Monday, September 13, 2010

Missed Indicators of Interest (IoI)

Via Aunt Haley, we hear a tale of missed Indicators of Interest at Modern Savage. (which is a great blog that had gone inactive.  Matt, glad you're back.)  

The analysis by Aunt Haley:

"The reason women tend to be roundabout in the ways they advertise interest, though, is that they want men to pursue them.  If a woman has to spell it out for the man, then she doesn’t feel like she is being pursued; she feels like she is the pursuer.  She will also feel like her feminine charms alone are not enough to incite action by the man, which is humiliating.  Worse, if you do end up going on a date, she will doubt your attraction to her, so expect more shit tests.  In addition, by being very straightforward, she will risk being labeled desperate and try-hard by other women and possibly other men, too. ...

As a result, the only option a woman has is to drop hints and hope the man responds.  If a woman suggests that you should do something together or hang out sometime, you’ve hit the motherlode.  She will not suggest hanging out to a man she has no interest in.  If she says something sounds like fun, that’s also an invitation to invite her to join in.  If she asks when the next time you’re doing X activity is, she wants you to invite her to go along.  If she asks if you need help with something, that’s also an opportunity.  If she eagerly expresses interest in something you’ve just expressed interest in (as in Savage’s anecdote above), you can make a move with confidence.

Given all of the above, when a man doesn’t act on a woman’s hints, the woman usually concludes that the man is not interested in her and has a list of 99 things he’d rather be doing.  Men complain that women want them to shoulder all of the risk, but for a woman, showing interest and dropping hints IS a risk."

Commenter Will S. nails it:

"I don’t entirely agree that a guy must needs be a “player” or even a “would-be” player, in order to be able to pick up IOIs, but I do agree that the Church has somehow, likely through older brothers not sharing enough with teenage and young adult brothers about female nature, created a lot of young men today who are socially clueless when it comes to interacting with young women. For whatever reason, it seems that each preceding generation of men has tended to leave it mostly up to the following generation to figure it all out for themselves, on their own. Certainly, I never had guidance in these matters from anyone in any church circles I’ve been in."

Part of the problem with your average church-going guy's ability to read women is that he has dramatically less experience compared to players.  The church-going guy is more discerning, trying to figure out which girl would make a good wife for him. 

The player is out there trying to sport fuck whichever girl he can.  Therefore, he's approaching a higher number of girls.  A higher number by a factor of ten.  And every time he approaches, he learns something about women, even the times he fails.  Maybe especially the times he fails.  So the player's data set is much larger than Johnny Pew.  So when Johnny Pew approaches a girl, from that girl's perspective, he's going to look like a clumsy bumblefuck compared to the smooth players who've approached her earlier.  It's not that those players were necessarily inherently smoother, they've just macked enough girls to have worked out most of their errors.

10 comments:

  1. Yep. Trial and error, learning from your mistakes, and all that. I think because they Church is so singlemindedly focused on preventing pre-marital sex, they actually don't do enough to encourage positive, proper dating, of church-going singles in their teenage years; rather, they seem to more or less encourage both sexes to put dating off until much later on. And everyone suffers, as a result. Meanwhile, the worldly learn the ways of men and women, and apply them.

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  2. ('The Church', not 'they church', silly typo.)

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  3. Johnny Pew...I like the moniker.

    The church seems to emphasize co-ed friendship in large groups during the teen years. Maybe it's just too hard to make the transition to romance when you've been part of the herd for several years.

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  4. Exactly, Haley; I remember once encouraging a buddy to ask out a girl at his church who was hovering around him, and clearly liked him, and he was flummoxed, "But, she's part of the gang; I've known her for like forever!" As if that ruled her out as dating material; I guess he had figured, till that point, that it did; but I was right, she was interested in him, but he hadn't noticed. (He did end up asking her out, though it didn't ultimately work out with her.)

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  5. Will--
    I think the group setting takes away most of the mystery of the other person. If you've been hanging out in a herd with someone for several years in an asexual co-ed group, it's pretty hard to be impressive to them; the other person already knows all of your foibles and shortcomings, and vice versa.

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  6. Agreed, Haley. But, if a guy, or his friend, notices an IOI on the part of a girl from the gang at church, he'd be a fool, IMO, to turn up a chance, if it presents itself, so he does well to be alert for such things. Yeah, it might not work, but then again, it might.

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  7. I have noticed that too, Haley, having been a memeber of one of these large church groups for 3 years now, and reflecting upon how few marriages have come out of it (despite the fact that, whether they publically admit it or not, meeting members of the opposite sex is most people's reason for attending.) Sure, a few couples have paired off, but their numbers have been dwarfed by those who will attend for months or years, with no dating action, no interest in others within the group who are interested in them, and then suddenly, they turn up in a relationship with someone they met at work or in a class or in their parents' church or something.

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  8. Im sorry guys, I just couldn't understand what the Church has got to do with that? Aren't young guys supposed to learn that from fathers?

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  9. That would be ideal, if fathers actually did so. Alas, often times, that doesn't happen, at least in our Anglo-Saxon culture, not sure about yours. Since it's in the Church's interest, ultimately, for its members to get together and make more members, they would do well to take it upon themselves to pick up the slack.

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  10. Gile,

    I don't think the Church as "The Church" ought to be teaching this. But I do think that a man's elders (in relative not family terms) like older brother's, his brother's friends, and uncles and such ought to clue a guy in on how to handle women, what works with women, and how it all fits in with the Gospel. It's not a great fit because we're all human beings, inherently flawed and sinful.

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