I've been reading, with great fascination, a book called Shyness and Love, which can be downloaded in its entirety from this site. It's a seven-hundred-page work on a clinical condition called "love-shyness," which apparently affects 1.5% of American males, predominantly characterized by, well, the inability to ask a girl out on a date. The Wikipedia article on the same subject bears quoting in full:

Love-shyness is a form of chronic, severe shyness of men or women who have never been able to form sexual or emotionally intimate loving relationships with others, but who have been constrained to remain that way because of severe shyness in informal social situations involving possible sexual partners. It is believed to be the result of a genetic-biologically rooted temperament, experiencing feminist ideology, and of learning experiences with peers, family, and organized religions.

Love-shyness can be found among people of all ages and of both sexes. However, research evidence indicates that the problem impacts far more severely upon males than it does upon females. Shy women are just as likely as non-shy women to date, to get married, and to have children.

Love-shyness is a life-crippling condition. Victims of love-shyness are unable to marry, cannot have children, and do not participate in the normal adolescent and young adult activities of dating and courtship. Moreover, the heterosexual love-shy are often misperceived as homosexual. The never-married, heterosexually inactive man has long been known to be vulnerable to all manner of quite serious and often bizarre pathologies. In most cases, these men do not allow themselves to become involved in anything or in any activity, wholesome or otherwise, for which there is any kind of existent social support group. The love-shy do not have anybody to relate to as a friend or to count on for emotional support.

Love-shyness afflicts approximately 1.5 percent of most male populations. More succinctly, love-shyness will effectively prevent many of its male sufferers from ever marrying and from ever experiencing any form of intimate sexual contact with others.

Yikes. What's to be done? Shyness and Love recommends some interesting courses of treatment, including, in all seriousness, "nude Jacuzzi therapy." The chapter on the movie and music preferences of the love-shy is also quite fascinating.

I should note, of course, that none of the authors or regular readers of this blog meet the clinical profile of true love shyness, which is usually characterized by the lack of any romantic experience whatsoever. Still, there are details here that hit pretty close to home. The book's discussion of "Higher Education as a Mode of Compensation," for example, deserves a thoughtful look by those of us who always hoped that girls would be impressed by a PhD.