Increasing popularity of friends-first approach

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In my experience, most men just aren't capable of pulling off such a "long con" for very long. Sooner or later they will get very bored with, for example, pretending to be interested in an alleged shared interest that they don't in fact share. (This is one of the reasons why I believe that my autistic trait of liking to talk a lot about my special interests has actually helped to protect me from abusive potential partners.)


In what specific kinds of online spaces are you encountering these claims?

I have mixed feelings on this.

I don't know if it's just a millennial thing but I've found almost unanimously that if you don't show overt relationship / sexual interest in the first 30 seconds your written off permanently. I'd have to be convinced that most women (this going to sound bad but...) have it in them to do otherwise. If not showing overt interest immediately is a fatal litmus test failure then this whole thing is just a nice idea that'll go nowhere.

This situation actually working would be perfect for me because I simply don't trust anyone I don't know on that level, whether it's opening myself up at that depth or letting her into the gears of my life. It doesn't matter how attractive she is or even if she 'looks' just right in an alternative but attractive way, if I don't know her I have no clue whether I'd sign off on her character, whether she'd be able to appreciate anything I have to offer (most wouldn't), so while I'd love to keep the world at a distance and only let the safe ones in I'm shutting them all out effectively by not being able to show immediate interest.

I'd add the biggest reason I'm single isn't because women are never interested, it's because nothing ever feels right and the times where things do feel right are often enough five years between which is LONG odds.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 15 Mar 2023, 1:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The results of the study aren’t surprising tho.

As I always said, having an active social life is the main mean how NTs meet people.
Aspies struggle in dating mainly due to lack of social life, hence lack of friends and hence lack of chances to meet a match.

Primarily Reddit dating/gender-related discussions. Which I appreciate isn't real life and is likely to be heavily biased by the kinds of people who participate, but these things echo throughout the rest of culture. Less vociferously, perhaps, than aggressive anti-male Reddit posters, but very much still the general sentiment in even professional news media, or out in public.

Some of it not even necessarily concerning in isolation. One crank on the internet is ignorable. One poster campaign in the city is ignorable. One wealthy, attractive, middle-class op-ed writer is ignorable. But when you start piecing these together - when you're someone who actually cares what other people think and feel, and you don't want to do wrong by anyone - you start to get the impression that anything and everything is harassment or, at best, poor form and dreadfully impolite.

I'd disregard the caption specifics but the overall frame of this meme sums it up well for what's happening to... apparently per Steven J. Shaw... 80% of long-term singles who want to find partners but can't find the right person.

See, this is another thing I've "heard through the grapevine" (by which I mean "have seen explicitly stated by some in dating discussions online). But then, once more, it directly contradicts "get to know a woman, don't just come out with indications that she's attractive, she's more than just a body, she's a person, blah blah blah".

So which is it?

Be clear about your intentions and don't hide behind "fake friendship"?

Or settle in and get to know each other well first, without jumping to shallow plans and sexual expression before it's time?

Again, I'm sure this varies from woman to woman, which is fine, but in the current atmosphere it feels as though everyone believes their opinion to be absolute gospel, and any deviation from that gospel is heresy or, worse, criminally offensive. It feels as though there's no room to experiment, recalibrate, make mistakes and have them understood as genuine accidents, or fail safely at all, in any way. All of which are incredibly important for an autistic person, particularly one who "should know better" according to his chronological age.



Right there with you, dude.

Where, how, and under what kinds of circumstances have you "found" this to be the case? In what kinds of situations have you been socializing with women?


I can't speak for "most" women, but I knew my partner for three and a half years (as a work colleague, then a business partner and eventually a friend) before the friendship took an erotic/romantic turn.

In any case, the data referred to in the quoted article would seem to indicate that this is much more common than you think.


I find it hard to believe that the majority of women would regard this as a "litmus test" at all, much less a fatal one. Apparently there are some women with this attitude, but I strongly question how commonplace it is.

How did you arrive at your belief that it is anywhere nearly as commonplace as you seem to think?

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 15 Mar 2023, 2:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There's 'nice guys', who - the real problem there as I think Robert Glover nails it - they have tons of what he calls 'covert contracts' meaning implicit expectations in their behavior. Then there are guys who are just slow-burn, like myself and like you seem to indicate for yourself as well. Seems like both have the same fate just that the first goes in with eyes closed, the second with eyes open.

I remember back when I was in my mid to late 20's my roommate (also my age) had a guy friend who was 33 who he'd met in a ballroom dancing class through his girlfriend. He was short, thin, intellectual but guarded with people, and he had a girl he'd liked for close to ten years and made no progress with. I think my roomate also knew here through some indoor volleyball stuff as well so there were multiple links? I remember meeting her for the first time at her 30th birthday party at her parents house. My roommate (my friends were the kinds of guys who'd sweep in, take a girl, and leave the hangers on and orbiters holding their purse - wasn't nice of them but it's what they did) had better luck with her that evening, right in front of him, and that burned the friendship - ie. never saw him again. Another one of my friends who doesn't date, I don't know if he's on the spectrum or not but think of the guy who always says the cynical thing that either everyone's thinking but no one says or, a step beyond that, offends everyone by going beyond their boundaries, laughed about this guy I mentioned liking the girl in question because... as he put it.... she was Ukrainian in the 'holding a shotgun while pregnant' sense, and he was just a skinny wimp.

This is what goes around with these kinds of things and I've seen it often in social groups completely outside of that of my friends. I gave up on trying to date anyone they knew after sometime when I heard a diverse group of people (socially, style-wise, ethnically, religiously) all spontaneously agreeing that head-shape told you all kinds of things about high or low breading and I was like 'Holy sh--.... how did I not know that I was in the phrenology club?'. It's like my friends are aspie-friendly on a given social level, like if it's me or a guy like me, but when it comes to women who might be different themselves its like their radars go on full blast, and I've seen some guys (again not in my circle) who were real quick to look at women who were the slightest bit different like they were serial killers but then the bar girl whose solipsistically three sheets to the wind sober, who I'd be terrified of because that's like dealing with a prepubescent (cognitively) with the ability to use the law to her benefit.... that doesn't phase them at all while when I do see the later that I just described that's what gives me the heebie-jeebies, similar to watching a couple out at a get together at a bar where the girl is working the room with seemingly no boundaries and the guy is sitting there with his arms folded like he's guarding a bank (I'd never in my life want to be that guy - sex just isn't worth that).

School, friends circles, restaurant industry, for almost anything I saw friendship is a permanent ceiling and the only way I'd see even 'friends with benefits' come in is if she liked him but he didn't want a relationship with her. The other problem - if you show overt interest when she wasn't yet you also lose immediately in most cases because it means either desperation or you wanted her more than she wanted you, whether either of you have any way to know that this is true or not.



Welll... first what I was forced to take away from it is that women see non-competitive men as 'weak' and you're only showing manly signals if you actually are showing intent immediately. If you don't show intent immediately you either genuinely aren't interested or you're afraid to - in which case you don't rise to the level of being considered eligible, so the difference in meaning is seen as negligible.

Mind you in that - this is by and large the normie 105 IQ way of seeing things, and it seems to be like this because those kinds of internal dialogs such as seeing the world and people in general as dangerously crazy and wanting to keep people you don't know, especially with the legal power women have, at arms distance until you can vet their character and that you'd both want to be in each other's lives, it's something that the herd just doesn't allow because for them it doesn't exist - ie. things are really simple, ie. willie up or no willie up, no willie up - nothing to discuss. It's almost like being forced to play by a set of rules made for people with no significant internal experience as someone who has significant internal experience.

The one thing I do wonder about is whether so many guys, especially gen Z, of any social status are afraid of showing any interest to women (ie. risk of dire consequences or at least perceived risk of it) means that the behavior would be looking much more uniform and thus they can't really weed out winners and losers as well by this heuristic anymore.

Something else to Mona...

I had a kind of on-repeat trauma through high school and then through my early to mid 20s.

What happened through high school was someone would be attractive and then 'Oh.... he's different' after a few conversations. That pattern repeated itself dozens of times.

In college it was them being interested, I'd try talking to them to suss out who they were, and within a few weeks they'd seem to hate me - I think because they felt like I'd shot them down. So I was on rolling repeat with a new girl every month at the restaurant I worked at trying to flirt with me and after a handful of times I was already feeling sick to my stomach thinking 'Here we go again....'.

What made me want to leave the dating world more than this however was what happened in my late 20's and early 30's, where I'd either meet someone on EHarmony, through acquaintences, or online where I had a lot of respect for them as people but attraction didn't click, and I felt like I was doing nothing more than breaking hearts.

It's not a fun game and sadly for a lot of people there's no way to do it intelligently because doing it intelligently seems to break the rules of attraction for most people to begin with.

There's probably some truth to that (although I despise the term "nice guys" when used to describe men who pretend to be nice but have ulterior motives, it casts a gigantic, unfair shadow over guys who really are nice).



Indeed, I've had friends like that roommate of yours too. Still friends with one, in fact he's the only guy I still know as a friend, although we live far apart now so we don't get to meet much. But the point is that he would be the guy who, when I'm trying to prepare myself, calculate plans, decide whether to risk making some kind of attempt to reach out to girl/woman in the group, he would just... well, there would suddenly be a relationship, and I wouldn't be in it.

It really got to me, because he struggled socially in school (same school I went to, and same age, but we didn't know each other yet), just like I did. But then, when we both went to (the same) college (but in different subjects), he gained massive amounts of confidence out of nowhere, and I didn't.

Ever since then he's had partner after partner after partner - generally some form of monogamous relationship, don't get me wrong, but it rarely took him long to get another when the previous one ended. It was absolute torture knowing that every relationship there was in the group, he'd be part of it, whilst I got to sit on the sidelines, watching public displays of affection, biting my tongue when they'd "disappear" for half an hour and leave me on my own.

I still don't think he understands. We've tried to do the whole "emotional bros" thing, but I can't even begin to imagine how he could really, genuinely, truly understand what I had to go through watching him be so successful, getting any relationship he liked, literally right in front of me.

We fell out over it once. One time at a mutual friend's place, a few of us were just messing about on the couch, a young woman I'd known since before I met this friend of mine was there, someone I'd kind of liked for ages. The friendly touches (which I basically never experience) from the messing around (non-sexually, in a group setting) on the couch got me thinking, maybe... maybe I could say something? Maybe she'd be interested? We'd known each other a while, we got on well together, it wasn't impossible.

Next thing I know, dude's dumped his previous girlfriend and is now with the woman I was friends with. No lead-up, no discussion, no hint of any change, just... happened. I was absolutely livid. Was it my fault for not saying anything to her sooner? Probably. But I didn't expect that guy to just switch girlfriends like he's changing his shirt. But that's apparently a thing successful guys can do. They barely need to know a woman, they don't spend weeks, months, years getting to know them, supporting them, being friends with them, they just rock up and poof a relationship appears.



Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like. Just about acceptable until there's something to be gained, then it's right to the back of the queue so the popular people can get what they want.

The one thing I do give the friend credit for in my example was that he was ultimately looking for long-term relationships and did his best to land those, which he's married a second time and they seem like a solid couple. It's just that when there was nothing around it seemed like he'd make due with almost anything - like being in his 30's and not passing on women in their late 40's, women twice his size, it really didn't matter.

For anyone else reading the end of that last paragraph - I'm not saying men should fixate on age or weight of women, just adding the observation that his taste preferences for long-term were much more stringent than for short-term hookups (which is common apparently but I reflect on that because I can't do it, I often times feel like I have as much aversion to having sex with women I don't want to have sex with as women more often have for men in that direction - and I really can't tell whether I'm happier for it or whether it's an inconvenience, depends I guess if I'm thinking long or short-range).


I get the sense that, in the NT world, this is just the going assumption and one almost has to be an aspie or outsider to look twice at it (otherwise NT guys who get irritated just settle the status or perceived aggression disequilibrium by fisticuffs and fixing the problem that way rather than observing and thinking, also needless to say I don't know anything about that magic window where fisticuffs don't turn into assault charges or police reports unless I'm fending off an assault). My friends have historically been the kind of guys who were one-foot-in one-foot-out and doing their best not just to model NT's but model top echelon NT's and so they saw this as 'successful' behavior and emulated it.

I think the friends first approach is the best for young people on the spectrum. Particularly if you are aiming to date an NT.
A wholesome relationship is cultivated over time and it helps to have common interests and passions.

One minor caveat with "friends-first" is to take care with getting "friend-zoned" which easily happens.

You mentioned what you call "the normie 105 IQ way of seeing things." I have always sought out fellow oddballs and preferably people who were also highly intellectual. Hence anyone who was too much of a "normie" has always been ipso facto ineligible to become either a friend or a potential romantic partner of mine.

Have you ever made a point of seeking out intellectually-oriented oddballs?

What can you really do to that extent other than run with the interests you have in those directions, join groups, and hope that there might be opportunities along the way? That much I've already done. It's one thing to follow your passions and find people who share them but if that doesn't yield anything you'd be forced to do what - pretend you're interested in things you're not and go scour those groups?

Attraction is a mostly emotional response. For example if you are relaxing on a golf course and you see a girl who looks like this smiling at you



You are leap frogging "friend" and intelligent thinking and animal desires start to kick in....