Something interesting about interpersonal interest

I learned something interesting lately by accidentally leading on a gay man. You see, as a straight man, I am quite used to being the one in pursuit. Not at all used to things being the other way around. What I've noticed is that when someone shows you that they like you, part of you says, "alright! validation! I can go with this." This is pretty natural. We want to be liked. That's about all we can handle though.

When someone expresses an interest in you, something that's more direct, perhaps more self-serving, we immediately cringe away. Even if we share the interest, we don't like to be pursued. We want it to be a partnership. We want them to like us and we want to like them back. We want to develop and interest and then have it returned but we can't stomach it when their interest happens before we develop our own.

As men, we don't ever get to have what we want. Not a partner for life. Not a fuck-buddy. Not anything beyond acquaintance. Not unless we provide the opportunity for the other party to develop it first. It has to be their idea.

This is the game. Much as we might hate it, most people are just not sophisticated enough to comprehend it and thus, cannot truly rise above it. Most women, specifically, don't even realize it's being played and so it's up to us, the nice guys, to learn it, then master it, use it to our advantage and get what we want out of it, whatever that might be.