blunting a scissor: PART 1

“AITAH for no longer walking my friend home to her dorm after she rejected me?”

note: i’ve been dealing with an ungodly amount of brain fog these last few weeks, which is why this post took so damned long to publish. i’m resigned to the fact that this won’t be airtight and i may have to update it later, despite the fact that i’ve tried hard to cover all possible arguments

belli on twitter recently asked my opinion about this reddit post. the short version is: a guy used to routinely walk a female friend home after late night group hangouts, until she rejected him romantically, at which point he stopped doing this

my knee-jerk reaction, which seems to be pretty common among women, was “damn, this is a really childish way to tell someone you were never interested in friendship.” on reflection, i don’t agree with this assessment, but it makes perfect sense to me why someone would arrive at this conclusion and then… stop.

the opposing position seems to be roughly as follows:

she never needed to be walked home for safety reasons, this was purely a pleasant social activity.

after a rejection, it’s normal to need space from the person who rejected you, even if you want to try to resume your previous level of platonic closeness.

it’s also normal to want to spend more time with people you’re attracted to; “you were never really friends, you were just trying to use this person for sex” is an extreme read.

the nice thing you were doing for social reasons stopped being a nice thing because it’s painful to be around someone you have unrequited feelings for, so you stopped doing the nice social thing. what’s the problem??

so who’s right?

if you want to understand why women behave the way they do in dating, it basically boils down to avoiding two things:

• being strung along until all your eggs have dried up

• physical harm (either through abuse or negligence, to you and to your potential future children)

this reddit story manages to trigger both of these fears, neither of which is really top of mind for most men, which i think is why the defense mostly lands on deaf ears

STRINGING HER ALONG

“just being used for sex” is one of the standard very bad things that can happen to you, if you’re a woman looking for a long term relationship. “but i would love to be used for sex!” is the retort i hear a lot from guys when the topic comes up. (normally i feel pretty emotionally disconnected from the volatility of gendered rage but this one hits me right in the estrogen tbh.)

every person is different and gendered phenomena are rarely strictly gendered, BUT…

typically, this is how women view sex: romantic sex > no sex > sex that definitely isn’t going to lead anywhere

typically, this is how men view sex: literally any kind of sex > no sex

…and typically, men don’t understand how women view sex (romantic sex > no sex > sex that definitely isn’t going to lead anywhere) and don’t realize that what, to them, would be a nice consolation prize is, to most women, a bait and switch that expends their most precious resource: time. most women want children, and they’re under some pretty strict time constraints.¹

if you’re still having trouble imagining why “just being used for sex” would feel bad, i think the nearest more-or-less gendered equivalent is “just being used for a free meal.” imagine going months without a date, finally matching with someone on an app, showing up for a fancy meal with a real life human girl who might actually want to, like, have sex with you? or be your girlfriend??? only to find she arranged this whole thing purely because she knew you’d pick up the bill. (if your response to this is “skill issue,” i mean, sure, but also: empathy is good.)

whether it’s sex or a free meal, the line between “this person used me” and “this was a consensual arrangement i now regret” is fuzzy. if a girl goes on a date she doesn’t really expect to go anywhere, expecting the guy to pick up the bill, but there’s a real possibility that he’ll win her over, does that count as “using someone for a free meal?” what about if she goes into it with good intentions but has a bad time and lets the guy pay anyway? same deal with “using someone for sex.”

lots of guys are very happy to have casual sex with no possibility of a relationship, and while (i hope) only a small minority are out there actively, deliberately trying to trick women into fucking them, very few guys are willing to turn down the possibility of casual sex with someone they’re pretty sure wants something more. after all, it’s consensual, the woman could always choose not to sleep with you, we’re all adults here. i think this is a pretty shit attitude tbh, but more on that later.

DISTANCING VS. DROPPING

there’s a very real difference between:

1. having feelings for someone, being rejected, and distancing yourself because you find it painful to spend time with that person, even if you still want to be friends

2. being extra nice to someone in the hopes that they’ll fuck you and then dropping them like a hot potato when you find out they won’t

but it’s primarily (often exclusively) a difference in intention.

intention is impossible to detect from the outside if the end state is the same: “someone i considered a good friend has suddenly distanced themselves without explanation, and i’ve just learned that our continued closeness was conditional on my not rejecting their romantic advances.”

it’s nice if you mean well! but if your intentions don’t actually change the outcome,² then… is it really wrong for someone to write your behavior off as shitty?

here’s my most charitable read of a situation like this:

a guy takes special notice of a girl he’s interested in, is nicer to her than he would normally be to a woman he’s not into because it feels good to be nice to someone you’re fond of!

he bides his time before asking her out, because he’s nervous and doesn’t want to ruin the friendship or make her uncomfortable. he finally works up the nerve, she rejects him. it becomes painful to continue interacting in the same way, so he distances himself. he stops being as nice to her as he used to be, or he drops contact altogether.

she thought he was being kind to her because they’re friends; evidently, she was completely wrong about the nature of their earlier interactions. she feels as though she’s been duped.

it seems very fair to me to come to the conclusion that this was never a friendship. you can’t ground a friendship on asymmetric information, and in this scenario, she literally doesn’t know what friendship with this guy looks like!

the problem here is the lack of clarity. the nature of courtship is, i think, essentially mutually escalating special treatment. you treat the people you’re courting differently from how you’d treat your friends; otherwise there’s no way to actually escalate to a relationship. plausible deniability gives you the ability to deescalate gracefully, but it ceases to be useful when you maintain it to the point that you yourself can’t even tell when you’re courting someone.

when you establish a pattern of behavior in the context of friendship, then you break that pattern once romance is off the table… well, you may not have been engaging in deliberate deception, but deception has occurred.

HOW TO AVOID IT?

the simplest way to avoid inadvertently duping someone is by dialing back that plausible deniability from the get-go. after all, it’s not even really “plausible deniability” if there’s no possibility you’ll ever have to deny anything, is it?? that’s just “completely concealing your feelings.”

if you’re going to give someone special treatment, and you don’t want them to feel betrayed when you revoke it, they need to have at least the inkling of a possibility that you’re giving them special treatment.

ftr i don’t mean, like, straight-up telling them, “you know, i don’t do this for everyone!”—i assume if you’re decent enough at flirting to pull that one off, this whole section (maybe the whole damned blog) is irrelevant to you. but, like, my instinct, when i have a crush, is to just totally conceal the fact until i can’t handle the stress any more and then i end up blurting it out and it either works out or it doesn’t.

if you’re like this, ime the time between “initial crush” and “blurting it out” gets shorter with age and experience, and this is good. you do not need to be sitting on this for months, this helps no one. you cannot treat a crush exactly like you would treat any other friend (of their gender) and expect things to go anywhere. if you plant yourself firmly in the friend zone, at a certain point you’ll be expected to stay there!

however obvious you think you’re being with your signals, if your crush doesn’t react in some way, you’re probably not being obvious enough. you need to dial back the plausible deniability until there’s some kind of response.

this is definitely something wint has actually said

do they become more distant? do they start giving you special treatment? this information lets you deescalate or escalate accordingly, rather than bumbling around until you finally can’t take it anymore and confess your feelings to a totally unsuspecting person.

if you have a lot of trouble gauging a person’s reaction: first, i think it’s possible to improve this skill, but if you’re trying to ask someone out very soon then it’s honestly not the worst thing in the world to just be direct.

second, are you absolutely sure that you’re having trouble gauging their reaction or are you having trouble accepting their reaction? i’ve noticed it’s (unfortunately) very easy to smother awareness of these tells, either because you don’t want to see those negative signals, or because you’re so afraid of getting it wrong that you totally ignore their positive signals.

also: i have to assume this isn’t particularly gendered, but the women are rarely totally unsuspecting. often they can tell when they’re being courted, even when their suitor is trying their best to keep it under wraps. but just as men are hesitant to risk their friendships by admitting their feelings (even to themselves), women are hesitant to risk those same friendships by admitting (even to themselves) that they’ve noticed those feelings.

i can’t be the only one who’s found that, if you reject a guy outright before he confesses his feelings, he’ll almost certainly laugh it off (”ha ha no this was just meant to be friendly”) and then proceed to distance himself, if not fully cut contact. this outcome is fine tbh. ladies: you don’t have to resign yourself to feeling a little weird about the friendship until the guy finally blows his emotional load and you wind up in the same place anyway. you have the power to nip this shit in the bud. you can either do it directly (much higher potential for embarrassment and hurt) or by artfully distancing yourself, but you don’t have to pretend you do not see.³

in fact, this is the same “pretending you do not see” that a man does when he fucks you and then tells you he doesn’t want a relationship even though he could sense that you were gunning for one.

“but it’s consensual, we’re all adults here, right?” bullshit. adults are aware that our behavior affects other people. stop trying to rules lawyer your relationships.

if you notice that someone is in a vulnerable position but they aren’t comfortable enough (or self-aware enough) to tell you what’s going on, you don’t get to take advantage of them and then pretend you’re in the clear because “we’re both adults”!

if your guy friend walks you home routinely, but you think he might be into you and you don’t feel the same way, find someone else to walk you home.

if a girl is willing to have sex with you because she thinks you might have a future together, but you don’t see one, find someone else to fuck.

just because no one can make an airtight case that you’ve broken some kind of moral rule doesn’t mean that people won’t notice that your behavior led to a bad outcome. the fact that the particular failing that brought about this bad outcome is debatable doesn’t mean people are wrong to expect continued bad outcomes if they spend more time around you.

HOW TO SALVAGE IT?

so: you can avoid causing a friend to feel betrayed (and invoking the wrath of women on the internet) by not courting them while denying that you’re courting them and then revoking the special treatment you’d disguised as “just normal stuff you’d do for any friend.” but there’s another reason not to cloak your intentions so thoroughly:

all that time a guy spends trying to maintain plausible deniability until he’s totally sure the girl’s interested or until he just can’t fucking take it anymore? that’s time wasted.

now, this is ethically a lot better than most flavors of stringing a woman along, which tend to be effective because first the man baits the hook, then he sinks it, then he drags his catch along. in this case, you’re not even bothering to bait the hook. i’m not even sure you brought a tackle box. someone help me out of this metaphor before i hurt myself on something.

i’m, like, way more into spergy, nerdy, nervous, almost cripplingly risk-averse guys than damned near any woman i know, but even i can only suffer so many weeks of a guy pretending really hard that he totally just wants to be friends, ha ha, before i go from “interested, attracted” to “lowkey contemptuous.”⁴

the longer you wait to show your hand, the more time you give the girl you’re into time to stop viewing you as a man.

if you’ve already fucked this up, the situation is still salvageable. (not salvageable as in “she’s going to change her mind about dating you,” and not necessarily even salvageable as in “you can become close friends once you’re over the heartbreak,” but salvageable as in, “she won’t come away thinking you’re a total creep who never really wanted to be her friend in the first place, and she won’t complain to all her friends about what a jerk you are”)

unfortunately, this requires direct communication. you need to tell her that it’s painful to spend time around her and you need to distance yourself, at least temporarily.⁵ if you’re hoping to resume your old friendship at some point, and if “resuming your old friendship” doesn’t mean (for example) “continuing to walk her home after parties,” then you need to clarify that you fucked up and led her to believe you were making a friendly gesture when that wasn’t your intention.

alright. i’m hoping that covers one of the two major aspects of what’s triggering the hell out of women (and goblins). i’ll cover part 2: physical harm (electric booga— nope sorry) in the next post. if i haven’t rewritten this section with a link once that’s up uhhh please remind me

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thanks to sympathetic opposition and my extremely offline anon boyfriend for sanity-checking and stress-testing! (i made some updates after they looked the post over, so if you still find any errors/shoddy thinking that’ll be why)

check out my website if u’d like to book a matchmaking or dating troubleshooting meeting

1. apparently men’s fertility, like women’s, does decline with age, but without an obvious, hard cutoff, hardly anyone thinks in these terms, and for the purposes of this post, it’s irrelevant

2. the difference might become really clear in a few months when the guy’s had enough space and is able to be friends again, but it’s rare that this happens at all, much less that the friendship bounces back to its previous level of closeness

3. if this is a situation you run into a lot, sympathetic opposition’s essay, “how and why to be ladylike (for women with autism)” might be helpful

4. scenarios where women come away feeling betrayed vs. contemptuous are sort of on a spectrum, i think. if a guy does a thoroughly convincing job of pretending to just be your friend, nothing else going on, then it feels more like betrayal. if a guy clearly wants something he’s too scared to admit to, it tends to feel less like betrayal and invites more contempt.

5. spoiler alert: i read the update to the original reddit post after writing the first draft of this two-party, and this (along with a recommendation that comes up in part two) is exactly what the guy ended up doing! things seem to have ended well for him. provided you don’t think the story is totally made up. but i believe everything i read on the internet, especially when it’s a story as common as this one.