Social cues

>make friends
Well, that's pretty hard.
I don't really have many "contact points" with other people, so I have trouble interacting with them (even if we were to somehow ignore the whole self-esteem thing etcetera). I guess I'm too self-absorbed.
Thing is, when I try to be interested in what others do/say it feels forced and wrong, so I'm not encouraged to keep doing it, because it seems deceitful to me.

You can't make friends and you are asking for help on dating? Do you see how crazy your plan is?

>Do you see how crazy your plan is?
I guess it makes little sense, but I don't really care for most people, and I'm interested in women, so I guess it sort of made sense in my head: I don't really feel the need for friends most of the time, and I feel the need for female attention more.
Guess I'm fucked.

So, you don't need people, you need "women"?

What are women to you?

>What are women to you?
People whose validation is important.

Why is it more important than male validation? Would you be happy if a single girl liked you but every man on Earth hated you?

Other men are just competitors in disguise anyway, ready to screw you over.

Ok, so you hijacked the thread. Have fun!

Wait, what?

>get's annoyed because someone doesn't know something I took years to learn

wow

The last edgy post have nothing to do with the OP. It was the most obvious bait I've seen.

But in case it was real: OP, you are 29 and you talk like a 15 yo trying to bait people on Jow Forums.

I did all my learning in high school. Sucks to be you.

A big problem too is all you kids practically live on the internet but now, the internet is just a den of depravity, a place to get the next Like or Upvote, or someplace to LARP whatever you wanted to be in life.

Get off the internet and ideally, find some way to people watch.

Social skills aren't a thing. You're just ugly.

OP, I think the guy above have a point, problem is he didn't developed it properly.

Thing is, dating is 90% like making a friend (be it man or woman). You probably noticed it isn't 100%, by the things you say, but you should not worry about that 10%, this is something you only understand after having some experience, the 90% part is the one you should worry and I'll tell why.

Bonding with someone is something that we (and many other species) need to survive, so it's safe to assume it's written in our DNA. But to develop the ability to bond you need the environment factor also. We start bonding with our family, and later learn to bond with our friends. Specifically when we are 12-20 years old this ability starts to consolidate and usually we are prepared to interact with other people in positive and also negative ways.
>How is your relationship with your parents and family, do you get along with them well?

Also, many personality traits are developed that may help to bond with other people or make it more difficult. You said many things that demonstrate you probably have a low self-esteem. This trait along with many others that usually accompanies it, makes it more difficult to bond with other people. Anxiety, depression, and many other problems that almost everyone have nowadays, also makes it more difficult to make new friends.
>Do you have any other characteristics that may make you more prone to don't develop a bond with people, or that worsen your ability to make your relations more deeper? Or have you ever been diagnosed with some mental condition, or think you have one?

Lastly, so I don't make this reply longer, if you want to learn to date girls, you have to learn to bond with people, because the principles are the same. If you learn to bond with men, you are also learning to bond with women. I think, that's what the other guy was trying to say. If you are still lurking OP, I can answer more later.

I felt an honest answer would be important.

Bravo, I hope you're not too proud of yourself.

>How is your relationship with your parents and family, do you get along with them well?
- My father is an asshole, and left when I was like 14. As a child, I once got to the point I was scared of him. After he left, I'd see him every once in a while. It eventually turned out he practically stole a lot of money from my mother, and contact became scarcer. Haven't heard from him in almost two years (I've seen him, though we didn't actually "meet").
- My mother was the one to protect me from my father's temper, and from things in general. Protected me too much (in good faith), and I became incapable of handling life myself. Now, I resent her immensely. Not sure why.
- My older sister left our home when I was like 9 (she's 9 years older), so I became used to not having her around. Due to my hesitant and insecure personality, I don't really get along much with her (she's kind of a polar opposite to me).

>Do you have any other characteristics that may make you more prone to don't develop a bond with people, or that worsen your ability to make your relations more deeper? Or have you ever been diagnosed with some mental condition, or think you have one?
I don't know: I have inferiority complexes, body issues, trust issues and an all-around negative way of thinking. I'm currently seeing a shrink, but I haven't really been diagnosed with a mental condition thus far.

>I felt an honest answer would be important.

Then be honest with yourself and admit you know nothing about social cues and can't come here to tell me how all men behave. If you are really OP, if you really came here to ask for help on reading people, if you really are the one that could barely muster an "I think I can" when I asked him if he was able to read others, then you have to have the emotional honesty to admit you cannot tell me how men are like. You don't know enough about social interactions to say that.

Yes, I'm OP.
What can I say? When it comes to women, I see other men as enemies most of the time.
All heterosexual men lust after women, so how are they not rivals in this? I'm asking honestly, but if you feel my question is too stupid, go and insult away.

>All heterosexual men lust after women, so how are they not rivals in this?

Because women get a say in this, too, and if she is into him and not you, then what's the point of fighting? Women are not a prize to be won.

Also, I didn't ask you about other men in relation to women. I asked you if you really thought you could have s single person care about you in the world, and everyone else just doesn't care at all. Do you really think a single person can provide all the attention and support a human needs?

I would imagine you had this kind of problem with your family. I'ts obvious to say that to read social cues you need to be taught that. And that starts at home, with family.

Imagine a child finding a flower on the street and giving to his mother, the way she would look pleased by that would be noticed by the child, and he would learn that giving flower to someone is a good thing. By exploring his environment and interacting with it in various ways, he may discover that some behaviors may reward him with something.
Now imagine the reaction of the mother when given a flower by her son, she may have made a facial mimic that one could say she was happy, actually her whole body would look like of someone happy, also she may say nice things to him. By now the child may start to learn the visual and verbal social cues that someone is happy.
But now imagine that the next day her mother gave him a gift, to show how happy she is, and/or how much she loves her son. In this moment, somethings may happen to the child, he will now have complex thoughts and feelings, and he may associate the act of giving flowers to always earning gifts; the visual and verbal cues of his mother happy with always earning gifts, and many other thoughts. The fact that when he do something to someone and this person reacts like his mother (smiles and sweet words, for example) will mean to him that person liked what he did and he will always receive a reward bigger than a smile, like a toy he wanted.
Problem is, he will give a flower again to his mother expecting another gift, and his mother may not give him it. The associations he had made will change and others will be created to understand more and more his mother, because the more he understand his mother, better their relationship will be, and more rewards will be earned.
(continues...)

This child will use at first all the things he learns along his early life interacting with his mother to interact with other people. But then he is confronted again with some inconsistencies, because not everyone is like her mother, so the same process I exemplified with the flower story, will repeat. He will learn new social cues, visual and verbal ones... but problem again, there are too many different people in the world, he will have to understand deeper and deeper motivations of other people, and for that to be accomplished, he will need to bond with more and more people.
Luckily when we are teenagers, we are eager to explore more our environment and the more you go places, chances are you will meet more people. Some will get to know a lot of people, others less, but it's ok, it'll just take more time to understand people better.
But if you are depressed, anxious, or may have any other reason to avoid people chances are it'll take a looot more time. So OP, you are seeing a shrink, and it's really the best for you to do so. Accepting yourself more, and changing what you have to change so you are able to get what you want, or even get there easier, is a first step for you, that you mustn't ignore.

Also, imagine the child in my example, didn't had a solid foundation like yours, everything become more difficult, and may even mess with your perception of the world. For example, I don't know how exactly things were with your father, but if he took advantage of your mother it's easy to think that all men are rivals and are not worthy of your friendship. And years of noticing only things that may endorse this belief, may probably make it very difficult to not think otherwise.

They're rivals in the sense that you're perpetually competing for female attention. Whom the female chooses in the end is another matter.

Well, I've been a bitter and resentful teenager, so I didn't really get to understand people (but that goes without saying). Thing is, I'm about 15 years behind my peers right now, with little to no chance to ever catch up to them, so I'll always appear like a fucking retarded sperglord to whomever I might choose to interact with.
I don't know what scared me in the beginning, but something made me want to never have to deal with the world again, therefore inhibiting whatever eagerness to explore the environment I might've had. I'm fucking destroyed.

You should make peace with your past, accept that shit happens and most of times we can't do shit about it, even if we see it happening in this exact moment, right in front of your eyes, but most important be ready for change and to try to do things differently from now on (and be prepared to fail a lot of times).
You should know more people, bond with them, and try to do so. Everyone can be a bitch sometimes, be it man or women, but there is a lot of OK people in the world. There are also some nice people that you will meet and never forget about them, fewer probably, but still they exist.

My point is, you already read social cues, everyone is hardwired to read them. If you think you are having problems to read them, probably it's because you are reading them wrong.The reasons may be many: Low self esteem or any other negative thought or feeling that not necessarily correspond with the reality; having problems bonding with what was supposed to be the most important people of your life (at least in your early life); not having enough contact with other people (maybe you met very few people, maybe you didn't bond deeply enough with other people, or even both). I think those are the most obvious one from what you said. So knowing yourself better, healing your wounds and learning to bond with people will probably make you less biased when interpreting other people, or as you say, reading the social cues.

Obvious social cues can be visual and verbal, but there are a lot of other things happening in our brains that we ignore. For example, the emotions we feel are one of the most important social cues to understanding other people. If you are talking to someone and feel the urge to kiss her, you probably felt something in that moment. If you were too anxious at the time those emotions may had become blurred, or maybe you were so eager to read the visual cue that you ignored other things.

>They're rivals in the sense that you're perpetually competing for female attention.

But that's the point. Either she likes you or she doesn't. That's not a competition. It's not like is there was no other guy at your class you'd automatically get to go out with any girl. She has to like you first. So competing is dumb.

>make peace with your past
I wish it was in any way simple.

>be prepared to fail a lot of times
I can't fucking take it. I'm fragile. I'm afraid I'll start having twitches if I get rejected one too many times.

>Low self esteem or any other negative thought
>maybe you met very few people, maybe you didn't bond deeply enough with other people
Yep.

I think you're right. I can't put my finger on the "why" (probably because I have a skewed view of the matter), but I think you're right. I just don't know how not to hate other men's success.

>I just don't know how not to hate other men's success.

That's the crux of your problem. You are mad at them, and assume they are all mad at you. Learn to love yourself, learn to enjoy what you have, what you do, and what you are. THat way you'll be less envious.

So say for example, you felt really nothing at the moment that girl leaned at you, I am certain that you wouldn't do anything. I know a lot of people that have relationships just so they don't be lonely, and they are fine with it, fuck I even know people that are getting married just to not be lonely. It means something for them, there are a lot of emotions involved in not feeling lonely. I think you are not being true to yourself. You are ignoring your emotions, or just misinterpreting them at your own will. If you start to pay attention to your desires, your emotions and accept them, you will start to understand others better. When you see someone that you may interpret as happy, you will feel happy.
People feel emotions and will act according to them visually (like smiling, or punching you in the face) and verbally (saying they love you or that they hate you). Your job is to notice how people are reacting externally (what they are doing, how they are acting, what are they saying, how they are looking). Your brain will translate this to a set of thoughts and emotions, based on your experience in the matter. Now your job is to pay attention to those thoughts and emotions.
So you have to notice things that you never noticed before and learn what they mean (it takes time, but if you have a shrink, he will give you somewhere to start, so you don't become lost in this) and the ones you already notice you have to recheck if you are interpreting them right. Lastly, you have to open yourself to feel emotions, be it your own emotions, or emotions other people evoked in you. It may be hard, some emotions are unwanted, but everyone was once at this point and suffered. There is no need to be embarrassed, no matter what you say. Eventually you will feel that being open no longer is worth the suffering you are having, and will close again, and maybe even open yourself later because you think you have more to learn. Everyone is like that, no need to worry.

Of course it's not simple. There are a lot of people who have a screwed up past living right now the world that also suffers a lot with it, but there are also a lot of people who grew up from all that suffering. Do you think these last ones did that easily? The pain of becoming in peace with the shit that happens in your life is always worse than all the burden you lived to begin with. But still, why would they still go through all that anyway?
Think about it:
When you scratch yourself, right afterwards you clean it and maybe even put some medicine in it (that sometimes even makes it hurt more). You understand that if you clean it properly, give it a rest and wait it'll go away.
But when a child have a scratch, he starts to cry and won't let anyone clean it, or put medicine, because the pain will get worse. From the point of view of a child having more pain is worse than having a serious infection (or maybe even dying of tetanus, for example). Also, do you know why children cry so much when they get hurt? It's because they think the pain will never go away.

The person that felt a lot of pain in life and still went through the suffering of healing himself did it because he knew that there is an end to it, if you treat your wound properly everyday, one day it will disappear. After you reach some point in maturity you learn that we all become hurt many times in life, so much, that sometimes we don't even bother crying.
I stopped crying at minor scratches when I was 4 years old, when I was 17 I knew people my age that would still cry with the smallest of the scratches, but I never made fun of them, even though there were people that would. Not everybody learns things at the same time, we all need to respect that. Also I recognize growing up from internal pain is much more difficult than those of visible wounds. But still, at some point everyone need to put their shit together, especially if there is something in their lives bothering them.