There really aren't any social skills that are women only or men only.
What there is are different sets of life experiences. Get to know people who aren't like yourself. Their experiences will be much more informative and useful than hearing another cis het man's life story.
so, listen, without invalidating anyone's feelings ...
I'd have to admit that while I understand that now ^
it is hard to do because ...
it's not really the case that women listen to me, if I have something to say about my own thoughts / feelings ...
my feelings are invalidated often, too, it seems ...
user15026
It's always good to listen to the groups whose voices aren't being heard. So if you just listen to more male voices, you're going to miss out on important things because while they may think they know how women work and think and act and why and all of that, at the end of the day, they're not actually women, so they lack practised experience.
@D.Hutchinson That doesn't change the fact that you should be listening more.
user15026
Sometimes, you have to know when your feelings are in no way important to the current issue at hand.
user15026
10:15 PM
Going back to last night - while it's all well and good that you'd be okay with someone coming up and interrupting you to ask you out, you're missing so much of the "female experience" as it were, so it doesn't equate to being the same at all.
user15026
So at that point, what you'd do or think matters little to not at all, because you're lacking the bits of it all that you literally do not experience in the same way as women do, being a (assuming) straight cis male.
Prime example: One of my flatmates (a guy) was out in short shorts (he runs a lot). a couple of days ago and someone yelled at him (in a derogatory way) that he was a "gay boy". He feels uncomfortable, but not threatened. He gets back to flat and tells us this. The 2 girls in the flat then say that they can get this kind of behaviour several times per day (depending on factors), only they also feel threatened by this kind of behaviour.
There's so much men in general aren't aware of simply because they're not women
Does anyone else want to tell the OP at interpersonal.stackexchange.com/q/9798/378 that Emily is clearly seeing things in his relationship with Rachel that he needs to address before trying to patch things up with Emily?
@apaul The question "How can I convince my partner to accept my best friend instead of wanting to break up?" sounds almost exactly like the love-triangle plot from the sitcom Friends--Ross's wife, Emily, was jealous of his friendship with Rachel (with pretty good reason), and gave him an ultimatum, friendship or marriage. Ross chose the marriage at first, but then waffled.
It was kind of famous back around the turn of the millennium in the US; when people talk about next-day water cooler debates, this is the issue that comes to mind for me. It was enough of a cultural thing that when I went to verify my memory of the wife's name, a buzzfeed article from last year was my first hit: buzzfeed.com/sheridanwatson/… But for folks outside that demographic I imagine it's pretty obscure.
user15026
I watched it some, when it first aired, but I never got into it the way some people did.
user15026
I never really found it all that interesting to be perfectly honest
@Ash I watched it, but not religiously. However, that particular issue was really polarizing, to the point that people who didn't watch the show at all had an opinion on whether the ultimatum was controlling and unreasonable, or a reasonable reaction to Ross's behavior. I was in the same age range as the characters, and everyone I knew had an opinion, whether they watched it or not.
user15026
I watched it when people around me were watching it but that's really about it
This question has almost exactly the same underlying dynamic, and the comments are already very reminiscent of the water cooler debate, so if it were a different kind of site I'd be saying "Ross, is that you?"
user15026
@1006a fair enough - my experience was vastly different than yours in that regard :)
