Flirting

Guys who are too nervous to approach aren’t always fearing rejection. Usually they probably aren’t.

This take is written for young men, but women are free to share their opinions as well.

There’s a stigma out around that if you aren’t approaching any girl you find physically attractive the moment you see them there’s a problem within you and you need help.

Often people speculate that these people fear failure or fear rejection, but I actually don’t think this is what they fear. Because they don’t go up to them in the end, they’ve already sort of taken comfort in their rejection by rejecting themselves.

So if it isn’t fear of rejection, what is it?

I think it’s fear of success.

Perhaps even more paralyzing than a fear of failure is a fear of succeeding. “What happens if she actually likes me? Then what?!”

Yes. This is more common than you think, especially if a guy is used to not being with a partner, ever. They can go so long never being with a woman that when the opportunity arises they suddenly have the epiphany that they have no idea what that means, how to do it right or even what’s normal or to be expected. It’s like being tossed into a rocket to the moon and being told “okay, just make sure to set up camp when you land. You’ll be great.” Okay. Let’s just fly to the moon with no training, no idea what to do or how to do it — and ‘you’ll be great?!’ What BS!

Yes. The fear of success. It rises out of repeated failure or inexperience. As one becomes more familiar with the latter, the less and less familiar and more and more foreign and shocking the former sounds.

This is is why I don’t necessarily endorse or agree with notions like “you need to get over the fear of rejection.” It’s like no, that’s already familiar. They need to get over the fear of succeeding.

When we look at self-sabatoging behavior it might look completely asinine from the perspective of someone who has always had relatively normal success. But in order to properly understand it, it has to be approached from the angle of someone who has never had relatively normal success. It’s downright frightening.

I previously wrote a take on fear of intimay. This is very much related. While I believe fear of intimacy is rooted in childhood experiences and development, and in particular whether or not one has a secure or insecure attachment to their provider — afterwards once into adulthood, besides regular fear of intimacy an insecure attachment manifests itself as fear of success.

Fearing love.
Fearing love.

These people have have had no good clear role models on how to properly handle positive feedback — because it was probably so rare in their entire young adult lives. Naturally, people are built to fear the unknown and unfamiliar. Our physiology reacts to such situations with the fight or flight response system. Such is the premise of things like social anxiety and other anxiety based disorders such as panic or fear of intimacy. Some people have phobias of spiders, etc.

The clear relationship between all these things is that all anxiety disorders affect people who have intense fears of things that the majority of people have no issue with whatsoever. That’s what distinguishes an irrational fear from a legit one.

People who don’t fear what they should are psychotic. Those who fear things they shouldn’t have the opposite problem, they have anxiety.

So what causes it?

Unfamiliarity. It’s the reason CBT therapy is really the only scientifically backed treatment plan for such people. It relies on a Pilar of two things: 1). Exposure. Increase familiarity of the feared thing (so long as it’s actually irrational to fear). This is where the idiom ‘face your fears’ comes from. It’s true. Gaining experience with a thing allows one to feel more comfortable and less fearful of that thing.

Imagine being a young adolescent who had a narcissistic mother. He has an insecure attachment and isn’t sure what to expect from other women in his life who aren’t his mother. Depending on his age, he may not realize other people aren’t all the same. He may grow up with a phobia of women for this reason. (For those who don’t know, real narcissists can be very dangerous and traumatic

A real narcissist
A real narcissist

If you’re really curious, check out this further reading: https://qr.ae/TWXXWg).

So, let’s break this case down. It’s crazy to fear women, right?! Well, says the guy with a secure attachment and a beautiful and wonderful mother. Easy for him to say. This guy as an adolescent will go out into the world believeing and expecting that all women will be wonderful and amazing creatures that will love, support and nurture — pretty much the opposite experience that the other boy had growing up. It actually feels sort of right to tell the other boy to check his privilege from the perspective of the other guy. It would seem right if it wasn’t the normal experience most people have.

2). Beliefs. CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This deals with the cognitive aspect of the term. Life experience influences beliefs. The boy who grew up under a narcissist now has an altogether different set of beliefs about the world that the boy raised by a great mother. Beliefs are influenced by experiences.

The hallmark of an anxiety disorder is a set of irrational beliefs that cause one to fear something they shouldn’t because of a traumatic set of experiences that the majority of people do not experience. The challenge, then, becomes ultimately convincing a person that their beliefs are completely and totally irrational. Once they believe this for themselves, they can free themselves from the shackles of their anxiety and move forward.

The only way a person can truly be convinced that their current belief systems are wrong and be willing to update and replace them with different beliefs that likely contradict their current set of beliefs is for them to go out and experience it for themselves and find out on their own first hand.

For those who can’t understand, or are struggling to understand, this sort of thing imagine the following thought experiment.

You are standing at the edge of a clif. You can’t see what lies beyond the edge. Your friend is standing next to you and tells you to jump off the cliff. What do you do?

The idea with this example is to try and mimic or replicate what anxiety feels like to people who don’t have anxiety. This is kinda what life is like for an anxious person.

Imagine being a guy who fears success with women. Imagine having that fear of falling to your death via jumping off a cliff every time you see or make eye contact with a person you are sexually attracted too. Such is the life of people with fear of intimacy.

Sadly, the only real way to cure this fear is to literally jump off the cliff and realize that you don’t die, and that nothing bad happens. The catch is that it is literally impossible to know these things before you complete the jump.

That means, as you stand there at the edge, you literally need to be willing to say your goodbyes and jump to your doom expecting that you’ll smash into the ground and die a horrible death.

So a person with ireational fears will hillariously be terrifed to no end whilst approaching a woman he is attracted to, because for this guy metaphorically he has said his goodbyes and has jumped to his doom, fully believing that he is about to kill himself in a painful horrible death falling into the ground.

So, guys. People can tell you this or that — that it’s totally fine. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ‘It’s nothing to fear.’

I understand that such encouraging words are nothing more than bullshit to you. You have to be willing to take that leap. It requires trust that other people’s experiences actually really do/did differ from yours. You can’t really be sure. That’s why it causes anxiety.

People don’t get freaked out for no good reason; human beings are far to advanced of biological creations for something so petty. So for all you anxious people. Understand that your anxiety is warranted, but that it is also irrational. So go jump off that cliff and pray for your life as you fall.

But while falling, I hope you realize that everything you believed was wrong. 🤞

This is the only way out guys.

Dislaimer: in no way do I endorse jumping off literall cliffs. I do not suggest suicide for anyone. I was speaking strictly metaphorically.

Guys who are too nervous to approach aren’t always fearing rejection. Usually they probably aren’t.
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