The catch 22 of playing it cool in dating

Post Reply New Topic

Often times I'm advised, "Play it casual, don't get too aggressive, just go with the flow and let things go where they may."

What drives me nuts is this never seems to work. It's a vicious cycle, a catch 22. I try to ask girls out for casual meetings, very friendly...let's check out this exhibit, I'm going here, wanna come with? And they decline, because THEY read it as an overture for dating, and all I'm trying to do is be friends with SOMEBODY and see where it goes. With every woman, it's like if you're with them it has to be read as something romantic, or you don't hang out at all. And I'm afraid of hanging out too much with guys or else I'll look gay which will just worsen my problems with women. So I wind up going out to places alone.

And of course if I DON'T play it with a little more aggression, some other SOB sweeps in and steals her away, like the woman I dearly loved, who I tried to build a relationship with for years...I was SO CLOSE, and then she gets fixed up on a blind date, and now she's engaged to the MFer.

Currently I've met a great girl, and we had lunch once, three weeks ago. We text back and forth nearly every day. I want to see her again, but she says she's too busy working on her house for the next two months, plus wedding season.

Cripes how do I find somebody when everyone erects so many goddamn walls of separation? What is so wrong about just wanting to hang out and not have to go every motherf*cking place alone?

Is there any way to win?

I don't know how useful or useless the advice I'm about to give is going to be to you, but I'm still going to give it a shot anyway.

This isn't meant to be judgmental, but have you thought of actually telling the woman you're doing it as friends? I don't know, it's hard to tell since there isn't a whole lot of context on it and I don't know you.



Generalization aside, it might have something to do with you (accidentally) giving off the vibe that you want things to turn romantic later, which I know is kind of a moot point to mention on an AS forum, but I don't really see any other explanation for it . Again, I'm just speculating on what you've said in the post.



I haven't heard of any problems with the bolded part, as many of my male friends (NT and AS alike) have had previous dating relationships and have lots of guy friends. Personally, I don't find too much issue with going places alone, but if it worries you, I'd try and hang out with a group of men, regardless of their relationship statuses.



Sorry to hear that Unfortunately, scenarios like that require swift action, but not too swift. Careful, but not too careful. We're at a disadvantage in a way that we have no idea what that will look like and the degrees of variation between person to person are so wide that there isn't a lot of anything concrete we can use to work into a model or a frame of reference (unless you build it on past experiences, but that can only go so far). Sorry, I got nothing



You struck upon the solution earlier in the post...it seems you really need to find a general balance for everything - Your perfect balance between aggression and passivity. Again, I can't really tell you what that looks like because I don't know you IRL As for people erecting walls of separation, you've got three options: try and break them down, wait until they feel it's safe to lower the walls, or stop and move on to the next person. In any case, I'd just make sure you yourself are in tact between attempts and try to find a group to hang out with if loneliness gets to you at times.

Hope all goes well!!

Last edited by AScomposer13413 on 26 Apr 2012, 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Attraction and 'game' are mostly nonverbal, having autism/AS - even if we can read people and mirror fine on an overture level - our outgoing nonverbal communication is shattered, fragmented, barely working quite often and in ways that we can't repair simply because its too fine of minutia to manually control.

What does that mean? Its going to be different for most of us. We won't be able to play by the same rules or win often. What's worse, because we're all so unique/different (and people can't read 'how' from us easily) it means that almost all of the few 'yes's you get will lead to dates that will make you wish you were at the dentists getting your teeth drilled.

How to proceed? Just get to know people and let whirlpools of interpersonal gravity either do their magic or not. If you see things falling into place where it feels from both sides like a logical progression and its just a matter of dropping personal/social barriers and letting it happen - you're set. If you feel like you have to chase someone around; be careful, you might just convince them that they are interested and you'll find out detail by detail why it didn't make sense to begin with.