The 2010s messaging that women never wanted men to talk to them was driven by a minority of extreme introverts. Modern-day singles are paying the price.

It’s not that I’m afraid of rejection — it’s that I assume it. That’s what I was really mad about as a kid. Why do I have to be the screw-up? Why do I have to be all of these things that I wouldn’t want, either? Emotionally fragile, socially shut-in, in equal parts sexually perverse and timid — and worst of all, self-loathing. That self-loathing has fed avoidance, which has led to a failure to express my needs and desires, which has led to dysfunction in my relationships, which resets the cycle.

On the terrible system dynamics of dating and sensitive young man syndrome. Beautiful cycle depicted.

Or; “Diptych, Panel I: The Mote in His Eye.”

A nice discussion of het dating norms and a useful script for treating people.

But I think there’s a more radical slipperiness in that “our sense of right and wrong” and “the social reaction of others” are not as separable as we like to think. Elsewhere, the article tries to get past the fear of accidental harm by encouraging the reader to make use of the “common-sense understanding of offensiveness that you have developed as a minimally functional adult living in a society.” The issue, I think, is that one’s common-sense understanding of what makes people feel uncomfortable or unsafe is built by receiving or observing social consequences.

I’m still haunted by the sense that my attraction to women is in some way inherently, almost psychically, harmful. I just don’t have the practice in more representative circles to have worked through it on an instinctual level.

Oh my God. Such beautiful application of contemporary philosophy to the pains of social life.

it’s not good advice, but it’s all there is

This is unfortunately what I must do, too. “Dating in the Bay Area” returns.

The comic in this piece is very cool.

see: https://archive.org/details/hup-04-1992_202302/Hup%2001%2C%201987/page/n15/mode/2up

Another day, another article attempting to intellectualize what is essentially the straight woman version of “ugh, my bitch wife.”

When it’s “punching up” to pretend the other gender’s loneliness crisis is self-imposed

Maybe the problem truly is with capitalism in that the nature of consensual sex relies on a supply-demand dynamic.

It’s easier to “de-center” men if you don’t want to have sex with them

More notes on heterofatalism, a la Garnett, “The Trouble With Wanting Men.”

Great comment from @polytropos365182:

Being in love, or even just being “down bad” for somebody, is a really vulnerable— and in many cases, humiliating— emotional experience. I think that often, resenting the gender that you’re attracted to, with or without an ideological rationalization, is a defense mechanism driven by fear of that vulnerability, or a way to palliate the psychic wound of humiliation. The really tough thing is that (as any gay person could tell you), things like rejection, getting dumped, infidelity, etc are personal, not structural. You won’t escape them by abolishing the patriarchy or leveling the longhouse.

Everything shared is fair, but maybe instead it would be better for this kind of guy to not get married and find an aligned sex partner. I dunno. Like, it kinda feels like author’s saying men should intentionally develop an attraction to their partners, and that seems a little LessWrong-y to me. Also feel a connection to Doyle, “Wife Guy.”

One commenter, @jessumsica, puts it best:

There are men who like women and men who like to fuck women. You’ve got to find the middle of the Venn diagram.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/three-cheers-for-the-tomboy-chaser

I would like to believe there is something purposeful, resistant, even radical in the heterofatalist mode, but the more I voice it, the more I am inclined to agree with Seresin that it can produce nothing but more of itself. “Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem,” he writes. “It doesn’t make sense to extricate your own straight experience from straightness as an institution.” It isn’t that my friend needs to find “some other way to live”; it’s that we all do. But instead of looking for it, we disaffected women “perform” for one another this mutually enabling kind of maintenance, periodically off-gassing some of the shame and frustration of dating men and then chugging along with the status quo.

At first I thought was going to be some pseudo-feminist drivel. but then it turned out to be quite honest and vulnerable. In a sense, it does a good job of summarizing much of what I learned about gender in 2025. Introduces the concept of “heterofatalism.”

You have to balance the risk of accidentally sexually harassing someone against the benefits of asking people out—to you and to the people that you’re asking out. Most of the time, the benefits are larger.

Equal parts hilarious and quite serious. Applicable even for me, an aroallo. Will save this for grad school.

The modeling of polycule dynamics is an open question, but it can be best approximated from the Erdős–Rényi model of the random graph.

Elise Schuenke comics about Sage, an exhausted hard working autistic, home from a long day of work, masking and social effort. Decompressing and pulling back from the effort to perform, we get to see a 5 pager comic of their partners reactions. A wonderful comic that highlights and gives a moment for a powerfully intimate moment that’s easy to misunderstand.

sometimes i wish i wasnt aroace but not because i actually want to date anyone its just because the structure of society makes it rly hard to be single😭

Falling in love with a fictional character is not abnormal. Neither by societal standards based on just how many people do and by psychological standards. It is a normal thing we sometimes do as humans; become attached to someone who doesn’t really exist. Let’s take a journey into the mountain of psychological research and real life pandemonium of fictophilia.

From a polyamorous person

Sometimes people say, “obviously, everyone would like to be polyamorous themselves and get to have sex with anyone they want, while their partners are all monogamous and only have sex with them. That way, you get sexual variety and don’t have to feel any jealousy.” I think this is completely false.

and there’s a lot of monogcycle accidents

The “sweater curse” or “curse of the love sweater” is a term used by knitters and crocheters to describe the belief that if a knitter or crocheter gives a hand-knit sweater to a significant other, it will lead to the recipient breaking up with the knitter.