"Women/Girls love a man with confidence"

I’ve been thinking about this recently and it’s one of those innocent sayings that are quite insensitive. Growing up I heard this quite a lot, usually in response to being shy about asking someone out.

As an adult it’s hard to view this as an encouragement when the flip side is women dislike men with insecurities, women dislike men who feel vulnerable when putting themselves out there.

I don’t believe any of the connotations that I skewed from the phrase but it’s better to suggest “women love a man who are brave enough to fail” as encouragement rather, if you want a basic encouragement.

Just wanted to shar this somewhere appropriate

bigboismith ,

The way I’ve always seen it is as a general rule for both genders. A confident women is AFAIK more attractive than a shy/timid woman.

gapbetweenus ,

Or the best phrase ist: there is no point in generalizing literally half of human population.

And the point with confidence is more that it makes your whole life easy(not just dating) - since you are just not really afraid to fail no matter the odds, but it’s really difficult to develop as an adult.

Ilflish OP ,

Confidence is difficult to build all of your life, not just as an adult. It wasn’t really a problem with “girls like” but more the “just don’t be insecure” connotations

gapbetweenus ,

As a child it’s basically your parents supporting and believing in you (helps being good at something). As an adult it’s being really good at something and working on your childhood trauma of not supportive parents.

I don’t really get your point - since not being insecure just helps generally in life. And it’s always good to work on ones insecurities - be it just for oneselfs peace of mind.

streetfestival ,
@streetfestival@lemmy.ca avatar

The meaning of this phrase depends pretty heavily on the meaning of confidence, and there are many. I had a woman coworker once tell me: the most attractive thing in a man is confidence and the least attractive thing is arrogance. Her differentiation of confidence versus arrogance helped clarify the former. I think what she said is probably true of all genders, not just women attracted to men, and probably extends beyond romantic relationships as well. I think it’d apply to teamwork in general. I get what you’re saying, but in my experience everyone has insecurities about somethings and confidence about others. The presence of insecurities doesn’t mean that one lacks confidence. Going a step further, the most insecure people generally do not acknowledge their insecurities. Gendered relationship scripts, like “a man must ask the woman out,” tend to take on less and less relevance the further removed I am from my high school years, but I do seek out progressive-minded people

running_ragged ,

One thing I learned way too late in respect to this, confidence isn’t being sure that you will succeed, it’s being sure that you’ll be okay if you don’t.

MapleEngineer ,
@MapleEngineer@lemmy.ca avatar

I’ve found that being confident about others ability to succeed or recover is very attractive to some people. “I think you can do this and if your can’t that will be ok and you will be ok and I will be here to help” is better than, “Of course I can do that.”

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Ooh, I like this a definition a lot.

Smk ,

Wow, that’s profound.

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