Something on my reading list today reminded me of this thing that is sometimes in my life.

I happen to have trust issues.

I have been asked, more than once, sometimes in these exact words: "What can I do to make you trust me?" This might be a reasonable request to someone who is not me and does not have the same shape of trust issues that I do.

At some point during the last six months, I read a blog post on the way that some people (mostly men) treat attempting to get sex out of a particular woman as a "black box" system that can be gamed: feed enough different inputs into the system, and EVENTUALLY BY THE LAW OF AVERAGES YOU HIT UPON THE MAGIC COMBO, RIGHT?!?! [Edit: "No More Mister Nice Guy", by Froborr at the Slacktiverse, kindly re-found by alexseanchai.]

This is a bad idea. This is not worse than attempting to physically force the outcome (either by direct force, threat of force, drugs, or WHATEVER ELSE THE RAPISTS OF TOMORROW THINK OF), but it is still bad.

Humans are complicated systems. While some mechanical or automated systems don't notice it when the same entity tries and fails to gain access, humans tend to notice these things. Identity is complicated and hard to automatically pin down, but most humans tend to be able to recognize a person who has been making repeated attempts to get in their pants. Most password-protected systems have a timeout to prevent this sort of gaming. Many humans treat that sort of repeated attempt as a threat and shut down all future possibility, even if dude learns incremental backoff.

(Using a varied approach of methods at a rate of three* or fewer per person on a very wide range of potential partners is far less creepy. * Number pulled out of my ass. It may not make people who know you like you better than they did at baseline, but in my book "player" is better than "potential sexual assault".)


Now, trust.

If I actively distrust you, why on earth should I hand you the manual that would make it possible for you to more effectively game my psychological protection suite?

Now, if it happened that someone was doing some specific actions that were contributing to active distrust, like repeated attempts to get in somewhere that they were unwelcome, and they didn't realize that this was causing distrust, it is possible that upon being told "Well, please stop trying to grope me every time we're alone" would cause them to rethink their approach and gain general trustworthiness on that front. But I personally don't always analyze the actions someone else takes that contribute to me not particularly trusting them. It's a lot of quality brain time that I could use on a topic that's more productive or pleasing, and again, why even should I go out of my way to make it easier for someone I distrust to game me?

It's extremely plausible that in more than one case of someone asking me this, the intent was more like "I think you're pretty spiffy. You also seem to know a lot about human interaction. I want to know you better! I want to be friends! I am bad at being friends with humans. Could you help me level up?" Unfortunately, the phrasing "so how do I get you to trust me" pushes the WRONG button inside my black box.