The Need for Romantic Intimacy

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thankfully its not too hard to spot the bots. THey use 9/10 and 10/10 which is insane. It's a bit like those 'make money on the internet' scams that say you can make $4000 per month by doing very little unskilled labour

I posted this on a different thread bit I think you could use tgis advice too @The Grand Inquisitor. We’re the same age. I can deeply relate to how you feel. For a long I too thought I would never be in a relationship. My best advice for you would be to see if there are any autistic adult social/support groups in your area. If not, do what I did and create one yourself! Send out emails to all of the therapists and diagnosing psychologists/psychiatrists you know of in your area and tell them that you’re looking to form an autistic/neurodiverse social/support group in your local area, and it would be great if they could spread the word to anyone they know who they think could be interested. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll meet your special someone that way, just like I did.

She might have reasons specific to you and her, e.g. if you and she both happen to have some highly unusual hobby (and you mentioned it in your profile).


Perhaps a fake in most cases, but there might be occasional exceptions.

Guys, please stop assuming that women are fundamentally all alike, differing only in how physically attractive they are.

Fake profiles are indeed a problem on dating sites. But surely there are better ways to sniff out the fakes than by over-generalizeing about what women want?

Somehow old-fashioned personal ads seem to have worked a whole lot better than today's dating sites/apps, judging by what I've heard about both over the years. I wonder why that is.

How did you go about finding those romantic connections?

IMO you need to find a way to build a social circle that is at least 50% women, preferably predominantly women, and likely to include a fair number of unattached women.


That's a good part of your problem IMO.


They aren't just more "built to last," but also more likely to happen in the first place, especially if you are a heterosexual man, given that that's how most women prefer relationships to form.


Someone should build a group-oriented dating app, whose purpose would be to make it easier for single people within already-existing groups to discreetly indicate tentative romantic interest in other group members and have this be revealed to said other group members only if a given other member is also interested in them. Groups (e.g. religious groups) that specifically aim to encourage members to marry within their group would have a motive to encourage members to use the app.

Such an app could combine the best aspects of both dating apps and the friends-first approach.

Such an app sounds wonderful on paper, but NOTHING changes the fact that 80% of all women are attracted to 20% of all men, and that 20% of men have sex with 80% of women. In the end, you'd have alpha males enjoying a sexual pleasure garden by meeting multiple women at once; women enjoying easy sex with alphas, and easy attention from betas; and angry, bitter beta males getting pushed into the friend zone yet again.

You CAN'T fight biology, not even with the augmented-reality holographic apps in year 3022. Then again, maybe we'll have gene-editing technology like in "Gattaca", which will forever end the alpha/beta divide among men. But even THAT'S hard to pull off: it's 1,000 years of technology fighting against 2,000,000 years of evolutionary instincts. Or conversely, we might become so highly "woke", that having a penis might be illegal by then.

The above is not a general "fact." Perhaps the above is true of the set of women who use today's more popular dating apps, but I seriously doubt that it's true of women in general, even in today's world.

Only a minority of women use dating apps. Many more men than women use them, resulting in a lot of understandable frustration for heterosexual male dating app users.

But, as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, no one would have made a claim like yours. Back then, most heterosexual men did not worry a whole lot about their own physical appearance, beyond basic grooming. If a man did put a lot of effort into his appearance, e.g. by being a bodybuilder, this was seen as an almost-sure sign that he was gay.

That's because, back then, the popular wisdom was that fussing around with one's appearance was necessary in order to attract men (of whichever sexual orientation), but not to attract women (of whichever sexual orientation). So, neither heterosexual men nor lesbians tended to put a lot of effort into their appearance, whereas heterosexual women and gay men both generally did.


What you've described above, if true at all, is an artifact of culture, not biology. Most likely it's an artifact of today's more popular dating apps, which intrinsically encourage a superficial approach.

My proposed dating app would counteract superficiality, to some extent at least, by requiring individuals to belong to at least one subscribing organization, and would introduce them only to other members of whichever organization(s) they belong to.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 05 May 2022, 2:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Different places on the internet. I probably spent an unhealthy amount of time looking for them, and even still, they're very hard to come by.


It'd be great if I could do this, but I don't know how. I don't know where I could go to find such a demographic, and I'm generally not very good at taking on the active role of navigating the transition from acquaintance to friend, so if the other person doesn't take on that role, it generally doesn't happen. Perhaps I haven't met many people I really click with, in which case I don't know how to do that either.


This is an interesting idea. I'm not sure how much utility such an app would have for the average person, and I can see how such an app might cause conflict within friendship groups. Furthermore, if the person you're interested in decides not to sign up to the app, then the app would probably be pretty useless to you.

In any case, I feel like a more immediate solution is important at this point, even if it doesn't end up resulting in a long-term relationship. I think finding a way to placate the emotional turmoil I'm currently dealing with would be greatly beneficial towards my confidence levels, motivation, and pursuit of self-actualisation.

What's giving me the most grief about my romantic situation right now is the lack of an avenue through which to experience romantic and physical intimacy (not just sex) with an authentically enthusiastic participant, and the way the ongoing lack of meaningful romantic success and validation has tainted my self-perception such that I see myself as "the guy who can't get a girlfriend". If I could remedy these feelings, I think making progress towards what I ultimately want would be significantly easier.

I would guess that your difficulty "navigating the transition from acquaintance to friend" is probably one of the main reasons why you have difficulty navigating any possible transition from acquaintance to romantic partner also. While being able to make friends does not guarantee an ability to find romantic partners, it seems to me that trying to initiate a romantic relationship, if one has not been able to find friends, is a little like trying to learn calculus without having previously learned algebra.

It seems to me that you need to find more people (especially women) that you "really click with."

I've asked you the following question before, but I don't recall your answer: Do you have any hobbies or interests that are shared by significant numbers of women? If so, what are they?

Of course, both a friendship and a romantic relationship require people to have much more than just hobbies/interests in common. But shared hobbies/interests are a good start and can continue to be a valuable dimension of a good relationship. If nothing else, they can make your initial interaction with someone a whole lot less awkward. They can also be a good ongoing source of companionship.


It would probably be most useful to religious denominations and other groups with a strong sense of tribal identity. And it's only a hypothetical longterm idea. Obviously it's not a solution to your immediate problem.


However, most women are interested only in relationships that have at least a strong potential to be longterm.

I probably used to be a bit better at making friends than I am now, but my social confidence has significantly declined since then because of my inability to attract a partner and other factors, and avenues through which to meet new people are less readily available than they were when I was younger. As I've gotten older and never met those important romantic milestones, and as I realise how different I am from the average person, I've found myself feeling more and more alienated from my peers. The last friend that I saw regularly, ceased contact with me last year.

I think a good deal of my issue with making friends is not feeling confident with myself, and feeling like an outsider.


I don't think so. I don't have a whole lot of hobbies, and I don't have a lot of motivation to actively pursue the hobbies I do have. Most of my free time is spent either in front of a screen, or thinking. A lot of my thinking is at least tangentially related to my life problems and circumstances, but I also think about things like political and social issues.

In terms of interests, I like games with an element of strategy like chess and card games. I like watching spicy YouTube debates. I have an interest in music, and making music, but I'm not motivated enough to do much about it. I'm interested in politics and current events. That's about it as far as interests are concerned. I tend not to know what to say when people ask me about my hobbies and interests, because I don't really spend much time doing anything worth mentioning. This lack of motivation to do very much probably has a lot to do with my depression over my perpetual inability to attract a romantic partner, the way that makes me feel about myself, and the way it makes pretty much everything I do or could do, ultimately pointless. As long as I feel like "the guy who can't get a girlfriend", and lack the means to satisfy my romantic desires, I'll never be happy to be alive.


I'd prefer something with a strong potential to be long-term, but I don't see how that can happen while my confidence is as low as it is. It's extremely unlikely that a woman is going to try to initiate romantic courtship with me, and it's also unlikely that I'm going to feel comfortable or hopeful enough to try initiating romantic courtship with someone who hasn't given me very clear indicators of interest. I feel like I'd have a much better chance of being successful with dating if I had more confidence in my ability to attract women. I can achieve that to a small extent by fixing things about myself that make me insecure, but it's going to take actually getting validation or interest from women to really boost my confidence.

I'd compare the way I feel about my ability to attract women to the way a person with body dysmorphia feels about their body, insofar as I've developed a strong reflexive feeling that women just aren't interested in me romantically. I remain open to the possibility that someone could be interested in me romantically, but I'd have to see it to believe it. I really hate that I feel this way, but more than a decade of an interest in romance and never getting to experience it takes a heavy toll.

Mona, all types and concepts imaginables of dating servies/apps have been tried by now since the 90s; and they all have one thing in common: sausage fest.

Absolutely! It's more cost-effective to give all beta males gene therapy and/or plastic surgery, to make them more desirable to women, than to create a newfangled dating app.

I'm feel like I'm the coolest Beta male around

Gene therapy? That would probably make me grotesque.....

Do you have strong feelings about any political issue? If so, perhaps getting involved in some kind of political activism might be a way to make friends?

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that a dating service/site/app aimed at specific organizations or cohesive subcultures, such as a religious denomination, might help the women feel safer and thus be less of a "sausage fest" (as long as the target subculture isn't predominantly male to begin with, of course).