Agreed. One of my player friends who is exceptionally good at text and banter is exceptionally good at it precisely because he is utterly outcome independent. He may send long texts, short texts, he is never formulaic and he does exactly what he wants, communicates when and as often as he wants, etc. but he’s never needy or desperate.
I think the thing men need to learn often is social attenuation. Too many guys here think if X then Y and almost look at interactions with women like an algebra equation with a set of rigid rules governing the outcome and that just isn’t how human interactions are.
So yes I get your point. It’s hard to help people who don’t realize they are missing the social cues understand that. I know many of us are trying, but to me it stems from binary thinking when there is a whole plethora of possibilities in between as you note.
Well, to be fair, women are confusing to guys because we don't think like they do or at least not in the way that they do.
The thing that I think has helped me the most is simply to realize that a lot of women, especially the attractive ones, have so many options that they actively and passively seek out ways to disqualify men early on to help them focus on ones that don't "fail the easy tests".
Even if they aren't doing this intentionally in their mind, this is what ends up happening in actuality.
Kinda like how some jobs will give assessments to help disqualify candidates as well. I mean if you are looking for a math teacher and you have 200 candidates, why would you want to try and screen all 200 candidates when 100 of them can be eliminated based on giving them a basic math quiz? Hard to hire a person to teach math when they can't pass an 8th grade math quiz.
Then a lot of what women do actually DOES make sense. But not until you realize why it's happening and use logic based on being in that position.
The first goal then, as a man, is to not do things that disqualify yourself early on with women. However, once you reach that base level, instead of worrying about not disqualifying yourself, you then can start focusing on how to do things that make you stand out more than the majority of guys, so that your interactions not only don't disqualify you, they actually give you a significant boost.
But honestly, most guys would make their dating lives much easier if they would simply focus on not disqualifying themselves initially.