Why I don't ask more people out

[dougo]

A little while ago dictator555 wrote about dating (in a friends-locked post, but she gave me permission to quote):

[G]irls, at least most of the ones I know, like men to do the asking. Hey, did I say this was fair? No. But that's the way it is. I mean, dudes, we want equal rights but we still want you to make the first move. And that sucks for everyone, because obviously we only want the guys we like to hit on us. As you know, I hate to reject people. And men, I can see how you'd want to avoid rejection, because that sucks, too.

Rejection does kind of suck, but it's not the main reason I almost never ask people out. (I'm not going to speak for all men, because I think I'm in the minority here. But perhaps not as small a minority as one would think.) For me, it's more about not wanting to hit on someone who doesn't want to be hit on; I get really uncomfortable with the idea of making someone uncomfortable like that. It's worse when it's someone you're friends with, because it might really distort the friendship, or ruin it altogether. Even unsuccessfully hitting on a friend-of-a-friend, or anyone in your occasional social circle, could lead to a lot of awkwardness down the road. This is compounded by something else she wrote:

Say that since I've graduated from college I've met about 200 available men between the ages of 22-40. Of these, I've been attracted to exactly 4. That's not to say I haven't found others attractive in an objective sense, but I haven't subjectively been attracted to them. That's a 2% track record [...]

Those odds are pretty overwhelming: that's a 98% chance of rejection. I hate to think of those 196 times that someone has to politely decline, and I really don't want to be part of that burden. It seems safer to wait for someone to ask me out, or at least send unambiguous signals that it would be okay to be asked out.

Another difficulty is the differences in the mechanics of attraction. For her,

The bottleneck is in physical attraction. Chemistry. The rest isn't that hard. I mean, I like plenty of men enough that I would totally want to get with them if it were just the intellectual/emotional connection thing. No, the bottleneck is definitely physical attraction. I understand this is a problem for lots of women, so my frustration is tempered by solidarity.

For me, it's almost the opposite: there are plenty of women I'm physically attracted to, but the intellectual/emotional connection thing is vanishingly rare (basically zero so far, depending on your definition). There's an asymmetry here, though. I'm happy to have a casual physical relationship without having emotional chemistry, but if someone has an emotional connection without being physically attracted, there won't be any relationship at all.

Another asymmetry, of course, is that if a woman is physically attracted, it's pretty likely to coincide with an emotional attraction. So in those cases where there is a mutual physical attraction, she's likely to have stronger feelings for me than I do for her. In fact this has been the case in most of my relationships, and it's frustrating for both parties. So I would prefer to wait to ask someone out until I'm sure not only that she is physically attracted to me, but that she is not going to be emotionally attracted to me, or at least not more than I am to her. But I haven't figured out yet how to determine this. (Actually, this sort of leads into my thoughts about polyamory, but that's another whole essay.)

Comments

[coolkit.livejournal.com]

"If "Me = Woman" then it's perhaps less aggressive than seemingly desperate".

OR can it be that:

Gals want to feel special too, like the man they are asking out is very selective and won't just pull the first attractive woman to enter the room to his lap. :)

Interestingly enough, I think it is very flattering either to ask or be asked. (Signals Suck! rather I suck at reading signals). Maybe because I think the recipient should be sensitive to fact that it took some courage to do the asking. And 'Asker' should be aware that it is not the end of the world if rejected.