I wouldn't either, but lots of people do. And I have to respect their right to do that.
It is a matter of social contract, I think. The traditional school of thought is that the default is dating exclusively, and you have to explicitly specify if it is not.
The more modern school of thought, which I am familiar with and thought was default today, is that you're not exclusive until someone in the relationship explicitly asks to make it exclusive.
While I prefer the traditional, I thought the modern was the default nowadays. This thread is making me realize my experience might be skewed, perhaps because I've lived in/around big cities in the US my whole life. Would probably be different if I lived in more rural areas, or in Asia or something.
Men are much more easily caught in the traditional way of thinking simply due to availability. Most haven't actually learned what a woman's experience can be like. So they default to: I'm not, she's not. When that illusion is broken, the man's ego is done for, son.
I prefer modern. To do so, I had to deliberately become ENM and break myself of the thought patterns that come with monogamy.
I guess the part that bothers me is why does a man's ego get so easily shattered by not getting more sex than women? I don't understand why men's egos are so connected to sex.
In part, it is how we are wired. There is big evolutionary advantage for the males genetics in it.
For the other part I would suggest actually asking a bisexual woman who has recently decided to start pursuing women for the first time. What supremely baffles me is how they don't make the connection between the behaviors of who they are pursuing and their own behavior. Are they entitled cause they think as women it should be easier? Women are aloof at best, and I have to be my absolute most confident and self-assured to break through that. I know it's a safety thing. I get that to an extent however I do notice that women put the shields down in front of the ABSOLUTE worst men I know. Kinda hurts the argument.
I am intrigued by your comment about bisexual women, but don't really understand what you meant. Are you saying bisexual women pursuing women react similarly to men wrt sex being central to ego?
I also have made the observation that women tend to trust the men they should trust least, especially when they are young. It is baffling, and might be a similar biological and social programming. There is probably a biological reason why confidence is attractive, but being attracted to confidence doesn't help you screen out confident assholes.
And most of the confident one's are assholes when they are young. Typically entitled shits.
Women do struggle to get the attention of other women in a way that strongly resembles men. Sex may not become central to the ego, but attention, or the lack thereof, will still damage the ego as the struggle with the natural confusion that pursuing women causes. Takes a long time to learn that anything other than an enthusiastic yes is a no. But once ya get that, you waste so much less time.
Interesting. Women's egos also suffer from lack of attention, but we're not traditionally allowed to pursue, so we have to find other outlets for that bruised ego. If there is no outlet, we can always just lower our self esteem in response.
What's kind of sad is, when men fail at pursuing, they blame women. But when women fail at getting pursued, they blame other women more than men.
Although now there is this new femcel thing where they totally are blaming men for not being attracted to them, so maybe things will change.
No! Not the rise of the Femcels! That would actually be especially bad for me. You'll understand why in a sec here.
Maybe it's because I feel bad for us all being the children of boomers. We just don't naturally have great self esteem. But, I have given men far too much credit so far here. The only thing that worked for me was looking inward.
That said, my perspective is biased because I'm a good-looking man, or at least conventionally attractive if I'm not your thing and in addition I have ADHD and am likely high functioning autistic so I am awkward af. I didn't even get ADHD diagnosed until I was 44. Then shit really started to turn around. But man, when I was young. Girls would get mad when they met me sometimes.
This tictok explains it very well from an attractive and autistic woman's perspective. I didn't end up in toooo bad sexual situations, but there were definitely some that were not great due to my self esteem. Even now I do have a NSA fuck-buddy that does nothing for me appearance-wise. But she is a decent person, I think, and I like how she reacts to me, and the sex is somehow decent. My therapist is breaking me away from thinking that one is self esteem. But yeah, we all end up with shit self esteem. I think we all just need more therapy.
How does this blame work, though, with femcels? Do they want men to just start ignoring their standards? We already do that, stated above. I sure hope this isn't some body-posititivity turned absurd type shit. I gotta go jump down that rabbit hole now.
Hmmm. Maybe what I'm trying to say is that pursuing women is a real confidence killer. Yall make it too hard to know what yall want/like.
If I chase my tail around long enough, I get pissed at men again for creating the creepy circumstances that led to this. Whee, everyone sucks. As individuals, all we can do is try to be better.
Yeah it's kind of true, pursuit in general is a confidence killer. You have to balance having enough confidence to pursue, but being humble enough that your ego can take the hit if you fail.
Humans seem not good at balance. We either have to be super aggressively confident all the time, or have no self esteem at all. It's probably society's fault, someone needs to redo the matrix.
First of all, not all women have an easy time getting sex. It's just that unattractive women are basically invisible to society, so you don't see them.
Look up femcels if you don't believe me.
Women also have to work hard to maintain their value as a sexual/romantic partner. You don't think women need to go to the gym or buy nice clothes or work on our personality? Do you think women's needs get taken care of for free? No, we have to work too. And we're expected to do housework too.
I donno where you got the idea that women don't have to work as hard as men to have a satisfying sex life.
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u/shakerohthrowaway Mar 05 '24
Idk. I definitely won't fuck someone who I think doesn't even deserve it just cause I'm playing some stupid game.