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Friends and co-workers assure me that my approach to meeting women, and dealing with women recently met, is frighteningly lacking in finesse. That's probably true.
Here's the problem. I didn't date at all in my teens. It seemed like an undignified waste of time and energy. In retrospect, almost everything I did in my teens was an undignified waste of time and energy, but there's no going back. The point is, my teen years were when I was supposed to build the set of habits that would allow me to meet women in the conventional fashion later in life. The learning of those habits was supposed to be fueled by adolescent hormones, blind hubris and shocking stupidity, as it was in almost everyone else's life. I never learned to obfuscate, to polish my rough edges, hide my foibles or say what people wanted to hear. It made me a holy terror to the administrations of any number of educational institutions and starkly unappealing to teen girls everywhere.
The funny thing is that in adulthood, that same openness and apparently guileless self-deprecation seems refreshing to young women who've spent the last decade dating the borderline sociopaths and overly sensitive maladroits that adolescent romance teaches us are the paths to success.
The problem is that it wears off. As charming as a guy who lists his worst qualities and openly expresses his insecurities while dismissing them as unimportant is, in the first few e-mail exchanges or even first few dates, his charm doesn't hold up to the rigors of a real relationship. Because women learn to date in their teens too. Relationships couldn't survive the first couple weeks without suspension of disbelief on both sides, and the white lies and feigned confidence are part of what makes spending time with someone feel like a relationship.
So, I guess my point is that I'm going to need to find someone as socially retarded as me if it's going to have a real chance.
But, at the same time, I like the first couple weeks before things go bad, too. So either way.
I'm Dan. I'm probably free this Friday.
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Here's the problem. I didn't date at all in my teens. It seemed like an undignified waste of time and energy. In retrospect, almost everything I did in my teens was an undignified waste of time and energy, but there's no going back. The point is, my teen years were when I was supposed to build the set of habits that would allow me to meet women in the conventional fashion later in life. The learning of those habits was supposed to be fueled by adolescent hormones, blind hubris and shocking stupidity, as it was in almost everyone else's life. I never learned to obfuscate, to polish my rough edges, hide my foibles or say what people wanted to hear. It made me a holy terror to the administrations of any number of educational institutions and starkly unappealing to teen girls everywhere.
The funny thing is that in adulthood, that same openness and apparently guileless self-deprecation seems refreshing to young women who've spent the last decade dating the borderline sociopaths and overly sensitive maladroits that adolescent romance teaches us are the paths to success.
The problem is that it wears off. As charming as a guy who lists his worst qualities and openly expresses his insecurities while dismissing them as unimportant is, in the first few e-mail exchanges or even first few dates, his charm doesn't hold up to the rigors of a real relationship. Because women learn to date in their teens too. Relationships couldn't survive the first couple weeks without suspension of disbelief on both sides, and the white lies and feigned confidence are part of what makes spending time with someone feel like a relationship.
So, I guess my point is that I'm going to need to find someone as socially retarded as me if it's going to have a real chance.
But, at the same time, I like the first couple weeks before things go bad, too. So either way.
I'm Dan. I'm probably free this Friday.
- Location: Suburban Minneapolis
- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
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