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Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

> 1. It's usually not actually helpful to signal that you are desperate and lonely and your life is in the toilet. Once in a great while, someone will be truly wonderful to you because you did that but it's usually counterproductive.

I met up with a close friend a few days ago to lament how tough its been to live alone throughout this Covid period, to get rejected by dozens of companies while job hunting, and to do online dating and not only get rejected by 99% of potentials but have some of the worst first dates I've ever had in my life. One woman was literally multi-tasking while she was on the Zoom 'date' with me.

And her response was "I'm sorry that you're going through that" before switching to talking about her kid being noisy. And internally I'm thinking all these years I've spent listening to you complain about your job/husband/baby and this one time I'm being honest about how tough things are right now and you can't even bear to hear me out more than a split second? Give me a fucking break.

Covid-19 really revealed who my true friends are. I am quite thankful that I do have a couple friends who I meet on a weekly basis where we check in on one another and keep our spirits up. Without them, I don't think I would've survived these lockdowns without having a mental breakdown.

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In contrast to some of the other replies, I don't find your friend's response particularly unexpected. She probably didn't mean to be hurtful. People often don't know how to respond to hearing other people's problems. They don't always know how you're feeling. Sometimes they try to commiserate by relating about their own problems.

I think most single guys are experiencing similar problems right now with online dating. It's tough. Your friend may have misjudged how much you wanted to talk about it. Often the best way to get the response you're looking for is to straight-up tell the person (politely) how you're feeling and what you want from them.

The reality is that 99% of people don't really want to hear other people's problems. Most people want to have someone to tell their problems. The other 1% can be considered as very good friends.

> 3. Signaling desperation attracts predators far more often than it attracts real friends.

Yep, these are excellent and hugely valuable life lessons. There is a real and common tendency among humans to react to negativity by either running away or moving in for the kill.

On the surface this is a depressing realization, as you get older you come to understand that nobody really gives a fuck (maybe a handful of people do if you're lucky, but I'm convinced that many don't even know how to care about someone else). Most relationships are only skin deep.

However it's also a powerful revelation, it gives you a tool for understanding people and that tool can change your life. If you suspect someone may be involved with you simply to take advantage (emotionally, financially, sexually, socially, whatever), you can start asking them for things.

The ones that care will give you what you ask for. The ones that don't will disappear almost immediately (which is one hell of a moment of clarity when you've known them for years).

When you feel a relationship is one-sided and you ask the other person (nicely) to do something which will even out the score, the result is always a win. If they value the relationship you get what you want and the relationship is reaffirmed. If they don't then a toxic relationship ends and you can go focus on the healthy ones.

This tool is so powerful that it's really on you to be fair and strike a balance. Once you start using it you'll find it's surprisingly easy to overuse, there are a lot of people who have problems with saying no. There are no rules but I try to strike a 50/50 balance of give and take even when the other person says they're happy. Aside from your innate sense of fairness the only other real check on your ability to use other people is your reputation (that's an enormous one over time, though).

Yeah. When it goes like that my internal reaction is typically "Good riddance. Don't let the screen door hit you on your way out. Thank god I don't have to listen to one more minute of your whiny shit ever again because we are so done."

People don't like complainers. Plain matter of fact is your significant other sees you as the rock in the relationship, which is likely why the relationship works, and by complaining the foundation their attraction was built on was shaken.

I was actually thinking of the year when I was bedridden for several months and my life hung in the balance for the entire year and a female friend -- my best friend when I was a military wife stationed in Germany -- managed to get hold of me after not hearing from me for several months while I fought for my life and she went on for 45 minutes about her really minor whiny shit without so much as asking me how I was and I finally interrupted her and said something about how I didn't have the energy for this because I was fighting for my life.

That was the end of that phone call and I never heard from her again.

Good. Riddance. I absolutely didn't need another thing leeching away my limited energy that year.

I hope you're doing well now. Happiest of holidays to you, Doreen.

Other than my perpetually dicey finances, I am doing well. My health seems to have stabilized recently and, with that, I seem to no longer be suicidal.

Happy holidays.

Happy holidays

I sometimes do something essentially the same as your former friend because I think the person with the problem probably wants to be treated like a normal person to feel as normal as possible instead of as a charity pity case. And to take their mind off of their completely obvious problems of the moment. IE, "I know my leg is cut off, we don't need to go over it and over it ..." I figure everyone in the world is smothering them with that so I will not do that.

However, I know that is a gamble and had I judged that wrong, and someone said "Hello can it be about me today instead of about you? just today? My leg... is gone... I'm not over it." I would NOT be hanging up and never call again.

I might possibly if the way you said it didn't clue me in why you were saying it. If I felt you really didn't want to hear from me at a time like that, then I'd be gone. gone. I thought I would be there for someone when the chips were down and they apparently do not value that from me. What a dumbass I've been.

I started this comment with the intention to say essentially "If you were worried at all that you did something wrong, don't." because even if there had been that initial mis-reading of intentions, that doesn't explain disappearing, so it's squarely on them.

But right at the end there while actuallly writing this, I realized there is a responsibility for communication on everyone's part. I realized there is a plausible sequence of events where I had good intentions and you had good intentions and I had reasonable reactions and you had reasonable reactions and still we both came away thinking the other person is not great.

So now I no longer know if I have a point. Well these worthless thoughts were free at least. :)

That sounds like something the likes of Jordan Peterson would say.

One of the best things my therapist did to me this year was get me off of Jordan Peterson. I was spiraling down in self-doubt because I listened to him so much.

It’s one hell of a miserable relationship if you can’t rely on your partner to have a receptive ear to listen to the things that bother you or make you sad.

The most confusing thing about the Jordan Peterson popularity was how some people seemed to take the opposite meaning from what I heard him actually saying. I don’t mean his detractors which took uncharitable interpretations but his fans. It was really bizarre since I listened to him enough to realize he wasn’t saying much he was just saying it in a way some group listened.

I like to hear about my friends' inner lives. Not all the time, and I have to already care about the person first, but it gives me a sense of intimacy and trust. It feels impersonal and dissatisfying when someone maintains a "crushing it!" front too well. Like we are just Facebook acquaintances.

Everyone saying she was a shit friend but she may not even have realized how you perceived it or that you wanted to keep talking about it.

I think this happened basically:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=x81M3g3zjXc

This is how you separate fake friends from real ones. Sorry it's been so shitty.

Heads up, most (not all) women really hate seeing men complain or cry. I think most men who have been around women a lot understand this. It's just the way things are, it's not out of malice. If you're a man and you want to sulk with someone, another man or a therapist is best.

This seems like a very dangerous generalization.

not really

Citation needed. Complaining is one thing, sure, but expressing a wide range of emotions (including healthy expressions of sadness, frustration, fear, etc.) is considered pretty positive and good by the women I know.

Crying is important, normal, and healthy.

There actually is research about men and women both turning away from men who are seeking emotional support. College age researchees, so YMMV. Research is referenced in Terrence real’s “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Basically you have to learn to express emotions in the right way, and to the right people, at the right time. I had to train my therapist girlfriend not to freak out when I have strong, negative feelings. She would constantly make it about herself (I’m not doing enough, you’re not acknowledging what good I’m doing). There was very limited space for simply expressing how I was feeling, and having it acknowledged without being punished.

You also just can’t expect most people to be skillful listeners, or give good advice. Even if they want to help, you need some pretty darn well developed theory of mind to conceptualize how the other person is feeling, and what would be useful for them to hear.

I’d also comment that you when men are stressed, it is often incorrectly read as anger, and thus threatening. I was in this terrible situation where I was in a vacation cabin rental with an ex and 20 other people- we’d broken like a week before. I was in anguish, but several people misread stonefaced non-emotion as anger and aggression. The fallout ended up being really immense, and a huge part of it was just a fundamental misread (combined with “all men are abusers and liars!” style distrust. It was real dumb.)

Mine is not a valid HN comment because I have nothing to add other than saying thanks for encapsulating this- I've experienced the same and wondered if I was the outlier.

>Basically you have to learn to express emotions in the right way, and to the right people, at the right time.

> a huge part of it was just a fundamental misread

I think you are on to something in the first part about you yourself learning stuff but in the last part you just put the burden of those around you.

My take is that men in general lack training in identifying/naming their own feelings/emotions. Then when you are experiencing some tough negative emotions you can't express/talk about them and then your secondary emotions come in from this frustration. What emotion that is is personal but often men will go to anger, "it's think it's this thing that is causing me pain so that thing is bad/stupid/wrong" but all along it was your own feelings coming from your own unmet needs that you could have handled yourself if you just had could have named and reasoned about them.

You're rather jumping to unfounded conclusions. I can assure you that I communicated directly and clearly what my emotional state was, why I was behaving the way I was behaving, and actively tried to avoid inflicting my feelings on other people by being non-expressive.

An example of an action I took that one person considered "aggressive" and "abusive": There were three couches, shaped in a U configuration. Ex and friends were sitting on one couch. Someone else invited me over to sit on another couch. I came over, sat quietly for about 60 seocnds, decided, you know, I'd rather be somewhere else, and walked away.

This isn't to say I bear no responsibility in how things played out, but the bits I'm disclosing here, even in context, are wild misunderstandings, and when I explained myself I was met with distrust and suspicion. We were in a rental cabin; physical proximity was unavoidable. It wasn't even clearly distressing to my ex, just her white knight friend.

Yeah I don't know your situation, although it sound like an intense one, so my observation was more a general one. But you also don't and didn't know the situation of the others in that cabin so your interpretation of how "they misread you" not true either. Maybe that "white knight" was worried that you would get in the way of him getting it on with your ex, maybe scared of not measuring up to you, but couldn't navigate those feelings and acted aggressively towards you by intentionally misreading you. My guess is as good as yours...

That's interesting. So you are basically saying anger is the only socially accepted way of expressing these suppressed emotions?

Thats's definitely not what I'm saying. I'm saying I was badly punished because a particular person misperceived me as being angry.

I think this line that anger is an acceptable emotion for men to express is out of line with reality; it's certainly out of line with my lived experience. Anger expressed by men is punished, sometimes exorbitantly.

I think it's pretty simple:

Women look to men for strength, so showing weakness takes a man out of consideration as a partner.

These are very broad generalizations, and not at all representative of anything like a truth. I concede that it may have been true in your experiences, but it's a fairly toxic pattern to make categorical statements about "what women want" or "what men are like" when the spread of human character is so broad.

Let's try not to limit what's possible by inflicting on the world what we expect.

Specifically, statements like these become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only are someone's perceptions influenced by social proof - if someone is treated as if you expect them to behave a certain way, they are more likely to behave that way (if I'm going to catch shit for being dishonest anyway, why not lie?).

>but it's a fairly toxic pattern to make categorical statements about "what women want" or "what men are like" when the spread of human character is so broad.

It depends on your definition of toxic and your definition of truth. The belief that categorical statements have zero relevance in this world is an ideal that is just too unlikely to be true. Broad statements can be made about both men and women.

For example Women tend to have bigger breasts then most men. Men tend to be physically stronger than women. Men tend to run faster than women. Women tend to be shorter then men. Men tend to weigh more than women.

These are all the same exact broad generalizations of the same nature that you pinpointed above but have the strange opposite effect. You say it is toxic to make broad generalizations but despite this you and most people would agree that you'd be insane not to notice the general differences in physicality I mentioned above. This is a contradiction.

Why is it when someone makes a generalization about the physical differences between men and women there is no resistance but as soon as someone mentions behavioral differences like how women tend to be attracted to stronger men that person suddenly violated a social contract?

It makes perfect logical sense. We see it all the time. Women are generally attracted to men that are stronger than them. There are tons of exceptions but the generality is real.

The delusion that's occurring within our society today is that although we are aware that biology can control physical differences between men and women by some black magic we cannot even fathom the fact that this same biology controls behavioral differences. No... biology must make men and women have the exact same intelligence and the exact same behavior according to current social thinking. Does this make sense from a logical standpoint? Again... No.... So why do we delude ourselves with this false notion?

We do it because we are afraid of sexism and racism. We are deathly afraid of inequality even though logically inequality is biologically built into us. No one is actually created equal biologically in terms of intelligence, behavior and physicality. It goes against everything we know about biology and natural selection. In order for something to be naturally selected it CANNOT be equal.

What is toxic is the attempt to paint a pretty idealistic picture of the world at the expense of truth. Equal rights for all does not mean people are born with equal biological traits.

Don't let an ideal hide the reality of the world we live in, but also don't let the ugly reality of the world pervert your ideals. We must learn to coexist with the contradiction.

You are probably not wrong in your statements about biology influencing behavior, but in my opinion that kind of thinking ignores the fact that we humans are capable of recognizing all of that and acting upon it. We do not have to succumb to our natural baggage.

The problem with making and accepting general statements about the behavior of men and women is that it leads to an incredibly exclusionary society where only the "normal" (per those general statements) can find companionship and happiness.

I'm a man, and I'm straight, but I'm very, very gender-nonconforming. I don't have your typical male traits of being aggressive and competitive and assertive. I'm shy, I'm very sensitive, and my interests are much more "feminine" per our society's norms than "masculine." I'm not handy, I don't go around fixing things in the house. I don't take big risks. I much prefer the cooperative and nourishing work style of women than the competitiveness of men. Perhaps the only typically male thing I have going is being rather strong, thanks to Olympic weightlifting... which I'm attracted to a million times more because of the graceful and aesthetic nature of the movements than any sort of muscle building benefits it might have for my looks. Getting stronger and looking better as a result of practicing it is just a nice side effect.

I struggled with all of that for a long time. I used to be a fan of Jordan Peterson & co, who promote the sort of ideas found in your post. I fell into a really deep depression because I just could not be a socially acceptable Manly Man (TM), unless I was willing to undergo a ridiculous amount of self-inflicted stress to conform to a model of being that's just not who I am.

When my therapist finally convinced me to stop listening to Peterson's ideas, things started getting better. Suddenly, there were possibilities. There are all sorts of people in the world. We're not bound to live strictly by natural laws, because we think and make judgements on people at a much higher level of cognition than simple physical traits.

Obviously you have more insight into your specific situation than I do, but I don't think Jordan Peterson's ideas are in conflict with your lifestyle.

The 12 rules don't preach that you be a Manly Man TM, but about taking responsibility for your own life, something which applies to both genders. -- JP and his book have plenty of female fans too.

I find it upsetting that this comment is being downvoted. It really doesn't bode well for our group if such openness is met with hostility without reply.

I too am a man who has traits traditionally associated with women, like prioritizing care over competition and having strong empathy. I don't think there's anything unnatural about it. It's somewhat unfortunate that masculinity or femininity have common roots with words male and female, because being masculine or feminine is not ultimately determined by your gender. There's of course tendencies, but the exceptions are common enough that probably everyone can think of a masculine woman or a feminine man in their circles. And masculinity/feminity isn't binary either, it's a spectrum. You have those who are balanced between the two poles. Further, your alignment can change over time. It's just hormones at the end of the day. Let's not assign moral judgments on something basic and natural.

All of your comments on this page mention JP. Why? Nothing he says is revolutionary. In fact, it's just his unique take on the wisdom of "being responsible for your own life", something which is shared by many others from military leaders to cancer survivors.

Being confident and competent in life will only improve it, and it's so universal that it applies to anyone regardless of race, gender, creed, or physicality.

This smacks of so much hubris. What you are doing is attempting to simplify and reduce a set of interactions that are so incredibly complex that you have no hope of understanding them in their entirety. Can you point out specific differences between the sexes? Of course. The problem lies in attempting to draw conclusions about complex systems (human behavior / interaction) that map neatly to simple concepts (how big are boobs?).

But, you asked me to define terms, so let's do just that.

Truth(1): Something that is verifiable, and by it's nature, falsifiable. If you cannot ever hope to disprove something, then you also cannot prove it.

Toxic: A pattern, substance, or behavior that has a deleterious effect on an organism. In this case, society as a whole.

and to define a term or two I think you might have gotten lost on:

Generalization: A set of conclusions obtained by inference from specific cases (e.g. I am not strong, and she doesn't like me, thus all women want strong men)

Average: A statistical measure equal to the sum of a set of scalar quantities divided by the number of said quantities (e.g. the average height of a male human is 5.7', whereas the average height of a female human is 5.2')

Nobody has all the answers when it comes to systems as complex as human cognition. If they did, there would be no point in things like markets, commerce, advertising, etc. Complex systems often display unintuitive behaviors. If you have women figured out so well, why don't you make a product they'll all buy? You'd be the richest man on earth! But, there's a problem - preferences are not a scalar quantity like height; they are far more complicated.

Something we can observe about people is that expectations can shape perception (2). Given this knowledge, one can quite easily infer that making unverified claims about the motivations of literally half of humanity is probably fairly dangerous - it has a high likelihood of shaping bad patterns out of thin air. Put more bluntly, it makes us all collectively dumber.

I do not have my head in the clouds, nor am I looking at the world with rose tinted glasses. I am merely pointing out that it is harmful to impose your (negative, uninformed, sexist, reductive) worldview on others, as we are all struggling enough to make the most of this difficult and confounding life we have without it.

(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Truth

(2)https://news.mit.edu/2019/how-expectation-influences-percept...

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.181...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616720730302...

Awesome. We have something to talk about.

What these studies show, is that given a set of pictures with faces removed, college age women will point to the pictures of guys who go to the gym when asked to say which one is more attractive to them.

Sure, I can get behind that. As a bisexual male, I also kind of get it. People who are in shape are sexier, duh.

Without even digging into the pitiful sample sizes (n=61, n=131) or the fact that these studies were conducted on an incredibly limited and not at all random subset of the population (college age, at one particular college). The conclusions this article comes to and the ones that you have come to are fundamentally different.

This paper is drawing conclusions about specific, visual sexual attractiveness, fixed for all other concerns - ceterus parabus, if you will. It assumes that all other things are equal.

The conclusions you have so quickly come to, are based on the assertion that all other things are equal. They are not. There is a complex system of other sociological cues and interpersonal relationships that signal whether you do or don't want to be with someone.

Think of all the other things you, as a male, might find sexy about someone. Are they into video games? Do they like the same music as you? Are they successful in business / art / a particular 'scene'? Are they smart? Are they bold? Are they funny?

What you have done, in essence, is to assume that women are simple, and easily understood. I would argue that this is patently ludicrous.

Merry christmas.

Well said.

To add to that, even the preference identified in those studies is influenced by the specific societal context. Generalizing that to “women prefer fit men” is incorrect, because we know sexual preferences are heavily influenced by the societal context.

For example: https://www.medievalists.net/2020/06/fatness-thinness-middle...

Wrong. A generalization can be correct in certain contexts. Take the below sentence:

In general, in the United States, women tend to prefer men who are fit.

The scientific papers I provided establish the generalization within that context.

When someone makes a general statement like saying men tend to be taller than women, that someone does so with the awareness that exceptions and alternative contexts exist because such exceptions and contexts are obvious. Obviously some women are really tall and obviously the context isn't some preselected population of women who are over 6 foot.

Another way to look at my point is that broad generalizations must originate from somewhere. They are often indicative of a population where the majority or major component posseses several or a single identical trait. It is absolutely insane to ignore generalities just as it is insane to declare them as absolute truths. That is my point.

That is the unfortunate reality of the world. Generalities, like stereotypes, illustrate an aspect of a truth. Social justice is important but one cannot change the world by eliminating a truth to mold the universe into a delusion that fits the perception of a social justice ideal.

I find your post delusional. Your conclusion is nowhere near anything I asserted.

I asserted a generalization that women tend to like men who are more fit and I asserted that generalizations apply to the universe. Something along the lines of: Not all women are shorter than men, but in general they are.

Then I used science to establish that generality. That's it. The conclusion of those papers never claimed women are easily understood and I never claimed it either.

The crazy thing is, you claimed to agree with me as "bisexual" man then proceeded to debate a point with an imaginary claim that was never made.

Perhaps you're not delusional and your arguments are tactics and lies used to manipulate a conversation in a direction of your choosing. If that is the case my conclusion is that you're a liar.

Tldr: You are arguing against claims that were never made.

A number of folks in this thread seem to listen to Jordan Peterson's ideas, which seem smart and reasonable but are actually very toxic. See my reply to the post you were replying to.

Thank you for being a voice of reason.

My pleasure. We do indeed have a pretty serious cultural problem, and it's not made any better by closing ourselves off to the wealth of possibility that lies in human interaction. I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of those who feel they've been given the cold shoulder - but hurt people hurt people, so it's important for a community to isolate and identify that damage. Dumbing things down is not the way.

Happy holidays to you and yours!

Happy holidays! :)

I'm happy for you that you got over Jordan Peterson. IMO you drew the wrong conclusions about him though. From what I've heard/read of Peterson, he is usually correct in his observation/analyses, BUT only within the framework of very conservative role models. The point here is that he doesn't even add original ideas.

I think what makes him so popular among his fans is that he lends scientific credence to embracing reactionary role models. Some men (and even a few women) seem to feel deeply insecure without a very explicit set of rules of how to interact with the opposite sex, how to live even. Maybe some men feel threatened by emancipated women or maybe they can't find their place in a society that places few constraints on what to do after growing up.

Peterson spells out for them in detail how to conform to the traditional gender roles historically endorsed by the church, but he substitutes the foundation of christian moralism with evolutionary theory and sociology. He's handing his disciples a step by step guide to building a family. Why this brand of "neo-conservatism" can be popular in a secular world, one where science offers explanations once received through faith, but fails to provide the comfort and sense of belonging that Christianity built its success on ever since its humble beginnings as an obscure, persecuted underground cult in the Roman Empire, doesn't need much explanation.

Believe it or not, there are in fact women subscribing to these old school values. It's not like Peterson is forcing anyone to roll back the achievements of feminism or promoting inequality, just some archaic ideas that still work well enough for some to embrace them as a template for their lives.

What's so toxic or controversial about that?

Where to start? Besides that it's oppresive, based on bad science, reductive, reactionary, and small-minded.

Those feelings of insecurity are there because of a conservative cultural context, that shames difference and enforces conformity to an arbitrary norm.

Put bluntly, this system of belief will prevent you from learning real things about the world. If you constantly avoid genuine interactions with people because those interactions scare you, you'll never learn why those interactions are not actually scary.

I would direct you to Plato's cave. Petersen is asking you to take the shadows on the wall at face value.

So I willingly broke a taboo, and I was misunderstood. Such is life :) I'll address each separately.

The misunderstanding:

It looks like you read me saying all women look for strong men and/or that women should look for that. I have no interest in either. People should follow their hearts, be themselves, etc. I am saying that empirically, and with big individual variation, on average, that is a fact. An important fact.

I'm also not saying that men should pretend to be who they aren't to get women. For one thing, they usually see right through that. But at the same time, if you don't understand what your potential partners need from you, you're probably not going to fulfill those needs.

The Taboo:

Saying it's "a toxic pattern" to talk openly about these things is a way of saying this is a taboo topic.

And of course I know it's sensitive, but I don't think it should be. These are very important things, and they need to be talked about and understood. Even though it's uncomfortable.

Alright, I'll bite. How did you arrive at this fact?

Was it through science?

Personal observation?

Did you read it in a book? If so, which one? And how did they establish it as a fact?

He wasn't trying to date her.

That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dating, either.

She might have not known how to react, so tried to be empathetic by communicating what on her mind, was her own struggle - "kids being noisy", childrearing is not easy.

She might have been unconsciously signaling: "everyone is struggling some way or another, let me share mine so we can relate somehow..."

I agree. I have no problem seeing men cry, and I've held several whilst they did so -- and never thought less of them. Crying is a human reaction and men are allowed to experience it too. Crying doesn't make you weak, it's just an outlet of emotion that can really help clear your head sometimes.

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