Who Becomes Love-Shy?
Love-shyness starts with shyness as a child. Shyness is brought on by the child being born introverted with a low anxiety threshold. With the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator love-shys reside in the INxx quadrant.
Both boys and girls can become love-shy, but the condition affects males more severely. Female love-shys often date and marry, although love-shyness may limit their romantic life.
Love-shyness seems to affect people from cultures all over the world. Likely the United States produces above average amounts of love-shy men with its combination of strong anti-sex Christianity, strong feminist movement and its rewarding of outgoing, assertive men. The US was culturally founded by sexually conservative Christians. While most of the public, even many Christians, may no longer hold these no-sex-until-marriage views, this general erotophobic atmosphere persists even among atheists and agnostics. Children apt to become love-shy can easily internalize the command "do not have sex until marriage" as "sex and sex-related acts are bad, so avoid the opposite sex."
While women’s liberation is well and good, the movement can easily confuse a male love-shy. When women protest against date rape and sexual assault, their message is for the overly aggressive guys on the complete opposite end of the spectrum than passive males. But, loveshys take the message to heart as it confirms that their seduction beliefs are correct in that men are too aggressive.
The United States, founded on free market capitalism, individuality and making one's mark in the world, is not generally accepting of shy people as successful. On the other hand, shier countries like Japan and some other Asian nations may be much more accepting of shy men as business leaders and alpha males, but its greater numbers of shy men may mean more love-shys.
As a rule love-shys need only look to their parents to explain the origins of their love-shyness. Parents pass on not only their shyness genetics along with possibly Asperger's syndrome characteristics, but they instill in their children their social and phobic attitudes. Nearly every personality flaw and psychological condition of our parents and every “family secret” gets handed down in some form to us.
