The Socially Self-Confident Non-Shy Men

     Like the younger love-shys, the non-shy men were similarly in the
age range from 19 to 24; and there were 200 of them. Their cooperation
was obtained in much the same way as it had been obtained for the
love-shys, except that contact was requested by telephone rather than
by letter. Non-shy individuals are usually quite averse to letter writing,
and they will normally do everything within their power to avoid having
to put pen to paper. Their style is always to communicate directly with
people on a face-to-face basis, or by telephone.
     The posted announcements for the non-shy men did not indicate
that the required respondents were to comprise merely a "comparison
group", or that the subject of the research was love-shyness or, for that
matter, any other kind of shyness. I felt that any mention of "shyness"
in the posted announcements might serve to turn off potentially good
respondents. On the other hand, the $10 reward was mentioned; and
the subject of the research investigation was delineated as being that of
young men who are socially successful with women and who engage
in a great deal of informal heterosexual interaction including dating,
partying, love-making, etc.
     Inquiries came in from non-shy men at a much, much faster pace
than they came in from the love-shys. Of course, this was to be expected,
given the many anxieties and fears which love-shy males entertain
regarding self-disclosure and self-assertion. The net result of this dif-
ferential was that I could have easily obtained all 200 non-shy men from
the same university and had the non-shy data collection phase of the
research over and done with very early. However, I decided that it was
not in the best interests of the study to do this, and that the best "com-
parison group" would be one composed of young men from the same
seven universities as those used for obtaining the love-shys. I similarly
decided that each university should contribute approximately the same
number of respondents to each of the two categories: (1) love-shy, and
(2) self-confident non-shy. This was done, and the number of men inter-
viewed from each of the schools was as follows:

     U.C.L.A.: 62 love-shys and 62 non-shys;

     Cal State Northridge: 32 love-shys and 32 non-shys;
     New York' University: 20. love-shys and 28 non-shys;
     C.U.N.Y.: 14 love-shys and 22 non-shys;

     Auburn University: 25 love-shys and 25 non-shys;
     Westfield State College: 14 love-shys and 14 non-shys;
     S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook: 9 love-shys and 17 non-shys;

     The 24 younger love-shys who were drawn from the membership
     of a commercial dating service were all in attendance, full-time or
     part-time, at other New York area colleges.

     In order for a young man to qualify for inclusion into the non-shy
sample, each of the following six criteria had to be met:

     (1) Each respondent had to be heterosexual;

     (2) Each respondent had to be "single, never married";

     (3) Each respondent had to be of the male gender;

     (4) Each respondent had to consider himself happily self-confident
     and relaxed in informal interactions vis-a-vis the opposite sex;

     (5) Each respondent had to be actively involved in a social life that
     included daily informal social interaction with the opposite sex;

     (6) Each respondent had to be in the 19 to 24 year age range.

      No minimum number of dates with women per week or per month
was required for inclusion in the non-shy sample. Unlike the situation
that prevailed twenty or more years ago, young people today differ quite
a bit from one another in terms of how they choose to define the word
"date". Moreover, 38 percent of the non-shys studied were premaritally
cohabiting with a lover; and most of these men did not view themselves
as being involved in "dating" at all.
      Throughout the United States there continues to exist some quite
thoroughly self-confident non-shy young men who CHOOSE to remain
virginal because of certain deeply internalized religious values which
are very important to them. The key word here is "choice". As I have
reiterated at several points in this book, shyness removes "choice" from
its victims, and with it a full sense of personal responsibility for both
behavior and behavioral inaction. Of course, better than a score of social
science investigations have revealed that for both sexes there is an inverse
association between sociability (including social self-confidence) and
choosing to remain virginal until marriage. In short, socially successful
young people seldom choose to remain virginal. But there are individual
exceptions to all statistical generalizations. And a minority of very attrac-
tive, highly sociable, socially self-confident young men and women do
manage, by choice, to remain virginal until marriage.
      In this particular study only 6 of the 200 self-confident non-shy
men (3 percent) were virginal. Three of these came from the Auburn
University sample; two came from Cal State University at Northridge,
and one came from the Westfield State College sample. In short, 97
percent of the self-confident non-shys were sexually experienced. Fur-
ther, a majority of this 97 percent had had a considerable amount of
premarital coital experience--although most of their sexual experiences
had been enjoyed on a monogamous basis. In other words, most of the
non-shy men had incorporated their premarital sex into love relation-
ships which had been stable and constant throughout most of their
duration.
     Most of the non-shys had been involved in three or four love
relationships which had incorporated sexual intercourse. And 53 percent
had cohabited with a girl for a period of at least six or more months; 38
percent of them were cohabiting at the time they were interviewed for
this study.