[MRD85]

I'm a single man, I date, and it's confusing as hell. The examples given in the article are no surprise to me since my whole adult life has been peppered with similar events. Women who later tell me they wanted to sleep with me but I didn't push hard enough, etc. Not pushing women to sleep with me has likely cost me a lot of opportunities, but it's also meant I haven't accidentally assaulted someone. On my birthday I had 5 previous sexual partners call or message to wish me a happy birthday, so I figure my philosophy of treating people well is doing ok.

How assertive should I be when interacting with women I am dating, given that every woman is a unique individual with their own preferences?

[zozbot123]

I suspect that "how assertive should I be" is the wrong question to ask-- there are many ways of being "assertive", only some of which work well! As a society, we are still in the process of developing-- and raising awareness about-- workable and effective sexual/dating "scripts" that men can stick to, and trust that they won't run into obvious problems. As the article hopefully makes clear, even the outwardly-trivial problem of how to ascertain full consent in a way that doesn't "ruin the mood" for the typical girl who was expecting the guy to "just man up and go for it!" is far from easy to solve. (This is not to say that such solutions, and more generally, such workable scripts don't exist somewhere already - the whole problem however is how to coalesce trust around them, from both the "male" and "female" perspective.)

[MRD85]

If we develop a set of working scripts to indicate availability, then women will still go for men who are "bold" enough to deviate from the script and seize the day. It's a complex issue, and it's my belief that the traits that women find attractive in men and the traits that women would like to find attractive in men are two different sets with less overlap than you'd imagine.

[krapp]

>If we develop a set of working scripts to indicate availability, then women will still go for men who are "bold" enough to deviate from the script and seize the day.

Some will, some won't, some will in some circumstances and won't in others. Women aren't actors playing roles to deceive men or buggy data sets for which a properly efficient sexual algorithm has to be discovered, they're just human beings and you just need to deal with them as individuals, get to know them as people, and communicate with them. And accept that if they don't find you attractive, or don't want to sleep with you, that's fine.

[zozbot123]

> ... women will still go for men who are "bold" enough to deviate from the script and seize the day.

There will be lots of ways to signal the kind of "boldness" you (and women) want, while still staying well within the 'script'. So hopefully this won't be a big issue in practice. (Though it's hard to say since we don't even have broadly-acknowledged 'scripts' yet!)

[StrictDabbler]

Since my bisexual wife has very similar problems when dating women I'd say the answer isn't simple.

There were times early on where we'd gone on a triple date with a nice girl and eight hours of talk had elapsed without any action. I could tell the girl wanted to be kissed. I could tell my wife wanted to be kissed by the girl. Real movie lean-in moments. Neither of them could bring themselves to be the initiator.

It would have been easy for me to initiate both because I'm good at reading those signals and good at feeling and accepting implicit rejection in an unenthusiastic kiss, but if I'd taken the reigns my wife wouldn't have had the opportunity to explore her own relationship with feminity. So I sat and chatted and watched the opportunities float by.

The next day my wife would express a paradox of frustration that she couldn't just borrow my assertiveness and gratitude that I was letting her find her own path. (edit: Important to note here that the women would tell her the same thing, that they'd felt the moment but hadn't been able to take advantage of it.)

Eventually she figured out that more assertive bi women were an important group to look for.

So it isn't entirely a gender thing and it's not about "pushing" anybody to do anything. It's about learning how to sense signals, how to make signals, how to recognize people who want you to take the level of initiative that you're comfortable taking, and how to gracefully accept that incompatibility on this one point is incompatibility per se, not just a missed opportunity.