I need relationship advice?

[Anonymous]

I have never been in a relationship. Lately a guy have begin to DM me. We were friends when we were younger and lost contact when we started on high school. We are both working now. He started to send me funny videos and I sent back because I was happy that one old friend started to contact me again. After one week of sending reels etc, he just stopped. I have been thinking of him a lot. I hate this feeling. I have worked to love myself and have been working on my mental health because of aome past experiences and situations. Still when he did not text me I was waiting for him to take contact and give the little happy feeling I have been feeling the last week. I sent him a message now because he is the one that always have started the convo. But now I feel like I did a mistake because people say men like to chase. Should I have never sent the message? I hate that I have no experience with men, and don't now what to do, and all I can understand from things I have read is that I am dumb that I shouldn't have sent him a message.

[MrOracle]

One text (unless it was mean or cruel somehow) isn't going to mess anything up, trust me. Remember, though: you are dealing with a MAN, not a woman. Men have responsibilities, often to a lot of people beyond himself, and many of us have jobs where we MUST pay attention and focus for hours at a time. Sometimes our "lunch break" is wolfing down a sandwich in the car for 3 minutes before going back to work.

Men also tend to be terrible at multi-tasking - generally, a man's strength is being able to focus on one task to the exclusion of everything else, and that's what we're good at. And that's terrific for the task we are working on, and terrible for everything else, because we tune everything else out so we can focus. If our focus is interrupted, our work grinds to a halt, and it can take several minutes to re-focus our brain again, so interruptions are expensive and even dangerous for us at times, and, again, our brains are not designed to handle them well. Women's brains tend to be the opposite: they have trouble focusing on any one thing because their brains are constantly shifting from one thing to another like an amazing, purpose-built multitasking machine. That's not how men's brains work.

Did you know that, initially, Bell Telephone hired only men as phone operators, because phone switchboards were new technology and men tended to be more comfortable with that? But it turned out that, while men grasped the technology right away, they were lousy at multitasking, and when things got busy, they couldn't switch their brains fast enough between multiple simultaneous demands. They brought in a group of women, who initially needed more training, but very quickly out-performed the men because the job played to women's strengths: multi-tasking. Bell soon fired all the men, and only hired women as operators for the next 100 years.

This also speaks to the fact that men in general don't prioritize communication in the same way that women do, ESPECIALLY when they have people in front of them in the real world. Men will focus on the people in front of them and will de-prioritize their phones - it's not personal, it's just how men's brains work.

So, he's probably just been really busy, with lots of people in his real-world life making demands on his time, and he hasn't had enough down-time to get back to you yet. It's almost certainly nothing personal. And, yes, I know there are a few guys whose phones are the most important thing in their lives, and are on it all day long, but those are the rare exception, not the rule. Most men don't have the kind of job or lifestyle that would allow that even if they wanted to do it, which they don't.

[Asker]

Thank you for your reply😊