TB_TB_TB_TB_TB_TB wrote:
I read this and wanted to share it:
I'm writing this for all the guys out there who Google "never had a girlfriend" late at night and cant figure out what is wrong with them. There are hundreds of posts about this topic and nearly all of them say the same thing, people asking why they cant find one. They try to rationalize, maybe its my personality, I'm too shy, maybe its my looks. Well I too am in this boat and have been for years, as long as I remember. I'm 19 years old and find myself getting on almost every week searching these same keywords. All around me I see relationships blossoming and everywhere I look the media, the culture itself, is obsessed with it. With good reason I suppose. Having an intimate relationship with the opposite sex is vital regardless of what anyone says. I wanted to ask a question to people who are in the same position as I am. Does it follow you around like a disease? Does it stay in the back of your mind, and every day are you reminded of it? I want to know something. If you have been alone for as long as I have, does your life sound something like this... In the beginning you were angry and confused. You blamed everyone and everybody and the pain was unbearable. You would do whatever you could to fuel your rage, listen to music etc... You were still hopeful though, surely next year you would find someone right? Then you approached the problem, tried to analyze it and see what you were doing wrong. I was in that stage for years. And now I've entered a stage of acceptance. Where you have been alone for so long that it has become a part of your life. Its become normal. Then you lie in your bed at night and feel that deep, empty hole in your stomach. Your so tired of being angry and trying everything you can that you become numb and just go on with your life. Sound familiar? Well thats how it has gone for me. I've realized that everyone says the same thing to you. The frightening truth: Some people are born with relationship skills and attract the opposite sex while the minority like us simply do not have the skill to do it.
TB: Eternally single because I dont have the skills to do it simple.
I think we're still trying to find our way in understanding just how malleable or immaleable the human mind is. The thing the author doesn't mention, which they really should - is whether they really were given good advice, and whether it worked, whether they ever tried, or whether it flopped regardless of how serious they were at applying it.
When I was in my early 20's I had all the right friends, all the right influences, all the right push and desire to be one of the cool kids, all the right clothing, went out to big events almost weekly, knew all the right things to say and not to say, felt a great sense of integrity, but I found out - at least with my own autism, that my odd nonverbal behaviors had not only absolutely nothing to do with my will and desires, it was caused by bottlenecks in my nervous system, that no matter what I was willing to put myself through to be my best that I would always look weird. Its not about not being willing to put in the effort for me, its more like the fact that someone who's really hungover, or perhaps has a bad leg, doesn't trip and stumble at their own liberty for the sake of being strange or making people wonder - they do it because their brain and body are giving out. It all happens though because, when I cannot fully exert my will over my body's own entropy (likely genetic) - this is what comes out. My own odd mannerisms, odd vibes and energy, happen because I neurologically will never have the energy to extend myself out far enough to look normal all of the time. I'm saying all of this as someone who's apparently, per other people's account - very mild on the spectrum. A big part of growing up is finding out that there are things you can get better at with practice and there are things that you'll for some reason, oddly, stay at square one on no matter what you're willing to do. For a lot of us this is just one of those things, we don't know why, though it seems like if your genes allocate your resources then that's exactly what your stuck fighting against. I've at least railed on myself hard enough to say that I've absolved myself of not trying - that one's gone, if anything I think I went beyond what most sane people would in order to make myself 'normal', just in terms of what I was willing to do to myself. Sometimes I feel bad that I chased this all the way to the end of the rainbow and likely seem like I have nothing but doom and gloom to bring on the topic but, trust me, I've learned one thing - keep the amount that you pound on yourself over this in perspective. I really brought myself to feel like every little seeming faux pa was like a suicide of honor, and that extreme came from finding that I needed to keep leveling up, turns out most of my progress was just from adrenaline and I couldn't keep it going.
That said - much more often even than this being about "Wah, I can't find a girlfriend", its a feeling that you can't even go out in public without getting really funny vibes. This spills directly over into day to day life, being able to deal with cashiers, being able to deal with people in general. If people have a nasty first impression of you based on your presence - you're in a really bad spot, it shows up by bullying by the same sex more in primary school but by secondary school and beyond that seems to reverse itself into the opposite sex fearing you often or seeing you as a threat. Understandably its not something that people deliberately set out to do to each other, it just happens because this just so happens to be a crap world and yes - they quite honestly do have plenty of rape threats around them on a regular basis, enough to where many would prefer to play it safe and - when in doubt - avoid. Its being stuck between a rock and hard place because you know that you're evoking negative behavior from people, for what you understand is a good reason, but you're helpless to stop it because its not like a set of habits or deciding to say something profoundly negative, its the whole sum of nuances that constitute the way you move, look, walk, talk, act, almost no one alive can pour through all of that and fix it - those who do are evidently those who never really applied themselves at getting it right, those people of course typically aren't the ones who've had it brought up to them that its a problem.
Don't get me wrong - I don't find myself in as bad a situation anymore, its quieted down considerably in the last few years, partly because I've hit that acceptance phase where I'm not getting pounded between the bumpers anymore, I've come to understand that its simply not my fault, that if people like me great, and even if people who I know are good people are freaked out or nervous about me because I've given them a ton of red flags - they'll live, I haven't exactly traumatized them or done any great harm to their lives, even other NT's around them will understand why its happening and if they already have me figured out they won't worry about it as they typically seem to understand how things work as well.
mra1200 wrote:
I once felt like that too. That pain you feel at night is like a hole in your heart/soul/chest/whatever, or at least that is how I saw it. I filled it with other things in life (a spiritual belief was a big part of it), as that hole is RARELY ever the "shape" of a woman, and no woman can ever fill that hole.
Yeah, if you have existential depression a relationship can help a little but only for so long. Self-actualizing seems like its really the only valid palliative. That and, I think in our situation where things are made drastically harder and where body language means that we can't say and do the same things other people can necessarily and get the same reaction, we really need to trim the fat off of what we're looking for and dial in on who's right for us, who would like us, and get really smart about understanding who it is we're looking for. When you're weighing yourself against the standards and readouts of people who are nothing like you, can't understand you, and likely will never be the wiser, its brutal and almost always its something of a no-win situation, only fix to that is wising up and realizing that there are plenty of people who, by their own design, shouldn't like you and that you should even be glad that they know better than to drag you into their lives.
_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
25 Mar 2011, 7:30 pm
