These always gets tons of upvotes and comments. People are all like “Good job, you overcame your fear!”. What’s the point though? They always say no anyway, why ask? You’ve only made her and yourself super uncomfortable. I’ve been there, it’s no fun for anyone, so why is it applauded here so much? It didn’t help me for” next time”, in fact, it just showed me how cruel rejection can be and that it should be avoided.
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>They always say no anyway, why ask?
facetious answer: because girlfriends are like job offers, you only need one “yes”.
more serious answer: because being clear and open about what you want really does make your life easier in pretty much every area, **as long as** what you want is in the same order of magnitude as what people want to give you. if you ask, then you either get what you want or you get the information you need in order to move on and find someone else to give it to you, which is still way better than stressing and pining and stressing and pining.
and there’s definitely a thing where people whose desires are roughly aligned with what other people want to give them assume that everyone else is in the same situation. if you’re in that situation then getting over the anxiety barrier is worth doing, and the advice is good advice. if you aren’t in that situation, and you want stuff from people that they’re definitely not going to give you, then the advice is, uh, less good.
a further problem is that in a sub like this or r/socialanxiety it’s pretty hard to tell which people are in which situation, because people with social anxiety are often not the best barometers of their own risk/reward probabilities, on account of the whole anxiety thing.
You won’t know unless you ask. What’s the point in keeping your feelings to yourself and then getting plagued by “what ifs”.
For most people asking someone out is scary because they’re afraid of the rejection. So when they do ask out it’s because they overcame that fear and that needs to be appreciated!
Consider this…you applied for a job and you got rejected. What do you do? Do you just give up or keep trying till you succeed? Same thing applies here as well.