hopeful loner said:
I mean, randomly approaching a woman whom you've never met and putting yourself at the mercy of her power like that? Oh, you can pretend that she's just a woman and there are many more like her and rationalize away the pain that comes with her saying no, but in the end of the day, the act of wanting her comes with the price of her "no" having the power to affect you deeply.
Here's the lesson you haven't learned yet:
Rejection is better than Regret
You are caught in the vicious cycle. You are hesitant because you are not used to things going your way. And things will never go your way because you remain hesitant. You see what you want, become hesitant, and the door of opportunity closes. It happens again. And again. And again. With each choice towards Inaction, you reject yourself a little bit more.
This is where that cycle of hesitation leads. In your world of Hesitation, you shred off more and more of your manliness until you turn into a full-fledged Nice Guy. Then you seek to remove hesitation by making the approach risk free. Then you start giving gifts, poetry, flowers, and declarations of love. You start to examine and re-examine non-existent signals until they read the way you want them to read. In the end, you place her on the pedestal and throw yourself to her worship.
If there is a choice between less pain or the possibility of more pain, we default to the less pain. In adolescence, going for a girl and failing made you think everyone else would laugh at you. Whether or not it was true, you thought it was true. This was how you are kept within the cycle.
Realize now that the choice of Inaction is more painful than Action. Childhood is over. You are the MAN. You must approach. Always default to Action now. From those of us who wasted years in that hesitation mode know that Rejection is always better than Regret. Always.
Constant rejection requires one of two solutions: either lower your standards or increase your standards in yourself. Do
NOT wish it were easier, wish you were better. You will not get better by hiding behind
BUFFERS that you think will protect you from rejection. You're a MAN; you will experience rejection more regularly and more often than women in many different arenas - career, personal, education, sports, women, family, politics - you name it, you'll be rejected. The measure of a Man is how he perseveres after rejection in spite of it, and in spite of knowing it WILL happen again.
There are no mistakes, only results. They may not be the results you were looking for, but they're results. The only failure is NOT learning from them.