Former Incel

And the problem isn't that no one handed me a solution. It's understandable that I'd have to figure out the vast majority of it myself. It's understandable that people whose social skills come naturally are not going to know which parts are difficult in order to give advice for those parts. It's understandable that it's not someone else's job to solve my struggles for me.

The problem is that the advice they gave actively made my situation worse.

When someone is struggling with something and asks for your help (not just about how to socialize, but about how to do anything), you don't have a duty to solve their problem for them, but you do have a duty to do one of the following.

If you want to help, first make sure you understand what the situation is, then show them that you understand, then share your ideas of how to help.

If you don't want to help, get out of the way so someone else who wants to help can or so they can figure it out on their own.

If you're not able to provide a solution, but you show that you understand the situation, you'll at least make them feel validated. And maybe once in a blue moon, you'll be able to provide some advice that helps a little. Even if your advice doesn't work, as long as it's relevant to the situation, they may be able to change part of it and come up with a solution.

But if you give advice without even understanding what the situation is, you can easily make it worse. If you tell them "yes you can" when they say that they can't do something, then they have to jump through hoops to prove that they can't. If you automatically assume that they're experiencing the most normal situation you can think of, then they have to jump through hoops to explain what the difference is, which could be exhausting when they have to do it repeatedly. If you assume that the problem is fear so you pressure them to overcome their fear when the problem isn't actually fear, then they could end up taking wild guesses that make their situation worse. If you assume that the first success, no matter how small, is evidence that their struggle is gone, then they'll have to jump through hoops to explain why their success was only possible under specific rare conditions, and they may even become afraid to succeed because it means everyone will dismiss their struggles. Also, if you're an adult and they're a child, then you'll be frustrating them while they'll be prohibited from showing it.

But when people give you advice, they never even consider that as a possibility. They see you as "negative" for doubting whether someone likes you. They use once-in-a-blue-moon times when you were included as evidence that it's a miracle and that your struggles vanished. They never teach you how to tell if someone is treating you like a charity case, because it never occurs to them that someone would do that.

It can be difficult to figure out how to respond. It's possible that the primary source is uncomfortable and hesitant to communicate a boundary, so they have the secondary source do it for them. It's also possible that the secondary source is overprotective and controlling, or that some kind of bigotry is influencing them.

And being unable to determine who likes me can cause people to dislike me. I could pursue people who don't like me and be seen as a creep, or I could avoid people who do like me and they could take it as lack of interest on my part.

you are still shifting the blame onto women -- although possibly unintentional. i have had multiple friendships with men who behave like what you describe, and at no point is it ever my fault their behaviour is creepy. these are men i genuinely considered friends until they became more obsessive.

it is not the woman who is at fault when you wont give her personal space. it is not the woman who is at fault when you wont give her time alone and incessantly attempt to garner her attention. it is not the woman who is at fault when your behaviour changes for the worse. however, your post still places emphasis on the woman for creating these missunderstandings or for having the man labled a creep.

i hope this wasn't intentional on your part as you seem rather lovely otherwise, unless you just arent as reformed from incel depravity as you thought

How can I be "shifting the blame onto women" if the post is gender neutral? Read the post again and tell me where I said what gender each person is.

If you're nice to someone and they develop feelings for you, that isn't your fault. But if someone presumes that you're their friend because you explicitly tell them that you are, or if they presume that you're okay with a type of flirting because you've initiated it and you've never told them to stop, their presumption is completely reasonable.

Someone decides to do something "nice" and interact with you. Maybe they call you their friend. Maybe they flirt with you a little. Maybe they get a large group of people to show interest in you so you can feel popular.

You start to feel optimistic about this. You start to believe that maybe you're not as doomed to loneliness as you once thought.

You then play along in what seems like a completely reasonable way. Since they called you their friend, you assume that you're supposed to interact with them as often as they interact with their friends. Since they flirted with you, you assume that they like that type of interaction with you and you start initiating it.

They then start to find you annoying. They only wanted to feel like they're doing something nice, not to interact with you like a person who's company they actually enjoy and value.

But they don't tell you that they find you annoying, because they "don't want to hurt your feelings" or because they expect you to take a hint. They don't tell you that they find you annoying, but they do talk to their friends about how annoying you are.

Eventually, one of their friends tells you that you're annoying and to leave them alone. And you now have a reputation of being an obsessive creep.

Which group should you choose?

You may be tempted to choose the first group because of the attractive women. After all, you want attractive women to like you, and you don't want to settle for someone who you don't find attractive. So you try to fit in with the group that has attractive women, because the effort needed to fit in with that group and be liked by those women seems preferable over being stuck with the unattractive women in the other group.

The problem is that you're classifying those women the wrong way. Instead of classifying them as Group A being attractive women and Group B being unattractive women, you should classify them as Group A being cherrypicked women and Group B being random women.

Anytime you see a group of unattractive women, you should think of them as random women. It's normal to not find random people attractive, so it would make perfect sense that a group of random women will be mostly unattractive.

Even advice from women cannot always be trusted.

If you're a man who's looking for advice for how to interact with women, there can be different sources of advice that disagree with each other without any of them being flat out wrong. But there are some red flags that make advice dangerous to follow. And I noticed two main red flags here.

There's a promise of it working. She says that if you follow her advice, the woman will 100% fall in love with you. In reality, there is nothing you can do that will work every time. If you approach women with an expectation of a specific outcome, you're pretty much guaranteed to be a creep.

Another time when you see her, you touch her again in a similar way and she finds it creepy.

You may be wondering why this is happening. She liked it at first. So what changed?

The difference is that the first time it happened, you were carefully trying to read her boundaries. You were slowly experimenting to find out what she likes and what she doesn't. You started out using the default setting of how people in general should interact with people in general, and you then slowly increased the physical contact while each time making sure she has a reasonable way out. You were paying attention to what she initiates in order to make sure it's not one sided. Meanwhile, the second time, you were just copying the parts that you liked from the first time. The first time, you were doing everything the correct way. The second time, you went in with expectations.