>>41009760 (OP)
After reading the thread, it sounds like there’s really only two ways to take her words as a compliment, and neither makes much sense to me:
(1) Some people are reading extra words into hers, which aren’t there. They take “he is not someone I would hook up with or be a fwb with” and turn it into “he is not someone I would ONLY hook up with or MERELY be a fwb with.” If that’s what she meant, then yeah it’s a compliment, but you have to cop to the fact that she didn’t actually write it that way. Even after learning that her words are hurtful from her bf, and even after talking with her guy friends who agree, she still doesn’t write it in that more careful way. So I highly doubt she said it that way to her bf originally—there’s no way she would omit it here, if she said it, when specifically seeking feedback on whether what she said was hurtful or not.
(2) Some people are suggesting that “guys I would hook up with” and “guys I would marry” are just mutually exclusive categories. Put differently, no man gets to be in both. And between the two, they argue, the higher compliment is being in “guys I would marry.” Other men have pointed this out in the thread, but we never see these as mutually exclusive. Yes, there are people we’d hook up with and NOT marry (e.g., hot but crazy and unstable), but I seriously can’t imagine someone I’d marry but NOT hook up with. I guess if they are ugly and rich and I was going to be a gold digger (which I would never do personally)? I guess if I’m settling hard (ditto)? Note how neither of these are compliments. The male ideal, as someone said earlier, is to find someone you want to hook up with AND marry. So from a man’s POV, she just told him that he’s not the ideal—he’s incomplete.
