Signals Intelligence

I saw this on Reddit, it was couched in an argument about emotional labor and the emotional misinterpretation when men misread signals from women regarding any emotional labor that they exercice when with men. Essentially, and I'm not paraphrasing that much, in fact I might be cleaning this up a bit, "Just beacuse I'm nice to you, doesn't mean I like you. Maybe if you had emotionally connective and mature relationships with other men, you'd know that, or you wouldn’t depend on women to talk to."

This led to something that me and my therapist have worked on in the past, and I want to bring back up and start working on again. And what that is ... is ... that I take a statement like the one above and *let* it affect me. In reality, when I look back in my history, I didn't ask out many women, and when I did and was rebuffed, I took rejections usually as relief. Relief from the idea of not knowing if I was missing an opportunity, and relief from feeling like a relationship's feelings could be misinterpreted, and now wouldn't be.

There is a possibility that, despite the opportunities of poly, I'll never ask anyone else out. Nevertheless, I feel conflicted. I remember when I was in high school, I had a friend that was in college who told me that I should focus on being friends first with people that I was romantically interested in. Wouldn't that type of friendship and getting-to-know-ness be party of the problem? Like, I would end up seeing that this person has a caring capacity on top of being attractive, or vice versa (sometimes people don't let their looks really show, or their sexuality show), and then when I asked them out, they would tell me off because I interpret them being nice as feelings of interest?

And again, that's all part of what I hate. Creating a net negative outcome. Now, I'd have someone hate me because my feelings led me to a romantic connection even though at the beginning, I was just going off the old advice, "Nope, be friends, see who they are." 

And maybe this is what I’m really saying all this for. What exactly are women experiencing? Like, if I asked out someone at a bar, would the reaction be, “Hey! Just because I didn’t splash a drink in your face doesn’t mean that I like you and you should ask me out!”