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newnumber6So in that last 'ask me to post something about something I don't normally write about' meme, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
80sfiend asked me to write about my romantic life. Not something I generally feel comfortably writing about indeed. The meme did say to push me outside of my comfort zone, so I suppose I have to.
Warning. Behind the cut lies the type of self-reflexive self-pitying whining I try not to engage in anymore. My only defense to posting it now is that it _was_ asked for. Still, I recommend not reading it. There's nothing in here worth reading. Nothing here I really would _want_ people to read, all told.
The fact is, there's really not much to speak of. I have, in my life, been on a few occasions that might be called dates, although often only if one were feeling charitable.
I have had many crushes, unrequited love that the other party was in most cases probably completely unaware of.
I have never, ever, had anyone I could call a girlfriend, nor anyone I think would call me a boyfriend.
The closest I've come to one was probably a girl I knew online who I talked to on a regular basis. We eventually moved to phone conversations where we seemed to click and even arranged a meeting to go see a movie. It did not work well. Nothing actively bad happened, but there was no chemistry in person, and I felt relief when I could finally go, and after that point the friendship started a slow but steady drifting apart. The situation (and a few others similar though lesser in intensity) kicked the idea of trying to push an online relationship into an in-person one out of my head.
Next closest was a girl in high school. We were partners in a Bio class. We (by which I mean me, her, and someone else from our class) went to lunch together once in a while. She invited me to a movie once, but it was with a group of people so it was unclear to me if it was a date or just friends. I think in retrospect it might have been a date attempt, since I didn't really know the other people. There was another time she invited a couple of the group in Bio class to her house where there was a family party of some such going on. Alas, it happened on what must have been the coldest day of the year, and I both misjudged the distance to her place (having never been there before) and not having thought to bring busfare, not only wound up with frostbite but having to turn back as well because I wasn't sure if I passed it, it was way farther than I thought, or I was just lost completely. Anyway, I later managed to get another friend to broach the subject that I liked her because I was a coward, but the friend said that she didn't really believe it and wouldn't unless she heard it from me. No surprises here, big coward. Maybe I would have eventually worked up the nerve, but by next year we didn't have any classes in common.
And that's about the closest it's gotten. There were a couple isolated instances but none went better in terms of romance than the above.
Sad, isn't it? That's the closest I've gotten to a romantic life. And likely will be the closest I'll ever get. At this point I've pretty well completely given up on romance and just dealing with spending the rest of my life alone. Not even in the sense of "when you stop trying is exactly when something comes along" (that's a bunch of unmitigated crap), I mean just a bleak reality assessment of the situation. I have no romantic life, and I don't expect my life to ever change in that regard, no matter how much I might hope. So I don't hope. Hope is the soul-killer. Hope is the precipice overhanging total desolation.
Anyway, I live so much through my imagination already, so true love, like a spaceship or a zombie apocalypse, will be just one more thing I regularly imagine myself in without any expectation it'll ever happen. Well, at least I can even combine two types easily enough.
I guess I'm just not romance material. I'm not terribly attractive, stylish, funny, interesting, or ambitious. I'm not even mildly so, at first glance. I can't approach girls, and have nothing that makes me worthy of approach. Even for those who'd approach me (for casual conversation at least), I seem to have very little in common with them. To make matters worse, I'm probably picky, too. I say probably because there certainly aren't any offers for me to say for sure, but I don't see myself jumping at the chance _just_ because someone was interested in me, since I have to be interested in them too, and there are all sorts of potential dealbreakers (smoking, to pick an example off the top of my head, is something I don't think I could deal with in someone I was interested in dating). So it's sort of demanding improbability on top of impossibility, like finding a spaceship buried in the dirt and arming the self destruct because it doesn't have TARDIS like abilities too. Magic 8-Ball says, Outlook not so good.
As to the why? I think even beyond the overwhelming shyness that has marked most of my life and kept me isolated (and seems only to have gotten worse over the years), beyond the fact that I have very little to make me stand out from the crowd, I simply, for some reason, have trouble making connections to people. I can connect fairly lightly somewhat easily. I'm friendly with a lot of people, even if I don't share much of myself. But real friends are harder to come by. My best friends now and for quite a while are people I've never met. Previous best friends lasted only so long as we were in regular contact, and then quickly drifted into some strange nostalgic category where I think fondly of them from time to time, but don't actively miss. With romance, I can't even get out of the starting gate in person, and like I said, the experience related above has turned me off the possibility of finding some romantic relationship online, because it won't work unless it can transfer to reality, and I think that's my fundamental problem. I don't work well in reality. I can't think of things to say, never sure what to do. What thoughts I do have I feel like I can barely express without tripping over my words or speaking too fast. This is mostly true online as well, but at least here I don't look like an idiot when I'm staring and thinking about how to respond (or not even thinking, just sort of running on a bumbling autopilot), or notice when I revise what I'm saying (often many, many times) before it gets sent out. I can hide it, suppress it, online. In person, unless I'm extremely comfortable, I feel borderline completely inarticulate (while it may be an exaggeration in terms of fact, it is not an exaggeration of how I feel).
I suspect the lightness of my connection to people is at least partly defensive, and, while not conscious, at least on some level deliberate, that I sort of keep people at something of a distance to prevent myself from being hurt overly much when they inevitably leave or reject me (or I have to leave... I was a military brat growing up, moving regularly as my parents were posted to different places, so no doubt that shaped me a fair bit), but it's not something I feel I can control. The best I do is try to forge new light connections and hope that somehow they'll manage to grow into something stronger. Which works out okay sometimes for friendship (I have no idea how, but it somehow does), but it's never done me any good in romance.
So there is something wrong with me. It's the only logical explanation I can come up with. Even the worst human pieces of scum can usually find someone to connect to, even if it's only self-servingly. Everyone else seems to find communicating to people easy, whereas for me it's both a puzzle I can't solve and a frequent cause for fear. That's pretty well it. I am either a failure as a human being or an incomplete person, probably fundamentally missing something that is needed to get really close to other people.
And that is all anybody really needs to know to know about my romantic life, or to know why I don't post about it often. Not mentioning it helps me preserve some sort of attempt at (what I might hope is) quiet dignity (which I guess is mostly shattered on posting this), and of course helps me not to dwell on it, which gets depressing as hell.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go shoot myself now (figuratively speaking). Comments disabled because this isn't a plea for sympathy or anything just a straight assessment and answering the question.
80sfiend asked me to write about my romantic life. Not something I generally feel comfortably writing about indeed. The meme did say to push me outside of my comfort zone, so I suppose I have to.Warning. Behind the cut lies the type of self-reflexive self-pitying whining I try not to engage in anymore. My only defense to posting it now is that it _was_ asked for. Still, I recommend not reading it. There's nothing in here worth reading. Nothing here I really would _want_ people to read, all told.
The fact is, there's really not much to speak of. I have, in my life, been on a few occasions that might be called dates, although often only if one were feeling charitable.
I have had many crushes, unrequited love that the other party was in most cases probably completely unaware of.
I have never, ever, had anyone I could call a girlfriend, nor anyone I think would call me a boyfriend.
The closest I've come to one was probably a girl I knew online who I talked to on a regular basis. We eventually moved to phone conversations where we seemed to click and even arranged a meeting to go see a movie. It did not work well. Nothing actively bad happened, but there was no chemistry in person, and I felt relief when I could finally go, and after that point the friendship started a slow but steady drifting apart. The situation (and a few others similar though lesser in intensity) kicked the idea of trying to push an online relationship into an in-person one out of my head.
Next closest was a girl in high school. We were partners in a Bio class. We (by which I mean me, her, and someone else from our class) went to lunch together once in a while. She invited me to a movie once, but it was with a group of people so it was unclear to me if it was a date or just friends. I think in retrospect it might have been a date attempt, since I didn't really know the other people. There was another time she invited a couple of the group in Bio class to her house where there was a family party of some such going on. Alas, it happened on what must have been the coldest day of the year, and I both misjudged the distance to her place (having never been there before) and not having thought to bring busfare, not only wound up with frostbite but having to turn back as well because I wasn't sure if I passed it, it was way farther than I thought, or I was just lost completely. Anyway, I later managed to get another friend to broach the subject that I liked her because I was a coward, but the friend said that she didn't really believe it and wouldn't unless she heard it from me. No surprises here, big coward. Maybe I would have eventually worked up the nerve, but by next year we didn't have any classes in common.
And that's about the closest it's gotten. There were a couple isolated instances but none went better in terms of romance than the above.
Sad, isn't it? That's the closest I've gotten to a romantic life. And likely will be the closest I'll ever get. At this point I've pretty well completely given up on romance and just dealing with spending the rest of my life alone. Not even in the sense of "when you stop trying is exactly when something comes along" (that's a bunch of unmitigated crap), I mean just a bleak reality assessment of the situation. I have no romantic life, and I don't expect my life to ever change in that regard, no matter how much I might hope. So I don't hope. Hope is the soul-killer. Hope is the precipice overhanging total desolation.
Anyway, I live so much through my imagination already, so true love, like a spaceship or a zombie apocalypse, will be just one more thing I regularly imagine myself in without any expectation it'll ever happen. Well, at least I can even combine two types easily enough.
I guess I'm just not romance material. I'm not terribly attractive, stylish, funny, interesting, or ambitious. I'm not even mildly so, at first glance. I can't approach girls, and have nothing that makes me worthy of approach. Even for those who'd approach me (for casual conversation at least), I seem to have very little in common with them. To make matters worse, I'm probably picky, too. I say probably because there certainly aren't any offers for me to say for sure, but I don't see myself jumping at the chance _just_ because someone was interested in me, since I have to be interested in them too, and there are all sorts of potential dealbreakers (smoking, to pick an example off the top of my head, is something I don't think I could deal with in someone I was interested in dating). So it's sort of demanding improbability on top of impossibility, like finding a spaceship buried in the dirt and arming the self destruct because it doesn't have TARDIS like abilities too. Magic 8-Ball says, Outlook not so good.
As to the why? I think even beyond the overwhelming shyness that has marked most of my life and kept me isolated (and seems only to have gotten worse over the years), beyond the fact that I have very little to make me stand out from the crowd, I simply, for some reason, have trouble making connections to people. I can connect fairly lightly somewhat easily. I'm friendly with a lot of people, even if I don't share much of myself. But real friends are harder to come by. My best friends now and for quite a while are people I've never met. Previous best friends lasted only so long as we were in regular contact, and then quickly drifted into some strange nostalgic category where I think fondly of them from time to time, but don't actively miss. With romance, I can't even get out of the starting gate in person, and like I said, the experience related above has turned me off the possibility of finding some romantic relationship online, because it won't work unless it can transfer to reality, and I think that's my fundamental problem. I don't work well in reality. I can't think of things to say, never sure what to do. What thoughts I do have I feel like I can barely express without tripping over my words or speaking too fast. This is mostly true online as well, but at least here I don't look like an idiot when I'm staring and thinking about how to respond (or not even thinking, just sort of running on a bumbling autopilot), or notice when I revise what I'm saying (often many, many times) before it gets sent out. I can hide it, suppress it, online. In person, unless I'm extremely comfortable, I feel borderline completely inarticulate (while it may be an exaggeration in terms of fact, it is not an exaggeration of how I feel).
I suspect the lightness of my connection to people is at least partly defensive, and, while not conscious, at least on some level deliberate, that I sort of keep people at something of a distance to prevent myself from being hurt overly much when they inevitably leave or reject me (or I have to leave... I was a military brat growing up, moving regularly as my parents were posted to different places, so no doubt that shaped me a fair bit), but it's not something I feel I can control. The best I do is try to forge new light connections and hope that somehow they'll manage to grow into something stronger. Which works out okay sometimes for friendship (I have no idea how, but it somehow does), but it's never done me any good in romance.
So there is something wrong with me. It's the only logical explanation I can come up with. Even the worst human pieces of scum can usually find someone to connect to, even if it's only self-servingly. Everyone else seems to find communicating to people easy, whereas for me it's both a puzzle I can't solve and a frequent cause for fear. That's pretty well it. I am either a failure as a human being or an incomplete person, probably fundamentally missing something that is needed to get really close to other people.
And that is all anybody really needs to know to know about my romantic life, or to know why I don't post about it often. Not mentioning it helps me preserve some sort of attempt at (what I might hope is) quiet dignity (which I guess is mostly shattered on posting this), and of course helps me not to dwell on it, which gets depressing as hell.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go shoot myself now (figuratively speaking). Comments disabled because this isn't a plea for sympathy or anything just a straight assessment and answering the question.
