Here I was, thinking that the most self-sacrificing action an American well off enough to have retirement savings (no immediate tax on capital gains) could take would be to divest from all domestic stocks and funds and shift to international ones.
Might not turn out to be as self-sacrificing as I thought.
Um, did you consider that this tall, beautiful woman might a) already have a partner despite being tall, b) not be interested in finding a partner right now, or c) since it was lunchtime, was thinking about something she needed to do for work and resented the interruption?
Your reaction is an example of why dating is so hard for guys. There is no way to approach women without risking a potentially reputation-ruining reaction.
Well, there's definitely no right way to do a cold approach and immediate invitation to a date to a stranger on the street; there are contexts where people are signalling they are open to dating approahces from strangers (dating apps, certain singles events—but even a certain amount of mutual sharing, facilitated by the app or event, is normal before an invitation, for both parties to do some assessment of compatibility beyond appearance), and there are relatively safe ways and contexts to inquire about the possibility of a date where there is a pre-existing non-dating relationship. But a cold approach on the street based on nothing but appearance (partially attraction, partially the paradoxical assessment that this attractive potential partner has an unusually limited set of potential partners of their own) has got to be the worst choice ever.
Not only do you have a mich higher chance of approaching someone who isn't available for dating in any context, you also signal that your only concern in dating in appearance and that you are incredibly socially inept and unaware of the contexts in which dating approaches are appropriate, neither of which are helpful to your cause, in most cases.
>>you also signal that your only concern in dating in appearance
a) first, i didnt tell her my assumption?!!!
b) you are sounding like: "do not do any of those assumptions because they are wrong and listen..." - in fact: EVERYBODY is doing those assumptions/calculations when approaching someone, regardless the environment - so there is absolutely no reason to point out that my "behaviour" is somehow any specific to someone else - this is just disguise from yours :-)
c) what about all this buff then: "why does nobody invites me on a date?" and "why do men do not speak to women openly" etc. and all this stuff that we can read everywhere, like: Men have to approch Women, so i did. And failed. And now you have your perspective, thats OK.
d) WHENEVER you are speaking to someone in a club/socialevent/etc. your primary signal is appearance, so do not try to wrap this otherwise since experiments & data show absolutely whats going on.
You approached her cold on the street knowing nothing about her but her appearance. You don't need to tell your assumption. Women have brains.
> you are sounding like: "do not do any of those assumptions because they are wrong and listen..."
While I may have an opinion on the assumptions you are making, I am not at all expressing that. What I am expressing is that you are failing to consider important factors in your calculation, namely, the social context, and the impapct of the social context on the way your actions are perceived by someone doing their own set of calculations.
> what about all this buff then: "why does nobody invites me on a date?
This is about what happens in social contexts where dating intent is signalled, not in those where it is not.
> and "why do men do not speak to women openly"
"Speaking" here is not code for "invite on dates", and, again, this still is sensitive to appropriate social contexts.
> Men have to approch Women, so i did. And failed.
You have confused a broad (though not universal) social expectation that men should be the party to approach women with the concept that it is equally beneficial to do so in any social context and all that matters is that there is a woman you think you might want to date present to make it appropriate. This is...incorrect.
You have managed to wrap your brain around (even if you may have overgeneralized it) a single social expectation. Your success may be improved when you increase your capacity for processing social expectations relevant to your task to a quantity greater than one.
If a guy sees an attractive woman out in real life somewhere, is there any action he can take that would be appropriate? What specifically should a guy do?
If you are not at a bar, club, church singles' mixer, or other environment where people go for the purpose of meeting strangers for dating, think to yourself, "oh, she's pretty," then move along. Seriously. This advice goes doubly at any even slightly professional event, like a conference or a technology meetup.
If you need encouragement to leave her be, remember that more likely than not, she's already in a relationship.
Good catch!
The days when i saw her some days in the metro, i checked explicitly if she has some signs of an existing relationship, like a ring or something specific that may indicate this.
Also i have to admit, she is a smoker; something i could deal with (teethgrindingly) since i was one for myself years ago, but honestly: Today most men wont partner up with a lady who is a smoker. And in case of men today, if you are smoking you are actually out forever for any women: Smoking _is_ just disgusting :-D
So, my "gut-statistics" is just telling me that she is/was single with a very very high probality.
EDIT:
before someone is coming with clothes or similar ideas: Im working in a decent office environment in which nice clothes are the standard (finance), so im not running around with jeans etc, also im in very good shape
Ceausescu also had that insane forced-birth policy where women under 45 (later relaxed to 40, but then raised back to 45) who had not yet had 4 (later 5) children were not only banned from using birth control or getting abortions, they were regularly pregnancy tested.
Yes, some call the people born in that era "decreței" loosely translated as children of the decree. Yes, they did not really respect women's reproductive rights. There are a bunch of horror stories about that aspect of Ceaușescu's regime.
The big group that keeps getting ignored are older people who actually do have smartphones, but find them increasingly difficult to use as they age, due to how fiddly touch interfaces can be and visuals designed by and for people in their 20s, not 70s and 80s.
Typing on a smartphone is impossible for my 70-something father, even on the larger models.
Touchscreens also frequently don't work with older people's skin which is often dry. They often literally cannot type because the screen doesn't pick up the electrical currents in the drier, more insulated fingers. Physical keyboards wouldn't have this problem.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what my dad’s problem boils down to. He worked in construction for half a century, specializing in concrete, so heaven knows what that did to the skin on his fingertips.
Same for my parents (ironically, my 90-something grandmother can use an iPhone with no problem). My dad has Raynaud's (poor fingertip circulation), so touch screens sometimes just won't work for him anyways. Making things app-only is practically discrimination.
My husband's mother, a German who spent a few semesters in Britain in the late 50s and subsequently taught English and geography in gymnasium (German academic track middle and high school), taught him and few other neighborhood children some English during her maternity year after his younger sister was born. He was 4. She then went back to work, he went into regular German Kindergarten (preschool), and the whole matter was forgotten.
Until he was 10 and started classroom English in 5th grade - he had a very easy time of it. That year of getting English sounds into his little kid brain, despite coming from a non-native speaker who had only spent a few semesters in England, did some sort of magic, because ever since I've known him, he's sounded British enough to fool Americans (British people, on the other hand, can hear that something's off, and of course can't place his accent). He's a more fluent English speaker than I am a German speaker, but we both have to speak more English at our jobs than German.
I've lived in Germany for twenty years, and despite speaking what I would consider a merely adequate and certainly not native level of German, I've noticed that there's something a bit off about how I speak English. It's glaringly apparent when I'm back in Texas. Like the author, I make some strange word choices that are almost like direct translations from German, and it's had an effect on my grammar, too.
We're raising our kid to be bilingual (my husband is German), but I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.
I'm also a Texan in Germany, and my German's good enough that it often takes people a few minutes to notice I'm not a native speaker. (Left the US at 21, am now 44.) I definitely also have a lot of German artifacts in my spoken English at this point. At one point I was given the attempted compliment of, "Wow, your English is really good" – because I apparently almost sound like a native speaker. ;-)
My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.)
The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.
That sounds perfectly British English to me, to the extent that I thought your point was going to be it was something German had stamped out of you.
Interestingly, I'm not sure if it's nationwide, or a local dialect (Dorset/West country) thing - interesting because there's a lot of German/Saxonism retained in the dialect, usually about word choice or spelling though, not phrases. As far as I'm aware anyway, not an expert.
(For example we tend to prefer the -t ending of -ed verbs: 'burnt' not 'burned' etc. including in stronger cases words like 'turnt' ('turned' in any usage, not the modern slang for drunk) that Wiktionary etc. will tell you are obsolete.)
Do you notice an increase in this usage lately? I see it a lot on reddit and hn. All romance languages probably have it by the way. I know Italian does for sure.
You could use it in English too so long as you add 'ago' on the end. "Since two days" makes no sense in English because "since" refers to a point in time not a duration.
That still doesn't sound natural to me. You could answer 'since when' with 'two days ago', but declaring it as a statement I'd say 'for the last two days' or 'since the day before yesterday'.
You could get away with it in speech since it sounds like 'since.. [thinking] two days ago' and it's acceptable to change construction like that in casual speech, but written it doesn't seem right to me.
I say this as a native English speaker… but I speak South African English (or something similar), and I’ve heard that this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!
Haha ok- but then so is German. Dutch has Low Franconian origins, and the more you learn about it, the weirder it gets. Also, it did not have the consonant shift- e.g. water (en) vs water (nl) vs wasser (de).
That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can. Who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.
I don't know, I think maybe Dutch and German are more estranged siblings. English is a weird case because the German part is very German, but then the non-German part is pretty big!
Not OP here. You're right, but you could be more charitable in your reading of the previous comment. While it's wrong at the micro level it's not even nonsense on the macro level. Dutch and German are at the very least very related. They share a lot of constructs and words.
I said this long before I moved out of the US. I live in NL now. I wish I could tell you where it came from. Probably from my stepfather who was raised in a rural Texas area that probably had some old Germanic roots.
This example at least sounds perfectly natural to me, in California. I can remember my dad saying it, who was also a born and raised Californian. No German around whatsoever, shrug.
> I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.
My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties.
Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to family online, take them to English speaking places and countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German.
Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing it on.
> Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German.
I think that's the main thing. I have been very stubborn in "not understanding" the other (local) language with my children, even if it's obvious to them I do understand it. Today (they are still young) they speak both languages, including between themselves, and they don't seem to have a preference for one language over the other.
Lately I noticed that I cannot even speak my native German dialect as easily as when I was a teenager (I moved away from home to university when I was 20). I often hesitate because I am not sure whether some word I said was correct in my native dialect, or the local dialect where I live now, or the dialect of my wife (Swiss German). At home, we speak a wild mixture of 3 different dialects and standard German. Our 5-year-old mainly speaks standard German because that's what they speak at kindergarten (most of the teachers don't speak the dialect, and there is a significant number of French, Italian, Ukrainian, and Syrian kids for which learning the dialect would be even harder). At work, I speak a mixture of English and standard German.
After living in Germany for nearly 10 years, but working in Switzerland, my wife recently had an identity crisis because a Swiss colleague thought she was German, and had just learned Swiss German very well.
Some youths in Sweden are doing this in Swedish, being unable to properly communicate in their native language. Their English is usually not that great either though.
Some are foreigners, others are extreme nerds who have failed to interact with people and have lived on the internet.
Learning language is a lifelong journey, I'm convinced we continue to master our native language as well as we age. Maybe more so if we care and pay attention to it. So I hope there is still hope for some of the youth..
And I would add that I think becoming more than proficient in and deepening understanding of one's own language (Swedish in that case) is important, in parallel with learning foreign languages.
I am also raising a bilingual 3–year-old in Spain. I speak to him only in English. But i have recently read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, which argues convincingly that his English will be limited in certain important ways unless he also has a native English-speaking peer group.
I grew up in a many-lingual house and really only know English, though I am trying to finally learn proper German.
But my word choices and pronunciations are definitely not 100% native. There are moments where I can feel the vtable pointing me to the wrong language for a word. Sometimes I get back to English, sometimes I pause, and sometimes a word from some other language pops out.
As an example I sometimes say “no thank you” in Swedish in situations where that is wildly wrong. I can’t speak Swedish, but I have those basic phrases in there.
I wouldn't worry too much about it, English is prevalent and useful enough that as long as gets to a reasonable level early enough, he should be able to pick stuff that separate him from your specific manerisms
Tangentially related, I see more and more kids developing a "TV Accent" in Spanish in their early years which eventually gets replaced with their local one
I'm guessing based on their exposure to parents and media vs School/Parents/Every day life
Similar timeframe in Germany, not only did my English got worse, even though I have more years of speaking English (since the age of 10), I also occasionally miss some Portuguese words, my native tongue.
Thankfully hearing it regularly keeps me up to date, though there are those moments where right in the middle of a conversation I have to stop and reflect on how exactly something is named.
I have the same experience as well. After living in Germany for 12+ years, my English sometimes has this weird mix of English words and German grammar.
My daughter however speaks fluent English and German so I don’t think they’ll have the same problems.
Until being pregnant carries absolutely no financial or social penalties (during or after), people who don't want to be pregnant will try to find ways to end it. Society can either provide safe, legal means, or women will die trying.
You're forgetting about the process. Pregnancy causes significant physiological and psychological changes for many women, sometimes long lasting, and many women simply don't want to go through that process regardless of the "financial or social penalties" as you describe it.
Regardless, I agree: society should always provide safe, legal ways for anyone to get the care they need, no questions asked.
As a fellow believer, I need you to understand that you are doing more than any hardcore, argumentative atheist to turn people away from Christ by posting like this.
And about one percent of the women around you have survived an ectopic pregnancy because we're still (mostly) a society that cares more about the life of a breathing, thinking person than of an embryo that was doomed from the moment it landed outside of the uterus.
I'm part of that one percent. I regularly say a prayer of thanks for the doctors and nurses who (mostly metaphorically, but one physically) held my hand and explained what had gone wrong, how I could deal with it in a way that would preserve our chances to try again with as little risk to me as possible. I thank God that I was in a country with the resources and the legal apparatus for me to deal with my disappointment quickly and safely.
And I'm thankful for the child who I was able to bear nearly a decade later.
I don't judge anyone for the abortion they felt was the best of their hard options. I theoretically would have been left until I was bleeding out in many countries [0], and even my own home state doesn't quite feel safe now.
[0] No, I wouldn't. I'm a well-off American woman who can fly to somewhere rational, and worst case, am good friends with several MDs.
Might not turn out to be as self-sacrificing as I thought.
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