From: donb@igor.tamri.com (Don Baldwin)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: Take up a hobby, instead
Date: 20 Nov 92 01:02:22 GMT
Organization: TOSHIBA America MRI, South San Francisco, CA

In article <17958@autodesk.COM> booter@Autodesk.COM (Elaine Richards) writes:
	[stuff deleted to save bandwidth]
>Peeve: Some very nice men are shy. They don't ask women out because
>they are shy. Then they wonder why they don't have girlfriends.
>
>Peeve: Some very boorish men are so insistent that you either have
>to club them with a MagLite or go out with them and act like a total
>dweeb to get them off your case.

Unfortunately, remembering back to my early single days, the onus was
always on me to make exactly the right moves at the right time.  As I was
a shy geek at the time, I usually erred on the side of non-aggressiveness.
At the time, I found that that approach put me in the same category as
the slobs, i.e., out of the picture.  Gradually, I learned how to be
aggressive about it in the right way but the women who'd give me a
shot (if I didn't make all the right moves at the right time) were
few and far between.

I'm not saying this to whine, just to let you know that there's another
side to the story.

>Women are less likely to indulge in this kind of destructive and 
>	self-destructive behavior and are less likely to be the
>	topic of such discussions.
>Men don't care as long as they "get some".
>Women care a lot more about how their partners behave than men do.
>Men don't want to think about it, as long as they "get some".

Elaine, surely you're too intelligent to really BELIEVE in such a
simplistic explanation.  I mean, the idea that men are only out to
"get it" is about as on-target and thoughtful as my saying that
women are only out to find someone with Ross Perot's bank account
to take care of them:  reality content, minimal.  Certainly there
are people like that but it's nowhere near 100% so I can't figure
out why you'd say something as obviously wrong as "men don't care
as long as they get some".  No hostility intended, I just don't
understand it.

>Its the law of averages. Some sage from years ago said that a good
>man is hard to find, but a good woman is too easy to find.  Since
>women cannot figure out how to turn themselves into dykes or tolerate
>living in a good man's harem, they have to make do with what they have.

Depends on how you want your life to be when you look back at it.
Personally, I decided to set my sights high, bide my time and find
THE right person to go through life with, die old and alone if that's
what it took to build the kind of life I wanted.  It wasn't easy, it
took a long time but it worked.  If I'd taken the easy way out and just
settled for anybody, I would've deserved what I got.

Just a few comments from a survivor of the battle of the sexes.

   don

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"For every problem, there exists a simple and elegant solution which is
absolutely wrong." -- J. Wagoner, U.C.B. Mathematics
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Don Baldwin  -  Software Engineer  - e-mail to:  donb@tamri.com
Newsgroups: alt.peeves