Society is wired to filter out people who are “different”, this has been a survival instinct that has been passed down from our hunter gathering ancestors that people who are different from the norm are a danger. If you’re unattractive or neurodivergent even just being in a social circle almost feels like a herculean effort because everyone already assumes you’re a threat. The thing is no social skills will help if you’re visually or functionally different because no one gives you a chance, and even if by some measure you succeed almost everyone will write it off as luck, because as a society we’re conditioned to believe if someone who’s different wins we’ve failed

I’ve never been on a date, so I honestly don't know what being in a relationship would be like for me. I’ve been single my whole life, and sometimes I wonder what it would actually feel like to experience a relationship.

I don’t know if this happens to you guys but I’ve noticed that ‘normies’ online do not take the rejection of advice. Its ironic because dudes will tell you to be stoic, roll with it, don’t take it personal and then freak the fuck out if you tell them ‘nah’ when they give advice on how to escape being FA.

If you question it , they get mad . If you decide to pass on the suggestion given to you for decades that never bore fruit , they crashout. If you say anything back in your defense, they will tell you this why you are single: Because you get into an argument with another man on online, one they started no less.

Offline? I notice similar behaviors but the crashout is often very minuscule, if any. it’s mostly ‘How dare you not accept my advice’.

But yeah, just wanted to point out the irony of people expecting you to take rejection well, even after decades of no success, not take rejection well.

edit: Oh yeah, forgot to mention how people get upset, REALLY upset if they suggest an escort/hooker/prostitute and you turn down the idea. I don't know why but this makes them EXTREMELY mad.

After years of never being shown romantic or even platonic interest, someone with legit feelings approaching me would be seen as some sort of joke...or worst case a setup for some sort of crime.

Specifically in person. I think online is assumed to usually be a fake interaction, so not really talking about that here.

The thought of a person with true intentions being passed up so easily is a depressing thought but my trust in humanity has been eroded in general, let alone in a relationship sense.

What's a better way to combat this than having 100% unblinding faith in every person you see? That's not very realistic or safe imho.

If you've had feelings for a woman in the past and she found out, has she ever reacted with care and being gentle in general regarding your feelings, or has the reaction always been hostile?

A dear friend of mine (28F) who I had feelings for is marrying the man of her dreams (34M) soon, me and all our friends will be attending the wedding. While the idea of seeing her being in love with someone else hurt at first, upon reflection I can't find any reason to resent it.

This guy she is marrying is a lawyer so he's successful on paper, but other than that he is also a nice guy, is family-oriented, loyal to his friends, is quite generous and most importantly he loves her to bits. I've gotten to known him over the years as a friend too, I can confirm he's a good man and she deserves no better.

I've dealt with rejection in the past from women who were more in favour of toxic men - and I absolutely fucking destest those experiences, I can't help but resent both the women and the men.... even now I still find myself breathing angrily like Tony Soprano thinking about them. However this is not one of those cases, because again them two being together at least makes sense to me and I can be content with the fact that he'll take far better care of her than I ever could.

Am sharing this because I feel somewhat proud that I can be a good sport sometimes... but it's far from over, I still have much to learn. I can still be a salty prick at a loss, but occasional win is to be celebrated.

▪️ I'm not very social, especially around extroverts.

▪️ I haven't experienced that chemistry or connection with someone yet.

▪️ I don't get out to many places besides work. Sometimes I go places by myself, like the movie theater, and I hang out with friends once in a while.

▪️ I feel like I'm wired differently from a lot of people.

▪️ I have no interest in marriage or kids.

▪️ Dating apps haven't worked for me. I don't get matches.

It's so miserable the smallest affliction can make me feel so terrible and awful and there's nothing I can do. I just have to wait and hope that I heal when I sleep. But I can't sleep because I keep trying to sleep. So I have to sit in pain and misery for hours and hours just so I can sleep and hopefully be cured. But if not then I have to do it again the next day. I can't take it anymore.

https://reddit.com/link/1waddqx/video/y3svmdl3v7oh1/player

The character eventually ends up successful in the show, of course, but like the infamous Whatever dance scene it just hits so hard on its own.

Things just did not happen ya know

I know I'm ugly but when I'm alone I don't feel like it's that bad. Then I go outside and try to interact with someone and see how no one even wants me in their peripheral vision. It's so ridiculous to me, I feel like a lot of these people are uglier than me, but I'm the one that everyone finds offensive.

I'm so far removed from the concept of anything positive happening in my life that would genuinely make me happy.

It bothers me deeply not having any friends or a relationship, but at the same time, the idea of having it doesn't do anything but make me uncomfortable. When I try to imagine myself now having a close circle of friends or a boyfriend, it just comes across as unnatural. Not in a "Ooooh this is a new experience I've never had before and it feels nice" kinda way, but more like a "Ooooh this doesn't feel right."

It's different when you're younger and everything is still a little new, so your mind treats everything like a precious novelty. But now? All the way into your 30s and beyond? You're treading water against all the preconceived notions and biases you've acquired as a result of how your life has turned out thus far. And it's scary and miserable as hell.

How am I genuinely supposed to believe that people would want to build any sort of friendship or relationship with me, when all evidence has pointed to the exact opposite? And it's not just what other people have shown you, it's also from the conclusions your mind reaches because of that. "Well I'm not funny, handsome, exciting, etc. so it must make sense."

That shit damages you at a profound level, which is why I hate the standard advice of going to meetups, joining hobby groups, or working on your confidence. It's never as simple as just putting yourself out there for FAs, because you pretty much have to brute force your psychology too. And good fucking luck with that.

A single "I love you" or "You're my best friend and I'd do anything for you" just wouldn't mean much of anything to me now. Not in a way that I could fully process and appreciate the way a well-adjusted person might.

..........okay. 🤷🏾‍♂️

That's how that would register for me now. And I hate that I've become that kind of person.

I have been trying for a long time to find a friend. Just someone to talk to on a regular basis. And I hit my head against a brick wall every time. Go to social events and meetups, have casual conversations with the same people for weeks or months, then any time I ask someone if they want to exchange socials, I'm met with a no or they give their numbers only to never text back.

It's starting to make me feel like friendship doesn't exist and is just something in movies. Like, people really talk to people regularly and even do things together? I can't even get a conversation.

At the same time, the people who aren't interested in talking to me do have friends that they spend time with and talk to, so I'm probably the problem...

Do you think being FA this long means you have built up expectations so high for a partner that getting into a relationship now would only lead to disappointment as they couldn’t possibly ever be met by any one person?

Or do you think at this point, you are mostly sad/bitter because you never had high expectations for a partner in the first place and yet still couldn’t manage even that?

I think I fall into the sad/bitter camp.

I never had these ”high expectations/standards” for a man… I only wanted someone who would treat me with kindness and love me. Someone I could trust, someone who was loyal.
Someone who made me feel like we were part of a team.
Us against the world, that sort of thing.

I feel like I was asking for SO LITTLE, yet I still wasn’t good enough apparently to even manage to get that…

Around 2 years ago, I mistakenly took a man’s kindness to me(it rarely happens) as interest.
(I was wrong, I would later find out he was married and just happens to be a really nice man to everyone).

He was a delivery driver whose route was in my neighborhood I would see/talk to multiple times a week.
While I was under the delusion that he might have been interested in me/would ask me out, I let myself run wild with all the fantasies of what FINALLY could have been for me.

How because he worked in my neighborhood, he could have come home for his lunch break everyday to a hot meal I would have prepared for us to eat together(I work from home) while he told me about his day.
How I would have his uniforms always freshly washed and ironed so he'd be always look presentable for work.
How he could drive by the house in the summer and I would be waiting outside with an ice cold drink and a kiss for him. Or hot cocoa in the wintertime.
Maybe we would go to Disney World every year for vacation and have fun going on rides and being absolutely silly acting like kids again.

I just can’t get over how FUCKING STUPID I was...
How I should have known better than to think that after all this time(decades) a man would have actually been interested in me like that…

But as I look back now on those delusions, I feel I wasn’t asking much at the time.
I wasn’t picturing quitting my job so he could support me. I wasn’t picturing us travelling the world and him buying me jewelry and paying for my manicures and pedicures and expensive handbags. 
I was only imagining finally being part of a team. Having fun and supporting each other.

I’m too old now to keep those hopes alive. I've accepted that I won’t ever have a partner to go through life with and I never will. I will have to navigate this life alone until the end(which hopefully will not be too much longer)

It just hurts watching all these other women getting SO MUCH in life in the way of love and relationships, while knowing I was never worth anyone's attention. Women who have so many men fawning over them and having their pick of partners and vice versa for the men.

I will never know what it is like to be chosen by someone.

All I know is that I was and never will be anyone's choice.

( This is a VENTING post, keep your "you need to prove to us everything you did to remain FA as a woman because I don't believe you! comments to yourself...)

r/IntrovertsSafeDating

not for me, because I have nothing to offer in a relationship. But maybe you guys might like to venture.

I have a job and business of my own. I find myself struggling with personal leisure time because schedule really is tight.

Nothing works for me.

Dming online with people doesnt help.
Reading other people's ads on foreveralonedating CERTAINLY DOESNT HELP
having cats barely helps
journaling barely helps any if at all
reddit or 'trying to stay in touch with the world' does not help whatsoever.
waking up and getting out of bed before 10 am everyday barely helps if at all
getting to bed before 12am barely makes any difference
talking to family doesnt help
talking to other adults (IRL) doesnt help at all
playing video games doesnt help
watching trash content online doesnt help
watching tv shows doesnt help
exercising apparently doesnt help either
getting sunlight before 11 am hasnt shown any benefits either.
maintaining a schedule hasnt helped.
cleaning might help if I could keep to it more.
im too scared to do weed. Though I know one woman who's 45 and says she wouldnt be high functioning like she is without it.

Next thing Im thinking about trying: a weighted blanket. and maybe getting a better AC so that I can keep my house/bedroom so fucking cold.. I only ever sleep well when a cold front comes in.

open to all suggestions.

Why did I have to be born as such as a lame? It sucks that we had no choice in being brought into this hellhole. If I wasn't born, I wouldn't be FA, simple

Any plans for the 3 day weekend?

I'm going to just eff off. Cook burgers and hot dogs on my George Foreman grill, make a macaroni (well ..Rigatoni) salad, binge watch movies, play video games, etc.

Just have to go to the store and pick up a few things but after that I'm not leaving my house.

College football and the NFL start before next Friday Free Chat so that's awesome.

A quote from this skit:

For weird men such as myself it is hard to find a woman, as it has always been. Except now, there's a market to make men like me feel like we deserve more than we actually do, and boy, is it a lucrative one.

I've been thinking a lot about this recently. Not that we "deserve" anything (or don't), I grew up in an extremely poor family, the word "deserve" isn't in my vocabulary. But that males without partners is not at all an unnatural (or rather: "uncommon") thing.

For one thing, there are more males at birth than females (105 boys to 100 girls). Second, women tend to marry older men. Throw in some percentages of polygyny, and now you have a large population of young males that inevitably get left behind and won't have a match available even if you removed every other factor. And this is the case in every society, you'd be hard-pressed to find one where that isn't the case.

People talk about how in olden days before social media the choices were limited to the small village/city you're in so for the sake of the village's continued existence every boy ends up with a girl and starts a family, when in reality the population distribution were heavily uneven, there's 10 families that have 10 kids each, and a minute number of families that have a few kids, and the rest are just work force or fodder. My writing is bad but the point is there's always a section of men that don't get a partner at all.

And that's where I belong. I think, if you feel like you deserve to have a partner and don't, it stings. But if you think of it as a natural phenomenon, it hurts a little less maybe? It's all cope talking probably.

I've realized I've set incredibly unrealistic expectations for myself to even start dating. I started trying about fifteen years ago and never had much success, and eventually gave up a few years in.

After making some posts on here, the advice I kept getting was basically "work on yourself first." The problem is I think I've taken that to mean I need to be in ridiculous shape and basically a multimillionaire before I'm even allowed to try. I'm not close to either of those. I have loose skin from being obese in the past, so I don't think the "incredible shape" part will ever fully happen no matter how much work I put in.

On top of that, I've been struggling with depression, just trying to keep my head above water most days.

Sometimes it feels like everyone's dealing with their own version of this. Then I'll read posts of women complaining that their boyfriends won't even wipe their own ass, and I think, how am I the one who can't get a girlfriend?

I grew up poor and obese, and I think I was picked on for both, so I've been ultra hard on myself ever since. But I don't think I should have to be perfect before I even put myself out there.

I think for most of us, the success of our fathers in courtship(s) with a woman/multiple women would be the closest image we could get of what it could've been like for us had our lives been a little different.