How can I accept turning 30 and still being single?

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I used to have visions of having a wife, children, and playing in a band but all those dreams fell and smashed on the ground. My mother even said I should get a vasectomy both because she used to think I would have sex in college and she thought I would be a terrible father. Even when the opposite about college proved true, she still pushed me to get a vasectomy.

The only thing you have to be sad about is your attitude. You're just flat out wrong and delusional if you believe the 20s are anyone's best years.

I know one person who says that her best years were in college. She's brilliant and beautiful, but super isolated because of her incredibly negative attitude. THAT is why her life is so sh***y now, not because she aged out of happiness.

And the same goes for you. It's not some horrible thing to accept, it's just life. Most of the time people, in relationships or out of relationships, have some loneliness to contend with. How you handle it is a test of character.

You're not handling yours well at all. You're being mopey and feeling sorry for yourself. Life is for the living, brother. Go for a walk, clear your head, and make a better choice about your own emotional state. If you want to be loved you need to love yourself first and foremost or you will attract other depressive, emotionally unstable people who want to 'fix' you.

Figure out how to really love yourself. That is the solution. Whether you like it or not.

Wow! And a trait of an Aspie is frankness and you have hit the nail on the head. I applaud you. Mostly, Figure out how to really love yourself. That is the solution. for to love oneself means to except oneself as oneself is ..... warts and all.
I used to HATE being gay and ASPIE.
Now I love being both.

To the both of you. You will find your goddess when you least expect to find her. Once you find her, you must shower her with love and affection. Show the world that your girl belongs to you.

To conflate the loneliness that most people feel from time to time with a situation like Marknis' and trying to make the case that this somehow boils down to strength of character is to overlook the fundamental differences between his situation and others. A person who has a robust social circle and a happy long-term relationship who has instances of loneliness here and there is not comparable to a person with a smaller-than-desirable or non-existent circle of friends and who has been single over a period of years despite their desires and efforts. While how you deal with loneliness might have some reflection on your character, you can't simply ignore the circumstances surrounding it and conclude that the sufferer must have a character flaw. If you have a strong desire for something that is not being met over a long period of time whilst other people seem to almost effortlessly have that same desire met multiple times over the course of that time, frustration is not only reasonable but to be expected. Now if Marknis had tried and failed for like a year or something and was getting this upset, maybe it would be fair to criticise his strength of character, but he's been dealing with this for a very long time and I can tell you from experience that it does build up and get harder to deal with over time as you start to feel like no matter what you do you will not yield the results you want.

Loving yourself and being able to take pride in yourself is important as it relates to finding love, and general well-being, I agree with you there, but loving your life becomes more difficult when things you want with a burning passion simply seem out of your reach. Prolonged inability to fulfil romantic desires contributes to a low self-esteem and more negative outlook. You start to feel as though you are not good enough to find a partner, and you have nothing to prove you wrong. It's definitely a hard situation to deal with.

Going for a walk to clear your head might help some people but I get the feeling that Marknis would probably be prone to think about his situation, especially if there are couples out and about. I think what Marknis needs short of a girlfriend is to feel like he is on track to get a girlfriend, and the past has shown him that going about things the way he has been hasn't been conducive to results, so I'd imagine this being the case he questions why he should expect results considering his track record, which would be a valid question. I would highly recommend going down the self-improvement route and trying to become your best self more than I would recommend going for a walk. When the walk's over, his problems are no different, and while self-improvement may be a longer process, the results will undoubtedly be more fruitful.

If a simple walk was all it took to get better, why hasn't it worked for almost 12 years now? I go on walks quite often and they aren't some magic ritual that cures you. They don't change the fact I am still an outsider in what's supposed to be my culture and, as The Grand Inquisitor put it, seeing couples while I am by myself keeps my thought patterns the same. When you have family members getting married (Even ones who are on their third or fourth marriage) and seeing other people couple up on a regular basis while you can't even get a coffee date or a reply back on a dating site despite your best efforts, it makes you feel very discouraged.

You're really not in as "bad a way" as many other people. You have a job--at a library, no less. You have a car---bad alternator notwithstanding. You have a license. You're not in jail. You haven't got a criminal record.

You can get yourself out of your situation much better than a person with a criminal record

I'm fortunate that my father is a decent (though conservative) man. My brother is one of those "wingnut" types. I was always treated as a "second-class citizen" by both, though my father was classy about it. I PRETTY MUCH FELT THE SAME WAY YOU FELT WHEN I WAS YOUNGER.

My "solution": REALIZING THAT I'M A VIABLE PERSON, EVEN THOUGH I'M AN "OUTSIDER." Being happy with your "non-redneck" self. Laughing at the rednecks, rather than being enraged at them. Finding your own pleasures in life. Turn the tables on those people who disdain you because you're "different." That's the way to do it. No other way.

You're stuck in this ideology. You have to wrest yourself away from it. Otherwise, things will only get worse.

The path you're going on now can only make you more depressed, in my opinion. You have to do something else. What you're doing now is not working.

If you don't think my advice is good, that's fine. Maybe it's not. But....please, do listen to SOMEBODY!! !

But, whether you accept what I say or not, something has to be done.

You have at least 50 more years to live. 50 more years where something great could happen, 50 years where you can accomplish something.

But you'll accomplish nothing if you continue to think the way you think.

I apologize for my rant.

But I just feel like you're stuck in this, Mark.

And I do feel like there's a way out.

You should be proud of that fact not discouraged! Heck, even before I had any experience I could have found someone to marry almost instantly but I chose to have standards (I didn't make them high enough but that's another discussion). Otherwise you would be on here discussing how you are trapped in an abusive marriage. Ultimately, who cares what the dominant culture is? You are only looking for one person. I found my wife BECAUSE I was different than everyone else and we are outsiders together. I can tell you that before I met my now wife, I could usually attract women with little effort but it was just as pointless as being dateless because I knew there was no way I could build a relationship with most of them.

Remember I was at my wits end going on one pointless date after another until I said out loud to myself "I accept whatever fate has in store for me as I've done everything I can on my own" and decided to forge my own path ignoring the 'expert' advice. About 5 months later I was engaged.

If you want to date, you need to make an effort to do so. Most girls you'd want to date are not going to want to date someone who is feeling sorry for themselves.

I've dated a lot and the only way to get over your issues is to get comfortable dating people so get someone to take good photos of you and sign up for Tinder and start asking people out on dates. I think you're placing too much importance on your age. You're 30, you can date a woman of any age.

How many people have you asked out in your life? If it's in the thousands and you've gotten rejected by all of them, yeah maybe start to sulk. But I bet that's not the case.

You clearly haven't read any of my posts. I have made efforts to date. I've tried internet dating, speed dating, Tinder, Bumble, calling a dating agency, cold approaching, gone on "blind dates" set up by family members, and even tried a "fling" site out of desperation.



I wouldn't shoot down anything from you, Kortie.

How many girls have you asked out though? Also, have you been introspective in trying to figure out what's going wrong? Dating may seem difficult but there are simple things you can do that will help your odds.

I used to feel like you did. When I was in college, I was just not confident about it and didn't know what to say so i would try time after time to get a date and I just didn't know what to do. But now it's as easy as going on an app, swiping a few times, sending out a few messages and I can get a date the same day if I want. And I'm very picky.

I started one of my famous walls of text a couple days ago, which really didn’t add anything new or original, and might have been a little condescending even for ME...but it got deleted in a crash. GHF, Kraftie, Inquisitor, and especially Alex really beat me to it anyway.

The gist of what I said was I have severe depression, too, I REFUSE to take meds for it, and I mainly just learned to recognize it as a physical thing that has no basis on anything going on in my life. It can be crippling, but I still go to work anyway, power through it, and take some time alone to let it work its way through. I hope you recognize that the depression is all an illusion. Stay positive and take steps to achieve what you want.

We all know you’ve made SOME effort. But Alex is asking a very serious question. How many times have you asked anyone out, and is getting together with girls something you’ve made a consistent habit of? It can take a lot of time to figure out and it’s a process with a curve to it: one does not simply ask a girl out and get a date. It might APPEAR like that at some point, but you aren’t in a regular pattern of doing this. Keep at it.

Thanks. There is a learning curve. When you first learned to walk, you fell down over and over and over and over again. Now it's not even something you think about. The same with riding a bike or driving a car. There's a learning curve. We quickly forget about how hard it was initially to do the things we find so easy because they become second nature.

Obviously this is something that is more complex than riding a bike, especially for autistics, so we might take longer to learn how to do it. But when we do master this skill, we can be just as good, if not better than NTs, because we spent more time learning it and had to think more about it.

I can say that I have neurotypical friends asking me for dating advice at this point despite the fact that at one point in my life I barely knew how to get a phone number from a girl, much less ask them out on a date. Now it seems so ridiculously easy to me that it's hard to imagine I ever even had trouble doing it.