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.