Defining the male role within dating/as prospective daters

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Defining the male role within dating, or a relationship or simply as a prospective guy seeking dates. I got a really cool reply from chef in another thread about how he handles daily life as a chef instructor by viewing it as a role to follow.

I think this is a great way of looking at things as it can help us get past things that would otherwise be really difficult for those with ASD thereby enabling higher levels of functioning.

Can we perhaps reduce things within Love & Dating as a guy down to a role that we follow, so as to make the process of dating/seeking dates easier and more straightforward for guys with Aspergers? The role would simply have us showing positive qualities to present us in a positive light. Not fakeness but finding a balance between being a total open book that scares people off and being like a robot that does not openly show personal qualities. I'm reading a book about love-shyness which I think can be a common thing in Aspergers men, some of the problems evident from the book's explanations include lacking basic knowledge of their role relative to women and not having any proper "filter. They might make mistakes such as talking about kids/marriage when just having met a girl.

The book also described the concept of a "mask" that basically means showing your best light and that essentially everyone will do when first having met an interesting person they may want to date up until a relationship has actually formed and then continued to exist for a fair timeframe. I think in the end it is a matter of a balance, somewhere in between being highly dishonest like a "Player" and letting them know all of everything essentially as though they can read your mind(100% complete open book, saying everything that comes to mind).

The thing with "be yourself" is that we seem to interpret this in a black or white sense. I think those who give the advice essentially are saying "don't be totally fake/compulsive liar" and I think those who reject it are rejecting the idea of being an open book. Everyone has "filters" that they use in everyday life to better get along with others and I think the matter is to find a balance.

I think an important filter for a lot of us is knowing when to break silences. I sure haven't a clue.

Indeed. I think it is in part a difficulty in knowing what is good/appropriate to say. Unsure what to say/do=silence it is a "stuck-ness" similar to writer's block.

I am susceptible to this and so I thought defining a specific role with specific rules would be helpful.

What kind of role then?

The key in the beginnermost stages of being love-shy/inexperienced with dating is getting to actually try. For myself and I feel likely also others we don't actually know what is best for us. We don't know a profile of who is our perfect match. I have no basis for reference/comparison at this point in time and the first thing to do is gain points of reference.

When we have a lot of experience I believe it becomes easier to identify:
-What positives we have to offer
-When women are showing interest in us
-What we want, based on the sum of experiences in relationships/romantic interactions. All of the good & the bad everything teaches us things, at the least about what to stay away from.

Problem with "be myself & miss right will come along" being the be all end all is right now from a perspective of no experience I know hardly a thing about what miss right will actually be like and similarly I know next to nothing about what she would see in me. No experience is what leads us to pretend to be someone else because we don't good/bad distinctions about ourselves.

Role of being a suitable, eligible bachelor. Another way of looking at it is "not screwing up".

It would be somewhat similar to PUA in a sense but without relying on deceit and manipulation. And keeping things within reason, not trying no matter what to "close" on every girl they meet. If interest/attraction is clearly, definitely not present then move on it's that simple, no amount of smooth talk/arguing/tricks/deceit will change this. This is more so an attitude to at least avoid screwing up to the point of changing a woman's mind to No when they would have otherwise said Yes. Also to operate within social scenario in a way that can better identify where there's potential attraction as I think a lot of times ASD guys especially can miss the cues that indicate attraction.

I believe NTs do this naturally, they will key in on the situation and focus on presenting themselves in a good light when they encounter a women who they feel attracted towards. On a basic level this is refraining from stupid/childish/immature behaviour that would put the guy in a negative light and therefore cause the woman to form negative assumptions about his personality and character.

A very logic-centered reduction of this concept is simply thinking of it in terms of 4 lists that you follow as guidelines governing behaviour:

The Bad list: This is stuff that will make you look bad. Includes obvious stuff like farting in public, usage of particularly offensive language like the N word. Creepy behaviour, really weird behaviour, distasteful behavior. Things that convince others you are a bad person or wonder about/ask themselves if you are a bad person.

Contextually sensitive list: These are things that can be good or bad depending entirely on context as well as the paired indicators that inform you of this. Special interest things may likely fall here. If you are a video game enthusiast or anime enthusiast that can sometimes be a positive, if it so happens that the woman also is one and furthermore is also receptive to a potential partner being one. If the previous is not true, then it is very likely that highlighting the qualities of being a staunch <X> enthusiast will put you in a negative light as it'll come across as weird/obsessive from her point of view, as an outsider to the world of <X>. It is perhaps not that the woman likely considers it universally super bad but more so about the fact that it was what the guy chose to highlight about himself and how it was what he directed conversation towards.


Neutral list/aka Safe List: These are things that are generally safe to do the vast majority of the time. Smalltalk stuff that could lead to finding out Good things to do or identifying contextually sensitive things that would have a positive impact in the moment. These establish you as more normal and also double as aids to learning more information.

The Good List: These are things that are definitely good to do, will "score points" and make others think positively of you. I think the itemization of this one would be less straightforward than the others.

My theory is that ASD men probably have a good knowledge of what's obviously bad list(80% of it are things we usually learn in early childhood) but may be lacking in knowledge of the other 3 lists.

Your posts tend to be a bit tl;dr for me, so I apologise if you already addressed this and I missed this, but: What is your reasoning for making this topic gender specific?

I'd say only certain parts are specific to guys.

Hmm I didn't really think about that TBH. Wish I could edit the title to "each person's role within dating"

I think Aspergers particularly creates challenges for the male role or else ones that are further increased in difficulty for men. Like we don't feel an innate need to impose, dominate, command & conquer in the social scene so we are more "meek" like not fulfilling what women are often looking for. However it's known that it's possible to be a well functioning adult as an ASD guy, therefore I feel it's possible for an ASD guy to be a worthwhile partner.

Part of it is bias on my part as the few females with Aspergers I know seem to function well enough in female role as well as female posters on here seem functional IMO. There are very few who appear to have crisis of female identity in similar way to many guys having crisis of male identity, my view about some of them is more that they perhaps had made poor choices of men or just simply bad luck. Put simply, I see no legitimate reasons why I would exclude them from consideration other than being taken/openly stating no interest in dating, they appear completely datable and no known reasons to believe otherwise. They come across as interesting, intelligent people and they convey their positive qualities well.

Whereas oftentimes for guys who make complain threads on L&D there will be countless reasons evident why they would quickly be eliminated from consideration. A lot of it is negativity/attitude but I think a big factor is unstructured behaviour meaning we don't have clear concepts of how to best behave in social situation where meeting women to date is possible and we don't have best strategies to endear others. I think the result is they convey their qualities poorly. My gut feeling about these threads is we're not getting a crystal clear view of them as people, more specifically we aren't getting a complete sense of their strengths and positive qualities. It seems to be combination of holding back too much and/or not know what to show.

Guys here can obsess alot about "the right girl" but I feel the facts are we don't know what this hypothetical person is actually like or how to attract them or anything when coming from a place of having absolutely no experience.

Defining this stuff as a "role" could be one way to make it into something more manageable to comprehend, and will serve as a better strategy than having No Strategy.

I see a degree of brilliance in the idea due to understanding how difficult a teaching role could be for me. In fact I'd ruled out teaching as a career some time ago in anticipation of the social challenges. Stated another way I think can do the strictly methodical things like just explaining concepts/making lessons but I think the social connection is the big challenging part.

Source here:
viewtopic.php?t=364079


I would say this is largely true but that the parts that affect guys keep them out of relationships and therefore keep them at 0 experience. The parts that affect women are more so those that would only come into play later on in the relationship.

My position right now is almost any relationship/dating experience beyond only always getting rejected at the outset will be growth promoting towards the goal of dating success. I want to take people's advice and plunge in but I know I need to mitigate the ASD factors that otherwise greatly interfere. Can't go in being all scared, extremely anxious, etc. Can't get perpetually stuck in an "I Don't Know What to Do" mindset.

I want reduce the fear by keeping in mind that if a relationship is indeed toxic I can always leave, and things don't have to progress too quickly if I don't want it to. I want to put aside some of the over complicated ideas about relationship dynamics to just go for experience and simply leave if it is a bad situation.

Last bumped by SSJ4_PrestonGarvey on 02 Jun 2018, 12:06 am.