Men can't read our signals

Me: kill -9 $$

It's only a joke btw.

Oh dude. I, uh, overheard a very failed asking out they other day. It basically went:

Person 1:Hey, you're real pretty are you single?

Person 2:uhhhh no.

Person 3 pretending to be oblivious: Hey that looks real sharp

I've never seen anyone disappear quite so fast as person 1, so that was neat.

A bit of insights:

They get all weird because they see getting your attention as a sort of investment. They take time, effort, dedicate themselves to figuring out how to best build contact with you, and when it doesn't work out, it naturally leads to frustration. From there, they either close down (minimize losses), or get weird (frantically trying to make it work).

As per hugs and cuddles, masculine culture heavily disincentivizes tender emotions, and they can be seen as a reason for ridicule. Being burnt heavily on that, many men prefer to be very careful about communicating such needs.

How to be a neurotypical:

1 - Have a somewhat societally common and shared, but also very unique and specific to yourself/particular social group, way of understanding and projecting tone, microexpressions, vocabulary choices, speech cadence, etc, with many distinct or uncommon idiosyncrasies.

2 - Assume everyone else on the planet has essentially the exact same way of seeing and performing all this as you do.

3 - Confidently interperet social cues incorrectly considerably more often than Autists, but be blissfully unaware of this, pathologize and shame the idea of asking for clarity and communicating in a direct, precise, and less ambiguous way.

... Autistic people consciously learn, process and evaluate how social cues actually work, and Autistic people also very much like logically consistent things that are not contradictory... so they are more likely to either be very rigid with one way of understanding something, or to.ask questions to clarify things that are not actually clear, consistent, universal, precise.

It thus takes them longer to learn how to adaquetly perform all this, aka, Masking.

Neurotypicals on the other hand learn, process and evaluate and perform social cues much more unconsciously, and they are far more likely to just assume their interpretation is correct, that their projected behaviors convey exactly what they think they do... despite the fact that if you sit a bunch of them down, they will all describe significant differences between their ways of understanding and performing mannerisms.

Essentially, they're bullshitting it, but there are more bullshitters than non bullshitters, so bullshitting is the norm.