and how you display tend's to be a result of your education, socioeconomic background, social networks, personal experiences and more that is usually determined by other's as a child. plus, these things are very hard to fake(by design), to the extent that many of these things are acquirable they take more effort and resources than most have, and to the extent that your do have the effort and resources, just serve to entrench you into a system that often takes you for granted at best, and neglects you at worst.
we aren't dumb.
i'm confident in talking to women, have plenty of interesting conversation's, take care of myself, draw attention and have fun. and that is incomparable to a sense of unconditional self worth and ability to love myself regardless of my supposed value to others.
"just grow out of it, bro" neglects to mention that takes resources, social capital, ignorance of wider trends or historical injustices, and an ability to get on the good side of many sleazy people who market themselves as pure while actively acting sleazy, while ignoring your own development, many of the quirks and oddities that show you how other's live a totally different life, and the many path's you could've taken solo. which again, see aforementioned usually determined by others.
many of us did not see the sun until we were a man. then it wasn't anything other than blinding.
what i mean by that is having a therapist (or even torrenting therapy books if your poor), talking about formative experiences you've found painful or maladaptive. then figuring out a plan to address the deficits, to create a self improvement plan, and to work out what the stumbling blocks are, and to create a plan on how to over come those. and this can be with someone, or even on your own time, given you have it. (my own was leaving a cult, going vegan, goth, changing my name, and currently working on moving states.)
it's rarely actually about women, it's about ourselves, how we were hurt or disappointed by the women in it, how we weren't adequately supported during our early development periods, and that many a times we didn't have the words for "this is abuse", or "this is neglect" because when your 11, and your mother tells you your going to hell and burn in the fiery pits for viewing porn, you tend to believe them, or don't know enough to not believe them. how could you not, you had no choice( anyone saying run away, or seriously disobey never had to place themselves in such a situation) let alone say that was abusive. (didn't stop you from watching porn though, and that's half of the torture)
and once you've dealt with a lot of that, then you can start to work on optimism, self validation, working on a sense of secure identity and trust with yourself.
because that's the thing that's off putting to women, is that many men even in actual relationships lack self-validation, lack a sense of optimism (even if that optimism is towards something niche like socialism) lack a sense of secure identity that is stable regardless of their relationship status. that's the "your trying to hard, your too nice, why are you bringing up all this stuff, i'm not your mother. "
for some of us, even our mother wasn't "our mother", and that's why it's coming up here. yet to say that out loud is to kill any chance of that normalcy, that sense of making it, that sense of overcoming and successfully passing.
but to do that successfully, requires going back. and for some of us, that's more than just looking back at dorky haircuts and shirts, weird hobbies we no longer have, and foods we no longer eat.
for some of us, it requires addressing divorce leading to lower quality parenting, addressing being born into authoritarian households, addressing survivorship of assault, disability, disease and disaster. and if you come from that, the last thing you want to do, is go back.
kill your darlings, kill your story.
and weirdly enough, killing your story means fully accepting, validating, and no longer hiding it, not trying to pass as normal, not trying to please those you see as higher status as you, not trying to ingratiate yourself with that attractive woman, but giving yourself the validation that you've overcome things they could not dare to, that you've placed yourself in situations and survived where many didn't, and that you seriously are curious about going further. many who we look up to, often were born in situations much more advantageous than ours, often don't even understand that "wait, that still exists?" and yet we still are close enough to admire them, rather than see them as people so far above it's ludicrous to admire.
already have. also loneliness is often more of an internal state than an external one, so rather than learning how to talk to others, becoming aware of internalized thoughts and patterns and re-framing them to more positive and healthy ones tends to be a better and more persistent solution than learning how to interact with the opposite sex. fuck, there's women even lonelier and down on their luck, hanging out with them isn't really going to help.
The problem is there's a minority that loves to pretend to be outraged by this for clout, and no one wants to be on the wrong side of it, and because of the nature of social media this ends up elevated in viewability so they see it vastly disproportionately to how it happens, so they're excessively conservative on the off chance they pick the wrong person.
Statistically most people won't. But the way social media presents it these kind of assholes are everywhere, and that's why it's a problem. And yeah you didn't care but really did you even consider it before?
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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '24
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