Space wrote:
NeantHumain wrote:
Yes, it is much harder to meet women after graduating from college. In many workplaces, policy can make it awkward to pursue a relationship with a coworker, and your job may not bring you into frequent contact with single women in your age range anyway. I've tried bars and nightclubs, and they're not really a good fit for my personality, and I don't have friends to go with anyway, which can make breaking the ice with new people harder. I've tried finding social/interest groups, but the age range is diverse, and there's no guarantee others will be single anyway.
It's not easy.
It's not that easy in college either. I've been there for almost 4 years. Still trying to figure out how to make friends here. I don't... get it... I have tried... all sorts of things. Nothing seems to work. I don't know what it is... I know I have AS, but I don't know why I can't make friends whatsoever. People probably think I am a serial killer or something. I just don't know how to make friends. I don't have a date either. Sometimes I think I should just kill myself because I am a failure at being a social human being... but I hope it gets better some day.
I'm a commuter student, too, and I'm in the process of sort of getting out of the position you're in socially, space. It's very hard as a commuter student, really. Before I went to the university I'm at right now, I used to go to another and I actually lived on campus. I don't think I've ever had so many friends in my life as I did at that school. Everything has been downhill from there for me, socially speaking.
What appears to be working for me right now is just getting to know people in your major who you have tons of classes with. They have to be fellow neuroscience nerds (in my case), though, otherwise I won't have too much to talk about with them because I'm not part of their immediate social group. I've gained the most friends from the lab I work at and we've pretty much got a social group from that because we spend so much time at the lab. Unfortunately, there aren't many girls that work in that lab.
It's harder to meet girls as a commuter, but it's definitely doable, though. My working hypothesis at the moment is that you just have to be a whole lot more adventurous in the sense that you're going to be speaking to what are basically strangers at first (I mean, the only thing you have in common with them is that you share the same room with them while a professor speaks at a crowd). So, this means you've got to be either talking to another nerd who enjoys the class as much as you do, or you've got to be pretty spontaneous and good at small talk. It's definitely doable, though. The thing for me is that I'm in this sort of phase where I'm basically emerging from 5-6 years of not interacting with girls at all for more than a couple minutes, so a lot of my encounters with them are sort of awkward (although things have been improving enough so that I've actually gotten a couple dates out of this). I just deal with it and try to make all of my dealings with girls a sort of learning experience.
The worst thing you can do in the case of meeting girls, in my experience, has been to consistently get cold feet and doubt yourself. I honestly don't give a s**t if girls think I'm kind of weird anymore. If they do, I try to figure out what it is about my behavior that's making me come off as weird, and if it's something like eye contact, or being too sarcastic, I make note of it and move on.
What really sucks is that I just realized in my 2nd to last semester of undergrad how awesome of a learning opportunity college is for getting myself comfortable around girls. If I had realized this two semesters ago, I'd probably have an actual relationship going by now.
God dammit, sorry for writing so much.
04 Dec 2008, 11:40 pm
