Do what with the who now?

I may have mentioned this before, but I am 100% oblivious to the mechanizations of the opposite sex. In other words, I can't tell the difference between a woman holding an every day conversation with me, and a woman who happens to be hitting on me. All those little signals that women give off to let you know they're interested in you go right over my head. They all get read as simple banter. To use an example, if a woman came up to me and said, 'Nice shirt.', I would read it as she liked me shirt, not as an invitation for me to ask if she wanted to dance. My brain simply fails to make a connection between the two, and the only reason I know that someone commenting on my shirt might mean something else is because I was told so by a friend. The connection doesn't make sense to me, and I'm unlikely to make it again. My clueless ness goes beyond what one might simply chalk up to simple male slowness. To put it bluntly someone could be hitting on me all night, then suddenly strip naked and scream out 'Do me!', and I'd probably just stand there in shock and wonder where that came from.

Since I can't catch on to subtle hints, and I'm not the kind of person to just hit on anything that walks, I have to pretty much hope that anyone who has an interest in me comes out and says so directly because I'm not going to figure it out any other way. I suppose this might not be much of a problem if I was a woman, but our culture has pretty much dictated that men must take the active role in pursuing a woman. This goes beyond the fact that our culture generally finds it less socially acceptable for a woman to ask a man out, the fact is I have yet to meet a woman who’s very interested in a guy who uses the 'passive' approach. Woman like the whole flirting thing, they like men to take an active approach a guy who just doesn't get that is going to be left in the dust.

It seems pretty silly to me to post this kind of stuff, and my natural inclination would be to just shut up about it, and deal, but I had a really good conversation with a friend about it the other night, and for some odd reason I feel compelled to discuss it.

The truth is I’m still dealing with a lot of shit that happened to me when I was younger. I know that sounds pretty weak, but its about as open as I can be. As much as I try to live my life and not worry about the past, I’m still plagued by a lot of its effects. This particular aspect is just one of them, and I’m not sure the friend I talked to last night really understood that.