In the context of TRP, I know the matter I'm about to speak of is petty, but not wholly irrelevant, so bear with me. A substantial chunk of my teens and 20's had been spent lamenting the lack of a girlfriend, and noticing couples with disdain, though they almost never registered my presence, unless I punched a wall or a tree. Now that I'm older and wiser, but still unsuccessful due to slowly cultivating finances and game, I see those relationships as shams, solace for the ego-challenged.

I'm using an example here, just to warn lesser TRP'ers not to go overboard and mistake the example for the entire reasoning of the post, which is wont to happen in other peoples' posts besides mine. I'm walking through a neighborhood, and a couple is about to cross me, the girl in front of course. They're not holding hands at all. She's openly smiling at me in a slightly more than friendly way. To thwart her perceived attempt at giving me a sign, to which the guy clearly looked at my face with a knowing yet sad look on his own, I flash my left forearm and verbally mention the self-inflicted cuts up and down my arm. This baffled the guy, and the girl reacted by having them throw singular arms over each other's shoulders as they walked on, more like a buddy-buddy embrace than a passionate one. It slightly depressed me, versus feeling like total shit as I would have in the past, like comparing a headache to a migraine.

These scenarios have been happening to me a lot in the past 2 years or so, even with my brother and his wife, and the above was one of the few times I was outward about it. Guys perceive me as a legitimate threat to take their ladies. Married women have bent over in front of me. I'm slowly even getting the attention of the elusive single women, but they're still ultimately groundhogs hiding from their shadow.

What I want to ask about is, guys on the other end of the situation, guys in relationships, whether they're happy or just for show, when you show off, is it because of the girl? I know the guy benefits with an added ego boost, but how much does the girl herself factor into the situation? Is it her idea to rub it in to the single guys? I've always had to look on these situations as the bystander, and the mystery of it all has distracted me to no end, and if I can't talk about this normally in TRP, then what else? Yahoo Answers?