I’ve noticed some men start with sugary sweet talk even before a face-to-face meeting. Some of them try to soften me up, thinking I’ll then be an easy mark on the first date for a roll in the hay.
But others don’t hint at sex, and say sweet, romantic things in email or on the phone. I’ve generally written off this sweet talk as neediness, or just the expressions of lonely men.
Now I’m wondering if it might also have something to do with the man aching to love someone, to shower her with affection, to pamper and spoil her, starting with his expressions of care. When he finds someone who is nice, communicative and apparently receptive to his verbal kindnesses, he is so overjoyed, he thinks he is smitten. But he hasn’t even met the object of desire yet.
I think many people have a lot of love to give, and get satisfaction from giving love. They give to their family and friends, but yearn for a romantic partner to act out their definition of themselves as a romantic, loving mate. After all, without someone with which to actually be romantic, you are just a theoretical romantic, not a practicing one. If you call yourself a romantic but have no one to romance, your definition of yourself can become shaky.
So is neediness and pent up love the same? The dictionary says “needy” is “lacking the necessities of life.” One could easily argue that giving or receiving love is a necessity. So lacking the ability to fully experience love is indeed needy.
Now when a man writes sweet things, unaccompanied by sexual innuendo, I give him some grace. I wait to assess if it is out of his neediness, loneliness or pent up love.
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Comments
12 responses to “Is it neediness, loneliness, or pent up love?”
DG, it’s nice to be spoken to sweetly, but isn’t it rather condescending if the sweet-talker has never met you? Would it still be OK if the woman did the sweet-talking to a man she’d never met?
I don’t like it when someone calls me ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey’ before they know if I’m sweet or want to be their honey. Actually, it gives me the heebie geebies. Same goes for someone telling me they missed me when they don’t really know me. To me it means either they are probably very superficial and those words/terms don’t really have a lot of substantial meaning. And I’ve been right many times!
Hi DG,
I’m with Kvetch on this one. I don’t appreciate a guy calling me pet names when he doesn’t even know me, as this leads me to believe he does this with every woman he e mails or calls. If a guy wants to make me feel special, he’ll use my real name, or at the least my username handle when addressing me and not some generic term of affection.
Best wishes from bookyone 🙂
I guess I am going to have to remind you that the internet is not real life..
how people act or what they say rarely ring true..
Everyone is in to game playing ..most men who do the honey sweetie thing have no intentions of meeting you in the first place..They are just looking for some net sex and trying to qualify you..
Legitimate men on the net are so rare its astounding…
Ladies wake up please we so outnumber the men , to them the dating sites with all the desperate women throwing them selves at most of the men..to them its like a giant buffet …
Believe me all the goodlooking ones are overwhelmed with emails.. so that just leaves the undesireables and the perverts, and of course the 20 somethings LOL
That is a good question, and I agree with Mady on her thoughts about internet dating. I do believe the men have more choices than women do on most of the sites. I learned a great deal about men and human nature in general during my 2-3 years of online dating. I was led on so many times, I could puke.
However, the last guy I ended up meeting turned out to also be a disappointment. This time, however, it was me who gave him the rebuff. He lived within an hour of my town and he and his cousins made weekly trips to my town to eat out as his small town did not offer a lot in restaurants. He came by the store where I work part-time and I was immediately let-down that he did not look a lot like his photo. He sort of looked like a hunk in the photo but in real-life, he was not appealing at all. Sounds a bit vain for me to say, but he also had a protruding gut (not really his stomach) that made him look deformed. :0 I could not see wanting to get close to this guy at all. He also did seem pretty “needy” to me. He called me and we had a couple good conversations, but then his e-mails started to get a little too “sappy”. He showed up at the store in the middle of the week basically just to “see me”. I was like “woa”. I was backpeddling big time at this point. The next day I get an e-mail which tells me that he’s “kinda crazy” about me. Hello…we had not even gone out on a date yet! In this e-mail he finally actually asks me out and I decided to nip this before it went any further. I wrote him back and told him that he was a nice enough guy, but that I could not promise him romance as I knew that was what he was seeking. I could not tell him that he was physically unappealing and that telling someone that they were “crazy about them” before they actually knew them was a huge turnoff. I felt sorry for the guy though. I have seen him a couple times at the store since then and he always speaks and acts like there are no hard feelings. I think the last time I saw him he had a girl with him, but I could not tell if it was the cousin or a “date”. I sincerely hope the guy found someone, but I’m quite sure that he said all the same things to her early on. Maybe that is OK with some women. However, it sounded phony, unrealistic and just plain juvenile.
That is one of the few internet dating situations that I ended because I could see it was getting out of hand. If we could just find the right combination and have some attraction, then maybe it could work. In the meantime, I don’t have much faith in the whole internet dating thing.
I sometimes think I must be living in an alternate universe when reading some of the comments from women on this site. First, I believe it is true that men outnumber women on most, if not all, internet dating sites. Certainly, men are doing much more of the initial emailing. So I’m not too sure about the concept that the dating sites are full of desperate women throwing themselves at men. Whether the men are “legitimate” as one poster put it, is an open question. However, I know too many couples (including the one I’m a part of) who have met online to believe that few legitimate men are online.
I think DG is describing desperate men throwing themselves at women. These men likely lack the characteristics normally deemed attractive. They are likely needy, lonely and aching to give love. It’s all really the same thing in my view. This sort of persona is far more acceptable in women than it is in men.
Walt:
Well at least you and I are living in the same reality! The data I read are there are many more men online than women, and half of them don’t get one single contact. By that statistic, it would seem that there are many more men desperate for a connection. Of course, there are always those of both genders on the skinny end of the tail throwing themselves at as many people as possible, and when they get a nibble they are beside themselves. The hard trick is to learn the signs of the desperate ones from those who are just a little rusty in the ways of wooing.
Mady,
Please let me know what internet site has more women than men!……how funny!……
Hunter,
I did some searching on the site I used and my results were:
At age 25 the numbers of men and women were equal.
At 35 the women started pulling ahead.
At 45 it was about 3 women to one man.
And at 55 it was nearly 4 to one.
Maybe British men are more reticent about doing this sort of thing? Not sure…
to Gatti.
Really? I may have to date online. I any particular site that you recommend?
According to the book Finding Love Online, the ratio of men to women on most sites is 60:40. In the UK, apparently, women are more pro-active than men, and do most of the initial contacting.
Hunter, I used the http://www.guardiansoulmates.co.uk. I found it a very good site with lot of decent people, most of whom could express themselves well and were (mostly) what they said they were.
Good luck!