This is my first FDS thread, and I am still learning so much in this community thanks to you intelligent, enlightened women of all backgrounds. If I could offer just one small nugget of wisdom, based on my previous long term relationships and a marriage, it is this:

Find out if he was a loser in the past before you get involved with him. Trust me.

Now, we have different ideas of what constitutes a loser in this situation, versus the societal idea of what makes a man a loser. For a lot of women, a man who is a loser is someone who hasn't leveled up to his potential in life, or who outright refuses to work on his issues and shortcomings, or is not financially independent, or can't flirt worth crap, or is hostile against women for his own personal failings, so on so forth. For some, the idea of a loser is probably someone who abuses themselves as well as other people, or someone who steals money to get their fix and not care who they hurt along the way, or someone who is a creep to people who are in a vulnerable position, ie much older men creeping on teenage girls, for example.

These are all very obvious examples and are insta-block-and-delete-able.

However, it is also good to be especially careful with the kind of loser that we all may have known in our formative years; the geeky guys who got bullied back in the day. The guys who seem smart but waste it on video games instead of studying. The guys who seem sweet, artsy, and maybe tormented, but couldn't get the popular girl to notice him (or that she was secretly filmed by him.. ew.). The guys who got rejected or dumped by a girl they were seriously in love with, and never found peace from it. The guys who had seriously spent years in his youth without any friends around him, and never sought help for that. The "late bloomers", if you will, who never got around to having a serious relationship or had sex before, before YOU came along.

These men are waiting for a woman... just one woman... to give him the benefit of the doubt, to fix him, to save him. And then, he unleashes all hell on her, as a way to get back at everyone, especially against other women, for making him feel inferior for all those years. That's all it takes. One woman. And that very same woman, could unfortunately, be you.

As a way to vet for this, just simply ask how his high school and college years went. That's it. Men are emotional when it comes to the past. They will open the floodgates-sometimes quite literally, tears and all-about how badly they were treated, how lonely or out of place they've felt, the whole nine yards. They reminiscent about things for far too long, much longer than women do, which is a bit strange, since we were always taught that it is women who are very emotional and teary-eyed about her years in her heyday. But in my experience? It is men, who never let go of the past. It is men, who cannot get over their exes, or the one who got away, whoever she is, and it will be YOU who will pay dearly for THOSE women's actions.

Women, on the other hand, at least from my observation, who got bullied back then, tend to try her best to bounce back from that, whether it's by losing weight and becoming healthier, or learning how to socialize better, or uses those experiences in order to be kinder to people around her. Men, by and large, don't use negative experiences to become a better person, but as an excuse to become fucking assholes to everyone around them.

The nerdy male aesthetic really took off especially during the 2000s, when being geeky and emo or twee or w/e was all the rage, and women were especially punished for wanting Chad when they could have chosen the nice guy in the glasses and grandpa sweater who could write her poems. And honestly? It was a horrible fucking mistake to let it get to me, and make me think I should give Mr Foreveralone a chance.

So to cap it off in a short sentence: If he was a loser back then, don't go out with him. You will be his dragon to slay for his own issues, instead of the princess that you really are, to be cherished by a man who's actually worth it.

Don't go out with ex-losers.