maycocksean said:
I found out that her roomate was a good friend of mine and that both of them would be coming to my house that Saturday for lunch (I'd invited the roomate and told her she could "bring a friend.") That Saturday Girl #2 and I talked for 11 hours straight, and we were dating within two weeks. And the rest as they say is history.
dinner dates with mutual friend as buffer
That's how we met also, or more correctly got to know each other--and it's a good thing too, since we're both quiet, "passive" enough people that it probably wouldn't have happened without an extrovert there to facilitate things, even though the attraction was already there.
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I don't know that there's a "solution" to the fact that, as BonosSaint put it, sexual validation (through getting "noticed") is a primal need for most of us, and that it can really hurt to go without it for a long while. I don't really understand how anyone with both male and female friends could
not notice that people of both sexes experience this, even if men are less forthcoming about it, as they've generally been raised to be. But as I said earlier, I do think it's true that women tend to be socialized to value sexual interest from men above all else where validation is concerned, and that IS unhealthy--men tend to get a little more ego mileage from the respect of their own kind, and IMO, that's a quality worth encouraging in our daughters. There are right ways and wrong ways to go about this though, and I don't see how it helps young women to tell them Well if you haven't gotten a date in awhile, that must be because men are passing you up en masse because they only brake for cover girls. If you actually swallow that, you're going to wind up with a warped and unhealthy view of men, and if you don't, well then you're probably going to wind up beating yourself up over whatever other "deficiency" supposedly explains it instead--you're not funny enough, chatty enough, sweet enough or whatever. I mean, it's fine and healthy to want to look good, make an effort to smile and show enthusiasm when talking to people etc., but not in a context of desperately trying to fashion yourself into some kind of one-size-fits-all, slam-dunk attractiveness package, because there truly isn't one. (Not that men don't make the same mistake; they do, only it's usually less of a one-size-fits-all mistake than a trying-to-pack-too-many-personas-into-your-bag-of-pickup-tricks mistake...in the long run, you're better off learning to just be yourself and come what may, trite though that sounds.)
Also, I do find some of these "A great personality is all that matters to me, that's always so attractive"-type professions to ring a bit hollow. Haven't you ever had a male friend who you genuinely considered a really good guy, kind, smart, nice-looking, the perfect boyfriend for someone maybe...only not you, because for whatever random inscrutable reason, you
just weren't attracted to him? I find it hard to believe that there are many women who could honestly answer "No" to that. And there's nothing to be ashamed of in it--that's just reality; attraction doesn't work that way.
Now if you've got a track record of repeatedly choosing people with whom things end in disaster,
then maybe you need to be a little more self-critical about why you're making the choices you are...and, ummm, there's a problem I can really relate to from my own pre-marriage dating history, lol. But that's really a very different issue. I think probably the best advice anyone ever gave me about longterm relationships was, "Choose someone whose faults you can live with, and who can live with your faults." And for me at least, learning to think realistically about the *second* part of that took many years. What tended to strike me as "ideal," appealing, sexy, and therefore "right for me" when I was 18 turned out to be, largely, wrong--
not in some general sense (the "ideal" qualities I prioritized really WERE good ones, for example) but in the sense that realistically, who
I am also imposes certain needs, as well as certain limits, on what kinds of qualities anyone who can "handle" me for long needs to have (or not have, at least not in too great an amount). It may not sound very romantic and perhaps it isn't, but romance isn't everything where things worth holding onto are concerned, necessary though it is.
Originally posted by AtomicBono
All my guy friends (of which I have many) seem so confident, whether single or taken.
They're not. Well, unless you have a HIGHLY atypical group of male friends. It's just not "cool" or acceptable for men to show their insecurities in most social situations, unless perhaps it's the wisecrackingly-self-deprecating kind of thing. And it doesn't fit too well with the whole expectation to be The Pursuer with women, either--which is, realistically, still the way things get started most of the time (as evinced by pretty much this entire thread; everything's couched in the metaphor of women passively waiting to be noticed, whether that fully fits anyone's reality or not). Acting confident
can have the effect of making you somewhat more confident in reality, kind of like the way smiling more can sometimes make you feel happier--probably because it affects how people respond to you. But this can come at a price.
Most men loosen up a bit about this as they age though (just as most women become a bit less obsessed with their looks). I remember noticing this expectation in myself when I managed a bookstore back in grad school and was training new employees--I found that I became annoyed much more quickly with the few male trainees who openly expressed their uncertainties, wanted me to regularly reassure them they'd done things right etc., whereas with the female trainees, it just seemed like second nature to cheerfully say, "No problem! You're doing great!" without thinking twice about it. It wasn't a happy realization by any means, but there was no mistaking what I was doing--I was expecting the men to project "can-do" confidence at all times and (inwardly) faulting them rather severely for it when they didn't, for no other reason than that they were men. And yet, in the abstract I'd be the first to say men should aim to be appropriately self-critical, reflective enough about themselves to be more "sensitive" to others, etc. It's very easy to be hypocritical about these things.
Anyhow, it's a truism to say this, but I think both sexes could benefit from taking a cue from each other's stereotypical tendencies in this area. Not because it will make you more desirable, but because it will make you more at ease with yourself and others--better able to find a happy medium where you can empathize well with others' problems while still believing in the worth of what you have to offer, "attached" or not.