I feel like I've blown my one chance at true love

Post Reply New Topic

So I started talking to this girl a few weeks ago on a dating site. She was absolutely beautiful. We seemed to be so compatible. We both share the same faith and have the same religion beliefs. She eventually gave me her number and we started texting regularly. We only talked on the phone a few times. The first couple of times were a disaster. I have horrible social anxiety when talking to girls and said very little to her. The second time, I got super drunk just so I could talk to her and she could tell I was drunk and it backfired. I explained via text after we talked the first time that I was on the autism spectrum. I also decided to be honest about my unemployment, something I avoided telling her earlier. She said she still wanted to get to know me and understood that a lot of people are out of work right now because of COVID and that that did not affect how she thought of me. A big concern of hers though was that we live 150 miles away, which I was more than willing to work with.

A few nights ago, we talked on the phone for almost an hour and I opened up a lot more. She wanted me to be very open about my problems, as she constantly stressed her problems and that she is by no means perfect either. I told her about my mental health issues I’ve been struggling with since COVID started and how I’ve been really depressed. She asked me point blank if I wanted kids and I said no I really don’t like being around children at all. She said that is a real dealbreaker for her, that she has had to break up with guys in the past over it. She later ended the conversation by saying we just needed some time to get to know each other. She sent me a text an hour later telling me that while I was a great guy, she is really busy with school and work and that she thought I wasn’t ready to be in a relationship because of my depression, that I should seek help, that the distance was just too much, and that she can’t be the one to make me happy. She also made it clear that the fact that I didn’t want kids was a dealbreaker.

This has been tormenting me ever since. I keep trying to tell myself it was simply not meant to be, but I don’t ever get attractive girls that are interested in me like this. I kept having these crazy delusions that she was my soul mate and that we were meant to be together and get married, even though I’ve never met this girl!! Part of me knew this would never work, the fact that she lives so far away and my own personal issues made it impractical. But I wanted so badly to believe. The few times girls have ever shown an interest in me like that I always get obsessed. I dropped so many red flags throughout the time we talked and she was so understanding. Usually when girls find out about me, they lose interest real fast and ghost me. Yet she remained interested in me. Now I feel like I lost my one chance at love. I keep thinking if I simply kept some of my issues from her and lied about wanting kids and didn't tell her about the depression, maybe I could have at least met her and gotten a date with her. But the truth would have come out eventually, and if I met her I'd be even more attached to her and it would be even more painful when she dumped me. I keep replaying her texts and her final message to me over and over in my head. How do I stop thinking of her?

The thing you probably won't want to hear but need to anyway - the things you're feeling right now, especially not having opportunities for relationships constantly thrown at you, are quite normal. The doubts you're having about your positions on things that matter to you - such as not having children - are perhaps there because you still have more exploration to make of those concepts and perhaps if your exploration and closure on that were more complete some of the doubts you're having about your own mutability / fungibility on core value positions might not be messing with you quite as much but - I'm not going to lie either - your own mind would still quite likely find some other corner to torment you about even if you did have that. I say that because as biological organisms our first priority is making copies of ourselves and at a subconscious level, no matter how many good rational reasons you have for not having a relationship, this sort of thing will cut close to your core.

I occasionally think of a girl I could have dated in my late 20's who I had a lot in common with, who understood my tastes in music and had parallel interests, who I found quite attractive and in a way that the world wasn't chasing after her, she even went so far as to show up to my going away party as I got my first serious graduation from college job and left the restaurant industry albeit the core issue is encoded here - she went so far as to attend and have an energy drink, at an alcohol-laden party, when she was a recovering addict and I lived at a party house and my friends were heavy drinkers and I still used psychedelics occasionally - all of which was a deal breaker for her needs of stability.

The thing most people won't tell you is that life will put you in impossible situations. Sometimes, if one were attribute a conscious ground of being to these circumstances, you'd have to impute that it's probably using these 'close calls' as a way for you to rake through who you are and figure out what's important.

Whether it's a comfort or not - this is normal and these feelings, as well as situations like this that end up not being reconcilable, tend to haunt most people's lives to some degree. The people who had too many people throwing themselves at them tend to have a different set of problem but definitely not zero, something more like devaluation of the circumstance and - particularly for guys - inability to settle down, FOMO wrecking it all, and ending up having it all slip through their fingers. Overall it's not particularly gentle on most people.