Yeesh. This guy has come to the conclusion that you can’t learn how to behave normally and that’s it’s a given trait. I think I see where their lack of success comes from.
Yeah, like in what world can you not learn to change your personality? I mean, sure, it’s not always easy, but you always have a choice in how you present yourself.
i think people can change in their teenage years by the forced interaction in a small social environment at school. but once they reach adulthood, anyone in need of further personal growth just isolates and festers in their ways, avoiding confrontations that could prove them wrong. here’s to hoping that you who scrolled this far down in this lemmy thread make an unlikely friend when you least expect it and become a little better than before 😎👍
My attitude has definitely evolved and imo improved in the decades between 20s and 40s.
Lots of events and just time can contribute to it. But if you’ve joined a community that’s telling you it can’t get better, you might not be able to work on making it better, or even end up in situations that might change you for the better.
Counterpoint: a lot of the time, no one actually tells you why they don’t want to be your friend. People want to be polite and avoid talking about your negative traits, but they end up just perpetuating them because you don’t know how to improve.
In addition, not everyone has a choice in how they present themselves. If someone has a physical or mental disability they might slur words, put weird emphasis on words, or do other things that disturb other people.
Fair point. How can anyone learn if they don’t know what they need to learn?
I hadn’t considered disability. Maybe “present yourself” wasn’t the best choice of words - maybe “conduct yourself” would suit better. And all I really mean by that is that if you think you’re perpetuating a toxic trait then you can take notice of when it happens and strive to improve.
It’s pretty much locked in once you hit your teens. You can nudge it a little, you can change how you present yourself but your personality is what you are. And you cannot change that significantly. Just try changing your core values, your ethics. Can you start believing and feeling like murder and rape is ethical?
I’m not sure how accurate this is but I’ve read it in a scientific article some time ago. In particular, it highlighted the connection to how likely people are to commit crimes based on personality and brain structure alone and whether you can actually be held responsible for crimes since there is at least some determinism.
Maybe I’m in the minority, but I feel like I’ve had several radical changes in personality through life. I’m not the person I was when I was a teenager. I’m wildly different from who I was in my 20s.
As I’ve grown and learned about myself and the world, I’ve become more empathetic. That’s definitely had a mellowing effect to my personality.
That said, I agree that you can’t suppress your identity. You might try to push it down and repress it, but some things you just can’t change about yourself. But your personality is in your brain, and the brain is plastic.
But at the end of the day, all a person needs to do to have a pleasant personality is not be an asshole. If a person can’t restrain themself from being an asshole, then they’re probably not interested in developing their personality.
Yup. I’ve seen plenty of conventionally unattractive dudes with really good looking wives. So why did the woman choose him? Because he’s genuinely a pretty rad dude and treats her properly.
Or a massive scholng and magic fingers.
I don’t think Anon is considering the set of all possible cute girlfriends or lending them enough agency. I think it’s somewhat reasonable if you’re app dating to assume that people are doing some amount of maximizing cute + interesting or something similar but I think that’s because the apps encourage people to gamify dating.
Anecdotally I’ve seen a ton of…erm…normatively mismatched couples form and find success in other contexts like dive bars, pick up soccer, chatrooms, kink communities, boardgame cafes, more traditional dating sites etc. Again anecdotally these relationships seem to skew (normatively) in the guy’s favor more often than the gal’s as far as looks and personality go despite the fact that complaints like this come more often from men.
what would be these more traditional dating sites you’ve mentioned?
3 of the couples I had in mind when I mentioned traditional dating sites used Match.com (between 2015 and 2022 in their mid 20s to mid 30s) and 1 couple each around the same time period/age demographic on specific religion dating sites (catholic chemistry and christian mingle)
thanks, ill probably never use it but i was just really curious cause i didnt know any dating site that wasnt tinder or some knockoff of it
They’re mostly owned by match, including tinder. So I wouldn’t trust them either personally.
oh well
“Which are looks or an extravagant personality”
Why won’t cure girls date me, I’m ugly AND boring!
It’s so sad that these people clump together and just reinforce each other’s insecurities. Sure if you look like a thumb and only want to regurgitate 4chan memes you aren’t a very desirable partner. But there are tons of guys that are not leading man attractive that have partners. How do they do it?
Do things, when you do the things if there are women there, treat them like the human beings that they are. The more things you do the more stuff you have to talk about, when you find people that like the same stuff you do and you treat them like people, they end up liking you… it’s really that easy.
It is maddening watching so many men gather together to try to unravel the mystery of “treat women as people” and the absolutely bonkers alternatives they will come up with. Did you know that there are fitcels? These are incels that bought the propaganda and decided “I’ll become the Chad” and dedicated themselves to building fit bodies. They still have the “-cel” suffix because for all the effort, all the hours in the gym, all the supplements, all the physical pain, they never realized that women are people.
It’s fucking wild. Maybe the internet was a mistake
importantly: “I’m ugly AND boring, AND i believe these things to be immutable circumstances of my birth”
Just date men, anon. We dont need all these words for such a simple solution.
What really baffles me is the fact that he seems to think looks and personality can’t be affected.
There are multiple industries which exist solely to make people look better, even without considering cosmetic surgery.
Learning social skills is equally possible. Many, many books and classes are dedicated on the subject. There are many non-physical aspects of attractiveness, and social skills and personality are some, but shared interests, type of humour, mentality towards life, values and goals also play a part.
The fatalism in the post makes me sad for him.
Learning social skills is equally possible. Many, many books and classes are dedicated on the subject.
Except if you are aspie, those will both take enormous effort and feel so insincere that you will drop them past the initial acquaintance, if you manage that effort. Which is the point where you are most likely done for the same reason - people don’t like insincere romantic partners.
Those non-physical aspects of attractiveness for some of us are not optional.
And mind that I do have good looks and even hobbies that may occasionally seem interesting for others, and cultural context ; all the most beautiful girls I’ve met where I attended social events would try to get romantic by their own initiative when I was someone new for them. Some would even say I have beautiful emotions, and in general characterize me as a good human, even later (when they thought I don’t hear, in person they’d plainly ignore me). You know why every such spontaneous moment failed?
Again, because of simply being aspie - ashamed of being too weak (dropping hobbies, easily getting tired, too emotional, headaches, tired eyes, already feeling dirty in the middle of the day) to be good for a girl, ashamed of being stupid (that’s purely anxiety, one can’t look into her skull and tell if she cares, but it exists), ashamed of being insincere because looking into her eyes is a conscious effort, so I’m pretending I’m someone I’m not, and also petrified, because I don’t know what to say. And previous wounds.
These comments terribly reduce the field of possibilities which would be the reason for such people not having romantic successes, OK?
The only correct answer is therapy. Preferably the therapist should be a woman too.
I think your point is valid, but my point is exactly that social skills can be learned, for non-neurotypicals that might require more help. The attitude of helplessness displayed by the poster is much more harmful, even more than splitting hairs about population edge cases.
that social skills can be learned, for non-neurotypicals that might require more help.
Mostly unlearning them requires help. It’s called imitation and considered harmful. It takes away a lot of energy with nothing to show for it.
That little that can be learned mostly, too, consists of gaining experience to help unlearn imitation.
That was my point. Experience with people should be gained. Learning to imitate something should not.
Helplessness - yes. I’d tell them, other than therapy, to just keep trying to talk to girls, and stop trying to become “better” inside, because that’s what makes one dull and boring.
Hmm, methinks that Anon (and all of us straight men) might do better by treating women as people. If we feel it’s so important to have a cute girlfriend, then should we not respect that a woman might want a cute boyfriend? If we think women should keep an open mind about us, maybe set an example, and keep an open mind about non-physical traits that make a woman cute?
Yeah, it’s always down to luck—that’s just life—but being a good dude is putting your thumb on the scale in your own favor.
They are blaming bad luck for their shitty personality. No matter how ugly you are. You can do things to make improvements and become more attractive to a potential partner. (Diet, exercise, breathing through your nose (for real), getting a hobby that a potential partner would like (music, draw, express yourself through poems?, car maintenance, something))
They think they’ll never find anyone because they’re under 6ft or don’t have dimples or whatever other thing these guys obsess over. It’s really because they have a shitty personality that they won’t improve their lives, so they blame everyone else for the actions that they aren’t taking.
They are blaming bad luck for their shitty personality.
I wish I was the kind of guy who liked being social and meeting new people, but I’m not. I can force myself to do it, but I can’t force myself to do it much (and I think people can tell that I would rather be going to the dentist). I didn’t choose to be like this, and I didn’t choose whatever inborn characteristics and childhood experiences made me end up like this. If there’s a way to choose not to be like this, I haven’t found it. I do think I got unlucky.
I’m not trying to complain about my fate here. I got lucky in a lot of other ways. I’m just saying that it isn’t fair to tell people that they would be happier if only they were someone else.
I know people have different hardships that I would never understand, but the outlook of ‘woe is me, I can never be happy’ I see in some people is just poop. I know people need to vent and this might be a little of that and not a 24/7 type of attitude for the people that post it.
Plus there is a whole nother part that might have mental health issues. I wouldn’t even start to pretend to understand that.
I was mainly focusing on his “it’s over for me” attitude. I know life is hard. I don’t like being social, but I learned how to turn it on if I need to. It is just very draining, but it is a good skill to develop. I’m pretty introvert but I was in the military and had to go recruiting. I was a nerd in high school and didn’t have too much of a social life. During recruiting duty, I developed some character to act like when I need to be more open and talk to groups. Not a completely different character, but more of an idea of a person to start acting like for this role. It was like old Colbert Report energy mixed with quiet samurai jack endless drive to accomplish his goal. It sucked recruiting but I made it. I was with people that hated their life too. Knowing that I was with people that hated their life and were struggling too made it easier for some reason.
I’m not trying to complain about my fate here.
I mean, go ahead if you want. It’s good to get your thoughts out.
I don’t really have a 100% correct answer, but there are different answers you could try that might point you in the right direction. My non-solicited advice is try to find a hobby that you like and work getting to know people around that. I can find places near me to do baby goat yoga on the weekend. Even if you don’t like yoga, you can check out baby goats! You can look up any comic shop, they usually host events. I want to get more into gardening and I just started looking in to amateur radio. I guess there are a bunch of ham radio groups, so I might be able to talk to people without being near them.
Public libraries host events too. They are awesome and need some more love.
Idk. I hear a lot of people are on twitch now, but I’m too busy between work and Lemmy so I’m content. Sorry for rambling and I hope you didn’t/don’t take offense, you might have tried all of that stuff. I totally understand the wanting to leave a place when I’m out in public. My wife and I have been known just to disappear early during social gatherings.
If we feel it’s so important to have a cute girlfriend, then should we not respect that a woman might want a cute boyfriend?
Isn’t that what anon is doing? He’s lamenting that because he is neither good looking nor particularly charismatic, the women he wants to date have no good reason to date him.
This, but in order to find A cute girlfriend you would have to interact with girls which automatically ruins all hope of ever getting one because we font do that over here(cries in loneliness)
What’s odd is that Anon is so close to achieving enlightenment. I got to a point in my life where I felt like I had no idea how to attract a romantic partner. I’d dated a few times, but each time it had kind of fell into my lap, and I never got the hang of talking to women I found attractive in a way that made it clear I was interested.
So I just gave up. I accepted that I had no idea how to get a date, and I just went about my life, pursuing things that I found interesting.
And, lo and behold, I wound up meeting the woman I would marry, albeit through the mechanism of someone straight up telling me that she was interested in me.
If you’re focused on “getting” a girlfriend, you’re thinking of a partner as a valuable object to be acquired, and you’re not enjoying your own life, and improving yourself within that life. If you don’t think of romance as a pursuit, but rather as something good that can happen within the context of living your life well, then you are much better off.
Also, you’ve really got to get it into your head and heart that women are people and not prey animals, which I’m going to be honest, it seems might be a detail that is escaping Anon.
Malaprops to the author, this is such a mess.
But I think he’s right that it’s tough to overcome actual bad looks. Like if you are both naturally ugly and also unwilling to even try to be stylish or fit or whatever (some offsetting physically attractive quality) then it can be a slog. But then why the “cute” standard for a girlfriend? If you aren’t willing to put in the work why do you feel you can demand it of your partner? That is such an ugly attitude.
why is the image red now?
Please just suck my cock anon, please u need your sloppy toppy anon just be my cute gf anon I neeeeeeddd ittt 🥵🥵🥵😵💫😵💫😵💫🥸
