Thread by @mbateman

A story about learning a masculine role in relationships, that may perhaps be useful to people similar enough to me.

In my early 20s or so I had no real conception of differentiated gender dynamics.

I was raised to believe that gender differences were ancien régime constructs.

Not as explicit ideology, as one might imagine today, just as a low-key, backgrounded, occasionally mentioned matter of course. “lol, those things are outdated and we know better now.”

I should also say that I’ve always been egosyntonically girl-coded in some ways. The biggest: I love children. I was the “boy preschool assistant teacher”, “boy babysitter”, the boy who visited the newborn, etc. There are other ways too; I’m pretty emotional and sensitive, etc.

So, like, it was quite nice that no one *ever* seriously made fun of me for these things or tried to nudge me out of them. And I did notice and appreciate that, and it reinforced the ancien-régime-bad-construct thing.

Anyway, all that is just context. My problem was courtship.

I “did fine” in terms of having girlfriends etc.—generally managed to date the girls I wanted to date, and in any case wasn’t an incel.

But it always felt awkward to me. Like, how-is-this-supposed-to-work awkward.

I managed to awkwardly situate myself into (and out of) relationships. They weren’t something I pursued like I pursued other goals. I got better at other things in my life, I wasn’t really getting better at relationships. I might have been getting worse at them.

So one day I decided to sit down and think about it.

For the first time in my life, I put my mind to considering: what is the courtship game?

Let’s assume it *is* a construct, purely a social artifact. Still—what *is* it? How does it work? What is there to be said for it?

I pondered romcom/sitcom-level things such as “guy is supposed to make move, guy is supposed to propose, guy is supposed to ‘lead’; girl is supposed to signal availability/interest, girl is supposed to gatekeep”, etc.

After some thought I was like... yeah ok I’m good with this.

By “I’m good with this” I did not and do not mean “I think everyone Must play this game in this way”, or “this is Biological Fact”, or “exceptions are Bad and there are no reasons ever to take exception”, or “critiques of this game are all wrong”.

I instead meant and mean “I like this game, I’m actually glad it was established, it’s nice for me that most people play it, I’m myself happy to play it; this is a good vehicle for me to find and participate in rather important forms of meaning and fun”.

Maybe this is blindingly obvious to some people? Most people? Plausibly I’m idiosyncratically dumb. But for me it was a revelation.

The level of relevant description was not where I expected to find it. The things that most people talked about most of the time seemed irrelevant.

Like it just wasn’t that relevant whether or not there was a True Biological Essence. It didn’t matter whether it was artifice or natural kind. It didn’t matter if it was part of some broader unfair pattern, because the relevant aspects weren’t unfair.

And just like that: I was unblocked.

I could ask girls out, I knew what to do on dates, I knew how to handle breakups, I was more comfortable with additional things in this vicinity better left to implication.

I won’t say I was *good* at these things. More just that I considered them to be, happily, my job.

And so it wasn’t awkward anymore, even when I *wasn’t* good at them. What’s worth doing is worth doing badly, or however the saying goes.

Whenever it felt like I was waiting, or things were coasting or simmering for too long, or it was unclear how to proceed, I would now think: oh right, *I’m* supposed to *read the room* and *do something* here. That’s my role in the game.

That’s it, that was the unblock.

I think there’s an equivalent if you’re on the girl-side of the standard game. Something like “my role in this game is *not* to do something so overt, it is to *prepare the room to be read*, it to issue and rescind invitations, it is to enable/handicap further moves” etc.

Of course one can see why this might be frustrating, especially from the girl-side, and especially if the frequency of playing the guy-side normally is trending downward. And, again, I am not against exceptions or critiques.

21yo-Matt’s discovery was that one can have sympathy for these problems and still play. Still *happily* play. To *appreciate* a world in which there are such courtship dynamics, which, for all their quirks, are very good fun.

This dead simple, apparently boring and obvious perspective has also been quite helpful in giving advice to people, as I’ve been called upon to do so. So I don’t think its value is purely at the N == 1 scale.

This was a different world btw. Like 2003 or so. PUA culture was less mainstream, its horrible offshoots were non-existent, me-too was still unborn.

The discourse certainly wasn’t healthy, but it was more homogenous, and less littered with dangerously sharp gender-war detritus.

I’ve found this way of thinking helpful, mostly in making personal decisions and in developing a more mature self-conception wrt relationships.

Not sure what “this way of thinking” is. Metaphysically-lightweight, defeasible, explicit, happily standard-issue gender?

ymmv of course