Really- Why is dating so hard?

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I thought I had found the easy way. I was wrong, since almost two decades after marrying I am now divorcing. I'm sorry I don't have the answer for you. If you'll ever find it, please share it with me.

Another difficulty: to love someone you must also love yourself when you're around them. And they must, in turn, love themselves when they're around you.

In other words: stay the hell away from people with ego troubles, and work out your own ego troubles as much as you can before finding a girlfriend. Everyone makes mistakes, but if you constantly hate yourself and put your partner on a pedestal, IT WILL NOT WORK.

LolaGranola,

I agree that dating is a weird labyrinth of complex this-and-that, which I've never understood. I think most people would agree on this. Also, for my part, I could never understand how people can take their relationships for granted, when some of us have gone our whole lives without any shred of relationship experience.

But I also wanted to mention how awesome your username is, because Bloom County is one of my favorite comic strips ever.

one of my problems is that I don't want to ask out someone I don't know, and since I don't know any females, there's no one for me to ask out. I've been at places (before I knew about Asperger's) and there will be a cute girl there and friends will tell me I should ask her out. My thought process is this. All I know about her is that she's cute. That in and of itself does not warrant asking out. She might be a total b***h, she might have significantly different values, she might have completely different interests or be opposed to mine, etc. I need a chance to get to know someone first and I have never had the opportunity to do that with single women. Every time, and yes, I mean every single, 100% of the time I've met a woman and over the course of time gotten to know a bit about her to the point where I'd want to ask her out, she'll either have a boyfriend, fiance or husband.

Although referring back a bit; the neurochemical explanation does help shape our understanding of life and the mind and is true. However, the human mind/soul is often romanticized so despite the literal description of internal events people tend to reject it, seeing it as a confining and narrow was of looking at things. But still undeniable truth that all the wonderful things the human mind has generated is a result of electrical and chemical impulses in the brain so go figure. I mean, everything around us is rooted in physics, is a rose less red when you know it's just a wavelength of light striking optical ganglion? (hopefully i got the terms right)

Wow... that's pretty much everything I had to say in this thread, except for the last sentence (it's not so much that they're always taken, but the effect is the same since they're never interested in me)...

You're on the right track here... Keep developing the logical/deductive conclusion of the argument.

So the problem is really that you are socially isolated, right? Because if you knew a lot of people, and did a lot of things with other people, you would know some of the people they knew, and have a larger network to draw on, right?

Don't take this the wrong way (because I've been there as well, so if anything, I'm talking about myself at an earlier point in my life), but isn't the problem really that you meet very few women in a given time frame, and then concentrate only on the ones you know, which are limited? So this means your, or anyone's, odds of success are very low because even an expert pick-up artist only has about a 10% chance of getting a woman to like him, and this is someone who has honed skills and experience.

For regular guys like you and me, the odds are that the random woman we meet in our lives are not going to like us, as least not 95% of them. So you have like maybe a 1 in 19 or 1 in 20 chance of actually meeting someone who likes you, but if you don't even meet 20 women in a year (or five years), you really could be just wasting time and mental resources on someone you never had a chance with. Instead, if you meet more and more women, you have a much better chance of meeting someone who is actually interested and available.

And like I've said in many other threads, the woman who is right for you but not available today could very well be available tomorrow, so don't write her off. If a woman sees that you drop interest as soon as you find out she is taken (and she could be lying about that to buy time to evaluate you, as my first GF did), then she will think that you just see her as an object, and are not interested in her as a person. And maybe she's right, and knows you and your motivations better than you know yourself.

Women want a guy who likes them for them. Here's woman logic -- Single or not, a guy should like her for being her -- the husband/BF only determines whether things go any farther, but it shouldn't impact whether you are compatible as platonic friends and human beings, which is the basic level of interaction. Too many guys here want to skip the bottom step and jump up to BF or husband right away -- but how can you even be considering this if you don't really know her?

For the love of God, guys, please listen to this man. As a woman I can tell you that, at least for me, he's absolutely right. I can't speak for all women....but I will anyway. He's absolutely right. Read it again. Commit it to memory. ACT ON IT. He's absolutely right. Whew!

What if you drop all feelings of attraction but are still friends with her after that? (as opposed to cutting off all contact)... I'm good at being friends with people, but I have to drop all feelings of physical attraction if she's taken, if only to protect myself from her boyfriend...

On top of that, what does that say about her if she decides to dump her boyfriend all of a sudden for me? What's going to happen when "the next guy" comes along?

Perhaps she dumps you for the next guy. And? So? If you spend your life making sure that you are NEVER in a position where your heart will get broken, then you will succeed in that but also never get to have a relationship. Relationships are always a gamble. There are no guarentees.

Correct. Last year, pretty much my entire social circle dissolved. Other than errands or going to a game shop, I pretty much don't go anywhere except for work. I don't like doing things by myself.


This is definitely true.


This is also true. With my limited interests and horrible work schedule (Tuesday - Saturday, 4:00pm to midnight) I don't have a viable way to meet more people.


This is also true. The last girl I was interested in who has a fiance I am still in contact with her in a strictly platonic sense.


This is how I think too (seriously though, I'm not a woman ). I just don't have the ways to meet people.

Dating is hard because at it's core its a person-to-person interaction focused around flirting, and at OUR core, we have difficulties with person-to-person interaction, and flirting is one of those absurdly complicated things that not even NT's all understand how to properly do, so it's doubly hard for aspies like us.

I agree with this