Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Crake, I think you're making an assumption here by assuming Hatter tricked anyone into a relationship, unless I skimmed and missed something.
Thump.
I only do that to get free pizza.
EDIT: I have a lot of friends. A lot of them. Like, too many. As in, we get complaints about pushing too many tables together at dinner. It's getting ridiculous.
I think it would be a wrong assumption to assume someone would act by what's technically possible. In the same breath, you'd be inferring that people should be expected to act by what they can get away with. Your position is weak in this matter, like or dislike Hatter.
Crake, cut it out.
But I thought the draw of this forum was that we could call people on their bullshit if we wanted to? Or have things changed a bit?
Er...you've been tempbanned for personal attacks before.
Pointing out that someone's opinion doesn't make sense/is offensive is generally okay. That's not what you were doing.
I don't understand why those posts were thumped exactly. Nobody seemed to be offended.
>dem thumps
^^The mountain of flags I'm looking at says otherwise.
Well when people are posting images of girls laughing or tearing down my rather weak arguments, how am I supposed to infer they are actually bothered by something?
Well, given that you've returned to the forum after over a month of absence just in order to call someone a horrible person after having been tempbanned partly for that before, I can't imagine your goal being anything else.
Crake, I flagged you because you were attacking a person rather than an argument. I'm not particularly beholden to Hatter and I find his political views pretty bad to say the least, and I thought you were going too far. There's disliking someone and there's allowing that to bias you against reason.
He's banned again btw.
Relevant:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/im-more-of-a-breast-man-and-completely-worthless-h,27152/
It's good to know that, even after all the bans and growing and self-awareness that IJBM has been through we still can't have a discussion on female interactions in society without a whole load of shit-flinging.
Moving to a more productive end of discussion, I'm going to move to what Insanity said, since that was right before this thread went tits up. I'd say that Pick-up artists stuff is social manipulation. After all, it's trying to convince someone of something that's entirely honest, sort of like convincing people you're clever by resorting to George Carlin lines.
And I don't think it's misogynist to call it that unless you're under the impression that all women would fall for it. Some, certainly, but there's a contingent of men that fall for stupid manipulation tricks of women and in non-romantic situations many people are manipulated by those of the same gender.
And if we were to say it worked 100% of the time that would make no impact on the ethics of it.
Manipulating people to get what you want from them at the expense of their dignity is a dick move. Also, all the pickup artists I've seen or met have been complete douchenozzles.
I know this one PUA; popular with the ladies, success-oriented. He's a social chameleon who changes personality and opinions to suit the situation, doing it well enough to fool people who don't know him, but really, he just gives off such an aura of sleaziness and douchiness that you feel like you need to take a shower afterwords. He sent me a link to the book he read that made him that way. I never looked at it again.
A close-ish friend of mine sent me a PDF copy of The Game at some point. This was back in the fall when I had a crush on a certain girl, and I think I had told him about it. Or maybe that's not why he sent it. I dunno.
He's a good guy, though. I didn't think much of it at the time. And I still won't hold it against him. Haven't read the book yet, though, and at this rate I might never do so.
I ignore most relationship advice anyway. I have for several weeks been in the second romantic relationship of my life, and like the first one that happened back in high school, it was the girl who initiated it. In high school it took two years of close friendship to draw out such feelings. This time, it was only a semester.
(Note: Whenever I had the feelings, it was always for girls I didn't know that well who tended to impress me quickly with their appearance and style of dress and some sort of specific action or talent [often acting], but would then turn out to be either not single, or asexual and aromantic, or something else. The only time this didn't end in resignation and moving on was with Frances, who I actually reached out to during a time when she was somewhat lonely abroad and not surrounded by longtime friends as she was here at my school. That was almost a year ago and she remains one of my closest friends and very nearly like a long-distance girlfriend, except she's aromantic and already has a longtime platonic life partner of sorts, and I actually have a girlfriend after all, so never mind...and I'm rambling again...)
My two most 'successful' relationship came out of friendships, which is the big reason I consider friendzoning to be a nice and hefty load of bollocks.
I think it's left that becoming a friend ruins sexual attraction and more that you became friends eternally because there was no chance of sexual attraction.
And seriously, if you don't find her worthy of your friendship, you're not worthy of her love.
People who talk about friendzoning are rarely interested in love.
Well, you don't deserve her snatch either.
For me, I feel really strong romantic feelings for a girl. But even though I really like her, I wouldn't want to be just her friend, with no chance of developing a romantic relationship with her. That would be hell.
^^Ugh, 'deserving' is not for anyone save those giving out the affection themselves to judge.
I'd argue from another perspective, that some people that fall into the friendzone pit are not scumbags but well-meaning and self deluding men. Basically, they misread the signs and feel an atraction that was never reciprocrated in the first place, which leads to heartbreak and resentment.
Another strange factor affecting relationships that people tend to forget can even happen by the time you're a junior in college: experience. It seems that I have twice in my life managed to elicit a romantic response from girls who have never dated before. It's a somewhat surreal thing, being the more experienced one, when my only other relationship was for a year, four years ago, and never...um...got very far, if you catch my drift. As far as I can tell, I still can't really kiss right, and here I am trying to show my girlfriend how it's done!
I realize everything I'm saying here is nearly irrelevant to the original purpose of the thread, but I've wanted to talk about romance for a while now, and I've been hesitant about doing so on TV Tropes ever since I joined Beyond the Lampshade, such has my opinion of the place been chilled!
Edit to take into account some of the several things that came along as I wrote this post: I kind of have been friendzoned a bunch of times. As I said in my first post, while I tend to attract unremarkable girls who no one else seems interested in, I develop periodic crushes on a very different sort of girl. And when this happened in high school, I told the girl in question, who I had very nearly been stalking, how I felt...and of course nothing came of it. We didn't even become close friends. With Frances it was different, because she's basically up for anything that respects a pretty broad set of boundaries. I knew she was aromantic, and that hasn't changed, but I was as physically intimate with her during our weekend together as I was with my past girlfriend, though without kissing. I think it says something that she let me tie her up, though I did a terrible job of it so whatever. I think I'm saying too much again. But the point is, with the right person something can exist that's not romance even with someone you were attracted to. A sort of sexless friends with benefits, I guess. But better. I dunno. And finding the right person is probably damn near impossible, I just got really lucky.
Most profound, vandro. I think.
^^We do not have need for a general purpose romance thread. In my memory the thread over on TVT was filled with one part couples being saccharine, one part pity-fishing and one part dating advice on the level of 13-year old highschool students. /adv/ could probably generate better opinions, and I doubt a thread on this board would devolve into the same cycle of angst, tiresome theories on gender relations and gleeful postings of the minor successes of even talking to the object of fancy.
In such a case, my advice would basically be to do what you need to do to get over it (barring anything unethical obviously) and that would probably indeed involve spending time away from her if you can't simply be satisfied with just being a friend. However, I think that if you find some value in someone as a genuine romantic partner obviously there's something you value on a non-sexual level. To deny friendship outright because she values you as a person but doesn't reciprocate your feelings is a bit of a dick move.
What I've decided to do is to be a distant friend and do my best to focus on other girls. I'm nice to her, talk to her when I see her, but I don't go out of my way to talk to her. When I see her in little bursts at a time, it's manageable.
And what I value IS non-sexual. The thing I wanted to do most with her was to hold her hand, or sit next to her. I just saw that she didn't need that kind of relationship with me, and was happy with her current boyfriend. I thought that I could help make her happy. I was wrong.