Love-shyness

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I first read about this only a few days ago:

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The term love-shyness was used by psychologist Brian G. Gilmartin to describe a specific type of severe chronic shyness....

Gilmartin had seven criteria for each "love-shy" man he included in his study:

He is male.
He is a virgin.
He is a person who very rarely goes out socially with women.
He is a person without a past history of any emotionally close, meaningful relationships of a romantic and/or sexual nature with any member of the opposite sex.
He is a person who has suffered and is continuing to suffer emotionally because of a lack of meaningful female companionship. In short, he is a person who desperately wishes to have a relationship with a woman, but does not have one because of shyness.
He is a man who becomes extremely anxiety-ridden over so much as the mere thought of asserting himself vis-à-vis a woman in a casual, friendly way. This is the essence of "love-shyness".
He is a man who is strictly heterosexual in his romantic and erotic orientations. In other words, he is a person who is in no way a homosexual.

Gilmartin did not rule out the existence of female or homosexual love-shy people, but he doubted they would feel the same negative effects as heterosexual men, and suspected that the condition would manifest very differently in them....

Gilmartin noted that the 100 older love-shy men studied were experiencing well above average career instability. Even though almost all of these older love-shys had successfully completed higher education, their salaries were well below the US average. They were typically, if anything, underemployed and were working in jobs such as taxi driving, or in lower level clerical or telemarketing jobs. At the time of Gilmartin's research (1979-1982), 3.6% of college graduates in the USA were unemployed. The unemployment rate for the older love-shy men was 16%.

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(The full article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love-shyness )

When I read this article, I saw that my own profile fit very closely, although not exactly, with it (and that in my opinion, it could easily have fit exactly if I had made just one or two random choices differently in my past.)

I also note a paragraph near the bottom:

Their impairment of functioning in social interactions bears some similarities to the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome or Semantic Pragmatic Language Disorder. For example, like people who have Asperger's syndrome, love-shy men often have a hard time developing peer relationships. In a March 6, 2004 letter by Gilmartin [1], he felt "as many as 40 percent of the cases of severely love-shy men would qualify for a diagnosis of 'Asperger's Syndrome'".

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Does this ring a bell with anyone else here besides myself?

Well, all of those symptoms can fall under Asperger's Syndrome, so if you are an aspie, there is a very good chance that you have that.

non aspie partners of aspergers males always complain about having to initiate intimacy and having had to initiate the first moves in a lot of aspie/non aspie relationhips. it is an aspie thing, nit being able to read the cues and signals that nt's give off.

Aspergers Syndrome can have the same effects as love-shyness due to the social difficulties. So, someone with AS could be said to be love-shy but it is not simply love-shyness; it would just appear to be love-shyness.

Wow, that sounds like me.

I only meet about half the criteria (heterosexual male, virgin, no prior relationships).


I don't think I have love-shyness.

In fact, since I tend to get along better with my female friends (and have more of that gender... which is going to change as soon as I return to NMT ), I strongly doubt that I have it.


I've tried to initiate a relationship recently, but it really didn't seem to work (she seems to like me, but not to the point of being interested in any sort of relationship)

I don't meet the criterion about being shy in approaching women. I just haven't had any success yet. I wonder why Wikipedia even includes this as an article. Usually articles like these have to be researched by more than one scientist and not just be one psychologist's pet theory.

I scored 136 on some questionnaire for love-shyness, which is apparently higher than even "self-confident non-shy men." For those of you who think Asperger's syndrome implies love-shyness, my score should put your conjecture to rest.

My thoughts,

Women probably can have pretty similar experiences. My thought is that it is also likely to be very horrible, though it might be horrible in a different way.

For Homosexual Men, I have a feeling that it would probably be very almost identical, with the added bonus of being marginalized. Even if they're "in the closet". I base this on that I talk to a lot of Gay Men on IM (Many of whom are not flirting with me and I only come onto them in a completely plutonic way).

They sound almost exactly like straight men, albiet Introverted ones (many would say that's not really male, but their opinions don't count. Ha! Take that Established Male Gender Roles!), save for that on occasion, the fact they're into other dudes slips into the conversation. So it stands to reason that they go through pretty similar experiences.

I also strongly doubt that if there is a uniquely "Male" way of dealing with not being in a relationship, that gay men will have the "Female" one. Gay men are not like women. Get it through your thick heads. Even most of the men that do wear womens clothing are straight.


Just thought I'd mention all that and open up a can of worms. (Maybe if I'm lucky I can flame some Homophobes )

Hmm I didn't see anything about likening the situation of gay males with that of females. Where was this?