whine
whenever i see people talk about dating in public / online, i get demoralized because it quickly becomes clear that they live in a totally different universe where the things i find difficult are easy
"so i've decided to stop dating for a while"
oh gee, see, i've been trying to start for years
"everybody i met just wasn't right for me"
you even *met* people?!
re: whine
i hate how the only people who can relate to my dating problems seem to all be giant shitheads.
i can't take their advice, because their advice is to be a giant shithead, and i'd rather be single.
but also, people assume that anybody with this set of problems *is* a giant shithead.
so i start to wonder -- am i a giant shithead in a way that everybody else is aware of but only i am unaware of? it has happened before.
re: whine
@enkiv2 It's a black hole out there. I'm not in this market so I feel that I can objectively say that I've never seen a social process grind up so many people and leave them feeling so worthless. I know a guy who's a handsome 6'4" doctor with ethics and money and lots of chill, and he endured 2 years of touch-starvation.
It honestly reminds me of the Great Recession, when I saw a lot of really smart, capable people denied the earliest opportunities to develop due to trivialities.
re: whine
There doesn't seem to be a path forward, unfortunately. That's the killer.
It also doesn't appear to be new, per-se. It seems like social changes have changed the distribution of who gets to just fuckin' die alone, but its the result of mostly completely justified heuristics about how to avoid very real risks.
But like -- until shitty dudes stop being a horrible widespread problem, the only ethical thing for me to do is accept that nobody wants to take the risk to get to know me. (That and minimize the amount of time anybody feels obligated to be around me.) That's really demoralizing -- eating some other dude's bad karma just because you resemble him in minor ways.
re: whine
@enkiv2 There's ultimate causes and then there's proximate causes, you know? Leave the ultimate and satisfy yourself with the proximate -- that's my advice.
re: whine
i'm not going to do that if it's going to make the ultimate cause worse, though. and it's pretty hard to think of something that won't.
re: whine
@enkiv2 Like, my best friend went from being someone who was outrageous, adventurous, and curious into a shell of his old self -- alcoholic, self-harming, and suicidal. It's that fucking bad. And if you want to talk about it as a social issue, you're on a fast track to get lumped in with some of the worst people on the internet.