Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
:X
Dating a woman that doesn't do hints is *hard*. Never thought I'd ever say that.
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It reminds me of the apocryphal story about the guy who stood on a street corner saying "Wanna screw?" to attractive women he encountered. It had the virtue of being direct, honest, and unambiguous about what was desired. It had failing of not being the way things are done in our society.
(A comment I saw by a gay man elsewhere indicated it
was done in his society, and if he met a hot guy, he could bluntly say "I think you're hot and I want to make it with you. Want to go back to my place?" He thought he had a better deal than heterosexual couple where that Wasn't Done, and I think he had a point.)
It sounds like you need to determine the point at which you decide "We've progressed far enough that perhaps we can lay our cards on the table. I can be forthright about stating what I want out of it, and she can be forthright about what she wants!"
A late friend of mine years back was thinking in terms of written contracts explicitly stating what was expected from each party, and signing the contract was explicit agreement to provide what the other wanted.
In his case, the main want was lots of sex, and I wound up telling him he appeared to have questions about his masculinity, and needed to obsessively check that his equipment was still present and in working order. He had concluded that women simply fell into my arms (which was news to me), and was taking a survey of women we both knew to try to find out the secret.
I told him we differed in approach. I was looking to make a new friend. If that friendship expressed itself sexually in a bed somewhere, that was dandy. If it didn't, I wasn't upset, because that hadn't been the point of the exercise. He got drunk and chased tail, the sort of woman he wanted would be offended by that, and those who wouldn't he really didn't want to be involved with. Perhaps he should reconsider his approach?
Technically, we deal with what the animal behaviorists call an action chain. It's started by a stimulus, and proceeds through a series of steps till an end result is reached. The key is that
all steps must be performed,
in the specified order, or the end result does not occur. Nest building is an action chain. So is mating behavior. We have action chains in human behavior, too, and they can differ between cultures or within a culture.
A woman I know elsewhere is a sometimes counselor about this sort of thing, and talks about unconscious scripts. If both parties are following the same script, all is well. If they are following different scripts, things deteriorate quickly, because each party will do something required by their script expecting the response their script calls for and not get it. The train comes off the rails in short order, but neither side understands why. There's a reason it's called a mating dance, but both parties must be performing the same dance with the same steps. If you're doing the Charleston, and she's doing the Lindy Hop, things just won't work out.
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Dennis