david456 wrote:The thing with the internet is that it is a safe place, you build up an image of someone, rightly or wrongly and the real thing, might be different to how you thought.
Personally, If you are talking to a girl for only a few hours in person, I think she's right in saying it's moving too fast by kissing.
Excuse me - but did I not say she initiated it? Hell, she even kissed me after she said things were moving too fast.
I'm sorry but there is NO EXCUSE for behaviour like hers. next time I'd prefer if you kept your opinions to YOURSELF.
Please do tell me what I said that has upset you? It Wasn't my intention. I think I need to clarify something though, as it appears to have been misinterpreted.
You just mentioned that she still continued to kiss you after saying things were moving too fast, this was omittted from you first post.
I don't think you have done anything wrong at all and I can understand if you have frustration and/or confusion.
Hi Benny, sounds like she does not know what she wants and it seems that quite a few women are like that. i've been in the same situation as you a number of times. dating seems so kyptic some times, it has driven me nuts in the past and it is one of the reasons why i seem to have ducked out of the whole buissness. it feel like an impossibe task to accertain what the hell the woman actually wants, if you take it real slow and careful, she gets impatient and bored, if you go for it, then you are moving to fast and all she wants is a friendship. i sometimes think that you need to be psycic. Then some people just get what they want and the same girl that you've been struggling with, becomes putty in their hands and allows them to walk all over them. i dont understand and at 44 i'm begining to think that i never will.
I'm gonna go into the general case rather than this specific one (since that's potentially usefull to more people and less likely to result in violence and rage - I say potentially because more likely I'll just be useless to a larger number of people. Well if something going to fail best to do it flamboyantly)
I find it's not so much a case of women not knowing what they want so much as their not being able to articulate what they want. A lot of the time I found in my previous relationship my g/f struggled to say what she wanted even though she could feel what was right and what was wrong, it was hard to convert that feeling into some predictive rule (which ultimately is what you're looking for if you want to make people feel good)
The gals who are putty in someones hand are generally being manipulated pretty heavily. Compliance psychology is insteresting stuff, I notice a lot on an academic level that I normally wouldn't recognise. There are too many manipulators in the world and too many who do well, it angers me a great deal. It's not much comfort that those relationships tend to end poorly and hurt the gal a great deal, if anything that makes it worse :(
I'm using guy and gal here in the same way people have been up to now, but there's nothing that says the genders have to be that way around. It seems that way more often than not because of the cultural expectation for the guy to make the first move, but it's by no means guaranteed. I see both ways round and I want to knock heads together either way.
What I think we need is some sort of activity that nutters like us can meet up to do which creates the right sort of environment for our interesting behaviours.
I seem to be single again..... but I don't know... bceuase he won't comunicate with me I don't know if I am single or not, I feel so awful I can;t cocnentrate on my studies even though I have exams in udner a fortnight... there's no way I will ever get another boyfriend as I am ugly and not even evry nice
1) Ugly is subjective, pretty much everyone whos made that claim to me I would consider to be getting it wrong. Even if that wasn't the case appearances really shouldn't matter and there are a few people out there who don't give a [deleted for good taste]
2) I just read through all the posts you've made using that handy 'find all posts by' button and see no evidence to support your not very nice claim. At all.
Now you can bemoan your terrible luck, curse the 3 billion odd people who have the nerve to posess a Y chromosome (bastards), regret past mistakes and that's fine.
But if you're going to kick yourself for no good reason and make sweeping generalisations about the future inviting a self-fufilling prophecy on yourself then I'm gonna have to come to your house and knock some sense into you.
Please don't make me do that because you give your location as 'England' so finding your house will take a really long time and frankly I've got better things to do (like my own exams)
Or to put it in a less ludicrously verbose manner brought on by me being overtired: Think whatever you want of the past, but the futures not been decided yet and you can make it better. Everyone shapes their own reality.
you make some very interesting point Greg. i think that you are right in sense that so often we mistake an ability to articulate what they want as to mean that they do not know what they want. however, i am still baffled a lot of the time and i would say that sometimes they are not to certain as to what they want because after all they are also prey to social conventions and the desire to be accepted and to be seen as normal (what ever that actually means).
i base that on my limited experiences with relationships and attempted relationships ( i am very limited in both), and extrapulating from who i am as well, for me are all humans, any way, and if they are unclear about what they want, so am i. furthermore, i lack clarity in what i articlate not only because i'm inarticulate and dyspraxic (i hate to point at my dyspraxia in that way because i'm convinced that that will give it more power over me), but because i'm unresolved about what i want and torn between two or more things. for example, at the moment i like a girl at university and i think she likes me but we are friends and share a lot of common friends. therefore, i'm reluctant to say anything and causing upset and tension (in case i'm wrong and she only likes me as a friend). on the other hand their is another lady that i like but i'm not a friend of hers but i'm pretty sure she likes and she closer to my age and more likely to be more closer in terms of what kind of life style, for want of a better word, she would want to live. the dilema is what do i want and what should i do about it. this kind of thing can go on and be applied to a number of different areas.
i feel kind of frustrated with this post and dont feel that i've really addressed exactely what i wanted to say. however, i will say this and that i find your post extremely interesting Greg and i'm real glad that you've joined our forum.
I think I see what you're getting at. That a person will often not know what they want in a situation because they have conflicting desires and they haven't had the time, information and/or clarity of introspection to resolve them?
When I see people talking about "women not knowing what they want" the stereotypical image it brings to my mind is the woman not stating what she wants, the man taking a guess and the woman getting angry because the guess was incorrect. In order for this to be the case there would have had to be a correct.
Or maybe not, counterfactual thinking is a useful tool, maybe whichever way she'd chosen she would have seen and longed for the potential benefits of the other and been angry at the decision. It's not uncommon for people (and I'm moving away from my sterotype into people in general) to want to delegate difficult decisions because they haven't the will to make them and then attack the person they delegated to if the decision goes wrong.
Either way my response was in part due to the culural sterotype I generated so it's got it's fair share of glaring inaccuracies. You're absolutely right to say that difficultly articularing a point is, at best, only a complimenary explaination to guneuine confusion.
We all have limited abilities to articulate ourselves (dyspraxic or otherwise) to a greater or lesser degree. Nothing a person can say ever quite matches their thoughts. I think there are a lot of differences in how much effort people put into being understood and making what they're saying accessible to who they're saying it too. I can respect anyone who makes the effort, whether that effort translates into success or not.
We are unable to generalise and put people into brackets, that what makes relationships difficult, as people respond to and like different things.
I guess this is the best thing and worst thing about relationships. Everyone is different, but that kind of makes life difficult, as a subject that interests one potential date, may bore the hell out of the other.
Never try and put everyone in the same box, you have to treat everyone as you find them.
Every single women is different, just like every single man. It's just finding someone who has similar values to yours or that you click with on some level.
I am in a relationship againn after what has been the longest dry period of my life. the dry period was partily due to spending three years of it in prison. However, what i think i now relaize is that it was also due to my choise. As soon as a made the desision to take the risk and face the fear and uncertantey; i met someone and low and behold took a risk. I found the courage to comunicate directly what my intentions were and things moved from there. What i did not do was waste to much time on people who did not display any real interest in me and did not allow myself to find excuses to discount or shy away form a particular girl who i liked and who also liked me. I'm no expert and i still struggle to identify what i did right this time and i know that i have not discovered the answer. In other words, i know that i would still struggle in the future wiht meeting someone that i could start a relationship with and not somehow sabotaging it before it could start. I also know that the real task starts once you have started a relationship and making it work.
Well done Nick, you've managed to do what I think many of us on the forum have difficulty with. I reckon you summed it up pretty well with the need to communicate your intentions from the outset, although I must say from person experience reading the intentions of the other party and having the confidence to make my feelings known remain major sticking points.
Thanks for your comments Daniel. Even though i do not feel like i have all the answers, if any, but try making your desires or intentions known in a humourous manner and try and have a laugh about it. the chances are the girl is just as shy as you, and making a joke out of it will make her, and yourself, feel much better.
heya, Iv been reading over some of this thread. I actually think guys are far poorer at articulating there feelings and wants. For the most part I think women are better at this, we do it with all our girlfriends so we're bound to be more practiced at it. When women dont articulate what they feel its more commonly out of a feeling that the guy wouldnt understand anyways, thats why we go to our girlfriends in the first place. This is the impression I get from my girlfriends anyways. Im not a typical girl, cant really judge if its a dyspraxic thing or not, just me. Iv allways prefered male company and as a result Iv hada lot of relationships. My current guy is the perfect man for me, I am so totally greatful Im with him. But Im really straight forward in relationships, although Im v high maintaineness and can be a major pain, I allways say how Im feeling and get them to do the same. My girlfriends never understand how to do mthat w' their guys and I find that so wierd!
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