Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

> Every time I see my female friends inboxes I gag all over agaon. Dudes are pathetic.

I was about to write something about everybody’s time on this planet being limited and how there’s actually a human being on the other side of that chat window. But… an appeal to human decency feels pretty pointless here.

View on HN

Tell me more about the human decency of saying nothing at all to someone end expecting anything at all from them.

Ah you mean like most women who never write the first message to anyone?

Yes equally as bad.

Maybe the women who never write the first message and the men who write "hey" to everybody deserve each other.

Though there's an important distinction between writing a message and real-time chat. "Hey" may be perfectly fine for a chat, but not for an email or similar type of direct message. I tend towards the latter.

Real conversations with real strangers are tit for tat. Going overboard coming up with a bunch of catchy bs is not helpful in finding real people. The one thing that got me from almost no dates to dates all the time was just going places myself first instead of just asking girls. So instead of asking girls on a hike I’d tell them, hey I’m going on a hike want to go? And if they said no, i asked other girls and if they all said no, i went alone. The next time i had more girls wanting to hang out than i could. But the step before that was to change my mentality from one of trying to get laid to one of empathy. If i had as many options as those girls do, i would flake out too… there would be a lot of girls i want to go out with who seem cool but I’d have to prioritize them. And with limited information, that prioritization is never going to be perfect and it would make me sad to constantly have to hurt girls who are perfectly nice. But i would also have to develop a thick skin about it. Kind of like homeless people asking for money. So i started being way more understanding about them being flakey. I also realized women are skiddish. They never know what they’re going to get. So I’d try to be as wysiwyg as possible. I stopped trying to have sex on the first date, it’s too hard to get to know people, too complicated. And the people going around intensely doing hookup culture are just a subset of bratty rich kids who aren’t interested in finding or being good partners. I started trying to form genuine connections. That got me some nice convos but still didn’t work to get me dates until I did the first thing. Then i has more dates than i could handle. None of it was out of my comfort zone. None of it involved a lot of effort. It was ultimately literally just empathy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com