Women face plenty of rejection and somehow manage not to kill anyone when it takes place. Plus, tons of men say they want women to be more assertive and then view them as "unfeminine" if they are. On top of that, women have a whole bunch of safety issues they have to be concerned with when approaching men they don't know - and still, a whole lot of women do initiate conversations, swipe right on apps, and otherwise put themselves out there in the dating world.
I get that rejection doesn't feel great, but if more men learned to read a woman's cues rather than believing that if likes her, she must like him back, they'd have a better sense of what the answer was going to be before they even asked.
Studies have shown that men tend to overestimate a woman’s interest in them, based on what she is wearing and how interested he is in her. However, when researchers prompted study participants to actually pay attention to emotional cues such as facial expression and body language, they did a much better job of accurately gauging interest. When men look past their cultural programming that attractive women are there for their pleasure, and actually pay attention to what the woman wants, they are quite capable of grasping if their interest is reciprocated or not, but they don’t always make that effort — in part because the culture doesn’t require them to.
