Contra Sympathetic Opposition on Women Asking Men Out

Adversarial Dating Is A Bad Frame

Sympathetic Opposition recently wrote about Women Asking Men Out, first pointing out that dating-in-practice is drastically different from the idealized math puzzle known as The Stable Marriage Problem. She suggests adding a few parameters (players entering and exiting play, and tracking number of rounds played) but it’s still far from a good model of real life. That’s fine though, that isn’t the real objection. The real objection is the claim that women want marriage while men want sex, and asking out men leads to sex but not marriage.

The post converges on:

1. if you ask out men they’ll take that to mean you want to sleep with them

2. they’re happy to sleep with you even if they have no interest in marrying you

3. they’ll sleep with you and then move on, and you’ll still be single.

4. If you want to get married you should wait for a man to ask you out, because at least then you know he has more than zero interest in you.

Not only does this fail to model dating correctly, I’m going to be inflammatory and claim that this isn’t actually the reason Sympathetic Opposition (SO) doesn’t want to ask out men, and the real reason is so unspeakable that she’s not allowed to admit it even to herself. O_O But I’ll get to that at the end.

Dating For Marriage

Being raised a Jehovah’s Witness, I was not allowed to date. This was very convenient for me as I was unattractive and extremely nerdy (back when this was a huge turn-off). I could tell myself that the reason I didn’t ask out girls wasn’t because I expected they wouldn’t want anything to do with me, it’s because my parents’ religion wouldn’t let me.¹

The reason my parents’ religion wouldn’t let me is because the official position is that DATING IS FOR MARRIAGE! Going on a date is the first line to be executed when running the “install marriage” script. When you are in high school you are not looking to get married, so you should not be dating. Indeed, even in college you shouldn’t be dating, unless maybe it’s your final year and you have good job prospects and actually you ARE looking for a wife you could reasonably marry in the next few months.

When I was nineteen and a woman showed sexual interest in me for the first time in my life, I did not hesitate. I asked her out as soon as I was aware (which, to be fair, still took some effort on her part. I was pretty oblivious.) We dated for a while, and the dating did NOT go well. We were not a good match. We had huge cultural differences. We fought a lot. But I still had the unexamined assumption seated deep inside me that Dating Is For Marriage, and we’d been dating for quite a while. And maybe no other woman would ever show interest in me. And I owed her a lot, because I’d taken months of her life and she’d become estranged from her family due to our relationship (they didn’t approve of her dating an atheist, to the point of kicking her out of the house.)

How does one deal with a relationship on the rocks? Everything in my childhood religion and popular romcoms and epic fantasy novels had instilled one truth in me — you commit harder. There’s nothing so bad that deeply committed love can’t work through it. So I asked her to marry me.

This did not fix everything. Indeed, it didn’t fix anything. We were miserable for seven years before finally divorcing. What could have been a few months of lost time turned into seven years of lost time, and of course lots of misery along the way.

This is not an uncommon failure mode of viewing dating as part of the marriage process. Once you are on the marriage track, it is dishonorable and potentially harmful to turn away without very good reason. Someone who believes this is the case is not going to ask out a potential date unless he has very poor judgement (hello Past Eneasz!) or you are both part of a fundamentalist subculture and already well-acquainted.

Many people who date hope to end up married, of course. But the purpose of a date isn’t To Become A Marriage. It’s to build intimacy, familiarity, and learn about each other. It’s to see each other’s souls a bit clearer, so that you have a better idea of if you want to get married.

And if that’s the case, then there’s no reason why a girl shouldn’t say “you seem interesting, I think I want to see your soul a bit better to find out if we’re a match.”

SO says this didn’t work for her, and that it doesn’t work in general! Primarily because men want sex but don’t want marriage at a higher rate than women.

Dating For Sex

The emotional payload of the post is the assertion that more men date for sex without possibility of marriage than women.

Footnotes 3&4 are “Euphemistically.” So “dating” means “having sex with,” which is how one makes sense of sentences like:

Here’s the most popular part of the essay, and the one I’ve seen quoted the most with the most cheers of agreement:

Thus the root of the problem: if you ask a man out, all you know is that he’s willing to sleep with you! But you already knew that, because (presumably) All Men Are All Willing To Sleep With Anyone. You have gained no information, and come no closer to finding a marriage partner.

She stresses this is the primary reason to not ask men out quite a few times.

she has very little additional information

A man gets much more information

women get much less information from asking men out than men get from asking women out

asking men out will give her less information

If there is a reason that you would expect him to be more likely to reject you if he doesn’t like you than the average man getting asked on a random date, then you will get more information by asking him out.

This is a weird premise, because the whole point of going on a date is to gather information on whether you are compatible. You are doing your best to exchange glimpses at each other’s souls. You can get more information in a single minute of conversation than you can get from the answer to “does he think I’m pretty enough to ask me out?” That doesn’t distinguish him from most men! (based on SO’s writing, anyway)

a whole blog post could be written about why this is a bad assumption, but it’s irrelevant, so I deleted it (sigh)

On the other hand, a man being asked out by a woman is rare. It certainly gives the man a surprising amount of evidence that this woman is different from most. This alone is enough reason to update from “she seems nice” to “oh, there’s something very interesting here!” Of course the acceptance rate will suddenly be significantly higher.

SO’s words, if taken at face value, are that she wishes to retain the information advantage of knowing a guy thinks she’s pretty and is willing to sacrifice the information advantage he would get that she’s exceptionally interesting to retain that. This is the protocol of two parties at war.

Hostile Opposition

The narrative of SO’s post is one of opposing sides at war. Information advantages need to be retained. Men want sex, women don’t. Women want marriage, men don’t. The two sides must fight each other to some sort of truce. Advantages won by one side are at the expense of the other side. It’s a terrible way to exist. No wonder people are opting out.

This reminds me of Brangus’s post about buying dinner on a date. The argument as presented there is that men want sex from women, and therefore must compensate the women for their time/attention/sexual favors. This also portrays the sexes as perpetually at odds, one taking from the other. It breeds resentment and dissatisfaction. It’s the same terrible way to exist.

I wrote then that the men should pay on a date, but not because they want sex from women, and not because the women need to be compensated for anything. But rather, because being taken care of like that on a date makes the woman feel very warm and happy, and the man feels really good that he can make a woman feel like that. She appreciates him, and he is proud to be appreciated.

Likewise, there is a good reason why men should ask women out. I suspect it’s the real reason that SO won’t ask men out anymore. But it’s not something one can just say out loud, or even admit to themselves, which is why it comes out as some weird men-want-sex, war-between-the-sexes, value-of-information thing instead.

Women Want To Be Feminine

Many women want to be pursued. They want to be asked out. They want to be live the feminine aesthetic.

When they take the asking-out role, it feels bad. It doesn’t matter that in practice taking the pursuing role will yield otherwise better partners. For many women even a partner that is better on every other dimension is undesirable if he cannot fulfill the “lets me play the feminine aesthetic” role. A relationship where she takes on the masculine aesthetic is not suitable by definition. Asking out her partner would ruin him as a partner.

Men should be the ones to ask women out for the same reason they should pay for dinner on a first date — it feels good to embody the masculine aesthetic. Even more importantly, it feels good to embody the masculine aesthetic with a woman who is embodying the feminine aesthetic. The two parts were designed long ago to match in a complementary dance. It’s only possible to pull off when the two very different aesthetics are played in a collaborative, mutually-supporting, entwining way. The man needs a feminine partner, the woman needs a masculine partner.

A woman that wants a masculine partner is likely going to have a bad time if she starts a relationship by taking the masculine role! Transitioning from that back into the feminine aesthetic can be a tough ask. Especially because apparently nobody can talk about the fact that this is very important to them!

SO’s post is primarily about defending the desirability and goodness of embodying the feminine aesthetic without saying that she’s doing that. The “you get very little information about if they are marriageable when asking men out” defense is perfect. Once you realize this is about femininity it’s obviously a great filter. You get no information on whether the man is happy to play the masculine role if you are the one to ask him out. You get pretty darn good evidence that he IS willing to do so if he DOES ask you out.

If people could be honest about this, Wes wouldn’t be so confused. If Kayla and Cyn and Sympathetic Opposition could say “The feminine aesthetic is psychologically important. It is the only way I can live a beautiful life” I don’t think he’d have a problem with that. The interesting part is that many people can’t say this out loud, and indeed can’t even think it. Posts like Cyn’s and SOs are a jugaad social tech, allowing disgraced solutions back into society under cover of new justification which holds up as long as you don’t look too hard.²

The two Classic Sexes of our species are still deeply ingrained in every part of our world, and much of our biology and psychology. Most humans are drawn to embodying one of the aesthetic ideals in their relationships. To be plain about it, most men feel better when they can be masculine and most women feel better when they can be feminine. But the modern world doesn’t have room for two sexes anymore. Men are hated and censured for being masculine. Women are shamed and persecuted for being feminine. The economic and political order exerts implacable pressure to crush all people into asexual Productivity Units. We get today’s kaleidoscope of dysfunction and backlash as a result.

But all that is for future posts.

#NotAllWomen

This particularly kerfuffle is about one small-ish aspect of the Masculine/Feminine Aesthetics. Two of the most stable and committed relationships in my social circles were initiated by the women, and I wouldn’t call either woman non-Feminine. Both of them had the desire to nab the best man-for-them and have the ability to express the desired amount of Feminine Aesthetic in other ways. The amount of Feminine (or Masculine) Aesthetic that any one person needs to embody to feel happy varies greatly from person to person. The amount of fulfillment they get from different aspects of that Aesthetic varies as well. For some being asked out is crucial, for others it barely registers as Feminine. I’m not out here saying “Women want to be asked out! It’s because they’re feminine!” If that’s the message you’re taking away, please reread with more charity.

Most humans feel their lives are more beautiful when they can embody an Aesthetic. The Masculine/Feminine ones are powerful, and common. Relationship-initiation protocols are part of these Aesthetics, and for some people they are important enough that the Aesthetic is broken if those are ignored. For others it’s a strong sign that they won’t get a willing counter-partner in the if the initial step is reversed. Acknowledging this desire is so taboo that most people don’t even realize this is what’s driving them.

Don’t date in ways that frustrate or embitter. Date to discover the souls of those around you. Play with the ones who delight you. With time you’ll find the one(s) you want to entwine yourself with for decades to come. This isn’t a war! If it is you’re doing it wrong! The other sex is here to collaborate with you. To take the other side of a dance that is unequal and asymmetrical, and thus mutually uplifting and enriching. The ones who wish to war are best left alone.

1. In retrospect, it’s hilarious how self-serving this delusion was. Several of my Jehovah’s Witness friends DID date in safe settings (the restriction was too conservative for many modern JWs!). And I had already officially left the religion in 10th grade. AND at least one of the nerdy girls in our friend group would have likely been happy to go on a date/dates. I was just a coward.

2. This old episode of my rationalist podcast talks more about Jugaad Ethics