Dr Helen,
Could I use your space to recommend a book called Shyness and Love by Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin. Shyness and Love by Dr Brian Gilmartin which I found most useful. It is free and online at
http://www.love-shy.com/Gilmartin/toc.html
He is the only academic I’ve come across to have studied this in deptth and the echoes with own experience were almost uncanny. Ultimately it is most useful.
He seems to have been the only person who has done a huge wide ranging survey on this subject.
The book is based on his findings and goes into early childhood experiences.
He is especially insightful in how early teenage experiences set the pattern.
“…In sum, becoming involved in a genuine love relationship appears
to constitute an extremely beneficial, life-enhancing medicine for young
men. The love experience is at once a kind of elixir of life, a sort of
fountain of youth and of vibrant aliveness and of masculine effectiveness.
It might also be seen as representing the richest form of fertilizer
for the cultivation of social self-confidence and expressive interpersonal
skills. Besides being immediately life-enhancing, such positive outcomes
are bound to exert a positive impact upon a man’s lifetime productivity
and general effectiveness.
…Simply put, nothing in the entire study correlated more strongly
with happiness and general sense of well-being than did extent of satisfaction
with amount of informal boy/girl interaction. The correlation
between these two factors was + .65 for the young men.”
All self evident to many maybe, but I’ve never all this put so well in the context of men. He is also sharp about how the entire cultural discussion about failure to love is usually about women who pick the wrong guys.
For those men who never get into the game at all, this is all irrelevant.
Craig Dunain
