Am I a loser?

Here is where the story begins for the typical Nice Guy. 

Around 14 years old, he spends weeks or months developing a crush on a girl in his class. When he finally builds up the nerve to anxiously and awkwardly approach her (and tell her she is pretty), she shows low interest (for whatever reason). He assumes her lack of interest is the result of her ability to see what a loser he is.

Or perhaps he spends months and years becoming a girl’s friend, listening to her talk about her problems, hoping that some day she will see what a great guy he is. She is happy to use him as an emotional tampon, but of course she never falls in love with him. Again, he assumes it is because there must be something fundamentally wrong with him -- and she can see it.

From adolescence on, he assumes that all women have the power to instantly see whatever disqualifying flaws he possesses. Over time, if he occasionally gets up the nerve to approach women and gets additional low interest responses, it validates his belief that all women have the ability to instantly recognize his inherent undesirability.

Men with this kind of dating experience have a hard time seeing that a woman’s low interest response can be the result of a number of factors:

--She isn’t available
--He isn’t her type (we all have types)
--She is distracted or preoccupied
--He approached her clumsily, anxiously, or passively
--He did nothing to create positive emotional tension for her
--He was waiting for her to be the decider and take action

These men use a few low interest responses and a few awkward advances (or months or years of being “nice” to a woman) as proof and support of their deeply held self-limiting beliefs. These SLBs might include:

--I am inherently flawed and undesirable
--All women can instantly see I am undesirable
--All women want a guy who is different from me
--This will never change

Regardless of how you feel about yourself, women do not have superhuman powers to read your mind or know the depth of who you are.

Further, you may be hyper aware of perceived personal flaws, but you are not a loser. Any internal beliefs of personal worthlessness you hold on to are nothing more than a lifetime of inaccurate interpretation of life events. 

Since you aren’t a loser (even if you believe you are), a woman can’t look inside you and see something that isn’t there. Just because some women whom you desired didn’t desire you back, it didn’t mean they looked inside you and saw you as lacking in some fundamental way.

You Cannot Not Communicate

While women cannot see into your soul, the female brain is more powerfully wired for EMPATHY than the male brain. Empathy is the ability to sense what another person is experiencing and to understand and share their feelings.

Due to evolution, the female brain is better wired to naturally experience empathy by sensing and interpreting the “meta communication” that we all project.

This meta communication is projected through facial expressions, body language, eye movement, voice tone and pace, and even energy. Communication experts say that only about 7% of communication consists of actual words, the rest is non-verbal cues. So even if you aren’t speaking, your body, face, eyes, posture, and gestures all speak volumes.

Without going too deeply into the evolutionary processes that helped the female brain develop greater empathy -- the ability to read the unspoken cues people project -- suffice it to say, women are more sensitive to your body language than they are to your words. 

But even with a greater capacity for empathy, women cannot read your mind and do not posses the ability to look into your heart or soul (or intuitively know you have a hidden porn addiction, live with your mother, or have never had sex).

So while there may be a multitude of reasons why a woman might have low interest in interacting with you (the majority of which have nothing to do with you), there might be some things you are doing at the meta level that might trigger a low interest response in a woman (none of which includes you being a “loser”).

There are two common issues that Nice Guys and inexperienced daters project which women experience at a meta level. Both of these dynamics typically lead to low interest responses in women. These two issues are incongruence and anxiety.