Out the gate, he's gotta be confident enough to approach her. Out the gate, if he lacks that, most women still have no interest in him even if she likes him. Yes there are women who approach men, I married the woman who came at me first, but that's still uncommon (up now from rare, at least). But for the most part, women are not interested in knowing or caring why a man is scared of approaching women. Either she's "too scared" to approach and face the risk of rejection or she feels like she doesn't have to.

The first shows a profound ignorance or outright disregard for the traditional gender roles that men are held to, by women. The second, well, he's a NPC to her. Either way there's no empathy in this equation at all.

Then there's the male insecurity that comes from being short. Women act like this just materialized out of thin air from the MenAreBadToxicMasculinityverse. Or because other dudes give them crap about it. If you try to explain how women also contribute to this. But let's just go with the discredited argument that women have no height preference and blame everything on the men. The short guy in front of you didn't create his own insecurities. It was drilled into him by years of negative treatment by society. Women flagrantly... proudly disregard this when they lay into guys who have issues stemming from that. (Meanwhile you as a man better coddle a woman with body image issues or you're not suitable for anyone at all.) Women get into scoreboard arms races with each other about how badly they can piss on men with a "Napoleon complex" (translation: any short man who doesn't tolerate being marginalized). There's no empathy here, no attempt to understand the bullshit these guys went through. Men's efforts to add short men to the body acceptance movement have fallen flat because almost no women want anything to do with it.

Some women on here have said they would empathize with a guy who's been done bad by some women in the past, I'll give 'em that. But most women label these dudes as "bitterboys" and will avoid them like the plague. Yet if you read women's personal ads, they read like aggressive trauma dumps, and that's what is recorded. Men have to pass shit tests because of women's emotional baggage. Meanwhile for most women he'd better stow his personal baggage and give her that shoulder to lean on.

Add all this together and there's not much mystery why, when you ask men as a collective about their experience being vulnerable with women, an overwhelming majority point out how the relationship took a nosedive afterwards. And then there's this empathy horror porn.

And let's not even talk about the shy dudes or dudes with low rizz.

The reality is, not all women want an "action figure" for a man (as u/AdEffective7894s put it earlier today, sorry man but I flagrantly stole that one 🤣), but well more than enough do, many while saying they don't. Hypothetically take those women out of the dating scene and we'll see Kansas backwood rent prices in San Francisco in 40 years if you know what I mean.

tl;dr: Too many women out there are not looking for a genuine human connection, they're looking for a man who'll boost their social status. #NotAllWomen and all that.