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wedrifid comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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For what it's worth, my reflex before reading a bunch of stuff here was closer to hearing "socially awkward man who can't manage to attract women" was closer to thinking of various annoying men who have hung around me, who I find unattractive (sometimes at the skin-crawling level [1]), but who never cross a line to the point where I feel justified in telling them to go away. This can go on for years. It is no fun.
After reading these discussions, I conclude that my preconception was a case of availability bias (possibly amplified by a desire to not know how painful things are), and so I use a more abstract category.
[1] To repeat something from a previous discussion, this isn't about being physically afraid. If I were, I'd be handling things differently. It also turned out to my surprise, that at least some men have never had the experience of that sort of revulsion. It seems to me that it's not quite the same as not wanting to be around someone who just about everyone would think was overtly ugly, though women frequently agree (independently, I think) about some men being uncomfortable to be around.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are specific elements of body language or facial expression which cause that sort of revulsion, but I don't know what they are.
The obvious conclusion from these premises: If you had the belief that "This could go on for years and is no fun" is a valid justification for telling someone to go away then your life would contain less 'no fun'.
That works for the future. You have to somehow acquire that belief in the first place, and it seems like something that would be hard to learn any way but experience.
If you find something that works for the past please let me know. That would be awesome. Kind of like timer-turner hack for relationships. You wouldn't have to guess which relationships would work, you would just automatically select a relationship that would work by virtue of all the counterfactual bad relationships being pre-empted by the techniques that work for the past!
Or, like with many life lessons, by having good friends, role models and mentors. They help you notice that you're making a silly mistake when you've been making it for an order of weeks not an order of years!
Amusing, and yes, my phrasing was imprecise - I wasn't intending tautology.
My objection was that 1) she probably has already made this transition herself, and 2) telling people that this transition needs to be made is not providing much information unless they understand how to recognize such relationships, and learning to distinguish what kinds of things suck for years from those that suck right now but get awesome later is necessarily going to take years unless we convey much additional information (assuming it is sufficiently stable between people to allow communication of that information to be meaningful).
I haven't made the transition in all cases. wedrifid's advice might be useful.
I probably need to figure out where I want the line to be. It's also a complicating factor when I'm thinking "I'd enjoy this person's company if there were less of it and I wasn't feeling pressured".
I hope not. I was trying to get as close as possible to a pure deduction from the quote so as to be almost entirely impersonal.
Understood. It wasn't so much a complaint directed at you, as at anyone who wanted to add more details.
Edited to clarify: That is to say, the negativity of the complaint, such as it was, was directed at the situation; the communicative content of the complaint was directed at anyone, including you.