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I feel your bewilderment too... I've had married women say shit like this to me and much worse, so they are willing to be homewrecked but not ask explicitly? But at the same time she a girl whos single and lives alone could say this just as a friend!!
Is the woman saying this while batting their eyes? Acting bashful or coy? Are her hands clasped behind her or is she leaning forward? She might actually want you to flirt back. But that doesn't mean she would accept a proposition. She might want a proposition, to stroke her ego, but she wouldn't accept it.
It's about posture and context. "I would like to spend more time alone with you" is way different from "I'm glad you were the one assigned to this task" or "I like to hang out with our group of friends, of which you are one." It's the woman's job to figure out how to get across "I would like to spend more time alone with you" without crossing the line of plausible deniability (because if she has to throw herself at a man, he's probably not invested in her.)
Is it fair that it's this way? Women have the more vulnerable role in continuing the species. She needs a man who will actually support her, and that is generally a man who seeks her out.
This is not true at all. There are a lot of men who are good men and are going to support their woman, but aren't mind readers who can magically tell that a woman's statement of friendship was actually meant to be taken as a statement of romantic desire. If anything, choosing men who read into things is going to select against getting decent men, because jerks are more likely to not care about the woman's intent and just go for it.
It worked for me.
That's one good reason to avoid being alone with a guy for the first several dates and to save sex for marriage. Helps weed out the jerks.
All the traditions work together, we can't just throw away one and expect it to work.
Well, I met my wife online and she initiated contact. So that means waiting for women to ask you out is a winning strategy, right? ;)
My point wasn't that it's impossible to find a good man following your heuristic. My point was that a) many people ruled out by your heuristic are in fact good men, and b) your heuristic is more likely to rule in bad men. You're right that you can compensate for point B in other ways. And point A doesn't mean all good men are ruled out. But it's still a very flawed heuristic even if you can succeed while following it.
I think most men ruled out my my heuristic are not men I would have wanted to marry. My heuristic means the men I dated had the bare minimum risk tolerance, agency, and social graces.
"Doesn't abuse you" is such a low bar. I selected for a man with the agency to pull over on a highway and yank away a ladder blocking a lane, while other drivers just passed it. I selected for a man who will volunteer to reboot a router when the local coffee shop has trouble with their POS system. I selected for a man who is familiar with the social norms my friends and family share.
Again, your heuristic is ruling out men like you describe even though you think it isn't. Being someone who takes initiative to fix things has pretty much nothing to do with whether one can Intuit "hey that girl likes you".
That is not my heuristic.
He liked me first. I figured out that he liked me and then I signaled to him that it was ok to ask me on a date using an indication well-known in my social circle. He read that signal successfully, indicating he belonged in a compatible social circle.
Then he identified a common activity we could do together, set a time and place, and summoned the courage to risk the wrath of HR and the rejection of the girl he liked. These all demostrate the bare minimum agency, risk tolerance, and self-confidence (which of course would continue to be vetted during the courtship.)
Your rebuttal seems to mostly be that this would rule you out. I'm sure you're nice to hang around, but based on what little I know, I wouldn't want to marry you even if we were both free to marry. I'm sure the feeling is mutual. Another win for the heuristic.
I kind of went back and forth on whether I should reply to this because it got weirdly personal at the end. No, this isn't about me and I'm not sure why you think that's my objection. And I knew from the beginning that you're happily married, so this is quite academic for you. But eh... if you can't discuss entirely pointless topics with no practical value then what is this forum even for, am I right?
So when I said your heuristic is basically that a man has to intuit whether you like him or not, I was basing it on your original statement way upthread:
Even assuming you don't literally mean that such a man wouldn't know anything about how to build a good life together, this is still a very strong statement. And I suspect that the reason we disagree on the implications of your condition is because we have very different views of what your hypothetical action of batting eyelashes and saying "I like spending time with you" communicates to a man. In short: that communicates almost nothing.
The reason why this doesn't communicate much to a man is because most of the meaning is being carried by the batting of eyelashes. Women quite often say "I like spending time with you" (or similar) to platonic friends they have no interest in, after all. But I think that @2D3D hit the nail on the head when he described how men simply do not communicate with subtle body language cues like that. The odds are very good that a lot of men won't even see the batting of eyelashes, much less realize it means "whoa this girl likes me". We communicate 90% with words, 9% with tone of voice, and 1% with very unmistakable body language that basically translates to "I'm happy/sad/angry". We simply do not do subtlety (in fact, subtle reading between the lines like that actively annoys most men I have known). Basically the only reason that any man would ever pick up on the romantic interest your hypothetical statement was trying to communicate is because someone (maybe an older man, maybe another woman) sat him down and explained "look, this is just how women communicate and they are the ones who have all the power in this dynamic, so you have to try your best to look for tiny signs and figure out what they mean even if it seems silly to you".
So, for most men (at least as far as their natural communication style goes) your hypothetical test basically doesn't tell them anything that a platonic friend wouldn't have told them. And I think that is the really big difference in our viewpoints that is causing us to disagree. I get the sense that from your perspective, you described a clear unmistakable sign of interest that a woman might show. But trust me when I say from a man's perspective, trying to read that intent is like trying to read tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. It doesn't come naturally, makes no sense to us even if we know to try to do it, and is pretty much the most difficult thing you can ask of us.
By comparison, the good qualities you're assuming a man won't have if he can't pass that test (i.e. "building a good life together")? Those are easy. We understand things like providing for a family, stepping up to take care of business, and making sure your wife is treated like the precious gift she is. They are driven into us very deeply (partly by nature, partly by seeing the example of good men around us). Even the scoundrels who take advantage of women understand these things way more easily than they do the sort of subtle communication you're talking about (they just don't do them, even though they understand them just fine).
And that, ultimately, is why I pushed back on your heuristic that I quoted above. From the perspective of a man, you're basically saying "If he can't do [really difficult thing that doesn't come at all naturally], he's going to have no idea about [really easy to understand thing which actually does come somewhat naturally]". It's just not at all accurate to what men are actually like, in my opinion.
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