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I have an opposite problem. When I (I'm a guy btw) was in school, I sometimes just want to have friends but whenever I talked to girls, I worry that girls would just think I have some other motive (which it seems to me like every boy in my class do just want romantic relationships). Like maybe I'm asexual/aromantic, but I never wanted those types of relationships, I prefer a long lasting friendship.
(I don't have much friends either way, regardless of gender; current amount of friends is: zero; because I just stopped talking to people after highschool, oh well 🤷♂️)
I (straight male) always found it easy to connect with girls, but I was also raised in a very feminist family (despite my mother being nominally conservative).
Dating is a lot of work and vulnerability and an attempt at 'clicking' on many more levels than friendship. It definitely wasn't that I wasn't interested in dating (I very much was), but 'Gorl fun AND pretty' just wasn't enough to automatically spark my interest in romance. 'Gorl fun' meant possible friend; 'Gorl pretty' was most girls, because girls pretty.
I got spontaneously voted the most handsome boy in the class when I was in 10th grade though. Always burnished that particular memory on the Altar of Ego.
God, that final bit. I was a resident assistant for my dorm in college for a year. Didn't date anyone that year. Had plenty of crushes, including plenty from the dorm. At the end of the year, my coworkers (female RAs) were like, "yeah we were all so surprised you didn't go out with anyone, like, half the girls here were in love with you." And I just stared into the middle distance, "and you didn't think to tell me???"
"We thought you knew!"
"I DID NOT"
How were you supposed to know? If half the girls acted the same then how could you know that anything was afoot?
Never really thought about it that way, but that's a decent point.
Gender norms make things so fucking hard XD
Yeah. It all worked out. Married a nice person, have a kid, the whole deal. But god I could not read the room for YEARS.
It can get really confusing. I was one of the only out bisexual guys at my school in the 1990s. In my senior year there were two girls who individually always expressed a desire to hang out and talk but took none of the opportunities offered to do exactly this. I was confused because they were both stunning and always kind of weird around me so I couldn't figure out what they wanted because it clearly wasn't a relationship (Im not stunning). That was 30 years ago. Both are married to lovely women and have been out for decades now. What they wanted to talk about was how I knew I wasn't straight. I wasn't able to figure that out even though I knew they weren't into me because reading the room has always been a challenge.
Was your grandma allowed to vote, and how many times did she vote? I kid ;)
Vote early, vote often!
I ended up marrying my best (girl)friend from high school. We both went into it wanting friendship, were attracted to each other (while in relationships), and ended up getting pushed together by a mutual former friend.
I honestly think this was the best way for this to develop, because we were already close and good friends before we dated, and didn't try to make a relationship out of it.
Hey, as a flavour of aro ace myself the feelings of not wanting those types of relationships and not knowing specifically took a long time to figure out. If you want to talk about it, you can DM me or come over to !asexual@lemmy.world or !asexual@lemmy.blahaj.zone there are slao aromantic communities on lemmy as well.
If you can afford it get therapy. You show some social anxiety here and that can be addressed.
That was pretty much it for me with a few different female friends. It wasn't so much "hey you're hot and I wanna sleep with you rather than just be friends" it was "hey, I really enjoy spending time with you and I'm happy being around you, but I've been down this road before and I know it probably ends when you get a new boyfriend so... maybe I can be that boyfriend and we can continue to enjoy spending time together"
Same man. A lot of this just boils down to poor communication between the sexes