At what step do you struggle the most?
I have trouble wanting to invest all that energy to effectively reduce my own autonomy in the end.
this hits home.
My wife.
You can date your wife
And should!
I currently hate my body and don’t feel comfortable dating until I like it again, as dating involves finding others who like your body (and other things about you, but still)
I’m sure there are people who would want to date me in my current body as well as my future (hopefully improved) body, but I just can’t summon any confidence while I feel like this.
Obviously there’s some mental health problems I need to work on too. I’m fortunate to have decent psychiatric care at this stage in my life and am slowly progressing in that area, and trying my damnedest to ramp up body improvement efforts.
I went to the gym today, at least. :)
I feel this.
I don’t have any love for myself, let alone spare any for someone else.
What helped me with that was “there’s a fetish for everything” which ended up correct, but I fucked up later.
Proud of you for hitting the gym 💪 or as a snowman ⛄️ would say: time to turn these sticks into logs 🥢🔜 🪵
I’m still figuring all this out but for me the biggest things were:
- Dating app stuff. What to put in your profile, what to talk about when you match with someone, how to convert a match into an actual date
- Confidence. After you hit 28 years old and still haven’t been on a single date it starts feeling more and more like there’s something wrong with you. I really had to work hard in therapy to kill that particular demon. The worst part is, you have to kill that demon or nothing will change. You can’t successfully find someone if you believe there is some legitimate problem with you that people won’t accept. And sometimes, there literally is something wrong with you that you need to correct.
- Socializing. I’m autistic so a lot of the general rules of conversation, particularly how to have the kind of conversation that makes the other person enjoy talking with you, was really hard for me. I’m still working on this one, but at least for the time being I’ve gotten over the hurdle of getting a steady girlfriend.
Whether it’s January 2 or February 1.
ISO 8601 supremacy.
Best interpretation of the question.
We also just want to keep track of all these natural cycles that have no guarantee of having any reasonable ratio. Every calendar system except, like, Epoch is a little dumb because of that. It’s unavoidable.
Meeting people, especially since I really dislike the idea of making someone uncomfortable or putting them is such a position. If I’m out in public I do not want to ask out someone who’s working a service job and I rarely talk to people otherwise. So unless there’s a good setting for natural talking to happen it feels rude/unwanted as they just want to do their thing in public.
Myself, I’m my own cockblocker 😅
I’d say I have 3 problems:
- I have zero game, can’t read signals, don’t know how to appear interesting, all that stuff
- Despite being 32, I still don’t know what I want, my sexuality is very fluid, so one day I may be super attracted to a girl, and 3 days later I may not care enough to even text her
- I don’t put myself out enough, I don’t want to use dating apps but I also don’t want to visit places where I get in contact with a lot of people because I get anxious
Talking to people I don’t know and initiating conversations in general. If the other person doesn’t approach me first, I can’t do it myself. I’m not much into dating, but it’s really inconvenient for socializing in general.
I think this is my issue as well. You always hear about how women hate being approached, and I really don’t want to come across as a creep who hits on women in public.
Yes that really sucks… I’m glad I’m a straight woman so I don’t have it as bad, I just don’t know how guys who have the same problem manage 🫤
Same. If I could skip the initial dating thing and just have an instant SO that I hang out with and enjoy, I’d be pretty happy. But I’m not good at meeting new people. Plus, after enough failed dates, it gets difficult to justify dumping more time into it. It’s so mentally taxing to find someone, get to know them, meet them (and deal with the amount of anxiety that goes into that whole ordeal), it probably doesn’t work out, repeat and try again. So I just hang out with my cat instead.
Oh I get that, just looking for someone has never worked for me either, it’s so much effort and so little chance of working out that I just can’t be bothered. The relationships I had were with people I met through common interests. Like an IRL meeting of an online RPG and stuff like that. It’s so much easier to get to know people when you already have things in common, you can skip most of the annoying parts. Wish I had a cat too, though !
Probably meeting people. I’m not a very outgoing person and when I do go out my hobbies tend to be 100% males. I also don’t use social media or dating apps. I have friends and relationships and I have no idea how I got them.
Its annoying because I feel like I have no agency I can’t just go meet people when I want to. I have to live my life and trust that I will eventually meet someone which has held true so far.
It’s a numbers game. Go to events where you are temporarily exposed to manageably sized batches of new people. One-time workshops and volunteering are great for this.
Talking without making myself look stupid
Nah, just drop the feeling stupid part. The night I met my wife I had just one drink too many so I had turned off my ability to think I was stupid - and I ended up talking about Lord of the Rings lore. Which she loved. If I had listened to that part of myself I would have held back and thought it was stupid, and my entire life would have gone differently.
Now I want to hear about The Lord of the Rings lore
I haven’t dated in almost thirty years but I think what would be the worst is finding out someone is heavily conservative when you aren’t. Or discovering six months into a nice relationship that he’s a closet antivaxxer or something, basically where you find out something that really goes against your values. Thankfully many of those people are obnoxious and loud.
OkCupid used to map those important things people don’t talk about via thousands of multiple choice questions, and you used to be able to build a search filter from the answers you’d accept. Then MatchGroup/capitalism/puritans wrecked it. I don’t know if there exists a good dating site anymore.
not under a system where they are rewarded for not working (and keeping their (paid!!!) users)
Agreed. I wish the quiet ones had better ways to find each other. Reminds me of a poem I’ll try to dig up.
Slightly different context, I suppose
Shel Silverstein!
Is that the author? 🤯
Yeah! Children’s poems.
TIL. Thanks for that!
My marriage. ^/s
Spouses can be such cock blocks smh.
I struggle most with meeting people, and then with talking to them, and then with continuing to talk with them.
It took me 5 minutes to send this
- Decades-long crippling social anxiety
- Money
Honestly, social media… Facebook is just absolutely full of bullshit meme’s for every type of occasion, and clicking on a single one sends people down that rabbithole. Eg… Say a person has a breakup with a person who exhibits some narcissistic traits and then relates to a meme about it and clicks on it (or pause too long), next minute the feed is full of gender hating memes, groups and pages to feed that part of the brain, and I think it is incredibly unhealthy. It just seemed a lot easier to meet people before heads were filled with social media influence
oh my god reddit was the worst with this. “Oh my god he had a beer after work? He’s an alcoholic, you can do so much better, DUMP HIM. RED FLAG GET OUT”
