There’s also another side to this where you’re too passive. Since girls, and especially more introverted girls, will expect the man to be the driving force of the relationship, if you don’t express interest and eventually shoot your shot, then even if she was interested in you she will just move on to someone else.
So you really have to be in touch with social queues in order to strike a balance between too pushy and too passive, which for groups that massively overprepresent the autistic and otherwise socially awkward is asking a lot.
Yup, been there done that. I’ve just resigned to the fact that the whole social cues thing is too much for my brain and I’ll just stick to the hobby and be friends with them unless I get really lucky and get to know a girl that’s simultaneously interested in me and willing to make the first move.
100%. It’s funny you mention that, as that was the situation with my first partner/wife. We ended up being close friends for a few years and I didn’t take my shot because I didn’t want to ruin the relationship, but thankfully one of her friends pushed the two of us together and we’ve been happily married for years.
My situation is also funny because I did a similar thing with my 2nd partner/our girlfriend. Though thankfully she was confident enough to make the first move, I wasn’t going to risk the friendship even though I knew we were all poly. But in either case, it was always friends first, then light flirting that only increases as it was reciprocated.
Ultimately, our system has evolved over millions of years and our culture builds on top of the basic instincts. Optimal sexual strategy for humanity has long been that men push as hard as fuck even if it means a lot of us don’t make it. We can do this because male sperm is cheap and plentiful.
So civilization has adopted cultural standards that are extremely harsh on men to the point of destroying some of us. To make an analogy, our culture has a grading curve for men that is designed to fail 60% of us.
This is called “male disposability” and while MRAs take it as a grievance, it’s really just a fact of the world. It’s right up there with childbirth and externally-kickable balls as one of the facts of life.
Why am I talking about culture being a gauntlet in this way? Because men often complain about how our cultural rules not making it possible to mate without breaking any of the rules. Like in this thread: “I’m damned if I make a move on her because then I’m a creep, and I’m damned if I don’t because women expect men to take the initiative. So what the fuck?”
Well, culture isn’t a video game that’s balanced to ensure players have a way to win. That’s what I’m saying. Culture is a game, a game that evolved to win wars against nature and other human settlements. And it is a game that’s been balanced.
Unfortunately for those who cut their teeth on video games, culture is not balanced to be playable. It’s balanced to eliminate 60% of the players.
And one of the ways that extremely difficult “weed-out” mechanic works is that a man who plays by all the rules he is given, loses. If he does everything he is told to do, he loses the game. That is by design. Probably because some great unconscious information processing mechanism that selects our rules to win wars and survive into the future, knows that men who are perfectly obedient are poison to the group’s long-term survival.
Basically what the whole interface is telling you, is that what we need you to be is capable of doing the right thing based on your own judgment, not based on minimizing the degree to which you get in trouble or get chastised by people.
So we’ve made a game you can’t win, unless you’re willing to stop trying to stay out of trouble. Because if that’s all you’ve got — following orders and avoiding conflict — the next generation doesn’t need your genes.
Fascinating perspective, well expressed.
One thing I would clarify is that there are still many different cultures in existence. Although most cultures are converging due to the global economic hegemony enforced by the US, they still maintain highly significant differences.
For instance, in many Muslim countries, your argument wouldn’t apply as much for a wide variety of reasons, including the prevalence of arranged marriages.
Furthermore, each generation actively produces its own culture and it can sometimes change rapidly due to changing environments. I agree with you that culture is built around human biology and in some ways remains similar across all human communities regardless of time or location. However, within that general framework, the possibilities are almost infinite, as we can see just by observing history.
So, in this specific context, I would argue that while it’s essentially inevitable that men will take on the more dangerous and difficult roles in any given culture, the actual manifestation of that tendency can come in many different forms. Western society manifests the male disposability phenomenon in a particularly harsh manner, in my personal opinion.
I think that many other cultural lineages may have traditionally held less demanding/dangerous expectations of masculinity. A relevant factor is that all Western nations have military traditions going back millennia, whereas many other regions of the planet do not share such an extensive history of warfare. All Western cultures essentially trace their roots back to the Roman Empire, in which basic mechanics of the male gauntlet which you speak of had already been firmly established.