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army1987 comments on LW Women Entries- Creepiness - Less Wrong
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And don't get me started with the advice about women my mother would give me: it sounds exactly like you took everything people complain of about Nice Guys™ and told me to do exactly that. Fortunately it has always been obvious to my System 2 that it's not enough for me to romantically like a woman but she has to romantically like me too, but my mother nearly convinced my System 1 otherwise.
That's exactly why these gender relation things are so insidious! They don't come from evil mens oppressing womens because they want to cause suffering and inequality or evil womens calling mens creepy and taking away all their status. They're cached thoughts that well-meaning mothers and grandmothers pass down to us because they think they're helping us survive in a cruel and confusing system. Without stopping to think that we can slowly dismantle the system to make it suck less.
Well-meaning? How in the stars can implying that so long as I'm a decent person and I'm attracted to someone it's irrelevant whether they're also attracted to me be well-mea... Wait. She grew up in a Guess Culture, so maybe her advice is sensible -- under certain assumptions that don't actually apply in my case.
(At least, she isn't asymmetric about that -- she also tried to shame me into dating someone who was attracted to me whom I wasn't attracted to.)
Have you considered not thinking of X being attracted to Y as an immutable property of X?
Yes, but IME there's usually much more variation among different X than among different time slices of the same X.
This was certainly less true in your mother's day when post people probably didn't go far from their village.
Wait... Ain't that backwards? I'd expect how much X is attracted to Y today to be a better predictor of how much X is attracted to Y if the two of them have known each other for ten years than if they have for ten minutes. (OTOH, people talking to one another decreases how much different Xes vary in how much they're attracted to a given Y, but probably that's a smaller effect.)
The point is you have fewer potential mates, so it makes sense to devote more effort to changing preferences.
She grew up near a major metropolitan area, whereas there are probably less than 10^5 people within 30 km of me, so whatever effects you might be thinking of probably apply more to myself than to her. (OTOH, she did get with my father, who lived within walking distance from her, when she was 15 and never dated anyone else.)
Right now, or throughout your life, e.g., did you go to college?
Most of my life, except the year I studied abroad (and stuff like holidays), and including time in university (I'm still here BTW, as a PhD student). (OTOH, given that this is a university town, the fraction of these people who are the appropriate age is a lot larger than the national average.) But especially when I grew up -- where (even if the population is not as small as what you probably had in mind when you said “village”) ISTM that most people only date people they have already known for years.
What would be the alternative to being well-meaning in this case--your maternal relatives conspiring to keep you single? I think well-meaning but clueless is the safer assumption.
edit: oh right. lost the train of reference
Yes, she's well-meaning towards me -- I meant, how could that be well-meaning towards my potential partners? (Anyway, that was more an expression of frustration than literal confusion.)
While rephrasing it as the matriarchy is deeply amusing to me, I don't think we're even talking about some deliberate system here. I think most women just have no idea how to date women, and give men advice on how they interact with women, which is to say, behave like a friend.
Pity lesbians have been fetishized. Men could use lesbian friends.
I think women actually give men advice by telling them how they'd like to ... be dated? At least, that's what I do. Which makes me think army1987's mother probably wanted a hypergentlemanly man to lavish her with niceness and gifts and attention. Actually, maybe she was experiencing a shortage of gifts and attention from someone she DID have romantic feelings for, and so didn't realize what an overabundance of gifts and attention would feel like from someone she had NO romantic feelings for, which is generally when Nice Guys™ become problematic.
Maybe we need to ask the opposite question. Mens! How would you like to ... be dated?
EDIT: I think it was a system back in the day when land and inheritance and dowries were important and some memes from back then are still alive and floating around confusing everyone.
"Actually, maybe she was experiencing a shortage of gifts and attention from someone she DID have romantic feelings for, and so didn't realize what an overabundance of gifts and attention would feel like from someone she had NO romantic feelings for, which is generally when Nice Guys™ become problematic."
Yes, what is desired of someone who you are attracted to vs someone you aren't is markedly different. When men ask for dating advice, they want to know how they get into that attracted-to category in the first place, whereas the question may be answered as if the man was already in that category for the woman of his affections, perhaps because the answered is not conisdering the second category of suitor at all, in teh same way that people don't usually desire to /know how to change their desires.
Don't ask me how I'd like to be dated. I have no idea. Historically I think women have had the most luck with...
...
Well, historically, being shoved into a preemptive friendzone after I suspected them of sexual interest, hanging out for a while, disappearing off to college, waiting eight years, and then contacting me out of the blue.
Yeah, maybe I shouldn't give anybody advice on how to date me.
This may be helpful.
Oh, that's easy.
I don't think I follow. This is what you want from every lady in the store/library/train who thinks you're cute?
I suppose that would be a bit too forward as the first sign of interest, given current cultural norms. But it probably has a grain of truth once you are dating.
99.9788% (hey, if I'm going to make up two significant figures, why not six?) of all the advice I've ever gotten from women on dating women has been to dial the Nice Guy up to 11.
After I decided I was bisexual, it's really weird how much better I got at dating women, because I didn't have all nonsense baggage in dating guys; gave a much different, and infinitely better, perspective on dating.