How can I accept turning 30 and still being single?

Post Reply New Topic

I have not been around for a while but I wanted to reply as someone who was sort in the same boat as you and offer something to maybe consider.

Maybe at this time you should focus your attention on other areas of your life, mostly becoming completely and totally independent.

You have mentioned a lot that you hate where you live (I get it, I used to hate where I lived, too). You really don't like the people around you and your family don't seem to be that great either. Your focus seems to be on your perceived failures in life.

So my thought is that you need to change your focus for a while and instead focus on going back to school and focusing on a degree (or a trade) that will get you gainful employment. You're only 30 and it's definitely not too late. I went back to school at age 34 and didn't graduate until I was 38. When I graduated, I was able to get a job making a lot more money, I had job security, I was independent, and I had actually completed something, which all translates into a success. And along the way I was able to move away from the horrible city in which I was living and found a long-term relationship - because ultimately I was NOT focused on finding a boyfriend, I was focused on becoming self-sufficient and changing my life.

There's an old saying - if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. Or in plain language, you need to have a real plan if you want to change your life.

Take this for what it's worth. Good luck.

Unless you live in the Bible Belt, you won't understand what I have to go through. It's a very sick and superficial culture. People are constantly cheerleading for Jesus but drink alcohol until they pass out, smoke until their nostrils burn, drive dangerously, have pre-marital sex, own firearms with the intent of "f*****g someone up", and rewarding anti-intellectual behavior while shunning intelligence. If you are a male, you are pressured to suppress your emotions and become an iron pumping alpha male, especially if you want a girlfriend, or else you are "gay" or a "p****". Females are told to shut up and be followers or else they are "complainers". Even before I tried dating, the deck was already stacked against me.

I've sworn off online and any digital form of dating. All it did was increase my frustration and stress to the point it made me both physically and mentally drained. I hated the constant binge messaging and waiting for a response that would never come. I've even had some women tell me the reason it doesn't work for me is because the gender ratio is heavily unbalanced and the women get swamped with messages so the competition is too great for me.

Only people who have like 30+ flaws are 100 % doomed, do you really have 30+ flaws ?

Why do you keep downplaying what I've had to go through? I missed out on what so many others were able to achieve easily and I am not getting younger at all. I fear that I am simply doomed until I am in my grave.

Really? Yiu actually believe thst anyone of the billions of people though out history who lived and died never having love had 30+ Flaws? It can only take one.
I have 4 of the biggest ones. Job,looks,car, home. I fail them all. Maybe if I was ruggly handsome I could get dates or if I was ugly but well off I’d get dates, but both ugly and poor. Not a lot of women who desire a balding, fat, ugly man who works 15 hours a week min wage, doesn’t own a car and rents with his family. Those are all giant red flags to most women. I can’t even get friends for the same reasons minus looks.

I would hope that a woman in an equivalent position (overweight, min wage, rents with family) would consider you but as far as I can tell your experience is that's not the case. When you say you rent with family, do you mean your parents or other family members? I know you've mentioned you have a sister before. I don't think living with a sibling would be looked down upon in the same light as living with your parents would be, especially if you're pretty self-sufficient. Working min wage of course makes things a bit tough though as women seem to generally desire a partner in a similar income bracket or higher. Probably partially because min wage isn't going to pay the bills if you have children.

I know you said you were trying to lose weight before. How's that going?

The bible belt is 1/4 of the US geographically - if you were complaining about your local small town I would understand because people in a small town can be really hive-minded clones, but your constant complaining about a region as large as half of Europe makes no sense at all.

You need to stop blaming the Bible Belt, first of all. I live in the Bible Belt. I’ve had more than my share of problems. I’ve lived in rural New York State, too. You know how many of my problems went away because I lived somewhere else? Not a single one. The kinds of things you described happen everywhere else. People may vary based on regional culture, but people are always superficial and subject to local interests. You might be a nobody in Texas if you can’t handle the bar scene or country music. But in New York or Massachusetts, you’re a nobody if you don’t dance contras. You can rail all day against anti-intellectual rednecks, but if you didn’t even finish school then you don’t fit in with the brights, either.

I’m not trying to discourage you. I’m trying to help you see that your mindset has to change, that you have to focus those aspects of your character and attitude that cause you to hate other people. Believe me, they know you hate them. I do agree, as do many others, that moving would do you a lot of good. I got out of Mississippi because there were things I could do in NY that I couldn’t do here. Yes, the people were different. The air was better and I was more mentally focused. But I was the same person. Location didn’t change me. Moving to Austin won’t change you.

You have to stop blaming other people, geography, and everything else. If you can’t fix your hateful attitude, then you really are doomed.

This is going to be a controversial post, but you aren't the only one who is terrible with women and have terrible social skills. I'm terrible with women and my social skills are terrible. It's not just apart of your mental condition, because there are far and I mean far even farther than the moon far worse than you marknis.

This is great advice.

The way you accept being single now is by choosing to take the road that will lead you to a relationship, and that's independence. Accept that looking for a relationship now is likely going to be fruitless as most women your age seek and expect an independent man, and as you walk the path towards independence, you can feel more confident and you'll have a much better chance at being successful in dating.

You may need to do a bit of work but this way you can choose where you want to live and largely be in control of your own life, be your own person, and that's so much more attractive and freeing than allowing yourself to remain shackled in a situation you don't like. As far as I can see, women tend to like ambition and dislike a lack of ambition, and living with your parents at 30 is much more indicative of the latter.

+1.

There’s no shame in not having ambition or living with parents. I admit a lot of times we really don’t have as much control over circumstances as we like or think we do. I took a massive pay cut moving to a private school but figured, hey, I can make it and keep the mortgage payments coming in. Then I got fired. NEVER saw it coming. Then wife got fired right after she had a baby.

So...taking no more chances, the house went up for sale and for a brief time we were a family of 4 living in a cheap motel. We were very lucky, but being homeless for any length of time is not fun.

When you think about homeless people, you think mentally ill, lazy, criminals, etc. But the truth is for some of us the bottom just falls out and we never see it coming. I don’t judge people for that, and nobody judged me when I went through it.

Same goes for adults living with mom. The kinds of people I laugh at in that situation are guys who went to a private university for their MBA and can’t find a job. I laugh at them because these are guys who want to earn big money without actually working for it. Getting MBA at prestigious schools gives them a sense of entitlement. So they are flat out STUPID, because they ought to know better, and I laugh at stupid people.

But a severely disabled person who is mentally and emotionally incapable of a relationship, job, etc.? You’re not lazy. You’re not stupid. You can’t help your circumstances. And there’s no point in shaming someone for that.

Yes, I’m a hardboiled conservative evangelical gun nut. Yes, I encourage hard work, ambition, and all of that because I know the rewards of it. But if your condition keeps you out of dating/socializing/working and all you CAN do is collect welfare and play video games, how am I going to put someone down for that? If that’s all you have in life, enjoy it and be glad you’re free from the stress and responsibilities of the rest of us. Because when we say relationships, dating, marriage, family, work, ambition is HARD, we know what we’re talking about. If it means giving up something you want that you cannot handle to be free and happy, as my grandfather liked to say, “get shed of it.” Let it go.

The more you value something, the more you’ll work and sacrifice and, heck, torment yourself to get it. I ran a half marathon for the first time this year. It felt AWESOME crossing the finish line after so many sedentary years and never a single athletic bone in my body. I didn’t even start doing this for me. I was supporting someone else. And then I got addicted. Now I want to do it AGAIN, this time in hill country where I’m from, not the flat, muddy, Mississippi Delta. And that means I’m training harder, longer, faster. And it SUCKS. I ran nearly 14 miles Saturday at my mom’s house up and down steep hills when I got slammed by an upset stomach and had to call someone to rescue me barely 3 miles from home. 13.8 miles, making better time running UPhill, got plenty fuel and little muscle/joint pain, and BAM...exploding intestines. So after an hour on the toilet recovering, I still had to be on my feet most of the afternoon shopping with the fam, AND I had to drive 2.5 hours to get us all home again. I was fine. So I’m back at the Y this week running up to 7.5 mph on the treadmill for a little over half an hour, getting 5-6 miles on the road yesterday, my quads screaming at me yesterday, and I just kept on running. Today I plan to ease up on my feet and do some intense cardio cross training and rest tomorrow.

I’m hooked on it. It means just that much to me. My chest hurts. My lungs hurt. My legs and feet hurt. I hate it. But I can see the finish line in my imagination and I want it to be real so bad I can taste it. I can feel it already. So...I’ll take the pain and torment for now if it means I can make that run reality. It’s only a HALF, so it’s not really THAT hard. So just a couple more weeks, take a few days off, and enjoy the race.

The training is painful and the opposite of fun. The attainment of the goal is worth it. And the moment you finish, you’re like “I’m so glad that’s over. I’m never gonna...oh look, another race.”

Anything that matters to you that much, relationships, whatever, is worth it. But you cannot get trapped into thinking it’s supposed to be easy and natural. It’s not. I’ve had several setbacks professionally, personally, family, dating, money, fitness/running, all of it. We ALL have experienced this. There ARE things I wanted in life that I had to give up. I wanted those things terribly. But in the end they weren’t worth the effort. The things I succeeded at after so much time and so many failures WERE worth the pain and agony of defeat—over, and over, and over again.

Are serious relationships worth the pain and torment of so many failures along the way? Can you find the strength to rise above yourself and do whatever it takes however many times it takes to get it done? For me, distance running is a synecdoche for everything in my life I never could have, all the times I failed to achieve my goals, and the ongoing struggle and pain of making the impossible my reality.

If I didn’t have legs, or if I had a chronic injury, I’d either never been able to start running or I’d have to give it up. I’d be sad. But I would accept it and find something else to do. How far are you capable of going with relationships? Can you get yourself there? I would feel no shame if I were unable to race. I’d be ashamed if I were capable, willing, and then didn’t do it. If you can’t be in a relationship, find something else fulfilling in life. Despite what you’ve been made to believe, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you struggle with relationships and yet want it more than anything, enough to endure whatever it takes, then get busy. If your aren’t ready for that kind of experience, you’re really better off.

I always wanted to be a fighter pilot like Tom Cruise in Top Gun. That was my dream. But you know what? I have astigmatism. Until now I’ve never been athletic. And my grades in school were never good. So guess what? I don’t fly planes. I had to give up that dream because I’m better off alive than dead, first of all, and I’m also better off doing things I’m good at than wasting my life on a pipe dream.

Not that relationships are your pipe dream. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying you should carefully consider whether you REALLY want this. I believe you CAN do it. But I don’t know whether it’s really for the best for you or not. Only you can know that for sure. But please figure that out for yourself and either give it up as DEAD WEIGHT or DO SOMETHING besides blaming all your ills on circumstance. Stop hating people. Stop blaming geography. Stop complaining—and I don’t mean to us, I mean internally. We will listen to your problems and try to help. But you have to cut the negative self-talk. And take SOMEONE’S advice and quit making excuses and shooting us down.

And while you’re at it, stop hating yourself. That’s the person you hate most, I think. If you can love that person, maybe you can begin to understand and love those rednecks you keep complaining about. You really have no idea how huge a difference that will make.

The last 2 posters had some great points and I wanted to add this also:

There's no better revenge than living well.

If you feel like you spent your life being put down, being looked down on, etc., there's no better feeling in the world than actually achieving something that you were made to feel as if you could not do and actually living better than those who made you feel that way.

I'm not saying that's the reason to better yourself - you do things for you, not for anyone else - but at some point you do have to admit, it does feel pretty good.

You just haven't tasted success. I think you would find you like it if you did.

Well, having a girlfriend is one of the things others told me I couldn't have as well as telling me I was never "getting laid". I did have a short lived relationship and I did have sex but because the experiences were short lived, I still feel like nothing happened.

I definitely want success. It's just that depression has plagued me for many years and it's even making me think my brain can't change.

Then you start where you are. Quit looking backward unless you intend to go that way.

You can't possibly change everything all at once so you do one thing at a time. If you're not on some sort of depression medication you might see if one is appropriate for you. Maybe talk to your doctor about that.

That's step one. Start there.

I would have too but most women prefer to date up it seems.

I rent with my mom and sister, my moms also on ssi, my sister works as her home care taker. Neither of us can afford to rent alone so we continue renting together.

I’ve gained 2 pounds stopped going to the gym. And been over eating cause I’ve been sad.

I have a psychiatric appointment lined up for the coming week. Before I lost my therapy, my therapist felt like I needed some sort of medicine to help the obsessive thought patterns I struggle with. A part of me does realize that my thoughts have plagued me for many years and they have not helped me.