Rushing things seems to make me anxious

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I said suppress, not repress - repression would mean I wasn't aware of it, which is much more dangerous.

I don't see the point in arguing much about the normality of having broad tastes. After all, I did say "to a greater or lesser extent," so your idea that it's abnormal is a bit of a stretcher. It's not as if I was getting a boner every time a girl was around. And it's hard to get reliable statistics about such a subject. In the animal kingdom the females are only on heat for a short time, but with humans, not so much. That might be expected to have consequences. I suppose a difference here between you and me is that I claim that when I was young I fancied most girls at least a little bit, while you claim that you didn't, or don't, fancy most women at all.

I know this sounds ridiculous as I don't know what goes on in other people's lives and relationships and I don't know how many have kids and don't have kids or don't want kids but it does feel like a lot of people are at that stage whereas a few years ago they were probably still single and so on. The thing is with me I'm not in a relationship and feeling like rushing things just provokes anxiety.

I do sometimes feel bad because in my 20s I wasn't thinking about marriage and kids much until late 20s, but even now my mindset feels like it's barely changed.

It seems to me that the question of how fast or how slow to go might be, in itself, an important indicator of overall compatibility. If you want to go slow and she wants to go fast, this might be -- at least if this difference is extreme -- an indicator that she is generally a more reckless person than you are, and that you might have difficulties getting along with her because of this. Conversely, if you want to go fast and she wants to go slow, then this might be an indicator that she is generally a more cautious person than you are, which likewise -- at least if this difference is too extreme -- might result in general difficulties getting along.

(Other factors being equal, though, you should expect women to be at least somewhat more cautious than men during at least the initial phases of getting to know each other, simply because, in most cases, the woman is taking the greater risk, at least on a physical level.)

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Yes I think that's about right. I can see why women would traditionally be more cautious than men, though I don't know why they would still be in these modern times. Maybe contraception and pay equality aren't quite perfect yet. Like I say, in my own recent experience women have mostly been more in a hurry than I was, though I had to infer that from reading between the lines because they never actually said "get a move on will you?" And there's also the fact that I've often been quite content to leave things to coast along without any progress for months on end, which is probably unusual for a man.