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Dear Doctor,
I am a 35 year old man living in a Western country who has never been in a relationship. I haven’t even gotten as far as a first date or kissing a woman, which as I’m sure you can imagine is rather frustrating. English is not my first language so I hope this post is coherent.
To start with, I’m on the Autism spectrum, diagnosed when I was a kid. This has of course impacted my dating attempts, since when meeting new people it’s difficult enough for me to figure out if the person I’m talking to is genuinely interested in talking with me instead of just being polite, never mind potential attraction.
Frustratingly finding advice online other than your website has been a complete nonstarter. I don’t take online (like reddit) dating discussions seriously, especially those involving nerds, but if I did I would probably have concluded that giving up hope forever and chemical castration was the only solution.
It’s not just the negativity that was frustrating, it’s that none of the scenarios and talks I could find were relevant to my situation. They all start with the people involved not even being capable of talking with and befriending women, which is not my problem. Ever since I finally started getting real friends at age 16 when I started in my country’s equivalent of High School, at least half of my friends have been girls/women. Sure, I made plenty of mistakes that make me facepalm when I remember them, considering that I’m pretty sure I did the social development other people do age 8-16 when I was age 16-24, but I feel like I more or less caught up at 30 in many things.
I am satisfied appearance-wise. I work out occasionally, I pay attention to my grooming and bring people with fashion sense as advisers when I buy clothes. I have found a very good barber, and whenever I have visited there, people afterwards compliment me on my beard. I am of average height, but I have the aforementioned beard, military-short hair, upper arm tattoos, broad shoulders and chest. I keep this in mind when meeting new people, and thankfully I do not come across as intimidating according to feedback.
It’s the flirting that’s one of the problems. When I go to social events and relax I can be a real chatty social butterfly. My biggest social fear is pulling the classic Autism error of babbling on and on about something I like without noticing that the other person has had enough, but according to feedback I’ve gotten much better at controlling that as well as really listening to and engaging with other people instead of just monologuing.
So when I socialize I am not scared of talking with women, since I know for a fact that many women like talking with me and wanted to be friends with me after we got to know each other. But flirting…I don’t have the faintest clue how to cause the “phwoar” reaction, as you once put it, when I meet someone who makes my heart beat faster. I don’t think I have the problem of being bland and boring, like you put it in your article about why being a nice guy is not enough. People laugh at my jokes, and they say I’ve got a great sense of humour. It’s not the kind of self-deprecating humour that hints at low self-confidence either. The other day a friend told me he thought I was charismatic. Yes, I have confidence issues sometimes, but they usually pop up before or after social events. I don’t think I give off a desperate or depressed vibe. I also stand up for myself and am clear with my boundaries, so I don’t think I have the “doormat vibe” problem either. A friend actually called me what I believe translates to “pure” in English once. Upon seeing my baffled expression she laughed and explained that it was because she considered me very straightforward and sincere.
But yeah, flirting I cannot get the hang of. I think it has to do with several incidents back when I was learning to socialize where girls thought I was flirting while I was just trying to be polite and friendly. I read tips on how to flirt, and it makes me shudder. I have read a whole bunch of articles, including yours, with lists of signs that a woman is into you romantically, and I have even in hindsight never noticed a single one. My friends have also never told me that they think someone likes me and that I should go talk with that person.
On the occasions when I’ve fallen for someone who’s already a friend and single and I thought there might be something there I’ve let them know, but I’ve been turned down every time. I was actually shocked years ago when my sister told me lots of relationships begin with friendships, because I’d started believing that once you’re friends with someone the odds of them ever seeing you in a romantic light was a perfect zero.
An additional wrinkle is that I have a disability pension. Even the stingy bureaucrats in my country concluded that finding full time employment (and believe me I tried hard for years) was impossible for me. Despite good advice on the subject from family and my coach and my therapist I can’t shake the feeling that that kills any romantic interest women might feel for me. (He’s autistic and he can’t even handle work? Ew!) I know it’s not rational but it’s what the metaphorical bastard goblin on my shoulder keeps whispering in my ear, the fucker.
On reason I thought it was time to ask your advice is that I’ve noticed an alarming trend. I’ve started becoming bitter and sad when I think about romance. When I go to the park or beach on my own (if I’m with friends it doesn’t happen thankfully) the happy couples and women in summer clothes sometimes make me feel miserable. Sometimes it even hits me when I read a book or play a game featuring couples. I don’t want to feel like this, but in the 22 years since I became interested in girls I’ve faceplanted every single time I got a crush and acted on it, and the mental bruises have been adding up. I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when my best friend found out I’d started liking her that way (I knew she didn’t think of me in that way at all so I’d been trying to strangle those feelings, but apparently not well enough for her not to notice), and it made things awkward between us for a while. Thankfully we’ve sorted it out and our friendship is strong again, but after that something said “click” in my head and for a while I actually wished I didn’t feel any sexual or romantic attraction. It’s never brought me anything good in my life, only frustration, stress and problems with friendships.
Another thing that’s eating at me is that every single one of my family members and friends my age and older (and increasing numbers of the younger ones) are in a relationship or have at least been in the past. I organized a huge family reunion and it was great, but afterwards it struck me that I was the only member of my generation present who didn’t have a partner. I know it’s not healthy to compare oneself too much with others but in this case it feels impossible not to since I’m The Exception. My mom has gently tried to prepare me for the possibility that maybe I won’t find someone, and that that’s ok. I know she means well but it just makes me feel like shit, like I have no sex appeal or romantic appeal, like I’m…hmm, metaphorically castrated is probably the most accurate way to describe it in English. I know that with billions of women out there it’s logically next to impossible that not a single one would find me attractive in real life, but I have never seen any evidence to support that idea.
To be honest it feels like I’ve hit a dead end. Dating apps don’t work. I’ve speed dated a number of times, enjoyed it every time, and got no further dates from any of them. None of my hobbies or courses or social events or volunteer work where I meet people have led to anything. None of my friends have ever tried to set me up on a date with someone they know (and yes, I’ve asked if they know someone they think might fit with me). You wrote once that “In fact, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that having amazing women as platonic friends is critical to having romantic success.” This has never been true for me. Amazing women as friends? Yes. Meeting women via them who might be interested in me? Nope.
Just about the only thing I haven’t tried are cold approaches in bars and clubs, but from your articles I’ve been given to understand that those almost never work.
Tldr: The evidence indicates I’ve got plenty of friend appeal, for which I am thankful (especially considering all those articles I keep coming across about a loneliness epidemic), but it also indicates I have zero sex/romance appeal, which is increasingly bothering me.
No Idea What To Do Anymore
As odd as this is about to sound, I’m actually glad you wrote in, NWTDA. You’re a good example of someone who’s doing a lot of things right and is still struggling for reasons that they can’t quite put their finger on. This is a situation that a lot of folks find themselves in and feel like it ultimately means there’s no hope for them… and so they never look any further. So your writing in to ask for help is invaluable, for you and for others who are in a similar situation as yours.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the answers easy or quick to implement. But there are answers… and they require looking inward, more than outward.
Let’s start with the bitterness you’re starting to experience. First, I’m glad that you’ve recognized this as a problem; it absolutely is. But it’s also something of a sign of where the issues are – that bitterness is really envy, looking around at all these couples and wondering what they’ve got that you don’t that they can find relationships and you can’t. The sting is less about their relationships but the x-factor that they seem to have that you don’t, combined with the understandable frustration you’ve been feeling. Recognizing it for what it is makes it a little easier to actually address it; you want to figure out what you’re supposedly missing and how to find it or develop it and you fear that you’re just deficient. And I suspect that some of this comes from how you feel about being autistic.
To be honest, that’s actually not far off from the issue. Not that you’re autistic but the way that the fact that you’re autistic makes you feel about yourself. It’s like that little goblin you mention, dripping poison in your ear – you have a hard time believing in your own desirability. After all, you’re autistic, you’re on disability, you’ve faced nothing but rejection… how could anyone be into you?
Well, here’s a better question for you: would you recognize it if someone were interested in you? Not “would you recognize the signs” – that’s a different question entirely – but would you recognize that it was even a possibility that they were attracted to you? Would you be able to accept that these were their true and authentic feelings, or would you be sure that it was a mistake of some kind? Would you be able to believe that it wasn’t a trick or a con, or another situation where you were about to make a fool of yourself?
Just between you, me and everyone reading this… my guess would be “no”. And therein lies the problem. In order to see it in the first place, you have to believe it. If you don’t believe it’s possible, then you’re never going to going to see it because you will always give more credence to the things that say it’s not real. This is confirmation bias in action; you give more credence and importance to the things that confirm what you already believe, and dismiss the things that run against those beliefs as wrong, mistaken, inaccurate or that they don’t apply to you.
This isn’t something unique to you; everybody experiences confirmation bias. It’s part of the human condition, and it’s why it can be hard to shift self-limiting beliefs. And when you aren’t consciously aware of it, it’s absurdly resistant to evidence.
To give a personal example: I remember having a conversation with a good friend of mine, a while after I left the pick-up scene, where I was questioning whether I actually had any skill with women at all or if it was all just dumb luck and coincidence – the sort of thing that any idiot could manage. She looked at me for a second and just said “… remind me, how many people are you dating right now?”
“Four, but that’s not the point!”
I will give her credit: she didn’t roll her eyes at me nearly as hard as she could have.
But the thing is, that’s precisely why confirmation bias can be so perverse. It makes you discount even the most glaringly obvious counterpoints because you can’t fully accept them. This is in no small part because confirmation bias is a form of self-preservation. We are very protective of our self-identity and resist things that challenge our concept of ourselves because we find them threatening. It doesn’t matter if our self-concept is negative or harmful to us; it’s still what’s known. It’s familiar. It may suck, but it’s a suck that you know and the possibility of giving that up can be pants-shittingly terrifying because… well, it challenges everything we’ve ever believed. If that’s wrong, what else are we wrong about? What does it say about everything we’ve done, everything we’ve chosen, every decision we’ve made?
This is why it’s easier, in some ways, to believe that you’re hopeless and helpless. After all, that means it’s all out of your hands. Nothing to be done; the universe has rolled the dice and you came up snake-eyes. Sucks to be you… but it still absolves you of responsibility – not just for your past decisions, but of responsibility of making decisions that would change your future.
Because if it’s not the case that you’ve been fucked by the fickle finger of fate, that would imply that it’s your fault. That you’re failing because you fucked up somehow. That’s… kinda horrifying, actually. It’s humiliating, even, on a level that makes you cringe all the way down to your mitochondria.
Or at least it is until you change your mind. What if, instead of looking at your share of responsibility for your situation and saying “this is why I suck”, you were a little kinder to yourself? What if you said “OK, I’ve made mistakes before, but I was making the best decisions I could with the information I had at the time. Now I know differently, so I’ll make different choices.”
One of those choices is to start changing how you think about yourself. You mention that you don’t know how to inspire that “phwoar” feeling in others. Well, a big part of the reason why you can’t is that you don’t feel it in yourself. Look at the ways you describe yourself. You talk about your positive qualities, but you do it in a way that’s less “Jean Claude Van DAMN I’m hot” and more “I’m ok, I guess,” which is precisely the issue. There’s a reason why nobody markets products with “Enh, it doesn’t completely suck” or “Look, we understand if you don’t like it, we’re not really crazy about it either.”
This is precisely the sort of thing when I say you need to change your beliefs to see what you want to see. You have to be your first and biggest fan and number one hype man. If you don’t see it, don’t feel it, you’re not going to be able to convey it.
Now I know the all the arguments; how could you believe it if nobody ever validated it first? Well… because that’s not where belief and true confidence comes from. Confidence doesn’t come out of success or external validation; confidence comes out of belief. If you have to rely on other people to feel confident or to feel valuable or attractive, you never truly feel it. You feel it only as long as other people say it’s so… which means that you always have that voice in the back of your mind telling you that this could all go away, that it’s not real. Your confidence and self-worth become entirely dependent on the opinions of others, which means that other people can take it from you at any time. So you will always be on the lookout for the first person to come along and yank it all away. One negative comment or experience and it all comes tumbling down like you pulled the wrong stick in Jenga.
And I’m sure you’ve seen people who are less than conventionally attractive who seem to punch outside their weight class. Hell, my favorite example of “dude who, by all rights, should not have gotten as much ass as he did” looks like a frog dipped in nicotine – like his mom spent just a little too much time around Innsmouth when she met his father. And yet he got more strange ass than a guy in a mutant donkey auction with a stolen credit card. Why? Well, in no small part because he believed in his own value, his own fuckability and this informed the level of swagger he had. You could say it’s delusional or due to other factors – Gainsbourg was a famous director, actor and musician after all. But those, too, were ephemeral; fame is fleeting and disappears like lit match in a hurricane. None of it could exist if the inherent belief in himself wasn’t there in the first place.
Right now, you don’t believe in your own desirability or the possibility that someone could see you as a worthwhile partner. You don’t believe that someone could love you, lust for you, desire you the way that you desire them. You have to shift that mindset.
So part of what you need to do is to stop being down on yourself or listing all your qualities as though the ones you like least outweigh the good ones. You need to start being the first person to hype yourself up to yourself, the Flavor Flav to your Chuck D. Embrace your inner Stan Lee and become an irrepressible hype man, talking about how amazing you are to yourself, along with a little Gomez Addams and living life with irrepressible joy and sincerity. Yeah, it may mean going a little (or a lot) over the top but ask yourself: if you don’t go over the top, how do you ever see what’s on the other side?
More seriously: hyping yourself up and talking yourself up to yourself is a form of practice. You’re practicing believing in yourself and your desirability. It’s over the top, sure, but it’s the same sort of “no, but seriously” as self-deprecating humor; it may be a joke, and you may be exaggerating it but there’s a kernel of truth at its core.
Now does that mean you go around to women explaining that you’re the hottest thing since World War III? No… but if you can believe it, you can convey it when you talk, flirt and banter with them. After all, flirting is a form of mutual play, a way of convincing someone to do something they already want to do and to have fun with you. People are going to have more fun if you believe you’re fun. People are going to believe in your own desirability if you believe it – shit, people think Donald Trump is actually a successful businessman, why don’t you think “intimate” could be your middle name?
You already know people like you and like spending time with you. You’ve got the foundation to build from. Now you just need to, yknow. Build. So hack your confirmation bias – after all, if you just reinforce what you believe, you may as well believe in something that helps you. Practice believing that you’ve got swagger for days, that you’re what Prince was singing about when he wrote “Sexy Motherfucker”. Let it suffuse your entire being. You may be faking it at first, but before too long you’ll start to live it.
Once you start to feel it, truly believe it, it’ll become real. You’ll be able to help other people feel it. And that’s whebn you’re going to start noticing how other people’s attitudes towards you are changing from “he’s nice” to “niiiiiiiiice”.
Good luck.
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