when I don’t), they usually say I am doing great, but probably they just say that in order not to discourage me) and for the pointers, anyway.
It always depends on what your comparision is. If you manage to let go, move to the beat and visbily have fun while doing it you might be better than 50% of the people who do improvised dancing at a nightclub.
If you manage to let go, move to the beat and visbily have fun while doing it you might be better than 50% of the people who do improvised dancing at a nightclub.
Sometime between when you read my comment and when I read your reply, I edited my comment to make it less harsh, e.g. replacing “tsuyoku naritai” with a smile; maybe I should edit it back? :-)
And if you manage to implement FizzBuzz in a couple minutes you might be better than 50% of the people who have a comp sci degree
The point is that whether you are good depends on the people to which you compare yourself.
I danced Salsa/Bachata for the last 4 years 2-3 nights per week. That means that I will see different things in your dancing than the average person that you meet.
I do improvise within my dancing and deviate from dance school pattern. I’m still not the person who regularly tries to dance in nightclubs to pop music or the kind of music that exists at the place of your video.
That means that I will see different things in your dancing than the average person that you meet.
How does that mesh with “people don’t feel emotions because of the knowledge that they have”? :-)
(FWIW, one of the people who sees me dancing much of the time (the girlfriend of one of the karaoke jockeys in that video) and sometimes compliments me, and has also danced with me in nightclubs a few times, is a belly dancing instructor, but that may be too different from anything else to be relevant; her sister is a Bollywood dance instructor, and also usually compliments me dancing, but that’s generally in the context of thanking me for being the only male in thisthing she’d organized and/or of trying to convince me to take classes with her again, so she might be gilding the pill on purpose.)
I must have misunderstood something, because you appeared to be claiming or hinting that:
the reason why people are reluctant to pursue long-term relationships with me is that I’m bad at some particular skill;
that skill is an integral part of certain styles of dance, so by taking dance classes I would get better at that skill; there aren’t many more efficient ways of practising that skill short of stuff like wearing a “free hugs” sign and hug a stranger for 15 minutes straight;
when someone bad at that skill is dancing (any style of dance), that is obvious to people’s elephants/System 1s and comes across as unsexy; on the other hand, their riders/System 2s won’t notice there’s anything wrong unless they are experts at one of those particular styles of dancing specifically;
more than 50% of people in my demographic are even worse than me at that skill, but this doesn’t mean they’ll never get a relationship, because they can compensate by e.g. being insanely rich.
ISTM that many fewer than 50% of people my age in my geographic area are single (though I’m not sure my sample is unbiased), and hardly any of them makes money by the truckload or anything similar;
[ETA: I haven’t seen any people wearing “free hugs” signs in years, and the last few times I did it was in somewhat unusual situations (e.g. carnival parties);]
people usually do have some idea as to whether something is sexy, even though it might not always be clear to them why;
why would it be long-term relationships that this emotions thing would hinder me with? That sounds almost exactly backwards—I mean, if Alice doesn’t get horny when around Bob because he comes across as tense, I wouldn’t expect her to lose interest after a couple dates or so: I would expect her to never ask him out in the first place. The type of ‘elephant’ responses you seem to be talking about generally act on the timescales of minutes, not months.
(Probably I’m just reading too much in what you said, though.)
In this epistemic state, taking expensive, time-consuming, and possibly status-lowering Salsa classes on the off chance that it improves my chances to get a LTR would feel a little bit like giving money to Pascal’s mugger. [ETA: (More specifically, I suspect that the low-hanging fruits could be picked by watching videos on YouTube or something and practising during my spare time with people I already know, and any further improvements that the high-hanging fruits would yield would be way too small to be worth the bother.)]
more than 50% of people in my demographic are even worse than me at that skill, but this doesn’t mean they’ll never get a relationship, because they can compensate by e.g. being insanely rich.
I’m not arguing that feeling no anxiety to physical contact and having the self confidence to lead woman in general is sufficient to be good at partner dancing.
I’m rather arguing that being good at partner dancing usually leads to feeling no anxiety to physical contact and having the self confidence to lead woman.
I mean, if Alice doesn’t get horny when around Bob because he comes across as tense, I wouldn’t expect her to lose interest after a couple dates or so: I would expect her to never ask him out in the first place.
In PUA literature there the idea that making a girl horny while at a club, asking her for her phone number and then calling a day later to make a date is not the way to go. Having the girl in a state of being attracted, comfortable and connected is supposed to be more conductive to getting a date than the girl feeling horny.
I think the problem is that you model being attracted and being horny as the same thing when the two are different categories for myself. You don’t have a mental model in this domain with a lot of categories and therefore it’s hard to follow the points I’m making.
(Just for the record, I don’t think having a mental model with a lot of categories is necessary to have success with woman)
Also, you appeared to suspect that I might have Asperger’s (something which FWIW none of my meatspace friends, who include several psychology graduates and a neurology resident, appears to have noticed lately) based on my reluctance to wear a “free-hugs” sign.
I don’t think you have full Aspergers.
I think you are ‘in your head’, but that’s not a label that I would expect to be well understood on LessWrong. When on LessWrong I rather try to use categories that are popular on LessWrong.
You are probably the kind of person who thinks that they have a body instead of who thinks that they are their body. You probably think that you are your brain and the rest is just there to serve your brain.
On the other hand I do think that your reluctance to wear a free-hug sign is purely based on a irrational fear of physical contact.
Wearing the sign is the rational thing to do.
FYI diagnosing people with mental disorders based on so little information is likely to make actual mental health specialists take you very unseriously
I choose the kind of language I use depending on my audience. I would use different lanague when discussing with a mental health specialist. A mental health specialist probably also wouldn’t take you seriously when you talk about giving money to Pascal’s mugger.
I’ve just noticed that you yourself in a different thread recommend a course of action for a couple finding themselves in the guy-is-too-nervous scenario which is IME vastly cheaper, quicker, and more effective than for the male to have practised partnered dance¹ while fully clothed and not kissing or anything else sexual, or hugged random people he’s not necessarily sexually attracted to. (Granted, I haven’t practised partnered dance by paying an instructor or hugged random people by wearing free-hugs signs, but I can’t see why that would make much of a difference.)
Am I missing something?
That can actually backfire in the very short run (a couple hours) if (say) the guy is sleep-deprived, as he’ll be more tired, which IME doesn’t exactly help.
So by “confidence” you didn’t mean ‘lack of nervousness’, but the epistemic sense instead? Makes sense, but I can’t imagine how being sure about how to dance Salsa would help people in the bedroom. ISTM that only a tiny part of the procedural knowledge needed for the former would transfer to the latter.
No, I’m not hung up on the difference between “confidence” and ‘lack of nervousness’.
In focusing on the difference in what the man can do versus what the woman can do to fix the situation.
Makes sense, but I can’t imagine how being sure about how to dance Salsa would help people in the bedroom.
In most cases there’s physical interaction before being in the bedroom.
Holding hands would be one example. It’s not something that platonic friends usually do.
If a guy tries to transition from not holding hands to holding hands he could be nervous about it.
The kind of body contact that happens during dancing would condition the person to be less nervous about holding hands.
Holding hands is an example. I’m not saying that it happens in every interaction, but usually their physical contact between a guy and girl that exceeds the normal contact of a platonic friendship before the two go to the bedroom.
In focusing on the difference in what the man can do versus what the woman can do to fix the situation.
Er… Why? You realize that the man and the woman can communicate with each other, and thence ‘trade’ (in a LWesque general abstract sense)? If it would take months for me to achieve something but minutes for her to achieve the same, it’d be most daft for us to do the former. (And it feels off to call what you mentioned in the other thread ‘something the woman can do’—it’s not like the man isn’t playing any role; it sounds as weird to me as calling walking ‘something my legs can do’ rather than ‘something I can do’.)
Holding hands would be one example. It’s not something that platonic friends usually do.
It depends on gender and culture. For example, physical contact tends to be closer among females or between females and males than among males, closer in warm countries than in cold countries, and closer among left-wingers than among right-wingers. (I grew up mostly hanging around with left-leaning Italian females, and as a result I occasionally would come across as touchy when interacting with right-wingers, males, or northern Europeans.)
If a guy tries to transition from not holding hands to holding hands he could be nervous about it. The kind of body contact that happens during dancing would condition the person to be less nervous about holding hands.
Yes it would, but if someone gets nervous at the thought of even just holding hands with someone else (other than due to epistemic uncertainty about whether the latter would like it etc.), then I guess that what the former mainly needs isn’t a Salsa instructor, it’s a psychologist.
I’m not saying that it happens in every interaction, but usually their physical contact between a guy and girl that exceeds the normal contact of a platonic friendship before the two go to the bedroom.
Sure it does, but AFAIK it’s not like dancing classes teach how to make out, either.
I grew up mostly hanging around with left-leaning Italian females, and as a result I occasionally would come across as touchy when interacting with right-wingers, males, or northern Europeans.
In that case you might not that profit much from become more touchy.
You might still profit from improving your dancing abilites as you dance frequently. Salsa might not be optimal here. Salsa has the issue that there a pause on 4 and 8, which isn’t easy to lead. Merengue and Bachata moves are easier to throw into the kind of dancing you do in the video you showed.
Er… Why? You realize that the man and the woman can communicate with each other, and thence ‘trade’ (in a LWesque general abstract sense)?
Framing a romantic interaction as a trade, cheapens the romantic interaction for a lot of people.
If you try to handle your relationship with a woman on an abstract level instead of handling it on a emotional level that significantly decreases your pool of potential mates.
Making a trade on an abstract level doesn’t make anyone feel horny.
A woman cares about how the interaction with you makes her feel. If all your interaction is on an abstract level she likely won’t feel the kind of emotions that she thinks are a requisite to starting a relationship with you.
I’m not against open communication but you should always understand what you are communicating. Communicating your desires in a way that isn’t needy is not something that easy.
Actually these days I usually only dance once or twice a week, and sometimes even less than that.
If you try to handle your relationship with a woman on an abstract level instead of handling it on a emotional level
That’s not what I meant. I meant ‘trade’ as in, the partners jointly trying to fulfil each other’s wishes, rather than each one only thinking about themself. That doesn’t require suppressing emotions.
that significantly decreases your pool of potential mates.
So what? We’re talking about long-term relationships, not hooking up with as many distinct people as possible. See the “Mean and Variance” section of this.
A woman cares about how the interaction with you makes her feel.
You don’t say?
If all your interaction is on an abstract level she likely won’t feel the kind of emotions that she thinks are a requisite to starting a relationship with you.
If something makes us both happy, why should we give a damn how likely anyone else would be to like it? It’s not like there are sex auditors watching us or anything.
I’m not against open communication but you should always understand what you are communicating. Communicating your desires in a way that isn’t needy is not something that easy.
It also depends on who the listener is. My new girlfriend and I don’t seem to be having much trouble with that so far.
Came across this discussion accidentally, but it fascinates me because I’m “in my head”, have some Asperger’s-like characteristics, have a lot of anxiety around physical contact, particularly dislike dancing and have in fact made my date leave a dancing event early because I couldn’t make myself do it any longer, etc...but I’m a girl. And I can get dates pretty easily. (They usually aren’t very fun for me, though).
This discussion made me realize that if I were male, but otherwise unchanged, I might not be able to get dates easily. This confuses me. I’m curious as to what you think the difference is in the male-female dynamic.
This discussion made me realize that if I were male, but otherwise unchanged, I might not be able to get dates easily.
What do you mean “otherwise unchanged”, same level of attractiveness broadly construed (to the extent that this makes sense), or same percentile of attractiveness broadly construed within your gender and age group?
Yeah, being the other biological sex is complicated, but a roughly equivalent statement might be “If she could (convincingly) present herself as male and attempted to get dates with women, she expect to find it much harder than she does getting dates with men while presenting as female.”
ISTM that the n-th percentile man is less attractive to women than the n-th percentile woman is to men (at least for n not very close to 100), and as a result has less ‘bargaining power’, if you will.
I think “getting dates” isn’t the goal for most people. The question is whether you get into relationships with guys that fulfill your criteria of being good mates.
(They usually aren’t very fun for me, though).
I would guess that they would be more fun for you if you overcome your anxieties around physical contact.
I think that you do can overcome some of it by taking dancing classes.
I’m curious as to what you think the difference is in the male-female dynamic.
If you are a pretty girl than many man are willing to chase you and wait some time till you are ready.
At the same time a guy that’s empathic is less likely to ask you for another date if you don’t enjoy the first date.
I think “getting dates” isn’t the goal for most people. The question is whether you get into relationships with guys that fulfill your criteria of being good mates.
You’re right, this is a different problem. Which is still unsolved for me.
If you are a pretty girl than many man are willing to chase you and wait some time till you are ready.
I have had a guy go to fairly epic lengths to do this. We had what I think most people would call an awesome relationship afterwards, and lived together for some time...but a year and a half later, when we broke up, I basically wasn’t upset at all and actually got a happiness boost from having my own space and better sleep again. If I was upset, it was because “what, I put all those months of effort in, and I don’t even get a partner to have kids with?”
I think you would probably profit from going to a Salsa course. While doing it keep in mind that you want to enjoy physical contact but don’t get so close that it makes you uncomfortable.
At the beginning it would probably be good to just ask a male friend that you know and with whom you are comfortable to take a Salsa class with you.
A mental health specialist probably also wouldn’t take you seriously when you talk about giving money to Pascal’s mugger.
Unlike Asperger’s syndrome, Pascal’s mugging isn’t something that’s got to do with mental health, so your comparison is invalid. On the other hand, decision theorists wouldn’t take me seriously either, so your point stands.
In PUA literature there the idea that making a girl horny while at a club, asking her for her phone number and then calling a day later to make a date is not the way to go.
You don’t say? :nicholascage:
Having the girl in a state of being attracted, comfortable and connected is supposed to be more conductive to getting a date than the girl feeling horny.
Ah. If that’s what you mean by “being attracted” (myself, I’d usually call that “liking”), then I think that there are tons of things that have a waaaay larger effect than anything one could learn easily learn by formal dance classes but not otherwise, though it depends on the person (for example, certain people seem to be attracted to intelligence, others repelled).
I think you are ‘in your head’,
That much I do usually agree, though it varies on whether I’m sleep-deprived, whether I’ve been drinking, how much and what I’ve been reading lately, and other factors. (In particular, I think I’m much less “in my head” when I’m with people I’m at ease with, which is a proper superset of the people I’m willing to date long-term.)
You are probably the kind of person who thinks that they have a body instead of who thinks that they are their body. You probably think that you are your brain and the rest is just there to serve your brain.
FWIW, I’m the kind of person who thinks that what “I” means depends on the context, so whether I am my body or my brain isn’t even a well-defined question (both literally and metaphorically).
On the other hand I do think that your reluctance to wear a free-hug sign is purely based on a irrational fear of physical contact. Wearing the sign is the rational thing to do.
Even taking in account status signalling? (A way to make that moot would be to wear such a sign somewhere I don’t expect anyone I know, or anyone who knows anyone I know and is likely to talk about that, to see me.)
I don’t know the company that you keep. Most people I personally care about impressing wouldn’t see it as low status.
If someone tells me: “I read about this free hug thing and then I tried it out”, what does that tell me about the person? He’s signalling that his adventurous and willing to do things that are a bit outside of the social norm that produce good feelings for other people.
Doing creepy pickup approaches can be a low status signal if people you know get wind of it. I don’t see that problem with running around with a free hug sign.
How about you ask one of your female friends whether they would think less or more of someone who did the “free hug” thing you read about on the internet? Does she thinks it’s cool?
I mean what do you do for signaling high-status? Playing golf?
If someone tells me: “I read about this free hug thing and then I tried it out”, what does that tell me about the person? He’s signalling that his adventurous and willing to do things that are a bit outside of the social norm that produce good feelings for other people.
I seem to have a vague recollection of someone in one of my social groups watching a video (or something) of some guy doing the free hugs thing, and commenting something to the effect that (loosely paraphrasing) he must be a loser pathetically looking for pretexts to convince girls to hug him who otherwise wouldn’t; and indeed, very few people seemed eager to hug him. (I can’t remember more details about that.) Looking back at all the times I remember people wearing such signs, they were almost always males, usually not terribly attractive, and often in religious or political associations; none of these sounds high-status to me, if by “status” we mean social power rather than structural power. And the only times they seemed to be received well was during New Year’s/carnival/similar celebrations, where ISTM it’s also socially acceptable to ask random people for hugs who are not wearing free-hug signs.
Doing creepy pickup approaches can be a low status signal if people you know get wind of it.
I dunno; extrapolating from the closest things to that that did happen to me, they would either applaud my boldness or excuse me because creeping each other out is something people (especially when drunk) sometimes do by accident and it doesn’t mean they are evil. Unless you have in mind values of “creepy” sufficient for the bouncers to kick me out of the club, but even then IME people I already know will react with sympathy, not disgust.
How about you ask one of your female friends whether they would think less or more of someone who did the “free hug” thing you read about on the internet? Does she thinks it’s cool?
The last time I mentioned to a female friend something about me sometimes getting anxious when around people and trying to overcome that, she was like ‘what the hell are you talking about, you’re one of the most laid-back people I know’ (incidentally, the same person said something similar when I said I wasn’t that good at dancing and was trying to get better at it). You know, people usually are reluctant to criticize their friends, and while I try to indicate that I operate under Crocker’s rules that often only goes so far. (I know that’s not exactly what you suggested me to ask, but I’m under the impression that in such contexts “someone” would be so obvious an euphemism that it would defeat the point.)
I mean what do you do for signaling high-status?
Mostly, stuff like singing, dancing (but not paying people money to do that, except occasionally for night club cover charges), drinking a lot but still functioning enough for stuff like this, dressing extravagantly (but not particularly expensively), telling people about my travels abroad, or posting witticisms and photos on Facebook. Why?
Playing golf?
Hell no. That sounds expensive, posh, and not terribly fun. And not the kind of thing I’d likely be good at. :-)
I seem to have a vague recollection of someone in one of my social groups watching a video (or something) of some guy doing the free hugs thing, and commenting something to the effect that (loosely paraphrasing) he must be a loser pathetically looking for pretexts to convince girls to hug him who otherwise wouldn’t; and indeed, very few people seemed eager to hug him. (I can’t remember more details about that.) Looking back at all the times I remember people wearing such signs, they were almost always males, usually not terribly attractive, and often in religious or political associations; none of these sounds high-status to me, if by “status” we mean social power rather than structural power. And the only times they seemed to be received well was during New Year’s/carnival/similar celebrations, where ISTM it’s also socially acceptable to ask random people for hugs who are not wearing free-hug signs.
“Free hugs” signs are also a fairly common feature at anime conventions. Many of the people I’ve seen with them have been cute girls.
“Free hugs” signs are also a fairly common feature at anime conventions.
Never been to one of those, but I guess that I would feel much less out-of-place wearing such a sign at an anime convention (conditional on me not feeling out-of-place at the convention without the sign) than in a street downtown. (Though now that I try to think of it more in near mode, even the latter would depend on the time of the day and my blood alcohol content. Hmmm.)
I seem to have a vague recollection of someone in one of my social groups watching a video (or something) of some guy doing the free hugs thing, and commenting something to the effect that (loosely paraphrasing) he must be a loser pathetically looking for pretexts to convince girls to hug him who otherwise wouldn’t; and indeed, very few people seemed eager to hug him.
“He” is the operating word. The fox and the sour grapes.
I dunno; extrapolating from the closest things to that that did happen to me, they would either applaud my boldness or excuse me because creeping each other out is something people (especially when drunk) sometimes do by accident and it doesn’t mean they are evil.
I’m not saying that everyone who does PUA is creepy but there are people who persue it in a way that alinates friends. I can understand why someone might not want to be seen by people he knows when he’s doing random cold approaches on the street.
Mostly, stuff like singing, dancing (but not paying people money to do that, except occasionally for night club cover charges)
I think that in both domains that you will get more status over the long term if you invest in professional training which costs money to build your skills.
I think you will get more status over the long-term by building your skills as effectively as possible than by self handicapping.
“He” is the operating word. The fox and the sour grapes.
I think that the person who commented about him was female, though I don’t remember for sure.
I can understand why someone might not want to be seen by people he knows when he’s doing random cold approaches on the street.
Why not? IME wingmen provide social proof. (Though there are cultural differences from place to place—for example, I would do that in the town where I study now but not where I grew up, as most of the population of the latter respond to random cold approaches on the street by frowning at you then looking away.)
I think that in both domains that you will get more status over the long term if you invest in professional training which costs money to build your skills.
Yes, but 1) I’m already 26, so I dunno how much sense it still makes to invest in “the long term” in this kind of things, and 2) the difference would be only noticed by people who are themselves sufficiently high-status in those domains (I’ve already had several people who asked me where I took singing classes and seemed surprised where I told them that I didn’t), so I’m not sure the game is worth the candle given that I’m not looking for a professional career in singing. (I might try to take singing and/or dancing classes next year if I’m not as strapped for time as now, but it’s not a priority.)
That means that I will see different things in your dancing than the average person that you meet.
How does that mesh together with “people don’t feel emotions because of the knowledge that they have”? (not an entirely rhetorical question)
(I’m trying to recall whether that one guy I know who dances salsa regularly has ever seen me dancing—I’m not sure, and anyway, I don’t trust his judgements about me to be unbiased, given that I know that there’s such a thing as the halo effect and I’ve repeatedly heard, from several different people, that he’s always telling people at parties how I was the best student in the mathematical physics class where he was a TA in the past freakin’ decade.)
(One person who sees me dance much of the time (she’s the girlfriend of one of the karaoke guys in the bar in the video I linked), and has also danced with me in a nightclub a few times—she’s a belly dancing instructor, which may be too different from anything else. Her sister is a Bollywood dancing instructor (from whom I once took a few classes), and she’s also always complimenting me; anyway, in case this is relevant to anything, she incorrectly thought that I had spent lots of time rehearsing for this (I’m the male one) while I had actually spent maybe 10 minutes—so I guess that’s the halo effect and/or gilding the pill to avoid discouraging me.)
Isn’t the feeling that you could do something more fun with your time what boredom is?
Not in my experience, except in a very degenerate sense. There seems to be some threshold of entertainment below which I’m inclined to describe my state as bored; above that threshold, I may not be having as much fun as possible, but that’s not the same thing at all.
It’s still romantic chemistry and when your brain learns to become comfortable with it in one context it can also handle it in other contexts much better.
I’m not interested in a relationship in which I can’t interact honestly with the woman, because I wouldn’t find it to be fulfilling. I’d rather be single than have to tiptoe around my romantic partner’s irrational beliefs. Changing that implies either ceasing to care about rationality, or dramatically lowering my expectations for a relationship. Neither of those sounds particularly appealing.
Are you suggesting that a non-religious person would have no irrational beliefs to tiptoe around? This seems unlikely.
Are you suggesting that if you didn’t tiptoe around religious beliefs that would be a problem? Because it seems that religious people are extra-resilient in their beliefs, so that might be less of an issue than you fear.
Are you suggesting that it isn’t possible to have a relationship where one person is religious and another atheist without them having to fight about it or lie about it? That your relationships must have zero tolerance and absolute agreement on all points?
Are you suggesting that a non-religious person would have no irrational beliefs to tiptoe around? This seems unlikely.
No, but a religious person is definitely going to have such beliefs.
Are you suggesting that if you didn’t tiptoe around religious beliefs that would be a problem? Because it seems that religious people are extra-resilient in their beliefs, so that might be less of an issue than you fear.
Yes, I am. It’s not a matter of resilience in beliefs; telling my significant other that I can’t take their opinion on [evolution/gay marriage/abortion/insert religiously-tinted issue of your choice] at all seriously doesn’t sound like a recipe for a harmonious relationship.
Are you suggesting that it isn’t possible to have a relationship where one person is religious and another atheist without them having to fight about it or lie about it?
It’s not possible for me, because I believe atheism is the rational position and religious belief is objectively unjustified. I don’t think the idea that relationships between religious and nonreligious people are unlikely to succeed is an uncommon one; I’ve had religious friends express agreement with it.
That your relationships must have zero tolerance and absolute agreement on all points?
This is a straw man argument, as I did not make such a statement.
Many people are religious without really examining the consequences of their beliefs. Also many people have religious beliefs that do not cause them to think irrationally about evolution, gay marriage, or abortion. I would expect many of these people to move toward atheism during a long-term relationship with a LessWronger.
Many people are religious without really examining the consequences of their beliefs.
Yes, I’ve made that argument for abortion. However, that generally doesn’t stop such people from being extremely convinced of their beliefs. I haven’t had any success changing someone’s mind about abortion with the aforementioned argument, despite how obvious it becomes that the person is merely acting out instructions without thinking about them.
Also many people have religious beliefs that do not cause them to think irrationally about evolution, gay marriage, or abortion.
Those were meant as examples, not a definitive list of topics. There are very few people whose religious beliefs don’t cause them to think irrationally about some important issue.
I would expect many of these people to move toward atheism during a long-term relationship with a LessWronger.
I understand that, but I would be setting myself up for disappointment to expect that from any specific romantic partner who fell into that category.
Those were meant as examples, not a definitive list of topics. There are very few people whose religious beliefs don’t cause them to think irrationally about some important issue.
I realized this, but there seems to be a cluster in personspace of theists who are no less rational about the concepts on your list than the average atheist. If there are any topics that even these theists are irrational about, can you give examples?
I understand that, but I would be setting myself up for disappointment to expect that from any specific romantic partner who fell into that category.
I realized this, but there seems to be a cluster in personspace of theists who are no less rational about the concepts on your list than the average atheist. If there are any topics that even these theists are irrational about, can you give examples?
To be honest, I really haven’t met enough theists in that cluster to be very confident about any examples. I can see the matter of church attendance (in general, in terms of the course of the relationship if it moves toward marriage, and later in terms of raising children) being an issue. It’s not necessarily something that will come up right away, but I would see the specter of it hovering overhead. There’s also the irrationality of religious beliefs themselves, e.g. the idea that God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, or the idea that Jesus performed miracles.
There are, in fact, plenty of couples who have diametrically opposed ideas on politics or religion. You just need to either a) agree to not discuss it or b) be willing to honestly debate and challenge each other without getting upset.
I agree that you should interact honestly and not tiptoe around what you think, but that doesn’t mean you have to agree on everything, even religion.
For what it’s worth, as irrational as religion is, I’m willing to bet that any atheist here has equally irrational ideas that they stick with.
Any atheist here, and equally irrational? That’s a bet I’d take.
It’s one thing to disagree with a person on a number of points, and another thing to be unable to respect their epistemology. On difficult matters, where it’s hard to locate an error, you can consider another person’s reasoning sound to respectable standards without agreeing with their conclusions (we’re only human after all,) and on matters of opinion, disagreement does not necessarily imply conflict of epistemology. Religion falls into neither category.
I used to be open to relationships with religious individuals, but eventually I came to the realization that I had been putting more effort into convincing myself that I was tolerant than being realistic about my preferences. I couldn’t be happy with such a relationship beyond the extremely short term.
Desrtopa makes the main points below; I’d like to add:
For what it’s worth, as irrational as religion is, I’m willing to bet that any atheist here has equally irrational ideas that they stick with.
Even accepting that premise, the difference is that I’m willing to update my map. If a religious person had the same willingness, ey already would no longer be religious.
Yes, most likely. I don’t see much of a difference between agnosticism and atheism in practice. If a person doesn’t know if God exists (agnostic), ey probably won’t hold an active belief in God (atheist). There are exceptions to that, of course, but in a minority of cases.
Have you tried using OkCupid? It allows you to filter by religion, and it appears to be the preferred dating site among Less Wrongers, and possibly young intellectuals in general. We already have a thread dedicated to optimizing your profile for positive attention, so it may worth trying out.
Even better than book groups, though, are dance classes.
Amen to that. I’d add a slight caution that chemistry generated on the dancefloor can sometimes just be about the dancing, and telling when it is more than that is possibly an advanced skill. So, as this Mefi comment says, don’t push your luck on the dancefloor itself.
Workaround: ask after the class or when you’re standing around chatting (assuming you don’t dance all the time). Don’t be the guy who asks everyone in turn: the women talk to each other :-) EDIT: I elaborate on what I mean by this below...
Perhaps I should amend that to “don’t be obviously indiscriminate in a sleazy way”. The bad thing isn’t finding lots of people attractive, it’s apparently caring nothing for them as a person (which is about having had no conversational interction with them before asking them out, some small amount of buildup is necessary, though as siduri says, if you’re a decent chap, it’s probably less than you think) or alternatively appearing desperate (which is about demeanor, I think). Things I’ve heard remarked upon have been bemusement at dinner invites following a dance with a stranger with no prior conversation, or demeanor problems.
If you actually like more than one person and have talked to the people concerned a bit, I don’t see the harm.
(There’s usually a niche for being the confident guy who flirts a lot with absolutely everyone: you get a name for yourself, but it’s more as the loveable rogue than the creepy guy. That’s possibly an advanced skill, though.)
Bonus link: only try these moves with a consenting partner ;-)
Don’t let it. I actually disagree with the original advice for this reason: any benefit you get is likely to be outweighed by the additional anxiety from worrying what other people think.
My general take on this is the opposite: go ahead and ask many people if you’re interested. Don’t worry about what they think. Most of them won’t care or mind anyway, as long as you’re not rude or hostile about it. There’s nothing wrong with asking out a lot of people.
In fact, this is a common internal obstacle to asking people out. A lot of guys seem to have the idea that it’s somehow wrong or dirty to do so, as if they were being the bad guy by expressing interest in someone.
It does get easier the more you do it. Just remind yourself that it is a numbers game. The worst thing that can happen is not that you ask ten girls out and they all say no. The worst thing is that you ask ten girls, they say no, and then you stop asking. Because whether it was Girl #11 or Girl #83 who would’ve fallen head over heels for you, you’ll never find her now. Keep looking to meet women, and keep asking them out; these are the two steps that lead to relationships.
If each list item consists of multiple paragraphs, your source code should look like this:
1. First paragraph of first list item.
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2. First paragraph of second list item.
####Second paragraph of second list item.
except replace the “#” characters with spaces.
Alternatively, you can defeat automatic numbered list formatting like this.
I think it’s more that the word is dated. People still spend time together getting coffee to get to know each other. It’s just not called a “date” because that sounds so 1950s.
You have to put yourself in environments where you’ll be able to interact with a lot of women. College is in a lot of ways set up perfectly for this: if you’re not in college right now, consider joining a class or an activity group. Try to make it one where the gender balance will be in your favor. Book groups are one example—they’re wildly tilted towards women (I suspect men just, you know, read books, and don’t tend to see the value in sitting around sipping coffee and talking about reading books). But if you like girls who wear glasses, try finding a congenial book group. You’ll probably be the only man.
Even better than book groups, though, are dance classes. Swing and rockabilly aren’t super trendy anymore, but the scenes still exist in a quieter way, and these classes are great for single men: a) they’re filled mostly with women; b) dance is an inherently flirtatious activity, and the physical leading/following dynamic is one that many women find very sexy; c) even if you don’t find a date in that class, you’ll have learned an attractive skill, and you’ll be able to participate in events that will introduce you to more women; and d) physical exercise is good for building both confidence and sexiness. Yoga classes might work too, or if you can find a martial arts practice that attracts significant numbers of women (maybe check out your local aikido classes?).
The SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) is also a surprisingly good choice for geeks who want to hook up. Wearing princess dresses is enough of a draw for women that the gender balance, while tilted towards men, isn’t too awful, and so many relationships get started in the context of SCA events that there’s a joke about it. (The joke is that “SCA” actually stands for “Society for Consenting Adults.”)
There are of course singles bars or activities like speed-dating that are specifically designed to let you meet single women, so you could try those too. A lot of people find those environments stressful and frustrating, which is why I’d suggest finding a social scene that is not specifically about dating.
Lastly, let all your friends know that you’re interested in meeting women. Ask to be introduced to their friends who are single. This is how people used to meet each other and it is still an important avenue to keep open.
You have to ask women out on dates. This part, I know, is hard, and I’m sorry to admit that many women don’t even understand how hard it is. You will be rejected and it will suck every time, but this part is a numbers game. You just have to keep doing it until you find the girl who says “yes.”
The pre-reqs for asking a girl out are fewer than you might think. It’s best if you have already been introduced and have interacted a bit in a friendly manner. When I say a bit, I really mean just that you’ve spoken a few times. It is far, far more common for geek guys to err wildly in the opposite direction. Don’t do this. If you like her, ask her out, and make your intentions unambiguous. The sooner the better.
If you’re following my advice and meeting girls in activity classes, you would do this by approaching her just after one of the classes, maybe as she’s getting her things together or as she’s heading out the door. Make eye contact and smile. Start with a compliment that references the interactions you’ve had—”Hey, I’ve really been enjoying dancing with you [or “sparring with you,” or, “I really liked what you said about the book”] and I wonder if I could take you out to a movie next week.”
Be really clear about the fact that you’re asking her for a date. Try not to say something like “I wonder if you’d like to meet for coffee and talk ” because she could interpret this as merely a friendly gesture on your part, and you don’t want that. A lot of inexperienced guys think they should establish a friendship before they ask a girl out, but you really don’t want to sink a lot of time and energy into a girl who is never going to see you “like that.” (It is true that established friendships can make a wonderful basis for romance, but never, ever count on that happening.)
Also, propose a specific activity and a specific time. Don’t just say “I wonder if you’d go out with me some time” because a) it sounds a little desperate and b) a lot of women have trouble saying “no” directly (we’re socialized not to). Leave her a face-saving way to refuse. If she says “I’d love to but I’ve been really busy with work/school/life recently,” that means no. Move on. (If, on the other hand, she says “I’m going to Guatemala next week, but I’ll be back by the end of the month, maybe then?” that means yes.)
Dealing with rejection: When you are rejected, try to be gracious about it, even if she is not. Like I said above, a lot of women truly do not understand how much gumption it takes to put yourself out there by making a pass. If she seems annoyed or condescending or whatever, try to shrug it off; just smile and say “okay, no problem” or something along those lines. Do the same thing if she says “I’d rather just be friends.” (But for the love of Pete, do not spend a lot of effort trying to actually cultivate a friendship. Moooooove on.)
It does get easier the more you do it. Just remind yourself that it is a numbers game. The worst thing that can happen is not that you ask ten girls out and they all say no. The worst thing is that you ask ten girls, they say no, and then you stop asking. Because whether it was Girl #11 or Girl #83 who would’ve fallen head over heels for you, you’ll never find her now. Keep looking to meet women, and keep asking them out; these are the two steps that lead to relationships.
Troubleshooting: If you do find that you are consistently rejected, there might be something going on with your self-presentation that is offputting to women. Make sure your basic hygiene is good: that you are wearing clean clothes that fit you, that your hair is cut and that you are clean-shaven. (Facial hair is Advanced Fashion for Men: if fashion is not your ballgame, just shave, trust me.) Ask your friends if there’s anything going on with your looks or demeanor that might be getting in your way.
If you are overweight, start an exercise regimen, but do not wait until you are at your ideal weight to start asking women on dates. It is perfectly possible for big dudes to find love, they do it all the time. It IS more important to make sure that you wear flattering clothing that fits you well—a baggy, threadbare tee-shirt and Hawaiian shorts may not cut it. Use Google Images to find pictures of some of the heavier celebrities (like Sean Astin, or Seth Rogan before he slimmed down). Check out what they are/were wearing, and use those pictures as a style guide.
You may also be acting in ways that indicate you don’t value yourself, which can make women (and other people in general) instinctively shy away. You will probably need the help of people who actually know you to diagnose these kinds of problems and help you fix them.
In general, though, from my observations, most geek guys are able to get dates so long as they go where the women are, and ask them out. The most common mistake by far is simply failing to execute one or both of these crucial steps.
Lots of good advice here.
One change I’d make is that, imo, a movie makes a poor first date. Do something fun and active where talking is possible, instead.
Agreed!
Can you suggest any specific good first-date activities?
Depends on your interests. Can be as simple as grabbing a cup of coffee. Could be going for a walk on the beach. Take some sandwiches and go hiking. Pick a shared interest and enjoy it—go to an art gallery, or go ice-skating. Something active is good—and/or something where you get to sit down and chat…
This is excellent advice, and I up-voted it. However:
I may just be reading too much into things, and I acknowledge that this comment is written primarily as a response to the question “how to get into a relationship”. Nevertheless, this bit bothers me a bit, as the “for the love of, don’t try to actually cultivate a friendship” part seems to imply that there’s no point in being friends with women if you’re not going to have a relationship with them. That strikes me as a bit offensive.
Even if we’re assuming that you’re purpose is solely to get women, I don’t think befriending lots of them is as useless as you seem to suggest. You say yourself that one’s friends may introduce one to somebody one might be interested in. People tend to have more same-sex friends than opposite-sex friends, so being friends with lots of women will increase your chances of one of them introducing you to a friend of theirs. I also suspect that women are more likely than men to do this.
I do admit that this may not be the most efficient approach if you’re optimizing purely for finding a romantic relationship in minimum time. But on the other hand, it can wield you rewarding friendships that persist long after the end of your relationship with whoever it was you eventually found, so personally I’d find it worth it.
I should also mention that my experience somewhat mirrors MBlume’s, and I find the notion of becoming involved with someone before being good friends with them a little off-putting. Which is not to say that it would never have happened to me, though. (Without going to details, suffice to say that I’ve both had relationships with women I was friends with from before, and with women where that wasn’t the case.)
Befriending women is sometimes useful for becoming attractive to other women. (Allow me to skip the obligatory part where friendship is good in itself, of course it is, but I want to make a different point.) For example, you can ask them to help you shop for clothes, relying on their superior visual taste. Most of my “nice” clothes that I use for clubbing etc. were purchased this way, and girls seem to love this activity. Also they can bring you to events where you can meet other women; help you get into clubs; offer emotional support when you need it; and so on. If you make it very clear that you’re not pursuing this specific girl sexually, being friends with her can make quite a substantial instrumental benefit.
That said, of course I don’t mean the kind of “friendship” that girls offer when they reject you. That’s just a peculiar noise they make with their mouths in such situations, it doesn’t mean anything.
Sorry, that line wasn’t clear. If you’d truly like to be friends with a particular woman, then by all means, be her friend! What I’m specifically counseling inexperienced men to avoid is the pitfall where they befriend a woman when they really want to be her boyfriend, and then spend a lot of time pining after her fruitlessly.
And I did mean it when I said, “It is true that established friendships can make a wonderful basis for romance...” My husband was my friend first, so I’m not knocking these kinds of relationships at all. However, it’ll either happen or it won’t; if there are strategies for making it happen, I don’t know them; and I don’t think hoping it will happen is a good strategy at all for men specifically looking for a relationship. My impression is that ending up in “the friend zone” with a woman you want to date is a fairly common failure mode for inexperienced men, so I advise SilasBarta to take some care to avoid it. I may have stressed that part too heavily.
There’s a big difference between “If I approach someone for a date, and s/he rebuffs me, it’s best not to spend a lot of effort cultivating a friendship with that person” and “It’s never worth cultivating friendships.”
Yes, making friends is worth doing. Agreed. And if it so happens that the person I’m making friends with is someone I’d previously wanted to date, great! I have numerous friends in this category, and some of them are very good friends indeed.
But even with that in mind, I mostly agree with siduri.
Mostly that’s because I know very few people who can make that decision reliably immediately after being turned down. Taking a while to decide whether I’m genuinely interested in a friendship with this person seems called for.
I also meant the “spend a lot of effort” part to act as a qualifier, since for me true friendships tend to develop spontaneously and easily, in contrast to a situation where I’m actively courting the other person and they’re kind of pulling back. In my own life, I’ve learned it’s better to just let those second kinds of friendships die in the bud.
However, I recognize on reflection that for more introverted people, developing any friendship probably takes significant effort—so advice along the general lines of “if you have to push it, it’s probably not meant to be” is actually probably bad advice for a lot of people. Instead, I think the question should be “would you be satisfied with friendship alone, if nothing further ever developed? Would the friendship be a source of happiness to you, or a source of frustration and pain?”
I just don’t think guys should spend the time and energy being friends with women if friendship isn’t truly what they’re after. In a case like that it’s much better for them to focus their attention on other women, who might reciprocate.
Fair enough. I can agree with that.
I believe the point is that if you want a romantic relationship with a woman, cultivating a friendship with her in the hopes that romance will develop is almost always a bad idea. Occasionally such romance sparks “out of the blue”, but more likely nothing will ever happen, and it is a huge investment of time and emotion that basically never pays off. So if you aren’t interested in the woman for the sake of friendship alone, it is better to just forget about her and move on.
If you find a person interesting and worth being friends with, by all means don’t reject such an opportunity just because the person is a woman. That’s idiotic. It’s just a terrible dating strategy, that’s all.
sark hit upon a good point here: think of meeting many women as a special case of meeting many people.
How good are you at generally meeting people? Improve that and you’ll meet more of the half of them you’re interested in. General social skills are good to exercise.
I think there’s also the question if the “I’d rather just be friends.” said in the context of rejecting an invite to a date actually means “I want to be your friend.” or is just a polite way of saying “I don’t want to go on a date with you.”. In the former case trying to cultivate a friendship will be more useful than in the latter...
I cannot possibly stress enough how non-obvious this is to “geeky” males.
I don’t think this is accurate. People generally don’t say “no” directly. It’s not a matter of gender socialization, it’s just how language works. A direct “no” is seen as rude, and refusals are usually couched in vague or tentative language.
But people seem to understand refusals anyway, which means the question is whether refusals are more vague and tentative in this case.
Valid point. Though I think people generally understand refusals even in this case.
is a little extreme. Though this could be an very ambiguously worded “polite” refusal, it can also be honesty from someone who actually is interested. Whereas “I’m sorry, I can’t, I’ve been really busy with life” is a clear refusal, “I’d love to but...” isn’t always and is worth at least a follow up.
Your experience may differ, but I disagree. Unless she suggests another time, this is meant as a polite brush-off. For most women, pursuing potential mates is a very, very high-priority activity, and no matter how busy their schedules may be, they can clear out an evening for a guy they’re truly interested in.
In the few situations where the woman really is booked solid (such as the example where she’s going out of town, or maybe if she’s studying for a very important upcoming exam) she’ll let you know when she expects to have some time free.
There is one alternative explanation—and that’s a woman following “The Rules”.
In that case, you may not want to go out with her anyway, given that it’s a book explaining how to manipulate men (much as PUAs do to women).
I think that there are cultural differences about that, too: where I am, ISTM that (assuming it’s unambiguous that you’re asking for a date, which is what siduri was recommending) “I’m not interested in dating at the moment” is perfectly socially acceptable.
I used to have trouble with this. (I was a geeky male at the time.) I knew perfectly well to accept No as an answer, but I never quite seemed to get that answer. (There were other problems too.)
This is not strictly true from my experience. I’ve had three girlfriends thus far and in all three cases, we were basically just friends who eventually realized we wanted to date one another. Of course, all three were also housemates, so I may be an odd case.
I’ve tried the “ask women out on dates” approach from time to time, but keep coming back to the impression that I’m the sort of person who just slides into romantic relationships with friends, and that if I want more romantic relationships, I need to make my social circle—not my circle of acquaintances, but my circle of folks I see on a daily basis—more generally co-ed (kind of a problem since it’s mostly folks I know from Singinst/Less Wrong these days).
Or become bisexual. If anyone posted a procedural comment on how to become bisexual, I would upvote it immediately =)
The way to become bisexual is to regularly extend your exposure to erotic stimuli just a little further than your comfort zone extends in that direction. I’ll use drawn pictorial porn as an example erotic stimulus, but adapt to whatever you prefer: start with Bridget. Everyone is gay for Bridget. Once you’re comfortable with Bridget, move on to futanari-on-female erotica, male-on-futanari, then futanari-on-male, paying attention to your comfort levels. You’ll run across some bizarre things while searching for this stuff; if any of it interests you, just go with it.
By now, you should be fairly comfortable with the plumbing involved, so it’s just the somatically male body you need to learn to find attractive. Find art featuring bishounen types, then pairing them with other male body types, and pay attention to what feels most comfortable.
It may take a while to go through this process, but I believe it’s entirely achievable for most people who don’t view heterosexuality as a terminal value.
The Bisexual Conspiracy commends your insidious efforts at propagating memes advantageous to us and has sent you several HBBs of assorted gender orientations by overnight delivery.
I wonder how much this would work for a homosexual male.
I’ve actually been trying this essential thing, although with less persistence as it requires a certain amount of effort to attend to something that just seems so immediately boring to myself. Perhaps living in a hetero-normative culture ensures that when a man decides that he’s gay, he is more likely to have discovered a roughly immutable biological fact?
Two related thoughts come to mind.
One is that male anatomy is more familiar, and therefore presumably less intimidating, to straight men than female anatomy is to gay men.
Another is that in a heteronormative culture, men who aren’t strictly monosexual are more likely to identify as straight than as gay. If what this technique actually does is make men who aren’t monosexual more aware of their non-monosexuality, then I’d expect it to get more noticeable results on men who identify as straight. (I’d also expect there to be a wide range of effectiveness among straight-identified men.)
Despite subcultural normativity being strongly biased against bisexuality, really quite a lot of gay-identifying men have experimented with heterosexual behaviour, but are—ha! - closeted about it.
Alas the benefits of being open about a very slight sexual curiosity are probably not often great enough to make complete honesty seem worthwhile. Also such curiosity tends to signal a lack of self-knowledge and thus to an extent lack of trustworthiness, probably hence the vague stigma that many people have against dating bisexuals.
The Bizarre World of the Bisexual—it’s all 100% true! [1]
[1] Statement of 100% truth may not be 100% true.
If you’re finding it boring, you may be trying to go too straight too quickly, or you may not be using your preferred form of erotica—I used hentai as as example, but I could’ve used textual fiction, videos, etc.
Or you could just be immutably gay; I am generalizing from just a few examples.
Hmm, I’ll experiment with a variety, and report back if I make findings.
I suspect how well this works probably depends on exactly how hetero- or homosexual one was from the beginning. (I’m basing that on personal experience with regard to both bisexuality and various fetishes.)
Instead of a strict straight/bi/gay split, I prefer to think of it as a spectrum where 0 is completely straight, 5 is completely bisexual and 10 is completely gay. I’m guessing it’s possible for you to shift yourself a couple of points towards the middle of the spectrum, but not an arbitrary amount. E.g. if you started off at 0 you might shift yourself to 2, or if you started off at 8 you could shift yourself to 6.
I’d also note that there’s a difference between sexual attraction and emotional compatibility. I’m rather mildly bisexual and using these techniques, could probably become a bit more so. But my main issue with pursuing same-sex relationships is not the sexual attraction as such, but the fact that I find it a lot easier to relate and connect to women on an emotional level. These techniques probably wouldn’t help in that.
Hah! You’re trying to squish two axes into one axis. Why not just have an “attraction to males” axis and an “attraction to females” axis? After all, it is possible for both to be zero or negative.
I would say there are more than two axes which could be meaningfully considered, here. Male and female body types, personalities, and genitals can exist in a variety of combinations, and any given combination can (in principle) be considered sexy or repulsive separate from the others. For example, there are those who prefer [feminine/curvy/penis] having sex with [masculine/buff/vagina] over all other thus-far-imagined pairings.
Dimension reduction is not automatically an illegitimate move. That said, I grant that in this case it’s worthwhile to keep at least two axes.
In a similar spirit, many discussions of sexuality separate “attraction” from “identity” from “experience” onto different axes to get at the differences between a man who is occasionally attracted to men but identifies as straight, vs. a man who is equally often attracted to men but identifies as bi, or various other possible combinations.
Something related is common in the asexual community: Many asexuals identify as hetero/homo/bi/pan/a-romantic. I could certainly see someone being hetero- or homosexual and bi- or pan-romantic, or bi- or pansexual and hetero- or homo-romantic.
An excellent point.
I would be surprised if the kinds of gradual-exposure techniques khafra endorses here for making same-sex partners more erotically compatible didn’t work equally well (or poorly) for making them emotionally compatible.
Of course, in that case you wouldn’t want to use erotic stimuli.
I’m not exactly sure what stimuli you would use, because I’m not exactly sure what you mean by relating and connecting to people on an emotional level… but whatever it is, I suspect you could test khafra’s approach by identifying specific activities that qualify, and then looking for the closest thing to that activity involving men that you find easy, and attending to that thing.
Let me stress here, though, that I’m not asserting you ought to change anything. There’s nothing wrong with being heterosexual, and there’s no reason you should feel like your heterosexuality diminishes you in any way.
Umm, no. To make erotic stimuli more attractive, it’s enough that you think about the stimuli often enough and learn to like it. It may be slow, but there’s relatively little risk. Learning to bond and relate to the kinds of people you’ve always had difficulty bonding and relating to requires you to open yourself up to them in an attempt to connect with them. At worst, you can end up embarassed and hurt and have an ever harder time trying to connect to them in the future.
It’s also a lot more complex, since it’s not enough to modify your own reactions. You also need to learn how to get the right responses out of other people.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, or that you couldn’t apply similiar techniques as you would to developing an erotic attraction. But those are techniques are only a small part of it, and it’s a lot harder.
Agreed that learning to get the right responses out of other people, and risking social penalties, are eventually required for this sort of social conditioning. (Though not necessarily initially required.)
It seems to me the same thing is true of erotic conditioning of the sort we’re talking about. That is, if I want to train myself to respond erotically to X, sooner or later I have to stop exclusively interacting with pictures or books or whatever and start actually interacting with X, and that can be difficult, and risks social penalties. But I don’t start there.
That said, I’m pretty much speaking hypothetically here; I’ve never actually used this technique. So I could easily be wrong.
That shouldn’t be as much of an issue, because there’s so much variation in emotional compatibility with men. If you’re sexually attracted to penises, it shouldn’t be hard to find at least someone you’re emotionally compatible with who has a penis. The main problem is getting attracted to the “other” set of genitalia. If you’re attracted to one penis, you’re probably attracted to all of them, whereas emotional compatibility is more complicated and subtle.
There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all emotional compatibility with men, the way there is with sexual orientation.
If Kaj_Sotala tells me that emotional compatibility is more of an issue for him than sexual attraction, I’m prepared to accept that… I don’t see the value in challenging his observations about what “the main problem” for him really is.
That said, like you, I don’t consider it likely that this describes very many people. Then again, I also don’t find it likely that “If you’re attracted to one penis, you’re probably attracted to all of them” describes very many people.
Then again again, the world is full of unlikely things.
Well, think about it like this. I also get along better and generally find it easier to get closer to women than to men. But there are some men I can connect with as well, because there is so much variation in men’s personalities. So the problem here is just finding the right ones.
Now compare this to sexual compatibility, which requires the right sex organs. This is a much bigger obstacle. I’m attracted to female genitalia and not male ones. Unlike with personality, this is a binary issue: you either like male genitalia or you don’t, and if you don’t, this rules out half the population.
Really? Why not? I would think it obviously describes everyone. You may not be attracted to the person attached, but you’re either sexually attracted to male genitalia, or you’re not.
Well, the short answer to “Why not?” is “Experience.”
The longer answer is, I suspect, longer than I feel like giving, since it’s clear that you and I have very different models of how attraction works.
Suffice to say that there are various attributes along which individual genitalia vary, to which I expect different people assign more or less value, resulting in different judgments. For many people I expect that this list of attributes includes the contexts established by the attached person.
I may not have spoken clearly. Let me try again, and tell me if this makes sense to you.
A lot of people are strongly monosexual: that is, no matter what a person looks like, what their personality is, or how emotionally compatible they are, if the other person has the “wrong” genitalia, this will preclude any possibility of dating, sex, or a relationship, because they won’t be able to sexually connect.
If you think about dating as going through a series of hurdles, the first and most important hurdle is having the “right” genitals. After that, there are other attributes, like looks and personality, which I think is what you’re talking about. But if someone has the “right” genitals, there is at least the potential for a sexual connection. That doesn’t mean there will definitely be sexual attraction.
Does that seem right? Am I missing something?
I think you’re being clear; I just don’t agree with you. Yes, I think you’re missing things.
For one thing, you treat gender as equivalent to having particular genitalia. It isn’t. Even people exclusively attracted to men sometimes find themselves attracted to people without penises.
For another, you treat all genitals of a particular category as being interchangeable for purposes of attractiveness. They aren’t, any more than all voices or all hands or feet or all eyes are interchangeable. You may not care about individual differences in a particular category, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t.
For a third, your whole structure of “the first hurdle” and “the most important hurdle” strikes me as arbitrary. The idea that someone to whom I am not attracted is someone I have a “potential sexual connection” with simply because they are a particular gender, or have the proper genitals, is a perfectly legitimate perspective… but to privilege that dimension over the myriad other parameters that allow or preclude attraction is not obviously justified.
No, I was thinking of gender as a separate hurdle. For instance, a straight cisgender male is most likely primarily attracted to persons with vulvas, whether they identify as men or women. He might secondarily prefer women, but that’s a lesser “hurdle”. that is, there would be a possibility of sexual attraction to a FtM (gender = man, bio-female) but not a pre-op MtF (gender = woman, bio-male) because of genital incompatibility.
I don’t think the attraction is “exclusive to men” as much as it is “exclusive to people with specific genitals.” Though this is probably very variable, and monosexuals may well be divided on whether genitalia or gender is more important to them. I’d be curious to know the breakdown.
I was thinking like this. Suppose you are a monosexual on a desert island with one other person. You will likely want sexual contact. At least for me, the most important quality of your island-mate (for purposes of sexual contact, that is) is that they have the “right” type of genitals; while other qualities may be unattractive or undesirable, they can be overcome if you want sexual contact enough, but having the “wrong” type of genitals can’t. To put this another way, as a straight male, someone I am not attracted to who has a vulva may be less than ideal, but still sexually satisfying; someone without a vulva couldn’t possibly be.
I had thought this would be universal for monosexuals; your comments lead me to think I was wrong, and it’s more complicated than that. I’m curious how common my view is, and the specifics of other views.
(BTW, I wish I could upvote you several times just for using ‘myriad’ correctly.)
Huh.
So George, a straight cisgender male, walks into a dance club and sees Janey dancing. He can tell she presents as female from the way she dresses, her hair, her body shape, etc. He talks to her for a while, and he can tell she identifies as female—or at least claims to—from the things she says.
But her pants are still on.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying George does not know at this point whether he’s sexually attracted to Janey, because the “primary hurdle” hasn’t been crossed yet?
If so, you and I have very different understandings of how sexual attraction works. It seems relatively clear to me that George makes that determination within the first few minutes of seeing her, based on a variety of properties, many of which are components of gender.
If not, then I’m not really sure what you’re saying.
Yes, he does. And you’re right: he is attracted to her even though he doesn’t know what her genitalia are like. He’s probably making an assumption that might or might not be correct, and this assumption is based on the gender properties he observes. If he’s not correct, this may change his attraction. Or not.
My mistake was using the word “attracted” in the quoted portion of my comment. What I should have said was “capable of sexual satisfaction with,” “sexually compatible,” or “genitally compatible,” which aren’t the same thing. While he may be initially attracted, he still doesn’t know whether or not he’s sexually compatible with her (though he assumes he is, which inspires the attraction).
I think you are also right that genitalia is not the most important thing for all monosexuals. I would bet it is for most, though. And at some point this is just a matter of how we define ‘monosexual’ (or ‘straight’, or ‘gay’). We could think of a 2-D version of the Kinsey scale, similar to what you discuss in an earlier comment, where gender is one axis and genitalia is another.
I’m not sure that helps. Many people, even entirely monosexual people, are perfectly capable of sexual satisfaction with one another despite injury to or loss of their genitalia. So I would similarly object to defining “capable of sexual satisfaction with” and “sexually compatible” primarily in terms of genitals the way you do.
I’ll agree with defining “genitally compatible” that way, though.
If you’re willing to define people for whom genital compatibility is not primary as not-really-monosexual, then your claim is trivially true. That said, at that point you have also defined a lot of people as not-really-straight who would disagree vehemently with you.
I think that given that not all traits are observable, we make assumptions about common ones. Someone who doesn’t know that a female-appearing person has a penis is attracted to a false image of what that person’s like, said false image not completely matching the real person.
That’s certainly true.
It seems unjustified to claim that in this case, they are attracted to that person because of their (false) belief that this person lacks a penis, or that they are attracted to that person because of their (false) belief that this person has a vulva, without further data.
I think “genetalia” is being used as shorthand for all sexual characteristics, both primary and secondary. Otherwise the idea of slowly going from women to futnari to men would be nonsensical, right?
I don’t know how to make that interpretation compatible with, for example, Blueberry’s claim that a straight cis male would not be attracted to a pre-op MtF, given that many sexual characteristics typical of women are present in a a pre-op MtF. (And, indeed, my understanding of the real world is that straight cis males are not infrequently attracted to pre-op trangender MtF people.)
But I would certainly agree that the claim that the “primary hurdle” for sexual attraction is the set of all sexual characteristics, both primary and secondary, is a much more sensible claim than the one I understood Blueberry to be making.
Did they actually make that claim? I saw you say it followed from their claim...
Well, whatever. As you say, it’s a more sensible claim regardless of whether anyone was actually making it :-P
Quoth Blueberry:
I’m pretty sure “a straight cis male would not be attracted to a pre-op MtF” is reliably implied by that quote, though of course I could be wrong.
This is precisely why I asked them to clarify the claim in the first place.
Ah, right. I probably read that as including hormones and breast implants, but yours is certainly the simpler interpretation.
(Well, you can—just create multiple accounts for the purpose—but I’d rather you didn’t.)
As I understand it, there are many cases of men who identify as heterosexual but who, in all-male environments, nevertheless participate in sexual encounters with other men.
That suggests to me that for many heterosexual men, having the “right” genitals isn’t as singularly definitive a property as it is for you.
Granted, another possibility is that such men aren’t actually heterosexual, they merely think they are, and your description is accurate for genuine heterosexuals. If so, it seems genuine heterosexuals are noticeably rarer than people who identify that way.
One theory is that there is a difference between sexual orientation and relationship orientation, so that there are men who prefer romance and relationships with women, but are sexually bi. Since our language and culture don’t typically make this distinction, such people might just identify as straight.
Another is that sexuality is flexible, so in the desert island example, or in all-male environments, the men adapt over time to become capable of getting sexual satisfaction from other men in a way that they weren’t before. This is similar, in a way, to the gradual-exposure techniques khafra talked about.
But—and this was my main point—before such a shift in sexuality occurs, a straight man would be out of luck even if he had 100 males to choose from. But once such a shift occurs, all he has to do is find one out of the 100 he’s emotionally compatible with (assuming he’s looking for emotional compatibility). This is why I said the sexual shift was the hard part: males are not an emotional monolith and out of 100, at least one should be more or less emotionally compatible.
I very frequently find someone attractive, or not, long before seeing their genitals. Indeed, there are dozens of people in the world whose genitals I have never seen, and yet I am still able to find them either attractive or not.
Compatibility of genitalia is surely important for answering the more specific question “am I going to have sex with this person or not?” but that’s not the same thing as attraction. For most of us, there are plenty of people in the world who are very attractive but with whom we will never have sex. Many people choose to have sex with people they find not all that attractive (e.g. because they are in some sort of long-term relationship, and either their tastes or the appearance of the other person have changed over time).
[EDITED once, to fix a trifling typo.]
As one data-point: I am a straight male, and gender is more important to me than genitalia.
By this metric, I started at a zero (unable to find other males sexually attractive,) and ended at a zero. My attempts to influence myself to have a sexual interest in men achieved null results.
I have no problem finding other men attractive, but they’re still about as sexually appealing to me as plants.
The scale you are talking about when used by psychologists and others when discussing sexuality is the Kinsey scale. Under the standard scaling it goes from 0 to 6 with 0 being complete heterosexuality and 6 being complete homosexualty.
It should be 0 for female-attracted and 6 for male-attracted (or the reverse, but I’ll go this way since Kinsey used it first on men). The idea that homo- and hetero- are the basic orientations is asinine, but surprisingly common.
I’ll admit to being a 2 on the scale that I just described, but I refuse to be placed on Kinsey’s scale at all.
I take it this is a process that’s worked for you?
Accidentally, but yes. I’ve also seen it work on other people who frequent /b/, both for bisexuality and many paraphilias.
heh, I had a suspicion that /b/ had something to do with this
Within the nearby cluster in personspace: I think Robin Lee Powell has said that he chose to become bisexual, if you want to ask him to elaborate on that process. :)
(I’ve gotten a bit more bisexual over time, and I occasionally wonder if I actually pushed myself in that direction (since I remember wishing that I could be, as early as 14 or 15), or if that’s just the direction I was drifting in anyway and I happened to be open to it in advance. But it’s probably hard to tell in retrospect.)
Beware that if you manage to become bisexual somehow, this can significantly damage a man’s prospects with many women. For a huge percentage of women, bisexual men are not as attractive (manly) as strictly heterosexual men.
I have heard from some people that having a reputation as bisexual has increased their prospects with women. I suspect this is dependent on location, social circle, and attractiveness.
It may also be that a large percentage of women are no longer interested, but enough of the women that remain are significantly more interested- and so you go from, say, 20 women who might date you to 10 women who might date you, of whom 2 want to. Overall prospects down, but easy prospects up.
(I will comment, though, that this probably has to do way more with the masculine/feminine balance of the people in question than their sexual history or orientation.)
For the foreseeable future, I’m going to be exclusively dating poly or poly-friendly girls anyway. I don’t think being bi would hurt me within that subpopulation—does that seem wrong?
(One data point: my girlfriend has only-half-jokingly claimed that if I really want to make her happy, I ought to make out with one of my male friends and send her photos)
It won’t hurt in any way. The pure heterosexual or pure homosexual are slightly odd in most poly scenes.
And everyone knows about straight guys kissing to get the chicks …
I actually know a girl who succeeded in getting male friends of hers to pose for that kind of picture.
I suspect it would be trivial to do so in most modern US college-type situations.
Don’t do it!!!!
She definitely wants to have something she can blackmail you with if the need arises!
He can only be blackmailed with such photos if he would mind having them displayed to some third party.
Indeed.
Mother: Mildly awkward conversation
Boss: “Mike, that was kinda TMI”
Brothers: “Ewwwww”
Randomly Chosen Singularitarian Friend: High-Five
...that’s all I can really think of.
But he might benefit from having her think she’s blackmailing him.
No such luck—I’ve already e-mailed her this thread.
I do not get how making out with a male is considered a blackmail worthy offense.
Well, it would likely prevent a guy from running for political office or becoming a CEO of a major corporation, for instance. Or at least make it very difficult. There are only a few openly gay politicians, and even then they have to fit certain social ideals.
I’m already quite publicly a polyamorous sex-positive atheist, I’m not running for political office any time soon
I wonder which you would get the most flack for. Reminds me of this one. (!TVTropes-link!)
Unfortunately, in the US today, probably atheism.
Okay, I cross that off then. How about naturism? In east Germany its a trivial part of the culture. In the US it seems to be a highly stigmatized lifestyle.
I’m trying to picture this scenario and can’t stop laughing =P.
Poly-friendly != bi-friendly, necessarily, but I’d definitely agree that your odds are better than in the mainstream community.
I didn’t select my friends from (a conservative Christian) college for lgbt-friendliness or non-conformist dating styles or really anything at all, besides maybe an enjoyment of genre television or some connection to friends I already had. And yet it turned out that at least a third of the women in my social circle share my love of hot bi guys and m/m in general. Also, m/m fanservice for the benefit of female fans seems to be rather a common thing for hot young male celebrities to do in certain cultures, such as Japan.
I’ve found that just meeting more people solves this one nicely. The percentage difference is not overwhelming, and you really won’t want those people anyway.
I disagree with the “you really won’t want those people anyway.” I suspect the loss of attraction many women feel if they hear a guy has been with another guy has marginal ‘conscious choice’ in it.
But anyway, I’ve followed this thread too long. I don’t really have any expertise on bisexuality—I’ve just heard lots of straight women tell me it turns them off.
I think the reason for that is that so many gay men go through a phase, as part of their coming out, where they claim bisexuality for a while. This, combined with the fact that there seem to be relatively few numbers of truly bisexual men, means that a significant percentage of the pool of men presenting as bisexual are actually gay. So going out with a bisexual guy is really risky from the woman’s point of view.
I’ll admit, when I run into people who talk like this, I generally assume that they are weighting the costs of a relationship ending badly due to a boyfriend turning out gay significantly higher than the costs of a relationship ending badly for other reasons.
But perhaps that’s unfair of me; perhaps, as you suggest, it’s really just about probability estimates.
Would you mind putting some numbers around “really risky”?
That is… if S is the chance of a relationship ending badly with a partner who identifies as straight, and B is the chance of it ending badly with a partner who identifies as bi, what’s your estimate and confidence level for (B-S)?
Well, my numbers would be a bit skewed by the fact that I quite happily date bisexual women (I am one myself). Should I put the non-straight women in S or B? Or make a third category L?
Your skew is fine… I’m just interested in clarification of your original claim, however skewed it may be, that going out with a bisexual guy is really risky because a significant percentage of the pool of men presenting as bisexual are actually gay.
That said, given that your original claim was about men, I should have said if S is the chance of a relationship ending badly with a male partner who identifies as straight, and B is the chance of it ending badly with a male partner who identifies as bi. Point taken.
Well, for S, most relationships end “badly” (in a breakup, at least), so I guess I’ll ballpark that at 90 percent.
For B, I estimate that 34 percent of men presenting as bi are actually gay (going from this study.) I’ll assume that a relationship with the other 66 percent of bi guys would have the same 90 percent failure rate as the S group, but that a relationship with one of the 34 would have a 100 percent failure rate. So B overall is 93.4.
It’s only a few percentage points higher, yes, but the fact that S is already high doesn’t do much to change the fact that if you have one (small) dating pool where fully a third of the dudes are essentially just looking for beards, a straight woman loses little by excluding that pool, and improves her prospects overall.
Agreed.
For a more extreme position, Rieger, Chivers, and Bailey (ETA: here) find that 75% of self-identified bi men get erections from gay porn, 25% from straight porn, though reported arousal is bisexual.
ETA: that is a quote from press coverage. It pushes a bit farther than the paper and does not match the data. The direct quotes in the press coverage suggest to me that the fault is the authors, not the reporters. The text of the paper is more cautious, but I think also misleading.
Eyeballing the data, I would say that 1⁄2 of bis respond only to gay porn, 1⁄4 only to straight porn, and 1⁄4 uniformly. Also, 1⁄4 of straights and gays respond uniformly. (this is after removing 1⁄3 of all orientations that have no genital response)
What is more interesting is that reported arousal to the porn fits self-identification pretty well. It would be interesting to how the gap between genital and reported arousal varies across individuals. Some patterns would suggest that people are lying to themselves while others that the gap is due to sexuality being complicated. I was amused that straights admitted to being aroused by gay porn, while gays did not admit to being aroused by straight porn; but I suspect that the sample of straights was pretty biased.
One of the things that amused me about that report when I read it was realizing that while I am often aroused by actual women, most mainstream straight porn does nothing for me.
I can only assume that many straight men find porn more arousing than actual women, since the whole point of porn is to be a superstimulus, so there seems to be a difference there.
One of the numerous problems with that study. I consider it completely worthless.
Wait, what? No! Not at all! The point of porn is to help you when you don’t have an actual woman to have sex with. It’s never as arousing as an actual woman. It’s like a microwave dinner when you’re hungry but don’t have the time or money to cook or go to a restaurant.
I didn’t mean ”...to have sex with.” I meant actual women. Who can sometimes be arousing even if I’m not having sex with them. As can men. Others’ mileage may, of course, vary.
I suspect mileage varies a lot here. But I’m a little confused. You’re comparing porn, which depicts people without clothes, in explicitly sexual positions and acts, with people in general? With clothes on? Do you mean just someone walking down the street? Obviously someone without clothes, or in a sexual position or activity, is generally going to be more arousing than a person in a non-sexual situation: this seems like it would be fairly robust across all genders and orientations.
Do you mean arousal from women in non-sexual situations? Or do you mean arousal from women in sexual situations but not from photos or videos or textual depictions of women in sexual situations? Or is this just about “mainstream” vs. alternative depictions? I’m curious what you mean.
I’ve noticed that people critical of porn (I don’t mean you) have a very narrow view of what “mainstream” porn is that doesn’t match my experience; it’s very common for someone to complain about porn in general because they object to a few specific things that are only in some porn.
Yes, I was saying that I often find actual women, even those in non-sexual situations, even those wearing clothes on, more arousing than women in porn, depicted without clothes, in explicitly sexual positions and acts.
I hope that clears things up.
I can easily see where this might be an artifact of a relatively narrow porn sample; I’m not especially a connoisseur of porn.
The point of porn is to be as arousing as possible so people want to watch and hopefully pay for it. I doubt that nobody finds it more arousing than having an actual partner, because it can depict things they’re unlikely to be able to see or do with a partner. I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone claiming to find live action porn more arousing than real sex, but 2D complexes appear to be a real thing.
True. Also, sexuality is one area in which...your mileage may vary. It’s a big world. I’m pretty sure that if you looked hard enough, you could find someone for whom X is more arousing than Y for quite a few values of X and Y.
I think I’d split the difference. Porn can’t give you interactivity or a lot of partner stimuli, so it attempts to compensate by superstimulating what it does have access to. It would of course be good for porn producers if they came up with something that was better than actual sex for most people, but thanks to the format’s limited sensory bandwidth that’s probably impossible.
If the Rieger/Chivers/Bailey results are reliable, this might suggest that male bisexuality’s associated with a preference for sexual stimulation other than what straight porn gives you. This ought to be testable, but I don’t know of any studies that have made the attempt.
In the study, 1⁄3 of the men, uniformly across all orientations, had no genital response. Also, 1⁄3 had no subjective response, though I don’t see any indication in the paper whether they were the same people.
(nods) I would also be interested to see what the correlations were between response-to-porn and response-to-people. Lots of interpretations of studies of this sort seem to treat the former as a proxy for the latter, so if it turned out that they were not strongly linked the interpretations might be misleading.
Are those sets disjoint?
I would say, speaking from other bisexual men I know as well as myself, that if bisexuality turned someone off that would in fact reduce their attractiveness, in the general case.
But yeah, we both only have anecdotes at this stage :-)
I’m reminded of coming out as bi to a high-school friend of mine, who allowed after some consideration that he was pretty squicked by the notion, but he saw no particular reason why either one of us should pay much attention to that reaction.
Which I can respect, actually.
Though admittedly it would turn me off in a prospective partner.
Nobody is required to signal their sexual preferences far and wide. That is personal information, to be revealed if and when you deem it appropriate or beneficial. This means that becoming bisexual merely gives you more options, without interfering with your existing options unless you choose to let it change your signalling strategy. That said, humans are notoriously bad at making decisions when burdened with extra choices!
Also, a lot depends on whether the people I am approaching for dates share a social community.
If they do, then if I want to keep control over who becomes aware of my sexual preferences, I need to expend additional effort to prevent that information from traveling through that community… that is, it stops being “private” and starts being “secret.”
This is otherwise known as “being in the closet” in some communities.
Fortunately it is a closet full of beautiful women who you find highly attractive. Such a better closet to be in than the one homosexuals have had to hide themselves in at times. :)
Sure, given a choice between having to keep all of my sexual attractions secret, and only having to keep half of them secret, the latter is far better. Agreed.
Of course, even better is to not have to keep any of them secret, and to instead be able to reveal whatever information about my sexual preferences I choose to reveal without fear of negative consequences.
All of that said: perhaps I’ve lost track of context.
MBlume’s parent comment framed bisexuality as an improvement, and lukeprog warned that there were costs to it. You countered that those costs can be averted by keeping one’s bisexuality secret. But that seems to completely subvert MBlume’s original point… if I’m in the closet about being bisexual, how is that an improvement over being heterosexual?
It seems the choice is, instead, between having your attraction and sexual appreciation mechanism biologically crippled so as to halve the potential partners or to give yourself the option of specialising your signalling as to optimise your chances within a specific target niche or of seeking more diverse experience.
Neutral returns as a worst case makes the point a good one. :)
Well, in my own life, the additional option of living in a social context in which honest signaling about gender-selection with respect to attraction and sexual appreciation doesn’t have especially negative consequences became available, and that has worked pretty well for me.
I’ve lived the “specializing my signaling” lifestyle before; I don’t prefer it. The returns of such signal-specialization can be worse than neutral in some cases.
But if it works for you, that’s great.
Alas, a process by which I can modify myself to broaden the scope of those to whom I am sexually attracted is not available to me—I can’t give testimony either way. But I can always wish for it.
You don’t have to be in the closet with everyone. Just treat it as something personal that you only tell people once you know them and trust them enough, and you’ve gauged their reaction to casual mentions of bisexuality.
Agreed that avoiding keeping just most people from knowing about my relationship preferences isn’t as difficult as keeping everyone from knowing about them.
Of course, as above, even better is to be able to reveal whatever information about my relationship preferences I choose to reveal without fear of negative consequences.
You don’t have to tell them that...
I’ll note that I have personally tried to become bisexual, and it didn’t work. If anyone else has had success in this endeavor, I’d be very interested to hear it.
I strongly prefer heterosexuality on aesthetic grounds. I wonder how common that is.
Is it purely a numbers game though? Most people have this thing nerdy academics call a ‘mate value sociometer’ and they use it to help decide how hot a female to pursue. Of course, this sociometer has to be calibrated, so you really want to be rejected often enough to know where you stand. My point is, it might be better to keep this sociometer in mind (especially since non-neurotypicals tend not to have this instinct), to at first target your proposals to be as informative as possible, and then later on target those girls your mate value can buy. (this is in fact what studies have found neurotypicals to be doing)
It’s not purely a numbers game. However, it really helps if you can interact with a number of people that’s at least in double digits.
Get used to meeting new people. It’s good for you. You grew this great big brain to do chimp-chimp interaction better, after all—you have an aptitude for this sort of thing. MEET MORE PEOPLE!
If someone takes my point as an excuse not to meet people, that person is wrong. Because that is not what it says at all. And also, meeting girls and meeting new people are not quite the same. Though the point does apply to the latter.
Perhaps you are saying people already adjust their expectations in light of their successes and failures, in which case my pointing out that sociometer point does more harm than good.
Sorry, I was speaking more generally of “dating as numbers game”, not disagreeing with you. I find many people who worry about the idea of a “numbers game” see that as a problem rather than an opportunity.
I must note that I am almost pathologically gregarious and outgoing myself, and have an unfortunate habit of offering unhelpful advice on such to those who aren’t—and if I seem to you to have done that, I most sincerely apologise.
Ah ok. I was puzzled I guess as that didn’t seem otherwise very relevant. Yes, thinking of meeting many girls as a special case of meeting many people does make it seem less daunting to me!
I do believe you’ve hit upon an important perspective trick. It’s meeting people. This also allows you to do the “don’t think about it” Zen mind trick.
I’m approximately 97% sure that at least one of the next five people I’ll meet will be a woman.
I’m also approximately 100% sure that at least five of the next five women I’ll meet will be people. :-)
97% seems high. Same sex groups are relatively common. Even if the expected number of women out of the next five people is 2.5 there is probably more than 3% chance of the next five being male.
But then again, more of the people I meet are female than male; I guess those two effects roughly cancel out. Trying to remember when the last few times I met five males in a row were seems to confirm that the number is roughly in the right ballpark. (OTOH, the probability that none of the next five people I met is a man probably is a few times larger than the naive binomial model would predict.)
I mostly agree with this, although I suspect it might be more complicated than a single hot-or-not scale. Like, indie rock chicks are looking for a different kind of dude than cheerleaders are. Both the indie rock chick and the cheerleader might be blazing hot, but they’re going to pick out different boyfriends. So if a guy is making a lot of passes at certain kinds of girls and getting nowhere, perhaps he should consider targeting girls who are closer to his own “type.”
Certainly.
I was just trying to acknowledge caveats. Of which there should be many.
This seems like very good, thorough, general advice. However, I wonder how many of us (heterosexual males reading Less Wrong) have romantic preferences that are as general. I realize that the “reading Less Wrong” part of that descriptor wasn’t specified in the question, but it seems implied.
In general, a heterosexual man might describe the set of his potential romantic partners in the following way: a woman whom he finds physically attractive, with whom he shares interests, and with whom his personality is compatible. (That the woman is currently single is also important for many, including myself, but I recognize that it’s less general than the former three, given the existence of polyamory/fidelity.)
However, for myself, I would add to this a fairly strict qualifier, that the woman is an atheist. I simply don’t feel that I would be able to be emotionally intimate with a woman who holds an irrational, i.e. religious, worldview. Atheist doesn’t necessarily mean rationalist, but religious almost definitely means irrational, i.e. P(rationalist|atheist) >> P(rationalist|religious), and even more so for P(would be open to rationality|atheist). I find it to be a sound heuristic that prevents me from embarking on relationships very likely doomed to failure. I doubt that I am alone among LWers in taking this into account.
Unfortunately, I have found it really damn hard to meet atheist women. I can count on one hand the number I have met in college. A large part of that is that I attend a science/engineering university which has a student body comprised of only ~30% women, but even then, my expectation before entering the university was that a population self-selected for interest in science/engineering would have a larger proportion of atheism than the general population. That expectation was not met by reality, and I recognized that I was confused, but trying to resolve that confusion (see below) didn’t appreciably help my goal of meeting atheist women.
Studies have shown that women tend to be more religious than men. I also hypothesize that women who do select a science/engineering university are more likely to have gone to a private high school (76% of private schools are religious). As women tend to be socialized away from an interest in science, a stronger educational program than exists in the average public school might qualify as a “push” to counter that trend. I have met a fair number of women at this university who went to a religious school, but the sample size isn’t large enough to confirm that hypothesis.
In any case, the problem remains: atheist women seem to be hard to find. The types of general activities you’ve suggested are good for socializing, but unlikely to have a larger-than-average atheist population. Are there activities similarly strong in socializing that would have a larger atheist population?
(Note: I don’t mean to slight the obvious effort you put into this post; it’s just that my own issues on this subject, and I suspect some others’ issues as well, are more involved than just social awkwardness/inexperience.)
So this is an interesting challenge. My first thought is that it’s actually a challenge shared by theists—Mormon men who want a Mormon wife, for example—but these people share a whole social structure (their religious community) that is already working to bring them together. Without this, atheists do face a special hurdle.
Wow, those numbers are high. Yes, when you’re limited to 14 percent of women, general dating strategies become a lot less useful.
Other groups faced with numbers like these have to create (and advertise among themselves!) special spaces for meeting and flirting. (I’m thinking about gay bars now.)
I hope others can suggest more, but the only one I’m coming up with is political activism. If you are in the U.S.A., you could look for events put on through http://secular.org/ or any of the Member Organizations. Even though men are more likely to be atheists, women are more likely to be volunteers, so you may find that the gender balance evens out.
From what I recall, if you filter for “active in atheism/rationalism/secularism” you get an even stronger male skew than if you just filter for “atheist/rationalist/secular” =(
In-person groups too, not just talking about online advocacy?
In that case, I wonder if it might not be worth it to date in the wider pool, with the aim of finding a woman who is open to deconverting. Generally it’s a bad idea to enter a relationship hoping to change the other person, but religion has long been a sort of special case: a lot of LTRs do involve one party or the other converting or at least modifying their religious views.
Otherwise, the numbers on this are just really daunting for atheist men.
I have a dear friend who loves rationality, reads Methods rabidly, quotes ‘That which can be destroyed...’ at the top of her FB profile… and still identifies as Christian. She’s young and has had the kind of sheltered upbringing that makes it possible to actually believe your religion without lots of doublethink.
I expect to have her deconverted within a year or two—I’d have managed by now if we weren’t half a state apart.
I would be interested to know how she responded to, for example, Chapter 39 “Pretending to be Wise, Pt 1”.
I wonder if sending her to this site would help at all?
I suppose I could if I were in a hurry—honestly rather do the job myself in this case.
That seems a little selfish to me.
This strikes me as a very high risk strategy, and probably a low reward one as well. Deconversion tends to take a long time, and even gentle attempts could strain a new relationship. Going by my own experience observing religious deconversions, it’s likely to take months at the lower end, which you could have spent looking for someone else, and there’s a high probability that it simply wouldn’t work out, in which case your time investment is wasted.
The numbers for atheist men aren’t very good, it’s true, but keep in mind that a rationally minded intellectual is filtering rather strongly for atheists simply by looking for partners they’re compatible with.
I recently began dating an old friend with conservative Christian religious beliefs. Obviously, I don’t have the rationalists-only filter that DA has, and I don’t want to deconvert her. (Her personal relationship with Jesus—that is, the mental feelings that she’s constructed around the idea of Christ—are important to her, and I don’t want to destroy that.) Nevertheless, here’s what’s happened:
In conversation with me, she quickly clarified some nagging doubts about the inclusiveness (and other characteristics) of her old, conservative church. She’s started attending a Congregationalist church instead. (For those unfamiliar with Christian denominations in North America, this is as liberal as you can get and still be explicitly Christian). For a while, she even considered attending the Unitarian Universalist church, since I would be willing to join it with her, but in the end she decided that it didn’t fit.
When we started, I expected the relationship to founder on religious differences, but I agreed to give it a shot anyway. And I seem to have affected her religion instead. I’m not sure what this proves, even when restricted to the one example, but it’s been a surprising few months for me.
In my view the ideology matters surprisingly little. Do not make the mistake of choosing your partner for having the right convictions.
Emphasis added to point out the non sequitur.
Also, my “atheist qualifier” is intended to prevent me from choosing a partner with the wrong convictions, not to encourage me to choose one simply for having the right convictions.
If that’s not something you care about in a relationship, by all means don’t concern yourself with it. But if you feel like you have to decide not to care about your partner’s convictions, then it’s a significant issue, and one that’s likely to surface in the future however you try to suppress it.
I meet many people were their religion has little or no practical influence on their daily lives. If you limit your partner search to the LW/similar cluster you might find it problematic to get a suitable partner. And even then ideological similarities are no guarantee for a happy relationship.
Might be interesting to poll what people look for.
Of course ideological similarities aren’t a guarantee of a happy relationship; for me and for many others, they’re necessary, but I know of nobody for whom they’re sufficient.
Dating a person with religious beliefs which do not have a practical influence on their lives, I have tremendous difficulty respecting them. This is not a hypothetical matter, it’s a mistake I’ve learned to avoid. I know people for whom it does not seem to be an issue, but anyone for whom it is is better off taking it seriously than following advice to exercise tolerance.
That sounds like a fair idea for discussion post. I’ll make one later today, unless you feel like doing it first.
Poll made. It’s been downvoted to −1, but hopefully the topic will not turn out to be that unwelcome on net.
That sounds like an exhausting process without a way to judge openness to atheism quickly. It seems like converting from one religion to another would be less jarring than dropping religion altogether, so I’m not sure how much better the numbers would actually become. Also, that sort of pressure seems like it could make the initial uphill climb of a relationship (getting to know the other person) into cliff-scaling.
I think you could suss it out on the first date. You might have to use some trial-and-error—and conversations with other atheist men—in order to come up with the perfect line that raises the question without coming off as overly aggressive, but you can get a pretty good picture of how committed a woman is to her religion just by asking her.
The general advice to people with specific requirements (I admit I’m getting this from Dan Savage’s advice to people with particular sexual fetishes) is to disclose early, but to present it as a bonus rather than an onerous hurdle that must be overcome by potential prospects. So instead of “Just so you know, I have a foot fetish, so being with me means you’re gonna have to be into that” the foot guy would say something like “Your shoes are super hot. I kind of have a thing for feet. Do you like footrubs?”
Following that formula, I think the thing to avoid would be lines like “Just so you know, I don’t date religious wackos.” Maybe something like “I’m an atheist, so I’m always looking for ways to celebrate earthly life on Sunday mornings. Do you like strawberries and mimosas?” That’s just a stab at a formulation that could start the conversation without killing any romantic momentum you’ve got going at that point.
At the least, that advice presents a reasonably positive strategy, which is appreciated. My attempts to be realistic about this issue are certainly prone to drifting into the sort of pessimism that comes from spending my entire undergraduate career single.
Your situation is harder than the norm, it’s true, but it’s not impossible. There are atheist women out there, and you’ll meet them if you’re diligent about being social. It may just take you a little longer. I wish you luck!
Actually just the simple act of trying to book dates on a Sunday morning could give you a quick decision of Christian-or-not.
Or awake-in-the-morning or not.
True :)
But then you don’t actually have to really make real plans for Sunday mornings… just ask if they’re available then and see what they say when turning you down. “Sorry, I’d prefer the afternoon” is different to “Well, if you’d like you can come along to my church group” :)
Not necessarily. There are a fair number of Christians who strongly self-identify as Christian but don’t go to church that regularly (in the US at least there are some very weird patterns. People claim in surveys to be going to church much more frequently than church attendance rates suggest.) This also won’t rule out other common religious groups, such as semi-religious Jews.
Oh certainly—it’s not universal, but more of a first-level filter.
I will look into that, thanks.
The reason to go into environments where you interact with a lot of women isn’t only an issue of having a lot of opportunities. It’s also a matter of practice.
Even if you don’t like to date the woman at a dance class the class will still teach you basic skills about interacting with women.
If you don’t have the practice with regularly interacting with women than you are unlikely to have success when you find a woman who would be a good match because she fulfills your criteria.
But the skills about interacting with women platonically aren’t all of the skills about interacting with women romantically. The infamous so-called “friend-zone”, anyone?
(How comes I’m making a point nearly diametrically opposed to what I said 21 hours ago, anyway?)
The point is a good one. That said, as far as interacting with girls platonically goes dancing is rather far from the most emasculating influence.
I don’t think it makes much sense to seperate skills into platonically/romantically.
If you look at some PUA who goes for a one-night stand “romantic” isn’t the label I would use to describe the interaction. On the other hand it’s a word that I could reasonable use to describe an intimite Bachata dance between two people who just meet.
The ability to be physically intimite with the opposing sex without getting tense is valuable.
In dance the man leads the woman. For a shy male that’s a valuable skill to learn.
Dancing doesn’t teach you everything. It doesn’t teach you having good conversations. The things that it teaches you are still valuable.
In that context, I meant “romantic” as ‘leading to romance’, rather than the colloquial meaning. So I wouldn’t call a dance between two people who aren’t looking to sleep with one another “romantic”.
As was pointed out before in this thread, physically intimate while dancing != physically intimate while having sex. (And ISTM that the latter is the more common meaning of that phrase.)
Does that transfer to domains other than dancing? (And anyway, IME it’s more accurate to say that the more experienced partner leads the less experienced partner. There are certain moves where from the outside it looks like the man is leading, but that’s not necessarily what it feels like from the inside.)
In my scale of “platonic” vs “romantic”, having good conversations is even more platonic than dancing.
Disclaimer: I have taken extremely few dancing classes in my life, extremely few of which were partnered dances. OTOH, when I improvise people often ask me if I’ve been taking classes (but I’m not sure they are serious).
Getting good at sex and getting good at the things that lead to sex are two different things. The problem of nerds isn’t that they have a lot of one-night stands but are bad at sex and therefore the girl doesn’t want to see them after they have sex.
No, I don’t think that many people think that sex is the only action that can be described as physically intimite. While sex is more physically intimite than dancing you can’t conclude that dancing isn’t physically intimite.
You might be right that the stuff that you dance in your first dance lesson isn’t intimite. At the beginning you have to learn to move. When I dance I do have to be aware of the level of intimacy that the girl I’m dancing with is comfortable with.
On the one hand you do have girls that find a lead where the hand of the guy touches their hips too intimite for them. On the other there are girls with whom I can dance in a way where both of our arms are wrapped around each other and the whole body from face, chest, hips and legs touches each other.
I don’t think that you can reasonably deny that dancing with full body contact is intimite.
The man chooses which moves happen at which time. If you are at a beginner class where the techer calls the moves, you know nothing about a dance and the girls who are there haven’t yet learned that they aren’t supposed to lead. It takes some time for a girl to learn to follow just as it takes time for a guy to learn to lead.
I meant A != B as in “A doesn’t imply B or vice versa”. IOW, my point was that dancing doesn’t necessarily lead to sex and sex isn’t necessarily preceded by dancing—especially the kind of dancing taught in classes, as opposed to the kind of dancing people improvise in night clubs. (Let me see if I can find the previous comment about this… EDIT: here.)
I said “more common”, not “only common”, but… [googles for
physical intimacy] Fair enough. But then again, stuff like hugging is also described as physically intimate, so it seems an overly broad concept to use in this context. (For example, I have no problem with being “physically intimate” in this sense with men even though I’m straight; or, women are often “physically intimate” with me in front of their boyfriends/husbands. (OTOH, I realize that there are cultural differences with this kind of stuff and what applies here in Italy needn’t apply in (say) Canada—but these are probably more about where the thresholds are than about the qualitative differences between the ends of the spectrum.))The point is not whether a given English word can be used to label a given behaviour, but whether skills learned in one domain (dance classes) transfer to another (trying to start a relationship). To some extent they do, but they are nowhere near either necessary (I know people in LTRs who pretty much can’t dance at all) or sufficient (see the comment I’m going to link above).
And most women (I guess) haven’t taken many dancing classes, so if you’re taking dance classes to “basic skills about interacting with women [outside the class]”, you can’t rely on a random woman knowing whether or not to lead. (Nor can I see what the big deal about this is—indeed because they don’t know that, they probably won’t particularly care if you follow rather than leading.)
That’s not something I argued.
If you take the average nerd and put him into physically intimicy with a girl he tenses up. It takes time and effort for him to relax.
Romantic chemistry that created in a dance context doesn’t lead with the same probability to sex than the same chemistry outside of a dance context.
It’s still romantic chemistry and when your brain learns to become comfortable with it in one context it can also handle it in other contexts much better.
You can learn the same skill through hugging. Basically you run around with a free hugs sign and do 15 minute hugs with the people who are willing to hold the hug that long.
Dancing isn’t the only way to learn the useful skills that you can learn in dancing. The fact that someone doesn’t dance in no way implies that he hasn’t learned the same skills in other context.
That said a billionaire won’t have much trouble getting into a long-term relationship even if all his skills relating to attracting woman are awful. There nearly nothing that is a necessary condition for getting into a relationship with a woman.
I don’t advocate to rely on anything. There are woman who might lead. If you have however inhibitions to leading yourself you won’t have success when a woman doesn’t lead.
People don’t feel emotions because of the knowledge that they have. Successful leading demonstrates power and power is sexy for evoluationary reasons.
Does it? IME, dancing with someone doesn’t magically make me that much bolder in non-dancing situations than I already was (I can even remember at least one case when it actually made me more awkward), and I’d expect the effect to be even smaller if we were made to dance together in a class than if we did so on our own accord. I guess YMMV.
That would mainly teach me resistance to boredom (and it would likely kind-of make me look silly, though that’s not necessarily a negative because counter-signalling). Probably not the best use of time.
Then why learn them by dancing (and in dance classes, rather than (say) night clubs), of all things? If it isn’t the only way, it’s unlikely a priori that it’s the most efficient way.
(I was going to say “if a billionaire won’t have much trouble getting into a long-term relationship, then making money is a skill related to attracting to women”, but the billionaire might just have inherited it or something.)
You only had a few lessons and that alone doesn’t have much of an effect on your interaction with woman in general.
If that’s true and you actually would find it boring you lack in the ability in the realm of perceiving the other person. Dancing helps with the perception part. For most people with asberger there a lot of anxiety that comes up during the process that can be worked through.
I know multiple guys who thought that a single 15 minute hug with another guy was an experience that was very worthwhile to overcome some of their anxiety.
The point I want to make is that two people who are both successful with woman might be successful due to different skills. One very strong skill allows you to succeed even if you have some weak points.
Is you dance something like Salsa, Bachata, Tango or Swing as a man you need to take dancing lessons before you go into night clubs where you can dance those dances. Once you moved actually can dance, I would advocate to go to the night clubs to also dance outside of lessons.
Why structured partner dance over a regular nightclub with pop music? Approaching in a nightclub enviroment is more likely to lead to stressful rejections. Those rejections tell your brain that it’s right to show anxiety in those situations.
Why do I recommend it over the hugging route? Signing up and going to a dance class is relatively easy compared to print a free hug sign and go around with it. People have more resistance to doing the free hug exercise. Getting a stranger to practice a 15 minute hug isn’t as straightforward either.
I wasn’t talking about dance classes, I was talking about ‘improvised’ dancing—as I expected the second part of the sentence to make clear (but on re-reading it I can see it wasn’t as clear as I thought). Why would lessons have more of an effect than improvisation? I’d expect it to be the other way round, especially given that you mentioned the “chooses which moves happen at which time” thing before.
Or maybe I have other things to do with 15 minutes than hugging a random stranger. Opportunity costs, anyone?
Yes, but wouldn’t that apply more to improvised dancing than to beginners’ dancing classes?
My AQ as measured by the online test linked to in the latest LW survey (FWIW) was 25, and still I usually feel little to no anxiety while dancing; if anything, I usually feel less anxiety while dancing than the rest of the time.
False dichotomy. Those aren’t the only two places you can dance.
So, when you said “the fact that someone doesn’t dance in no way implies that he hasn’t learned the same skills in other context” you were thinking of going around wearing free hugs signs? That sounds even less plausible to me.
That’s a completely different objection than saying that the activity is boring. If you change around your objections in that way it’s likely that you are in the process of rationalizing some fear of intimicy.
What do you mean when you say “improvised dancing”? Do you already have the skills to spend a significant amount of time dancing closely with a women in nightclub settings?
Isn’t the feeling that you could do something more fun with your time what boredom is?
For such a broad definition of “intimacy” as yours, I’m pretty sure I have very little fear of intimacy itself.
e.g. this (I’m the tall guy with glasses and a black T-shirt). (That was over a year ago, I may have gotten better—or worse—since.)
What amount of time would you consider to be significant, and are you talking about women I already know or about strangers? (Also, “in nightclub settings” isn’t a terribly homogeneous category IME, women tend to be fussier in some of those than in others.)
I don’t advocate doing it primarily for fun but to learn something. Sometimes good learning experiences are boring.
At the beginning of the video you are touching the hand of a girl but expect for the part where you spin her it doesn’t look like you have much contact with her. When it comes to the girl on the end you have a bit more contact but not much more.
If dancing like that feels like you aren’t leading the girl it’s because you actually aren’t leading.
Most of the time that this video goes you aren’t touching a woman. If you are taking a dancing lesson you are basically all the time touching.
Let me give you a link to a beginner kizomba lesson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbYChD5b9VE Watch that video and compare the amount of physically intimacy that you have in your video with the women and the amount of physical intimicy that you see in that beginner kizomba lesson. Some beginner kizomba lesson might be a bit less intimite but that level of intimicy can exist in beginner kizomba lessons.
If you do a lot of that kind of improvised dancing that you showed in your video, I would recommend you to take Bachata lessons over Kizomba lessons. Beginner bachata lessons are a bit less intimite than beginner kizomba lessons but you learn a bunch of things that will improve your improvised dancing.
Once you learn Bachata decently it looks like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y5YAdHfT9Q&list=PL07372236D9BBFDBD . That an average dance that you could see between two strangers who just meet at a decent social Bachata event.
(I often do have more contact than that (depending on what the music is like, who the woman is, and my mood), though I’m not sure whether anyone has shot any decent videos of that. OTOH, I’m pretty sure I’m a lot clumsier than the people in your videos.)
Thanks for the feedback (people usually say that I am doing great, but probably they just say that in order not to discourage me—or maybe in a few cases because they can’t tell the levels above theirs apart¹) and for the pointers, anyway.
Try improvising something on the E♭ minor pentatonic scale (aka “the black keys of the piano”) in a room full of non-musicians, look at their faces, and you’ll know what I mean.
It always depends on what your comparision is. If you manage to let go, move to the beat and visbily have fun while doing it you might be better than 50% of the people who do improvised dancing at a nightclub.
And if you manage to implement FizzBuzz in a couple minutes you might be better than 50% of the people who have a comp sci degree.
The standard threshold of non-crappiness is the 90th percentile, not the 50th… :-)
To get to the 90th, presumably you have to pass through the 50th.
Nevertheless I’m adding that to my fortune file so that I will be regularly reminded, because it really is important.
Wouldn’t that depend on where you started from?
Sometime between when you read my comment and when I read your reply, I edited my comment to make it less harsh, e.g. replacing “tsuyoku naritai” with a smile; maybe I should edit it back? :-)
The point is that whether you are good depends on the people to which you compare yourself.
I danced Salsa/Bachata for the last 4 years 2-3 nights per week. That means that I will see different things in your dancing than the average person that you meet.
I do improvise within my dancing and deviate from dance school pattern. I’m still not the person who regularly tries to dance in nightclubs to pop music or the kind of music that exists at the place of your video.
How does that mesh with “people don’t feel emotions because of the knowledge that they have”? :-)
(FWIW, one of the people who sees me dancing much of the time (the girlfriend of one of the karaoke jockeys in that video) and sometimes compliments me, and has also danced with me in nightclubs a few times, is a belly dancing instructor, but that may be too different from anything else to be relevant; her sister is a Bollywood dance instructor, and also usually compliments me dancing, but that’s generally in the context of thanking me for being the only male in this thing she’d organized and/or of trying to convince me to take classes with her again, so she might be gilding the pill on purpose.)
As far as I understand belly dancing isn’t something where the guy has to lead the girl. There, the criteria of what good dancing equals is different.
I must have misunderstood something, because you appeared to be claiming or hinting that:
the reason why people are reluctant to pursue long-term relationships with me is that I’m bad at some particular skill;
that skill is an integral part of certain styles of dance, so by taking dance classes I would get better at that skill; there aren’t many more efficient ways of practising that skill short of stuff like wearing a “free hugs” sign and hug a stranger for 15 minutes straight;
when someone bad at that skill is dancing (any style of dance), that is obvious to people’s elephants/System 1s and comes across as unsexy; on the other hand, their riders/System 2s won’t notice there’s anything wrong unless they are experts at one of those particular styles of dancing specifically;
more than 50% of people in my demographic are even worse than me at that skill, but this doesn’t mean they’ll never get a relationship, because they can compensate by e.g. being insanely rich.
This hypothesis is already so complicated that it’d take lots of evidence to come up with in the first place, and what evidence I have seems to point against it; there isn’t much of it I can communicate short of divulging anecdotes about potentially identifiable individuals, so suffice it to say that:
ISTM that many fewer than 50% of people my age in my geographic area are single (though I’m not sure my sample is unbiased), and hardly any of them makes money by the truckload or anything similar;
[ETA: I haven’t seen any people wearing “free hugs” signs in years, and the last few times I did it was in somewhat unusual situations (e.g. carnival parties);]
people usually do have some idea as to whether something is sexy, even though it might not always be clear to them why;
why would it be long-term relationships that this emotions thing would hinder me with? That sounds almost exactly backwards—I mean, if Alice doesn’t get horny when around Bob because he comes across as tense, I wouldn’t expect her to lose interest after a couple dates or so: I would expect her to never ask him out in the first place. The type of ‘elephant’ responses you seem to be talking about generally act on the timescales of minutes, not months.
(Probably I’m just reading too much in what you said, though.)
In this epistemic state, taking expensive, time-consuming, and possibly status-lowering Salsa classes on the off chance that it improves my chances to get a LTR would feel a little bit like giving money to Pascal’s mugger. [ETA: (More specifically, I suspect that the low-hanging fruits could be picked by watching videos on YouTube or something and practising during my spare time with people I already know, and any further improvements that the high-hanging fruits would yield would be way too small to be worth the bother.)]
[paragraph deleted]
I’m not arguing that feeling no anxiety to physical contact and having the self confidence to lead woman in general is sufficient to be good at partner dancing.
I’m rather arguing that being good at partner dancing usually leads to feeling no anxiety to physical contact and having the self confidence to lead woman.
In PUA literature there the idea that making a girl horny while at a club, asking her for her phone number and then calling a day later to make a date is not the way to go. Having the girl in a state of being attracted, comfortable and connected is supposed to be more conductive to getting a date than the girl feeling horny.
I think the problem is that you model being attracted and being horny as the same thing when the two are different categories for myself. You don’t have a mental model in this domain with a lot of categories and therefore it’s hard to follow the points I’m making. (Just for the record, I don’t think having a mental model with a lot of categories is necessary to have success with woman)
I don’t think you have full Aspergers. I think you are ‘in your head’, but that’s not a label that I would expect to be well understood on LessWrong. When on LessWrong I rather try to use categories that are popular on LessWrong.
You are probably the kind of person who thinks that they have a body instead of who thinks that they are their body. You probably think that you are your brain and the rest is just there to serve your brain.
On the other hand I do think that your reluctance to wear a free-hug sign is purely based on a irrational fear of physical contact. Wearing the sign is the rational thing to do.
I choose the kind of language I use depending on my audience. I would use different lanague when discussing with a mental health specialist. A mental health specialist probably also wouldn’t take you seriously when you talk about giving money to Pascal’s mugger.
I’ve just noticed that you yourself in a different thread recommend a course of action for a couple finding themselves in the guy-is-too-nervous scenario which is IME vastly cheaper, quicker, and more effective than for the male to have practised partnered dance¹ while fully clothed and not kissing or anything else sexual, or hugged random people he’s not necessarily sexually attracted to. (Granted, I haven’t practised partnered dance by paying an instructor or hugged random people by wearing free-hugs signs, but I can’t see why that would make much of a difference.)
Am I missing something?
That can actually backfire in the very short run (a couple hours) if (say) the guy is sleep-deprived, as he’ll be more tired, which IME doesn’t exactly help.
There are two different problems:
1) How can a girl effectively interact with a guy who’s nervous?
2) How can a guy get confident?
So by “confidence” you didn’t mean ‘lack of nervousness’, but the epistemic sense instead? Makes sense, but I can’t imagine how being sure about how to dance Salsa would help people in the bedroom. ISTM that only a tiny part of the procedural knowledge needed for the former would transfer to the latter.
No, I’m not hung up on the difference between “confidence” and ‘lack of nervousness’.
In focusing on the difference in what the man can do versus what the woman can do to fix the situation.
In most cases there’s physical interaction before being in the bedroom.
Holding hands would be one example. It’s not something that platonic friends usually do. If a guy tries to transition from not holding hands to holding hands he could be nervous about it.
The kind of body contact that happens during dancing would condition the person to be less nervous about holding hands.
Holding hands is an example. I’m not saying that it happens in every interaction, but usually their physical contact between a guy and girl that exceeds the normal contact of a platonic friendship before the two go to the bedroom.
Er… Why? You realize that the man and the woman can communicate with each other, and thence ‘trade’ (in a LWesque general abstract sense)? If it would take months for me to achieve something but minutes for her to achieve the same, it’d be most daft for us to do the former. (And it feels off to call what you mentioned in the other thread ‘something the woman can do’—it’s not like the man isn’t playing any role; it sounds as weird to me as calling walking ‘something my legs can do’ rather than ‘something I can do’.)
It depends on gender and culture. For example, physical contact tends to be closer among females or between females and males than among males, closer in warm countries than in cold countries, and closer among left-wingers than among right-wingers. (I grew up mostly hanging around with left-leaning Italian females, and as a result I occasionally would come across as touchy when interacting with right-wingers, males, or northern Europeans.)Yes it would, but if someone gets nervous at the thought of even just holding hands with someone else (other than due to epistemic uncertainty about whether the latter would like it etc.), then I guess that what the former mainly needs isn’t a Salsa instructor, it’s a psychologist.
Sure it does, but AFAIK it’s not like dancing classes teach how to make out, either.
In that case you might not that profit much from become more touchy.
You might still profit from improving your dancing abilites as you dance frequently. Salsa might not be optimal here. Salsa has the issue that there a pause on 4 and 8, which isn’t easy to lead. Merengue and Bachata moves are easier to throw into the kind of dancing you do in the video you showed.
Framing a romantic interaction as a trade, cheapens the romantic interaction for a lot of people. If you try to handle your relationship with a woman on an abstract level instead of handling it on a emotional level that significantly decreases your pool of potential mates.
Making a trade on an abstract level doesn’t make anyone feel horny.
A woman cares about how the interaction with you makes her feel. If all your interaction is on an abstract level she likely won’t feel the kind of emotions that she thinks are a requisite to starting a relationship with you.
I’m not against open communication but you should always understand what you are communicating. Communicating your desires in a way that isn’t needy is not something that easy.
Actually these days I usually only dance once or twice a week, and sometimes even less than that.
That’s not what I meant. I meant ‘trade’ as in, the partners jointly trying to fulfil each other’s wishes, rather than each one only thinking about themself. That doesn’t require suppressing emotions.
So what? We’re talking about long-term relationships, not hooking up with as many distinct people as possible. See the “Mean and Variance” section of this.
You don’t say?
If something makes us both happy, why should we give a damn how likely anyone else would be to like it? It’s not like there are sex auditors watching us or anything.
It also depends on who the listener is. My new girlfriend and I don’t seem to be having much trouble with that so far.
So by “confident” you don’t mean ‘not nervous’?
Came across this discussion accidentally, but it fascinates me because I’m “in my head”, have some Asperger’s-like characteristics, have a lot of anxiety around physical contact, particularly dislike dancing and have in fact made my date leave a dancing event early because I couldn’t make myself do it any longer, etc...but I’m a girl. And I can get dates pretty easily. (They usually aren’t very fun for me, though).
This discussion made me realize that if I were male, but otherwise unchanged, I might not be able to get dates easily. This confuses me. I’m curious as to what you think the difference is in the male-female dynamic.
And that’s why I think “repository” threads belong in Main. That would have been much less likely to happen if this thread had been in Discussion.
Have you tried small amounts of alcohol, and/or mindfulness meditation?
What do you mean “otherwise unchanged”, same level of attractiveness broadly construed (to the extent that this makes sense), or same percentile of attractiveness broadly construed within your gender and age group?
Yeah, being the other biological sex is complicated, but a roughly equivalent statement might be “If she could (convincingly) present herself as male and attempted to get dates with women, she expect to find it much harder than she does getting dates with men while presenting as female.”
Same percentile, I guess?
ISTM that the n-th percentile man is less attractive to women than the n-th percentile woman is to men (at least for n not very close to 100), and as a result has less ‘bargaining power’, if you will.
I think “getting dates” isn’t the goal for most people. The question is whether you get into relationships with guys that fulfill your criteria of being good mates.
I would guess that they would be more fun for you if you overcome your anxieties around physical contact.
I think that you do can overcome some of it by taking dancing classes.
If you are a pretty girl than many man are willing to chase you and wait some time till you are ready. At the same time a guy that’s empathic is less likely to ask you for another date if you don’t enjoy the first date.
You’re right, this is a different problem. Which is still unsolved for me.
I have had a guy go to fairly epic lengths to do this. We had what I think most people would call an awesome relationship afterwards, and lived together for some time...but a year and a half later, when we broke up, I basically wasn’t upset at all and actually got a happiness boost from having my own space and better sleep again. If I was upset, it was because “what, I put all those months of effort in, and I don’t even get a partner to have kids with?”
So yeah, unsolved.
I think you would probably profit from going to a Salsa course. While doing it keep in mind that you want to enjoy physical contact but don’t get so close that it makes you uncomfortable.
At the beginning it would probably be good to just ask a male friend that you know and with whom you are comfortable to take a Salsa class with you.
Unlike Asperger’s syndrome, Pascal’s mugging isn’t something that’s got to do with mental health, so your comparison is invalid. On the other hand, decision theorists wouldn’t take me seriously either, so your point stands.
You don’t say? :nicholascage:
Ah. If that’s what you mean by “being attracted” (myself, I’d usually call that “liking”), then I think that there are tons of things that have a waaaay larger effect than anything one could learn easily learn by formal dance classes but not otherwise, though it depends on the person (for example, certain people seem to be attracted to intelligence, others repelled).
That much I do usually agree, though it varies on whether I’m sleep-deprived, whether I’ve been drinking, how much and what I’ve been reading lately, and other factors. (In particular, I think I’m much less “in my head” when I’m with people I’m at ease with, which is a proper superset of the people I’m willing to date long-term.)
FWIW, I’m the kind of person who thinks that what “I” means depends on the context, so whether I am my body or my brain isn’t even a well-defined question (both literally and metaphorically).
Even taking in account status signalling? (A way to make that moot would be to wear such a sign somewhere I don’t expect anyone I know, or anyone who knows anyone I know and is likely to talk about that, to see me.)
I don’t know the company that you keep. Most people I personally care about impressing wouldn’t see it as low status.
If someone tells me: “I read about this free hug thing and then I tried it out”, what does that tell me about the person? He’s signalling that his adventurous and willing to do things that are a bit outside of the social norm that produce good feelings for other people.
Doing creepy pickup approaches can be a low status signal if people you know get wind of it. I don’t see that problem with running around with a free hug sign.
How about you ask one of your female friends whether they would think less or more of someone who did the “free hug” thing you read about on the internet? Does she thinks it’s cool?
I mean what do you do for signaling high-status? Playing golf?
I seem to have a vague recollection of someone in one of my social groups watching a video (or something) of some guy doing the free hugs thing, and commenting something to the effect that (loosely paraphrasing) he must be a loser pathetically looking for pretexts to convince girls to hug him who otherwise wouldn’t; and indeed, very few people seemed eager to hug him. (I can’t remember more details about that.) Looking back at all the times I remember people wearing such signs, they were almost always males, usually not terribly attractive, and often in religious or political associations; none of these sounds high-status to me, if by “status” we mean social power rather than structural power. And the only times they seemed to be received well was during New Year’s/carnival/similar celebrations, where ISTM it’s also socially acceptable to ask random people for hugs who are not wearing free-hug signs.
I dunno; extrapolating from the closest things to that that did happen to me, they would either applaud my boldness or excuse me because creeping each other out is something people (especially when drunk) sometimes do by accident and it doesn’t mean they are evil. Unless you have in mind values of “creepy” sufficient for the bouncers to kick me out of the club, but even then IME people I already know will react with sympathy, not disgust.
The last time I mentioned to a female friend something about me sometimes getting anxious when around people and trying to overcome that, she was like ‘what the hell are you talking about, you’re one of the most laid-back people I know’ (incidentally, the same person said something similar when I said I wasn’t that good at dancing and was trying to get better at it). You know, people usually are reluctant to criticize their friends, and while I try to indicate that I operate under Crocker’s rules that often only goes so far. (I know that’s not exactly what you suggested me to ask, but I’m under the impression that in such contexts “someone” would be so obvious an euphemism that it would defeat the point.)
Mostly, stuff like singing, dancing (but not paying people money to do that, except occasionally for night club cover charges), drinking a lot but still functioning enough for stuff like this, dressing extravagantly (but not particularly expensively), telling people about my travels abroad, or posting witticisms and photos on Facebook. Why?
Hell no. That sounds expensive, posh, and not terribly fun. And not the kind of thing I’d likely be good at. :-)
“Free hugs” signs are also a fairly common feature at anime conventions. Many of the people I’ve seen with them have been cute girls.
Never been to one of those, but I guess that I would feel much less out-of-place wearing such a sign at an anime convention (conditional on me not feeling out-of-place at the convention without the sign) than in a street downtown. (Though now that I try to think of it more in near mode, even the latter would depend on the time of the day and my blood alcohol content. Hmmm.)
“He” is the operating word. The fox and the sour grapes.
I’m not saying that everyone who does PUA is creepy but there are people who persue it in a way that alinates friends. I can understand why someone might not want to be seen by people he knows when he’s doing random cold approaches on the street.
I think that in both domains that you will get more status over the long term if you invest in professional training which costs money to build your skills.
I think you will get more status over the long-term by building your skills as effectively as possible than by self handicapping.
I think that the person who commented about him was female, though I don’t remember for sure.
Why not? IME wingmen provide social proof. (Though there are cultural differences from place to place—for example, I would do that in the town where I study now but not where I grew up, as most of the population of the latter respond to random cold approaches on the street by frowning at you then looking away.)
Yes, but 1) I’m already 26, so I dunno how much sense it still makes to invest in “the long term” in this kind of things, and 2) the difference would be only noticed by people who are themselves sufficiently high-status in those domains (I’ve already had several people who asked me where I took singing classes and seemed surprised where I told them that I didn’t), so I’m not sure the game is worth the candle given that I’m not looking for a professional career in singing. (I might try to take singing and/or dancing classes next year if I’m not as strapped for time as now, but it’s not a priority.)
How does that mesh together with “people don’t feel emotions because of the knowledge that they have”? (not an entirely rhetorical question)
(I’m trying to recall whether that one guy I know who dances salsa regularly has ever seen me dancing—I’m not sure, and anyway, I don’t trust his judgements about me to be unbiased, given that I know that there’s such a thing as the halo effect and I’ve repeatedly heard, from several different people, that he’s always telling people at parties how I was the best student in the mathematical physics class where he was a TA in the past freakin’ decade.)
(One person who sees me dance much of the time (she’s the girlfriend of one of the karaoke guys in the bar in the video I linked), and has also danced with me in a nightclub a few times—she’s a belly dancing instructor, which may be too different from anything else. Her sister is a Bollywood dancing instructor (from whom I once took a few classes), and she’s also always complimenting me; anyway, in case this is relevant to anything, she incorrectly thought that I had spent lots of time rehearsing for this (I’m the male one) while I had actually spent maybe 10 minutes—so I guess that’s the halo effect and/or gilding the pill to avoid discouraging me.)
Not in my experience, except in a very degenerate sense. There seems to be some threshold of entertainment below which I’m inclined to describe my state as bored; above that threshold, I may not be having as much fun as possible, but that’s not the same thing at all.
[citation needed]
It’s probably a little bit easier if you don’t live in the U.S.; the U.S. is unusually religious when compared to other First World countries.
From reading your whole comment, it seems this:
would be the easiest bit to change to remove the problem from your life.
I’m not interested in a relationship in which I can’t interact honestly with the woman, because I wouldn’t find it to be fulfilling. I’d rather be single than have to tiptoe around my romantic partner’s irrational beliefs. Changing that implies either ceasing to care about rationality, or dramatically lowering my expectations for a relationship. Neither of those sounds particularly appealing.
Are you suggesting that a non-religious person would have no irrational beliefs to tiptoe around? This seems unlikely.
Are you suggesting that if you didn’t tiptoe around religious beliefs that would be a problem? Because it seems that religious people are extra-resilient in their beliefs, so that might be less of an issue than you fear.
Are you suggesting that it isn’t possible to have a relationship where one person is religious and another atheist without them having to fight about it or lie about it? That your relationships must have zero tolerance and absolute agreement on all points?
No, but a religious person is definitely going to have such beliefs.
Yes, I am. It’s not a matter of resilience in beliefs; telling my significant other that I can’t take their opinion on [evolution/gay marriage/abortion/insert religiously-tinted issue of your choice] at all seriously doesn’t sound like a recipe for a harmonious relationship.
It’s not possible for me, because I believe atheism is the rational position and religious belief is objectively unjustified. I don’t think the idea that relationships between religious and nonreligious people are unlikely to succeed is an uncommon one; I’ve had religious friends express agreement with it.
This is a straw man argument, as I did not make such a statement.
Many people are religious without really examining the consequences of their beliefs. Also many people have religious beliefs that do not cause them to think irrationally about evolution, gay marriage, or abortion. I would expect many of these people to move toward atheism during a long-term relationship with a LessWronger.
Yes, I’ve made that argument for abortion. However, that generally doesn’t stop such people from being extremely convinced of their beliefs. I haven’t had any success changing someone’s mind about abortion with the aforementioned argument, despite how obvious it becomes that the person is merely acting out instructions without thinking about them.
Those were meant as examples, not a definitive list of topics. There are very few people whose religious beliefs don’t cause them to think irrationally about some important issue.
I understand that, but I would be setting myself up for disappointment to expect that from any specific romantic partner who fell into that category.
I realized this, but there seems to be a cluster in personspace of theists who are no less rational about the concepts on your list than the average atheist. If there are any topics that even these theists are irrational about, can you give examples?
Good point.
To be honest, I really haven’t met enough theists in that cluster to be very confident about any examples. I can see the matter of church attendance (in general, in terms of the course of the relationship if it moves toward marriage, and later in terms of raising children) being an issue. It’s not necessarily something that will come up right away, but I would see the specter of it hovering overhead. There’s also the irrationality of religious beliefs themselves, e.g. the idea that God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, or the idea that Jesus performed miracles.
There are, in fact, plenty of couples who have diametrically opposed ideas on politics or religion. You just need to either a) agree to not discuss it or b) be willing to honestly debate and challenge each other without getting upset.
I agree that you should interact honestly and not tiptoe around what you think, but that doesn’t mean you have to agree on everything, even religion.
For what it’s worth, as irrational as religion is, I’m willing to bet that any atheist here has equally irrational ideas that they stick with.
Any atheist here, and equally irrational? That’s a bet I’d take.
It’s one thing to disagree with a person on a number of points, and another thing to be unable to respect their epistemology. On difficult matters, where it’s hard to locate an error, you can consider another person’s reasoning sound to respectable standards without agreeing with their conclusions (we’re only human after all,) and on matters of opinion, disagreement does not necessarily imply conflict of epistemology. Religion falls into neither category.
I used to be open to relationships with religious individuals, but eventually I came to the realization that I had been putting more effort into convincing myself that I was tolerant than being realistic about my preferences. I couldn’t be happy with such a relationship beyond the extremely short term.
Desrtopa makes the main points below; I’d like to add:
Even accepting that premise, the difference is that I’m willing to update my map. If a religious person had the same willingness, ey already would no longer be religious.
Could you be comfortable with an agnostic? That would expand your pool somewhat.
Yes, most likely. I don’t see much of a difference between agnosticism and atheism in practice. If a person doesn’t know if God exists (agnostic), ey probably won’t hold an active belief in God (atheist). There are exceptions to that, of course, but in a minority of cases.
Have you tried using OkCupid? It allows you to filter by religion, and it appears to be the preferred dating site among Less Wrongers, and possibly young intellectuals in general. We already have a thread dedicated to optimizing your profile for positive attention, so it may worth trying out.
I haven’t ventured into online dating, but if I do, I will keep OkCupid in mind.
Thanks, this is what an informative answer looks like.
Even better than book groups, though, are dance classes.
Amen to that. I’d add a slight caution that chemistry generated on the dancefloor can sometimes just be about the dancing, and telling when it is more than that is possibly an advanced skill. So, as this Mefi comment says, don’t push your luck on the dancefloor itself.
Workaround: ask after the class or when you’re standing around chatting (assuming you don’t dance all the time). Don’t be the guy who asks everyone in turn: the women talk to each other :-) EDIT: I elaborate on what I mean by this below...
This has mostly frightened me off so far. I’ve been tentatively pushing at it the last couple weeks.
Perhaps I should amend that to “don’t be obviously indiscriminate in a sleazy way”. The bad thing isn’t finding lots of people attractive, it’s apparently caring nothing for them as a person (which is about having had no conversational interction with them before asking them out, some small amount of buildup is necessary, though as siduri says, if you’re a decent chap, it’s probably less than you think) or alternatively appearing desperate (which is about demeanor, I think). Things I’ve heard remarked upon have been bemusement at dinner invites following a dance with a stranger with no prior conversation, or demeanor problems.
If you actually like more than one person and have talked to the people concerned a bit, I don’t see the harm.
(There’s usually a niche for being the confident guy who flirts a lot with absolutely everyone: you get a name for yourself, but it’s more as the loveable rogue than the creepy guy. That’s possibly an advanced skill, though.)
Bonus link: only try these moves with a consenting partner ;-)
Don’t let it. I actually disagree with the original advice for this reason: any benefit you get is likely to be outweighed by the additional anxiety from worrying what other people think.
My general take on this is the opposite: go ahead and ask many people if you’re interested. Don’t worry about what they think. Most of them won’t care or mind anyway, as long as you’re not rude or hostile about it. There’s nothing wrong with asking out a lot of people.
In fact, this is a common internal obstacle to asking people out. A lot of guys seem to have the idea that it’s somehow wrong or dirty to do so, as if they were being the bad guy by expressing interest in someone.
This can backfire if you live in a small town.
Wow, you really made an effort to understand the male perspective.
The auto-formatting has changed my #2 to a (duplicate) #1--can anyone tell me how to fix that?
If each list item consists of multiple paragraphs, your source code should look like this:
except replace the “#” characters with spaces.
Alternatively, you can defeat automatic numbered list formatting like this.
Great comment, by the way.
Thank you!
I think dates are… well… dated. Maybe they still do them in the US Heartland, but on the coasts people just hook up.
I think it’s more that the word is dated. People still spend time together getting coffee to get to know each other. It’s just not called a “date” because that sounds so 1950s.
Dating is for people who have trouble hooking up without making their intentions explicit.
YMMV. “You’re hot, but I’m really quite keen on knowing if I can bear to be around you for a few hours” can be a good thing to establish.
I’m in San Francisco, and people date here.