something_else

Ironic

I genuinely thought this was a parody, I thought you were mocking OP until the last sentence 😂

A good fallback for starting a conversation with anybody is a Barnum statement. Statements that almost everybody feels like apply to them but still sound personalised “You look like you’re either gonna be the nicest person I’ve ever met, or like you’re going to ruin my life” It’s somewhat manipulative but as a means to an end for getting into a deep conversation it works well

I know this first hand. I was a loner most of my time between high school and my early twenties. I resorted to going out to bars and clubbing alone to build better social skills. It worked to a degree, but I don’t have a single person from that stage of my life who I still talk to, and I was still deeply insecure at the end of it. I also had baseline social skills already which is why that was even viable. Now I have a solid social circle of 4-5 great friends who I love dearly, and it has almost eliminated my social anxiety. I wish I had prioritised building that first instead of going straight to cold approach. Deep friendships are where you learn who you really are and how to express that in a way that is appealing to others.

I’m not talking about social circle game, I’m talking about making genuine connections with people and building friendships without the sole purpose of it all being to get laid. The kind of friendships where you can actually go and do social stuff together and just have a good time. That’s the path to developing basic social skills if you have none. This teaches you basic social dynamics, and most importantly it teaches you that socialising is actually fun, and not just a barrier in your way to getting laid. Cold approach can be good for developing social skills, but if you’re weird or cringy and don’t possess even basic social skills it’s just going to make it worse for you. You’re going to be continually told how weird or strange or awful you are which will totally destroy your self-image. Not to mention in a small town you will end up with a reputation.

This is not a downside! This is called growing up

No reputation is also a problem as it means no status. No status + weird gimmicky approaches will put you solidly in the loser category in the mind of most women Women don’t really want a nobody, or somebody with nothing to lose. They want a man who is somebody. You don’t need celebrity status to clear that bar, a good group of friends that you do fun social stuff with is enough. You have the wit to be entertaining and sociable, this is something that’s definitely achievable for you and it’s where you should direct your energy if you want to get laid. I guess if you’re not doing these gimmicky approaches too often you may have avoided a negative reputation for now, but certainly don’t risk tarnishing your reputation anymore. In a town of 60k people most people know each other and stories about the weird guy who pretended he was married to try and get laid is exactly the kind of story a girl shares with her friends and laughs about

Dude, in a small city like that you’ve got to approach this by building a social circle. With some of the stuff you’ve told us about here I’m willing to bet you already have a fairly negative reputation in a town that small As I’ve said, you’re spinning your wheels because you’re trying to learn to drive in a car without any tyres. Learn basic social skills and get a social circle going and you might actually get somewhere.

lmao

Thank you

Leo's comment says nothing about liking anything. He specifically says 'disliking a thing before understanding the thing is backwards', implying that you should understand something before you dislike it. There is no mention of liking at all. You literally just misunderstood what Leo was saying. Or you interpreted it that way because you wanted to see it that way which, ironically, is the exact thing about bias that is problematic.

You've got to be trolling at this point, right? 😂 The whole point is that you need to be relatively neutral and unknowing towards something before you form an opinion on it, if you want that opinion to have any chance of being accurate. You don't like it, you don't dislike it. You are neutral and open minded. Claiming you are self-aware of your own bias and that you don't let it cloud your judgment is, to be frank, laughable. People spend their entire lives aiming to reach a state like that and are still plagued with blind spots. Right now you are at the peak of a Dunning-Kreuger chart. And, again, taste/preference are entirely separate thing. Being biased against women in the way you often present it is not a 'preference' or a 'taste'.

🫪 Disliking strawberries is a personal preference. Disliking or discriminating against someone because they’re a woman is prejudice. You’re conflating completely different things by hiding them under the word “preference.”

To a degree. Yes, bias can be useful in a genuine survival situation. But if someone breaks into your room, you have direct evidence that person is dangerous. That is completely different from being generally prejudiced against men because one might hypothetically attack you. Or being generally prejudice against women because the only value you see in them is as being meat to stick your dick in. Some biases being useful does not make all biases justified. Context matters a lot. In the vast majority of cases (e.g. the bias you show on this form towards women) your survival is not threatened enough to justify acting on bias instead of truth and understanding.

Yea, that was the exact point being made. Most people are incredibly biased. That's the default. Being wise involves being acutely aware of your own biases, not denying their existence or claiming that you're above them. That is delusion. Bias is incredibly subtle and tricky. It grabs the balls of your rational mind and puts them in a vice, then forces it to produce an endless stream of very logical reasons for why your biases are the right biases.