The other day, my parents asked me (22M) if there were any women that I find attractive (I guess because they’re paranoid about me being gay lol) and I told them yes, there’s a fair number of women that I’ve seen in public that I’ve found attractive.
They asked me, “Do you talk to any of them?” and I said “No??? It’s inappropriate to approach women in public unless you have business with them.”
I told them that it is only appropriate for a man to talk to a woman he doesn’t know when the social situation is explicitly designed for meeting strangers—dating apps, hobby groups, meeting friends of friends, etc. In my view, cold approaching women you don’t know just because you’re attracted to them is harassment.
My parents told me that I’m being ridiculous and making excuses because I’m nervous. They are adamant that I need to learn to approach women or else I will never find a partner. I told them that times have changed and this is disrespectful and potentially predatory behavior along the lines of unsolicited flirting and catcalling. Approaching women is a violation of their personal space and could make them feel very uncomfortable, especially if they feel like they don’t have an easy way out.
My parents are almost 60 and they are very conservative, so they don’t exactly follow progressive discourse, and I feel like they’re super out of touch on this as a result. Particularly, my mom tends to strike up conversations with other women in public, and she’s skeptical when I tell her that I can’t do the same thing because I’m a man and would be viewed as a potential predator.
But I also don’t get out much, which makes me second-guess how distorted my understanding of the social world is from reality. My parents are like a broken clock, and sometimes they DO have a point about something despite 90% of their opinions being insane. Maybe there is a more nuanced reality that I’m not picking up on.
So I wanted to ask here. Are my parents out of touch? Am I out of touch? Are we both wrong? I want to know your opinion.
If someone yelled about asking politely in an acceptable social situation, then they were wrong. That is not normal. It’s certainly not a regular occurrence.
That being said, given your prior comment, which just screams “incel, mgtow, etc”, I’m gonna go ahead and doubt you saw what you say you did.
It is a regular occurrence. Regular enough that it’s been reflected in popular media for decades. They even make entire movies about “boy gets rejected by popular girl, boy transforms himself to win her over, boy decides he doesn’t need her anymore because she’s mean”
Are you honestly so naive that you think those initial rejections don’t happen in real life? Everyone saw them at high school, and everyone saw them even more on social media when said girl spreads it around to cyberbully the boy even more. It’s been more than 20 years since I was at high school, and even when we didn’t have cellphones that shit still happened, and it didn’t stop at University either.
So your examples are “things that happened to me in high school”, and “movies which are obviously real”?
Again I’m going to have to ask you to leave your basement and interact with real people. You are wrong.
Do you think highschool isn’t real?
We aren’t talking about 40 year olds dating here grandm.
High school is it’s own environment, and it’s pretty far removed from the adult world. I would not take the drama you experienced as gospel.
Sorry I thought we were talking about “talking to women in appropriate situations” as an adult. So no, high school is obviously not relevant.
The majority of humans have awkward, embarrassing, and cringy memories from high school. If you’re stuck on that as an adult, and I mean this with genuine compassion, I suggest therapy.
I think high school is irrelevant when talking about the behavior of men and women, because it’s attended by children. In my high school, matching socks were actively uncool and would get you made fun of- making a complaint about how the world cares about your ingenuity in mismatching socks based on my experience there would be more reflective of my personal history than of larger society