Last night I saw a meme on Instagram from a young model I follow. She has a video of herself dancing and lip-synching to music, smiling, winking, and gesturing to the camera in a playful, perhaps teasing manner. The text over her says, "I never lower my standards for someone. If u want me, pursue me. If u can't do it, then another man will." What she said there really started my gears turning.
I have really bad associations with the pursuit of women from my experiences of doing, in my opinion, way too much of that kind of thing in my youth. However, here's a really hot, young model saying she has to have a guy pursue her or it's no deal. As the gears turned in my head, I concluded that, for me, the extent I want to pursue anyone romantically seems to be entirely up to me. I doubt this young woman could put out one, all encompassing rule that applies to all instances of when a man pursues her and what constitutes acceptable pursuit and what goes too far.
That's not to say she couldn't come up with general guidelines of when a man goes so far in his pursuit of her that it veers into stalking and harassment. I think lots of desirable women can give some cut and dried rules about that shit, but what about someone like me? I definitely have a history that gives plenty of examples of too numerous, too frequent phone calls and too much of the repeatedly asking a woman for a date when she'd turned me away numerous times, and, more recently, asking women such as baristas and waitresses out and then getting the impression that such an overture struck these women as premature, arbitrarily decided upon, and just overall one-sided as to whether or not they even had that kind of an attraction to me in the first place.
I think my limits on what I'll do to get with women I'm attracted to strike me as quite conservative these days. Furthermore, I think this overall conservative approach to that kind of thing allows me to get along reasonably well with the women in my world. The women in my day to day world include not only the above-mentioned waitresses and baristas, but also coworkers. I really try to be careful about approaching coworkers, because that's a situation where both me and the woman have to show up for work in order to meet the expectations of our employer. Whereas, with waitresses and baristas, I can choose whether or not to patronize such a business if circumstances appear questionable in the wake of some approach I made to such a woman.
So yeah, it occurred to me just now that the very reason that I get along with my female coworkers as well as I do might be the very same reason a hypothetical female coworker who might actually like me slips through my fingers. The same conservatism of admiring attention to female coworkers that serves me well enough in getting along with them on a day to day basis might actually work to my detriment in getting with one of them if one of them really does like me. At least that's the "silent assumption" that turns over in my head. A silent assumption is a thought in one's head that one has not yet put into actual words. So that's what the gears are doing in my head right now. That's the paradox. Here's the thing, though, I can live with that, because my relative conservatism in my attentions to women I admire in circumstances such as a work situation reflects how I want to live my life these days.
Furthermore, is my above-mentioned silent assumption really true? Is this not something I can investigate? Will I really let a potential love of my life just slip through my fingers if I'm just a bit more cool about the whole situation than I really need to be? Well, to find the yes or no to such questions probably requires that I play such a situation pretty cool. I'm trying to answer a question that's important for me to answer. Therefore, trying to "play it safe" and coming on like johnny-on-the-spot to some waitress, barista, or coworker would not serve to answer the question I want answered. Yes, I'm willing to sacrifice a potential love of my life to just answer this paradoxical dilemma that bedevils me.
I have really bad associations with the pursuit of women from my experiences of doing, in my opinion, way too much of that kind of thing in my youth. However, here's a really hot, young model saying she has to have a guy pursue her or it's no deal. As the gears turned in my head, I concluded that, for me, the extent I want to pursue anyone romantically seems to be entirely up to me. I doubt this young woman could put out one, all encompassing rule that applies to all instances of when a man pursues her and what constitutes acceptable pursuit and what goes too far.
That's not to say she couldn't come up with general guidelines of when a man goes so far in his pursuit of her that it veers into stalking and harassment. I think lots of desirable women can give some cut and dried rules about that shit, but what about someone like me? I definitely have a history that gives plenty of examples of too numerous, too frequent phone calls and too much of the repeatedly asking a woman for a date when she'd turned me away numerous times, and, more recently, asking women such as baristas and waitresses out and then getting the impression that such an overture struck these women as premature, arbitrarily decided upon, and just overall one-sided as to whether or not they even had that kind of an attraction to me in the first place.
I think my limits on what I'll do to get with women I'm attracted to strike me as quite conservative these days. Furthermore, I think this overall conservative approach to that kind of thing allows me to get along reasonably well with the women in my world. The women in my day to day world include not only the above-mentioned waitresses and baristas, but also coworkers. I really try to be careful about approaching coworkers, because that's a situation where both me and the woman have to show up for work in order to meet the expectations of our employer. Whereas, with waitresses and baristas, I can choose whether or not to patronize such a business if circumstances appear questionable in the wake of some approach I made to such a woman.
So yeah, it occurred to me just now that the very reason that I get along with my female coworkers as well as I do might be the very same reason a hypothetical female coworker who might actually like me slips through my fingers. The same conservatism of admiring attention to female coworkers that serves me well enough in getting along with them on a day to day basis might actually work to my detriment in getting with one of them if one of them really does like me. At least that's the "silent assumption" that turns over in my head. A silent assumption is a thought in one's head that one has not yet put into actual words. So that's what the gears are doing in my head right now. That's the paradox. Here's the thing, though, I can live with that, because my relative conservatism in my attentions to women I admire in circumstances such as a work situation reflects how I want to live my life these days.
Furthermore, is my above-mentioned silent assumption really true? Is this not something I can investigate? Will I really let a potential love of my life just slip through my fingers if I'm just a bit more cool about the whole situation than I really need to be? Well, to find the yes or no to such questions probably requires that I play such a situation pretty cool. I'm trying to answer a question that's important for me to answer. Therefore, trying to "play it safe" and coming on like johnny-on-the-spot to some waitress, barista, or coworker would not serve to answer the question I want answered. Yes, I'm willing to sacrifice a potential love of my life to just answer this paradoxical dilemma that bedevils me.
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