How am I supposed to tell that you’re actually hinting and this isn’t just you? I’ve literally had that happen where a girl seemed super into me. Constantly talking to me and coming up with every reason to be close to me or touch me. I asked her out and she had a boyfriend and I’m just like “alright I’m never asking a girl out again this shits infuriating”
So now I just don’t even think about it much. Occasionally I’ll see a pretty girl and want to interact with her but then remember my experiences and go back to not caring.
It’s happened multiple times with multiple women and I’ve resigned myself to believing it’s clearly something about me that no one is willing to tell me is a problem so I’ve just given up entirely ¯\(ツ)/¯
something about me that no one is willing to tell me
Let me try: You’re decently attractive, quick to offer help and have a meek and gentle nature. Sounds like you? These women were looking for a shoulder to cry on without giving anything in return. She was touching you because things weren’t going so great with her boyfriend.
Lol, men should have a mantra, “She’s a WAITRESS, she’s just being nice!” “She’s a BARTENDER, she’s just being fun!” “She’s at the grocery checkout, she’s just making small talk!”
“She’s just a person being nice to other people. You are just a person she is being nice to. Be nice and leave her alone!”
maybe it’s more, women feel like they have to give hints because being direct can receive judgment or not be safe. so it’s not that they’re bad at hinting it’s just that they have to use hints a lot more often than we do, and I can’t pick up a hint to save my life
I’m an autistic woman, and I’ve found great success in leaning into my autistic tendencies. By that, I mean just being blunt and upfront. One of my favourites is that if I’ve got chemistry with someone I don’t expect to see again, before I bid them farewell, I’ll give them a note with my number on and say something like “I had a great time hanging out with you tonight, would you like to go on a date with me sometime?” And then I hand them my number and scuttle off like a crab because I can only put on a cool face for so long before I crack under the anxiety.
Aspie man here, it’s harder for us to do that. I have a friend who I gave the standard, “Hi, my name is MapleEngineer and I have Asperger’s. That means…” speech to when I thought she was hinting. She said, “Ok, you don’t like hints?” “No.” “Ok. I’ve always found you attractive and have fantasized about sucking your cock. We should get together.” We did. It was awesome.
Life would be so by easier if the normies didn’t muddy the waters so much with their hints and clues.
Oh yeah, it’s why I mentioned I’m a woman - it’s certainly relevant to my experience here. I don’t have to worry about being perceived as threatening - if I flirt with a woman in an upfront way like I described, I never feel like there’s a risk of frightening her. Whereas on the flip side, if a guy asks me out, I’m always a bit on edge because of the small minority who are not safe to politely turn down. “Privilege” is definitely the wrong word for this, but being perceived as non threatening does make some things simpler.
I have been accused of being incredibly dense because I mask by playing all new relationships with women as completely natural. The woman I mentioned in my comment was hinting hard but I played it neutral. After I had a couple of hours to think about it I went back and said, “I have Asperger’s and here’s what that means. Here’s what masking is. I mask by playing hard neutral. I think you might be hinting. Hinting doesn’t work with me. If you’re hinting you need to stop and just say or ask what you want to say or ask. I won’t be offended. I will probably say, ‘Yes’ (I’m a sexy Aspie and I always say, ‘Yes’. )” So she just asked, I said, “Yes” and we had a good time. She told me that she had always found me and my attitude toward sex very appealing but thought I didn’t like her because I never flirted or expressed any interest. She said that in the almost 15 years we had been acquainted I had never even touched her. I said I thought it would be fun if the first time we touched was a kiss. The first time we touched it was a kiss. Now I’m waiting to find out if she’s going to go with me on a short road trip with one or two nights in a nice hotel this weekend.
I could’ve written this comment word for word. It really does make things a lot easier to just be direct, being able to do this is one of the very few outright advantages of our non-standard brains imo!
I had a woman flirting with me yesterday at the bulk food store. Happened to be at the coffee grinder, and she was struggling with it, and I just spontaneously teased “you broke it I’m telling”!
This led to a little bit of banter and talking about recipes, which led back to how she likes to get her coffee here.
I told her how I like ro enjoy my morning espresso.
She smiled and gave me that flirtatious side look and mellifluously intoned “I’d sure love some morning espresso… Brought to me in bed…”
The words floated off my lips “is your kitchen floor cold? Should I bring my slippers?”
She immediately looked shocked, faced directly at me pie-eyed. “I should have known better. Typical response from a man.”
I was fucking gobsmacked.
Don’t ever tell me that men don’t pick up signals, we have been trained… by women, to never pick up signals.
Could you help fellow lemmings by saying how even approximately pick hints, i mean, many men mistake goodwill and good chat for relationship hints, as for me, I’m like op, I’m way too pessimistic to trust hints
Picking up on hints is a thing that requires a lot of social context and emotional empathy/intelligence. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s any pro tips I can offer to help you better identify them except interact with girls more and have honest conversations where you’re not trying to get the girl to date you - it’s learning the hard way, but bridging that emotional understanding gap is the only good way to get a better understanding of girls as people (and get your heart rate down so talking to them isn’t a panic).
That said, if you can find the confidence, being a little blunt yourself can work as well. Girls can be dense too.
A lot of the reason girls are doing the subtle hint stuff is because they’re also not confident / unsure / scared of rejection / scared of coming off too strong. It’s a way of feeling out a situation without strong commitment. We kind of expect guys to do that back so that we can have a sort of subtle social fencing game to figure out if there might be mutual interest. (unfortunately, most of the time, everyone involved is too dense for this to be effective)
Honestly both sides kinda suck at this in their own ways.
I’m male, and bi. I’m about equally bad at picking up on hints from men and women, but it seems more common with men to just flat out state what they want, either immediately, or after I miss their clue, which I’d presume to be cultural.
I’m bad with social clues in general, so I dunno if it’s a male-thing, or a me-thing.
I'm not sure if @FatTony is talking about romantic hints or all hints, but I think in many cultures women are socialised to be little a bit more Guess Culture than men, even if it doesn't come naturally. The same goes for LGBTQ+ in cultures that are repressive. And of course some nationalities tend towards one or the other.
As someone whose natural state is very Ask, I found this concept really helpful. Sometimes I straight out ask the Guess people if they are hinting to me.
The funny thing is, despite often being bad at ascertaining what is being hinted at, I have very much been raised in a ‘guess’ culture, a family that found itself to be very high-brow and fancy, which lasted until the companies went bust, and the debt caught up to them.
Anyway, that leads to me, while having lots of problem with reading ‘guess’ people (unless they grew up in similar circumstances, that usually helps), also apparently being pretty hard to read for many conversation partners.
In the end, I found that jumping over my shadow and just spelling out what I’m trying to say, ask, or think I’m being asked, usually resolves things.
@VeganCheesecake yeah I was raised in a mostly 'guess' family as well! They think I'm oafish.
You're right it does cut both ways. My 'guess' ex thought I was super hard to read because they couldn't grasp that I literally meant exactly what I said not some extra hidden meaning.
These days I'm with another 'ask' person so the only stress like that is figuring out what our mothers are trying to get at.
My mother’s actually pretty approachable in that regard, she’s a surgeon from a mostly working class family that married in. Anyone else can be pretty difficult though. Especially the part of the family that didn’t crash and burn financially, though they life on the other side of the country, luckily.
I’m usually a bit taken aback when I meet a ‘guess’ person that gets legitimately offended when being asked stuff directly, because pretty much everyone in my circle is pretty chill.
I guess everyone is living in their own world, in the end.
That's interesting how it's linked to social class so clearly in your family!
Come to think of it, the guessiest guesser in my life is from an industrial factory-labourer workingclass background, but different country. They experience direct requests as confrontations, so they are very easy to inadvertently hurt. It used to exasperate me, until I read the above concept.
Yeah, kinda curious, might also be one families customs vs the others, though. Might also be a family that became wealthy at the turn of the last century, and then got stuck in the way they thought they where expected to act, enforced via ‘traditions’ taught. Dunno, really.
The guessiest person I ever met was actually the mother of my last partner. She was, on the one hand, usually offended by direct requests, while also very much assuming and extrapolating things from anything indirect one said, to the point where she often became incredibly offended by things no one said, but that she heard. It was exhausting, to a degree, and my first instinct was that she was looking for things to be offended about, either consciously or subconsciously, but I also feel that I can’t really judge someone for the way they perceive the world.
I think once you get a group of people all guessing it normalizes it within a family as well maybe?
It really is a perception thing I think, but yeah it can feel incredibly exhausting for us, instinctively oppo and I guess frustrating for them.
I had some insight once when a sibling was complaining about how they kept making excuses not to pick up a gift they'd accepted and they seemed genuinely angry the person was still offering and hadn't "taken the hint" they don't actually want it. It's flabbergasting to me but seems like that's really how they see things.
One way to normalise it was probably that there where euphemisms seen as the acceptable way to hint at, or say something. I guess.
And yeah. I think people just need to come to terms with there being a range of ways others express themselves, and that they can’t expect everyone will just understand their specific way immediately.
Please dont be that edgy it hurts, I have taken home a girl or two back in my going out days. The last one that I’ve bought a house and made kids with. While I had fun I’m glad I don’t need to deal with that anymore, particularly in this decade as it was abit more relaxed when I did it.
What you seem to be missing in your simplicity is that the whole post is about young males scared about making a move, mentioning plausible deniability, wishing women were more clear, and needing more than a hint to take a risk these days. The person I replied to made an asinine comment dismissing all these concerns, and you ran with it thinking it was smart, and triple down.
If I interpret what I see as a hint in the wrong way, and actually act on that misinterpretation, it could almost trivially lead to my arrest, conviction, and likely incarceration. And any sort of record - even if I was exonerated - could do significant to severe damage to my life-long economic potential.
So I just don’t fucking deal with hints. The math just does not make that a viable option in any logical or rational way.
If you, as a woman, can’t come out and converse like a functional adult, imma just gonna ignore you wholesale like the immature, games-playing child you are.
Unless your response to a hint is sexual assault, how do you think that it’s supposed to trivially lead to your arrest?
I think you need to update your 60s-era viewpoint to include unwanted attention and a metric arseload of other things a lot less severe than outright rape.
This world isn’t black and white. There are a lot of shades of grey, and most of that spectrum has been criminalized (for men, specifically; women aren’t affected) since your obsolete and archaic viewpoint ossified itself into your brain.
Men have been arrested for as little as making a woman uncomfortable. Even when he didn’t even realize she existed in the first place.
Shoo, incels. Women might be pissed when you approach them, and might insult you, but that’s about it, unless you actually assault them.
They actually have a lot of trouble making cops move their butts when actual rape is committed, so nothing important is going to be done about guys hitting on girls 🙄
You were saying? And that’s just one of the first articles in the search results.
Shoo, incels.
Interesting how the first thing you reached for was an ad hominem that is explicitly designed to shut down any conversation by shaming the other person into silence and into compliance with the female supremacist narrative.
Almost as if you had absolutely no viable counter-argument to provide.
Edit: And I am married. 18 years this year, 28 years with the same woman. So I am absolutely ineligible for the incel attribute. I just refuse to ignore uncomfortable facts, and will never bow to anti-reality ideologies.
Crybabies. Don’t be a creep, and you’ll be alright. Open streets are not the right place to pick up women minding their own business. And even if you do it, the worst you’re likely to get is an insult, meaningless anecdotes aside, because cops are fucking useless.
What business does a man married for 30y have in talking about seduction? You clearly haven’t spoken to actual women in a while to seduce them, by your own admission further down in the discussion thread, and you’re spreading FUD about things you haven’t experienced. Stay on your lane. The world doesn’t need your misogynist ramblings. We all have uncles at Christmas dinners for that, thank you very much.
“Why is this man so dense? He never responds to the subtle clues I carefully place behind a veil of plausible deniability.”
If you’re trying to make a move without making a move, that might be the reason he’s not responding. You’re asking him to take on all the risk of misinterpretation. At some point somebody has to be overt. If you’re presuming it should be him, you should ask yourself why you think that.
You’re spot on, I no longer deal with said “veil of plausible deniability”
This is 100% how I approach all sorts of relationships in my life, not just romantic. That’s called direct and open communication.
I will straight up ask (politely) that someone clarify what their explicit stance is, if they refuse or try to play coy about it I simply let them know I don’t know where they stand and I don’t know what they want.
I’ve done this with bosses, siblings, my son, and my partner. I have grown to respect people much more because I understand them better and have also cut out some toxicity from my life that I didn’t know was eating away at my happiness.
I know a girl who hinted so badly that she wants me to send her nudes but kept laughing afterward. Until one day I told her that I would send her then she said she was joking and acting like a horny man. That’s one example of many I have in my life where a girl would tell me that we should be boyfriend and girlfriend, then when I proposed to go out with her and gave weeks to choose from where I know she had no work, she replied that she is a busy woman and keeps her day offs to her many friends. I was devestated and felt like a creep. I also had a female friend who had forever hinted that we should fuck, and when I went to her house she showed up to me covering her boobs behind the door of the shower wet covering her boobs with her hands , and I immediately apologized and said I didn’t know she was in shower, and she said it’s okay come in. So I go in thinking she wanted action, but guess what? After I kept pushing and hinting she said she was just being herself and never wanted shit. I can go on and on with such stories. They all made me literally too numb to give a fuck anymore and I wouldn’t pick up a hint if a girl I’m with started masturbating in front of me unless she made it clear she wants me to join. Anyway, I gave up on this shit long time ago. I came to terms with the fact that females and males have different brains when it comes to sexuality
It’s true. I once played spin the bottle with one other person and didn’t realize what the plan was after playing it. Thought it was just an awkward interaction until she asked brought it up a couple years later.
Later on in life, a girl invited me to a sleepover and we were joking and having fun shared a bed and went to sleep. I woke up to her crying because she took it as me finding her ugly and not being into her.
Needless to say neither went anywhere because I guess my smooth brain was not an attractive trait.
I mean, if men are bad at taking the hints of human women, maybe that means we are meant to take the hints of women of other species like elves, fairies, sexy space aliens or something else.
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