Ah I have that problem with men... I'm pretty relaxed around them, I guess because I have brothers and I'm not looking for anything romantic anyway. I'm always frinedly to them, and like to make friends with them. uinfortunately things tend to end badly, beucaus they get the wrong idea and think i'm interested in them when i'm not. and then they get annoyed and say i flirted with them and led them on. it's really quite irritating.

I think the majority if not all of women have this problem, and it's for two reasons. One, women are naturally friendly and conversive with people, regardless of whether there's any romantic interest there or not. Two, men naturally interpret *any* possible sign of interest from a woman as more than it actually is. From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense: if men doubted themselves with potential mates, they would miss out on the occasional opportunity to breed. So basically, over time the blindly overconfident men bred out the rational ones because they got a little more action each generation. Damn natural selection.

Hey This is going to be a slightly excessive rant but oh well.. I've had a bit of a think about this topic. I find it pretty interesting when people, of any sexuality, comment on how they can't find people to be with. I've definitely done it a fair few times. Obviously there will be differences between people as to why they're having trouble, but there are also some things that people share in common. For example, I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking you've tried everything you can, when you haven't.. I think there's always more to do (not that you should be doing this in the first place, but I'll get on to that later). I don't know your personal situation - how old you are, whether you are out and to what extent, whether you have any gay friends or know of friends who do, etc - but if someone really, REALLY wants to get out and meet people, 99% of the time they have the means to, and it's just a matter of whether the effort they have to put in to do that is worth it. A general concept that I think can be applied to a lot of patterns in behaviour is that for someone to do something, they a) have to sincerely want to do it, and b) the risk/cost/any possible downsides are not strong enough to deter them. So you have to ask yourself - are you REALLY wanting to meet guys? Are you ready for all of the consequences that will come with it? If you are, then you need to realise that there are plenty of ways to do it but you obviously have to invest an amount of time and energy, and probably various sorts of 'putting yourself out there' to get the ball rolling. This is starting to get a bit babbly so I'll move on to what I mentioned in the brackets about whether you should be actively looking for someone in the first place.

People always say things like "when you stop looking for something, that's when you find it" etc etc. I think that's a little romantic in a way but I agree with not actively looking for people to be involved with - and unfortunately it's particularly easy for people in small inbred towns cough*canberra*cough and people with a drastically reduced pool of potential interests, ie gays/lesbians, to do that. My opinion about this has a lot to do with my personal experiences with looking for people; it's funny because I've always known I prefer to date people who I develop a stable friendship with first, yet the first opportunity I got after I decided I was going to get serious about meeting girls, I let the fact that I was looking for someone to be with take control of how I handled the whole thing. Looking back now I know that there were a lot of things that were out of my hands that contributed to the problems that arose, but I know it was at best unhelpful and at worst very destructive for me to be in the mindset of "I want to be in a relationship with a girl" rather than "I want to be in a relationship with THIS girl". Essentially, my rational judgement of the person I was pursuing went out the window because I was so intent on being with a girl. So in summary (): if you really want to meet people, you will - in good time. But try not to let that push you in to getting involved with people you normally wouldn't.

Quote

Maybe we should start our own little club 

This sounds sexy! 

Yeah, once a few people started replying to this topic I thought "wow, how can there be so many of us and nothing like this has happened?". But then I remembered the whole organising a meet up thing and.. well.. my question was answered 

How about dinner/coffee in civic one weeknight? Does Wagamama still do that $10 meal + drink deal on tuesdays?

Fridays and I work well together. So if my desire to:
 a) drink coffee, and
 b) actually make myself go to one of these meets

outweighs:
c) my sheepish nature

then I'll prrrrrrrrrobably come along!

Quote from: champignon on 25 April, 2009, 04:46:50 pm

Hey everyone, just thought I'd introduce myself. 19, female, not actually french or able to speak half-decent french despite the username. I tend to drift in and out of things like online forums, even though I've spent a lot of time lurking around qnet. so I'm sorry if I disappear I don't know how many of you go to bitbent, but for whoever went to the woden one last week (this week? the one a few days ago) I was the newbie who left early. So hi 

Hey French Mushoom (if I read rigt)!  Welcome to Canberra's gay internet forum!  I DO remember you from Bit Bent.  You'll be pleased to know that...the game never finished, so you never ended up winning!!  You guys were WAAAYYYYY ahead of everyone else.  God, I sucked at that!
Coming again?

Aw shame! Y'know I was bitterly disappointed with the lack of pool, but that almost made up for it. My next bb appearance would probably be at belco, more convenient location and time for me now that school's back. Who knows though, I may get another burst of spontaneity one thursday and pop down 

Ok bad news.. you actually can see the who the members are without being in the group. Or at least I can :S when the search results come up it says

Group: Qnet Meet Group
Size: 7 Members
Type: Common interest bla bla bla...

the '7 Members' part of the text is a link and gives you the list.

All you could change about the actual group (without making it secret) is limit what you've got in the group description. Qnet, bitbent and the fact that it's in the dating & relationships category might be enough for someone to figure out it's got something to do with gays/lesbians.

END STALKER RANT