gf catch 22

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Man, I legitimately feel for you. I wish I could be more helpful, but I've never really looked into financial assistance/help for autism because my case is more or less manageable. I found a list of resources that looks promising at: http://www.autismspeaks.org/family-serv ... lts-autism

Google for things like "Financial resources for autistic adults" and contact as many people as possible.

@ sly279:
Ha, I didn't mean to become homeless, I was just thinking of ways to reduce costs. Maybe those old guys in the food bank line know some nice girls your age. They could probably teach you a thing or two. I don't know, maybe you have that all figured out. I think you should let a woman decide whether she's in your league or not, don't ruin your chances up front. There are a lot of really amazing women out there who don't get much action because everyone thinks she's out of his league. I don't know, maybe you have found out for sure already.
I understand that you have some financial problems, don't let them hold you back from finding someone. My parents were 10k-20k in credit card debt for most of my life. I don't even touch the darned things if I can help it.

thanks i guess

idk apparently i have no choice but to be depressed. theres just too much wrong with me to every be loved, unless i go and change 90% of who i am to possible please shallow women.

only solution i see now is to eventually kill myself, not today or this year but probably in a few years gives me time to prepare for it. think of a good way of doing it.

Your attitude of 'there's all this stuff wrong with me but I refuse to do anything about it' would make me pause before going out with you.

o.O only thing i'm not trying to change is my body.

despite it will put me in a worse situation I'm actively trying to find work and going try to get back into VR, i saved up and bought car so "don't have a car" wouldn't be a problem(also for employment stuff) I've changed my hair and bear style bunch of times to try to approve attraction(different women like different things)

also you wouldn't know a lot of this stuff or about my on and off depression if we'd meet for dating. on dates i come off as confident and fun. its getting there thats the problem

I didn't use to think there was much wrong with me until i started trying to date was always ashamed of aspergers but that was about it.

THOSE ARE NOT FLAWS. Not having a car can be blamed on the system and nobody cares anyway. Nobody cares about the things you listed. It's more just an excuse. And just to note that dinosaurs never died out and still live happily among us. Well, not exactly among us but they're there. Even if someone knew that place existed, they wouldn't reveal it. Mainly because of the other things that are there.

the list I made is almost exact to the list that almost every woman list as their base requirements to even contacting them.

I have a car, its just not a BMW.

^ That's craziness, not ONE of those things makes my list of base requirements for contacting me. Surely I'm not so completely different to "almost every woman" out there. I think you really need to reassess this perspective you have.

on at least 60% of dating profiles and almost all Craigslist ads they list that. though some do it in sentences. I wish it was just me being crazy. glad you don't maybe there's some hope. oh and most don't list the no gf(that comes later), as for the no sex its in some okc questions. ie would you date a virgin, would you prefer a virgin or someone with experience ... etc

but the
must have
job
nice car,
own house(alone)
athletic /skinny
handsome.

I guess its like a "must be this tall to ride this ride" lol in a sad way

its funny cause the same women list they want romance not sex, and they're tired of only getting guys who want sex, so since they only talk to guys who have the above. it seems to me their type wants sex, but they won't stop asking for those guys why?

my list of what i want in a woman, don't have any of those. its based of personality types and interests. o.O I feel so wrong, i guess i should base my love interests off material things instead. though maybe its cause I'm not in the position to ?

none the less I must be the only one to see the irony in

"i only want to be loved" or and "this, this, this, this, this) only want love and then a list of things a guy must have seems to contradict . like if I said I only wanted pizza tonight then also said i want hamburgers, hotdogs, lasagna and ice cream .

but it could just be my area, but i also feel it has to do with kids being spoiled and raised to believe they're better then others. I think this will only become a more common thing. I also know they keep posting and looking cause we live in a area with unemployment on the rise and in a poorer area, we aren't Portland. people aren't rich here. those who are are few and already married, or only want sex.

ones who piss me off are the ones saying where are the guys that will treat women with respect, love them, care for them, and not want just sex.
I want to raise my hand and say I'm right here, but I"m not tall enough to ride the ride(fugitive, I'm 6'3" and growing)


can i ask you though would you date a guy without a job, own house, and nice car?

if so i wish there were more women like you.

Most guys I have dated have had a job. I guess a job would be semi-important so that he was financially stable enough to be a happy person. But if he gets by just fine without a job, that's okay. If he wants a job, I would want him to be looking for one. I pay my own way even when I have a partner, so I don't want his money.
I don't think many guys I have dated have owned their own house. Most lived out of home, but I've dated guys living at home to save up to buy a house. Personally, I'm not interested in home ownership so I don't really care about it.
Most guys I have dated have driven average cars. I may be a little turned off buy a guy driving an expensive, wanky car. It's a waste of money IMO, but if he was passionate about the car, that's okay. I would date a guy without a car, if he was getting by without one.

So the main theme I think when I look at the above is that I want him to be personally content, as in, he has the things he needs to be happy within himself, or if he doesn't he is working towards getting them. Plus I'm not interested in dating a guy who sits at his parents' home all day, playing computer games, getting money from the government because he is too lazy to get a job. It's all about context.

Do I sound particularly unusual? Maybe...

by own home, I don't think they mean owned only, but renting, living alone.
I rent a house with my family, when i move they'll have to too and they might not find a place and will have to put animals down more then likely.

I don't get money cause I'm lazy, i get it cause I'm disabled
I tried hard for a year and a half to find work, I went to school for 4 years. I love working its depressing not to work, but no one will hire me. I have a seasonal job that I look forward to going to every 3 months, even if it causes some stress during. I'm still trying to find work, although taking a different route as doing it myself has clearly failed.

I don't want to tell women I'm on SSI cause then if they don't run away, I"d have to explain whats messed up about me. that cause them to run out of miss knowledge.

as for playing games, its certainly better then sitting around depressed until i reach a point of hurting myself. not to mention I need something to keep from going crazy.

but i guess this is why women view me as trash. To be honest if not for being diagnosed I'd had died doing some good. At least then my worthless life would have meant something and I wouldn't be around to deal with be judged by women who are some times in worst situations then me(not you.) but no I'm not even good enough to die for my nation. "tears"

I wasn't talking about you in my post, sorry if you thought I was referring to you. I was talking in general terms. You don't sound lazy to me.

There's one way to solve this that's guaranteed to work, and that's going for one-night stands before going for relationships. Be sure to never let any of the one-night stands know that you're a virgin, and just accept that the first few times will be awkward. To get a one-night stand, dating sites come in handy. A lot of girls who look promiscuous on online dating sites, are just that in real life. It's a generalization, but it's gotten me laid before--and I'm a strict teetotaler.



I agree that this is unfair, but you can't blame individual girls for it either. This is social conditioning.

I wasn't sure, but I also feel bad when I hear that stuff. I have strong conservative friends who post stuff like that on face book. I tend to feel lumped in just cause I'm on SSI, add to that that I don't like being on it, I have a real independence nature. I do ask for help though cause I'm logical. But I'd prefer to be self sufficient. I only want a SO for the emotional connection, help on some stuff I guess. I don't need anyone to cook, clean or do stuff for me. I like to do it myself.
Its actually a concern I have when I talk to a woman who loves to cook. They like "I love cooking for my bf or I'd love to have someone to cook for." I want to cook for them maybe cook together for romantic cooking.

nothing happen how i wanted. I wanted to finish high school and join the military right away. I would have been indpendent and some women love men in uniform.

SSI makes it really difficult to get off of it. I shouldn't be too upset as if it wasn't for it, I'd be homeless and starving. yet still my disorder and SSI cause so much problems. I feel like a bum from the way women treat me.

If my plan had gone thru , I would likely be dead. I have terrible luck with combat, so I wouldn't have lasted long. Even so I feel the short life would have been better.


I hope i didn't upset you, I didn't mean to. I just see stuff like that a lot from my friends. They'll be like oh you're the exception. I'm just like well if I'm ok then isn't it possible there's tons others like me. I'm a big failure though. year and a half trying to find work, nothing, but 3 interviews, one week of paid work. apparently it's suppose to be easy and yet I can't do it. I feel like women look at me and think or hes just as bad as a homeless guy.

what if they didn't and they gave me a shot. What if i made them super happy, and eventually got a job. for the record I have a job, but its not good enough as its seasonal. hard not to feel worthless trash when faced with that from women day after day.

At least some have the decently to put it up front. I don't like the ones where i read thru and get so excited" like wow this girl is perfect match for me and I seem to meet he wants. Maybe I can be loved" only to see at the bottom the dreaded list.

I just don't get how someone could ignore a person that would make them so happy, matches their personality and interests so well. Just over material things that shouldn't matter as much. looks fade, money is paper, items rust. but a good friend is there from worst to greatness, thru dark storms. It also makes me upset how they've built this resentment in me. this feeling that no woman will ever love me unless I have money. I don't want that kind of woman. A fair weather woman. I want someone who can love you when you're at your worse cause if they can't why should they deserve you at your best.

you seem like a nice lady. so I don't mean to direct any of this at you.

I had a one night stand and I don't want to do it again. It also wouldn't help with the not having had a GF. Its quite ironic that I can make women feel good sexually with touch, words, kisses. I want to please, some stuff I'd have to learn. its irrelevant though. they won't give me a shot.

I can, they don't have to do what society tells them even though they know its not right.
by that logic women can't be mad at men who use them for sex its only social conditioning .

neither that i agree with.

I honestly find it hard to see anything be death in my future. the older I get the worst it gets for me dating wise.

Well, the dating catch-22 isn't EXACTLY like the work catch-22, but let's say we go with that…

How DO you get around the work catch-22? I used to work in education, and you CANNOT work in the classroom without prior experience. EOS. But you can't get experience without working in the classroom. It's a true mutual exclusivity.

There are two ways to do it: 1) You work through an approved college program in which you go through a semester of classroom observation followed by a semester working under a mentor. That's the normal route and counts as your experience. 2) You demonstrate competence in your field of study such that you're hirable under certain circumstances, especially if there's a shortage of teachers in that field. They'll hire you on an emergency or provisional basis, and the way it works in my state you have 1 year to earn your credentials, and the school district is supposed to walk you through the process.

In fact, almost any work situation is like that. I'm a piano teacher. I started out as a classroom teacher (general music, band, etc.). When that career track didn't work out for me, I went the private route. I'm basically a well-paid tutor, and I'm ok with that. I'm also the only paid staff instrumentalist at my church, and I wear a lot of hats in that capacity. Here's the thing: My educational/experiential background is NOT in piano. I played a little in high school, took four semesters in college because it was required, passed all the juries and proficiencies that EVERYONE has to do, but it's not my major instrument. My major instrument was clarinet. I even have some graduate hours on clarinet and even spent a semester studying clarinet literature and pedagogy. I can tell you anything you need to know about the instrument, PLUS I have some skills in some of the more mind-blowing playing techniques, like quarter-tones, multi phonics, and I can even circular breathe.

Since I got out of school, you know how much money I made teaching clarinet lessons? Not one red cent.

I didn't do jack to learn to teach piano lessons…just asked a few questions about teaching methods, but that's it as far as pedagogy goes. I make $40/hr. teaching piano. I won't say what my part-time job playing piano for church pays, but lets just say it doesn't suck.

I never took anything more than the required semesters for my music ed. degree. I haven't set one foot in seminary to prepare for participating/leading in church ministry.

So how did I get around it?

I really just kinda chipped away at it. I took piano lessons in high school because I wanted to achieve certain goals that had nothing to do with actually performing on piano…I just happened to acquire certain skills in the process that helped me out later on. The other thing I did was I made myself available. I get the process of teaching and learning, which I can apply to any musical instrument. I had to take individual methods courses on each instrument family, so there's no instrument out there I don't have elementary knowledge of. And if there's something I need to know, I study the heck out of it. My master's degree was in electronic music composition, which means for me going well beyond conventional ways of thinking about and making music. So if I ever felt like it, I could decide to get into dubstep production, and I'm not exactly a young guy anymore.

Mostly it's that I don't keep an attitude of what isn't possible. I focus on possibilities, and I keep it positive.

Dating, intimacy, and all that isn't THAT much different. You have to start from where you are if you want to break the catch-22 cycle. Like I said, if I wanted to know something bad enough, I studied it to death until I had an exhaustive theoretical knowledge of what it was I wanted to do. My mom was always big into cheap, trashy romance novels and she read all the freakin' time. So I took up reading some of those books and entered the world of women's fantasy. I asked the questions "What are women reading about so much that's hooking them? What do women really want/expect?"

I also used to sneak my mom's copies of Redbook magazine. Back then (early 90's), and I assume probably even now, the target audience was married women. So some of the things they were concerned about was how to get the spark back into a LONG-term relationship. Honestly, several of the articles about intimacy that I read weren't about what the woman was supposed to do to the man, but rather subtle ways to get the man to do what the woman wanted done to her. Basically, it was about women teaching men how to make love to them. So, between reading trashy, romance/fantasy novels and Redbook, I got a good dose about what women wanted from men. It was women from women's perspectives, and you really have no idea how informative that can be. I mean, NO, not ALL women are like those women, and NO, not everything I learned from those things works on all women all the time. In some ways I did myself more harm than good and I'm well aware of that. It was just having that sort of open window that really helped me get started on the path to understanding the kinds of relationships I wanted to be in.

It helped me understand how to play the part of a love interest.

It's a pretty big leap going from theoretical knowledge to real-world experience, though. College didn't prepare me for a real-world job. My degrees only show that I've demonstrated high enough aptitudes in my field of study that a bunch of academics feel comfortable approving me for receiving those two pieces of paper.

To gain experience, you have to be realistic. In the job market, "experience required" on an ad just means they're trying to filter out the losers by keeping them from applying. I've gotten jobs before without even applying for them, and those were in education. In my experience, the resumé/application process is a dumb formality companies put you through just to make everything official-looking. People who actually GET HIRED are people who make connections from the inside. If a company doesn't know you already when they hire you, it's probably because they are understaffed, experience high turnover rate, and are desperate. In my experience, you don't really want to work for these people unless you just want the experience and you plan on getting out in a year. There's nothing WRONG with networking and working from the inside-out. It's just that most people are either unaware of this step or just skip it altogether, which is why it always seems so unfair that some people seem to always get new jobs while others never work past entry-level positions. Always build relationships first…THEN apply for the job. Forget about online job applications. Nobody gets hired online. You need real names, real faces, a real voice, and a real handshake.

So when I say "be realistic," what I mean is you can't look at your apparent LACK of experience as precluding you from the position. You have to look at what you DO, where you've been, and where you plan to go. Believe it or not, if you've been out of a job for any length of time, some employers will actually look at your VOLUNTEER work as actual job experience. I've volunteered as a symphony orchestra board member, and currently play in an all-volunteer orchestra. I play bass guitar in a praise and worship band as part of a church youth ministry--I'm not very good, I don't get paid extra to do it, but I enjoy it. That counts as experience, and if I ever wanted to join a band as a bassist, I'm experienced enough that I could do it confidently and competently. What I'm saying is don't take your good qualities for granted and don't underestimate yourself.

I mean, we're talking jobs and skills here, but what about dating, etc.? The way I see it, online dating sites, etc., are kinda like applying for jobs online. It's great for getting leads. But it's not a good long-term solution. We have a few exceptions on WP it seems, but I seriously doubt OkC really works that well for most people. Just like in the job market and in business, at some point you HAVE to build relationships and make those one-to-one or P2P kinds of contacts. It's the only way you get hired. You have to work at your own level of experience, perhaps starting off on a purely theoretical platform, and build from there. I think perhaps many of us men are waiting for something we can't ever have, which is jumping straight from meeting someone to having a romantic relationship. I think we shoot ourselves in the foot if our primary purpose is to get laid. Just like in the job world, you need to get to know people you'd potentially want to work with.

You need a different model. Get to know who the major players are and how their business operates. Find the girl who likes the same coffee shop/bookstore/library/bar/club you enjoy, or who like the same kinds of movies, or whatever, that you enjoy. And instead of looking to DATE someone, look to just "hang out." You can call it dating in your own mind if you never actually voice it, but basically meeting for lunch IS a "date." It's just not a "date-date" the way most people tend to think of it. BTW, a "date" is just another way of saying you made an appointment. You carved out time from your schedule to meet someone for no other reason than to just get to know them a little bit better. "DateING" implies a little more exclusivity than the casual sense of the word. You need to casually date, you do NOT need to take it into the romantic arena. Start on YOUR level and just get to know a bunch of girls and rotate 'em. What you're going to eventually find out is some girls gravitate towards you more than others, and out of THAT pool you're going to gravitate towards some more than others.

Eventually you get to that ONE that you have something mutual with. And THAT, my friend, is where the catch-22 cycle will break.

A bit of warning: My first sexual experience was with a girl who I'd been dating for YEARS, and yes, she was a virgin, too. I'd suffered some serious self-esteem issues and come to the conclusion that this relationship was all I'd ever have. What I couldn't see was that this girl was even needier than I was, and while I'd never in a million years dump her for treating me like dirt, she'd never dump me in a million years, either. It took another girl that I'd known before showing interest in me and another mutual attraction for me to steal the initiative and break up with her.

I say that to say this: The way I met this girl was by taking part in a local community organization which expanded my dating pool beyond the snobbish or (sorry to say it) hideous girls girls I went to school with. I met her while I was dating her best friend, and I briefly dated her cousin. The best friend moved, the cousin ended up being utterly horrid, and this girl was the only constant I had. So it kinda made sense, but I should have had the sense to break up with her at the first sign I might be interested in seeing someone else. I just way overvalued commitment at too early an age for all the wrong reasons, and I missed out on dating some truly awesome girls because of that.

So my point is don't be too hard on yourself and don't think dating has to be anything more than just casual. Start with your friend zone. You're just hanging out for coffee or lunch or something. Wait a couple of weeks and see if you can do it again. If not, wait another couple of weeks and try one more time. Not happening? Cross it off the list. Move on. Don't think you have to limit yourself to just one girl at this stage--you don't do yourself any favors by trying to be exclusive on the first "unofficial" non-"date-date" date.

IF there is such a thing as an alpha-male, bear in mind that even this guy had a time in life he hadn't been with a woman and hadn't dated before. Everyone has that initial point of contact with the opposite sex. The way you do it is through constantly meeting women and getting to know them on a casual-acquaintance basis. As a musician, getting gigs for me is a great thing, but the BEST thing is repeat gigs. It's not unlike dating…I play this luncheon or that event, and when it's over, I ask, "so, what are y'all doing this time next year? Hey, I'm not busy either! Oh, you'd like me to come back? I'll put it on my calendar!" You may not necessarily get lunch dates every day of the week, but it's worth trying for. Once you find someone who returns the interest, you'll want to phase out your other meetings, or you might have that one date when you say, "I really like you and all, but I promised so-and-so I'd meet her Friday. No funny business, I just don't want to be a jerk." Nobody likes date-breakers, so if you've got a potential love-interest who can't understand you don't want to be a dick the last time you see someone before going LTR, maybe you need to rethink that particular situation. If you have standing dates past a week or so, and you really like this one girl, it's a good idea to call those off. But, rambling aside, your goal initially was never romantic or intimate in the first place. That only comes after you actually get to know someone.