I don’t think your male friends are asking you out. I think a bunch of interested guys that aren’t your friends keep asking you out. When you’ve spent your whole life learning that any attention you receive is the product of your fascinating personality and interesting ideas, you can fail to notice the much more superficial reasons people start pretending to care about you, and you can mistake someone making you the subject of all their sexual fantasies for real interest in the person you are.

I’m not saying guys who want to date you are all predacious creeps faking interest in your personality so they can try to nice-guy their way into bed with you. I’m just saying that in a heteronormative environment where a lot of young unattached strangers exist, the pursuit of a romantic partner often boils down to a boy seeing a pretty girl and talking to her until she rejects him, loves him back, or reveals something that makes him lose interest.

To be honest, it sounds like you don’t have a real problem here at all. This accusation I’m about to project onto you could say a lot more about me than it does you, but to me, you kind of just sound like you’ve discovered for the first time that you are desirable to men, and you’re second guessing this with a sort of anonymous humblebrag. When you’ve spent your life used to putting in real effort to merit yourself some positive attention from others, it can be really disconcerting (not to mention super exciting and a bit depressing) to discover quite suddenly how easy it is to get positive feedback as a pretty girl on a college campus. Ugly duckling syndrome is real.

Why does rejecting your male friends make you feel like an asshole? Surely you believe women have every right to refuse sexual advances even if they’ve treated those people warmly in the past?

My guess is that you don’t like rejecting your male friends because doing so changes the nature of your “friendship,” which is actually not a friendship at all, but an incredibly flattering one-way street where interested suitors try to impress and validate you. When the guy finally asks if you’re interested in dating you have to forfeit the uncertainty that maybe you’ll sleep with him, which was what set the very pleasant terms of your friendship. To women who have had years of experience deflecting the advances of romantically interested men, it is weird and unnatural to start befriending every guy who takes an interest in you. For someone who is experiencing a lot of male attention for the very first time, it feels weird and unnatural to treat friendly strangers like romantic rejects. Friendly strangers have never been friendly because I might fuck them before… ignoring them feels cold, rude, and aloof, three things most INTP women have long been criticized for being!

Your female friends don’t have this problem because, unlike you, they’re not trying to be friends with people who are not trying to be friends with them. Trying to befriend people who are trying to have sex with you leaves everyone disappointed.

In my experience, a guy friend asking you out doesn’t have to be a problem for your friendship. Typically, a real FRIEND can accept romantic rejection and continue to care about you and enjoy your company. But trying to make real friends carries risk of rejection, in a way trying to befriend dudes lusting after you does not. For the most part, other totally random people don’t find you as charming and cute as sexually interested guys do. It’s much easier to avoid saying or doing anything too embarrassing when your audience is distracted by the prospect of sex with you.

To be honest, what you’re going through right now WILL go away with time and experience whether you consciously do anything about it or not. Eventually you’ll either like someone confessing his love enough to date him, or you’ll get used to being flirted with and be able to identify what’s happening. There’s a part of me that urges you to just enjoy it. There is absolutely a certain kind of privilege, and a lot of completely innocent fun to be had in the petty dramas of being an attractive young woman.

But if you’re finding your existence is seriously suffering from short-lived, shallow friendships with a changing cast of romantically interested men it’s time to do some real soul-searching to figure out what emotional needs you have that aren’t getting met. Do you lack friends and therefore need to make a new friend of anyone willing to give you the slightest time of day? Do you feel unattractive and undesirable and therefore try to desperately prolong the pantomimed affection of sexually interested strangers before having to admit you won’t actually fuck them? Do you worry you’re so unlikable that nobody who isn’t sexually interested or super weird could possibly want to be around you? Are you willing to label extremely weak ties based on one-sided lust “friendship” because your closest relationships are that fragile and tenuous? Are there some insecurities of yours that it might be better to own and acknowledge rather than try to hide and wish away with a series of non-friendships that stress you out?

My guess is that the last statement is true. Both sexism and feminism socialize women to be ashamed of craving male attention. Hell people in general are socialized to be ashamed of craving attention; nothing delegitimizes the worth of someone’s efforts or actions quite like suggesting they’re doing it all for attention.

I have yet to meet a woman who doesn’t like attention who is chronically getting asked out by romantically interested male and/or female friends, and more generally, I don’t think there’s really a whole lot wrong with that. But if you’re finding your easiest route to attention is befriending sexually interested parties, it probably does mean you’re a bit hypersensitive to rejection and if you feel like that sensitivity is holding you back from getting what you really want in life like strong friendships or a great relationship it’s time to start taking risks that make you feel vulnerable and small instead of trying to stay exclusively in situations that make you feel safe and wanted. Try to chat with that hoard of bitches you’d never in a million years want to be friends with. Ask that humiliatingly hot guy for his number. I’m not saying those girls will be your new BFFs or that guy will be your new husband. I’m saying the mere willingness to put yourself in front of them, in all your honest, mockable, judgable, criticizable glory, might be the only thing you actually need to get the friends or partner you want in this world. You’re a hot INTP girl. Be proud. The world trembles at our feet.