Men and those socialized as men are generally completely starved for affection and attention and acceptance in a world that, for the benefit of capital and naturally out of capitalist social relations and the general legacies of individual private property which preceded them, trains in them many malformations such as to be hyper-individualistic, beyond-self-sufficient, and “strong” (in the patriarchal sense, no vulnerability, forceful, entitled, etc). You are trained to be in constant competition with others and to see others as ‘in constant competition with you’; and to internalize all of these things as ‘personal failures of yourself’ when you fall short to meet an impossible collection of standards while seeking basic human emotional and social needs. You are trained into developing a conscience and disposition totally at odds and totally counter to deep community, vulnerability, collaboration, and companionship.

Men and those socialized as men are also trained that they can only ‘appropriately’ get affection and attention and share vulnerability with (and only kind of) from romantic partners/interests (with a whole shitload of things tied into what that means and the dynamics there, not gonna get into that right now), which makes these feelings and needs and any baggages and emotional-mental sufferings pressurized through a funnel directed at “the one possible romantic interest who looked at me or said a nice thing to me or hugged me which is the first time this has happened in 4 years.”

The thing to do is be aware of this, as you clearly are (maybe have a therapist if you can afford one, or a trusted friend who understands all of this and can keep you grounded but won’t blow up your spot or shame you over it, but again those are hard to come by for men in a hyper-atomized ‘individual-competitive’ society who are trained to be and act these ways), take deep breaths, immerse yourself in other hobbies and such, and try to scale back your behaviors to what you clearly know in your mind to be the level of “normal and appropriate for the dynamics with this person,” while still enjoying the warm fuzzies because it’s one of the few pure good things left in the capitalist hellscape that has intruded and commodified every aspect of human experience and existence and made us see things in this lense (even dating apps like Tinder I find utterly dystopian). Let it torture you in the ways that make you feel you are living a poem, but don’t let it upset your life, and don’t let these things override your conscious respectful engagement with this person driven by cognition that just uses the warm fuzzies as a little extra fuel where appropriate. You can do this with the understanding (that you obviously have) that these are hormones, and we exist in a social and societal context that makes the experience of them and expression of them complicated.

Socialization in this framework itself an exhausting game of guessing and gesturing. I hate it, but with this all in mind you’ll be fine. And you might fuck up, but that’s life, and you’ll learn from it. It’s the only way to. Or you can just say fuck all that noise and pain like me (“I can quit any time I want, I’ve done it a hundred times!”)

And understand that even if you were to fuck up and come off too strong, and this person said they didn’t want to talk to you anymore, if you said “okay I understand” and respected that, you wouldn’t be a “creep.” You’d be someone who feels a lot very strongly and deeply and hasn’t yet developed the tools and understanding and experience to guide them in directing it properly. You’d be someone who fucked up, realizes they fucked up, and is working so the next time you don’t fuck up again (or fuck up in a different unique way, providing another learning opportunity).

The thing not to do is do what you are trained to do, that is, internalize all of this (or even imagined potentialities of all of this) as shame and personal failure, and self-sabotage. You don’t need to carry the baggage of the (occasionally very tactless and counter-productive) discourse around the many multitude problems that patriarchal men carry and subject women to, and the very serious grievances and frustrations they have struggled to be allowed space to voice; because you are very obviously paralyzingly aware of those problems and your disgust at the thought of perpetuating them. Don’t discard your cognizance, because you need to keep yourself in check as society tries to exploit every contradiction it can to make you into a patriarch or aspiring-patriarch, but you don’t need to carry it and beat yourself up as if you are all of the bad things people say about your gender and sex.

This is also part of why I am very forceful and adamant in saying that patriarchy does not benefit men; it destroys men and has them destroy each other and destroy themselves or otherwise submit to being destroyed. Patriarchy does not benefit men — it benefits patriarchs. The side-effects of this are certainly real gendered imbalances, which exist and need to be highlighted and struggled against, but those don’t exist to benefit men, they exist to entice men into engaging in patriarchy and reinforcing it, with poison false-promises that ‘they too, might one day be a patriarch;’ and with sleight-of-hand misdirection mislead them that there exists an escape for working class men from the hells patriarchy creates for them in the first place ‘if only they would’. Men who are not patriarchs, can’t be patriarchs, or don’t want to be patriarchs, suffer immensely at the hands of patriarchy in a plethora of horrifying ways, some more visible than others. How many hundreds of thousands of men have been beneficiaries of patriarchy in the trenches of Donbass?

This is of course not a reason to get into some oppression olympics of “we have it hard too” because 1. in most cases you’ll lose — others don’t even get the sugared-droplets of enticement; but mainly 2. that is exactly the competitiveness that these propertied power structures try to induce in you — by making it a competition, patriarchy has succeeded in conditioning you back into patriarchal power struggles, which inevitably reinforce it and strengthen the social dynamics of capitalist patriarchy. (Incidentally, this is the purpose that the “red pill” garbage serves, manipulating millions of young men suffering under capitalism and its patriarchal superstructure, who’ve been made to internalize their suffering and bewilderment and carry the baggage of the often-shallow and essentializing discourses around the necessary struggle against the worst trends of attitude and action of patriarchist men; who find speaking-with-forked-tongue to aspects of their very real and often-unheard or actively-mocked suffering and confusion some grifter dipshit mysoginist to funnel them back into (cishet-normative) patriarchal individualist cynical competition and impersonalizing against other men, against women, and non-binary-conforming people; thereby reinforcing the patriarchal structures that undergird capitalist society)

Instead, recognition that patriarchy hurts everyone in unique but still catastrophic and no-less-unacceptable ways, ought to drive all working people within and without the gender binary into uniting against its destruction. Which also means the destruction of capitalism and the private property relations which undergirds-as-the-base the superstructure of patriarchy (a core example of this connection between patriarchy and capitalism would be how the unpaid gendered labor or ‘social labor’ in the “traditional nuclear family” is used to subsidize costs of the “minimum socially necessary labor time” of the worker for commodity production which manifests in wages; therefor cutting costs and raising margins for the capitalist, with which to extract as surplus value and reinvest in capitalist competition. We are not in competition with each other, we are in competition against the systems and structures which seek to keep us in competition with each other, and against those who actually rule them.