Dating when you're a depressed shut-in & neet aspie...?

[BinkanSalaryman]

Should I even seek for a relationship in such a horrible state? My sister once told me relationship tend to develop best when personal issues are lowest and I think there is a lot of truth to it. On the other hand it might exactly be what I need to find out of misery, dividing pain by sharing secrets and finding a personal shelter, finding a major motivation to keep living life.

If so, what platform could possibly help me find female beings, roughly near my location, sharing interests and while having trouble with life? That's a lot of filters where usual dating websites are really useless. I don't really care about the looks, so the usual swipe-left/right model is no help either. I tried OKCupid for a while which looked like a solution but I got me no real results in the end. Maybe people like me are too shy too and/or face similar problems.

Also please don't tell me to visit a doctor or something. They don't even try pretending to listen to your problems, right before pointing to another institution. I tried getting help before, and every time it was just felt useless or just hurt myself, worsening the situation. I'm glad I still have my grandparents alive actually caring for me when my parents never were there for me since I was born.

Thanks for taking your time.

 

[Au Naturel]

That is painful. Your sister is right. And don't ever think that an app is going to find you love. You get that by living life and meeting people, even if that is often painful. (A job will help.)

I don't know how old you are. The first great love of my life happened when I was 18, a 27 y.o. artist at the same college I was attending. Passionate and caring for a few months but didn't work out for the long term. I was needy, she was super nurturing but I didn't need a new mother, I needed a full-blooded lover.

My next serious relationship was 9 years later. (That is a long wait.) I was 27, she was 26. We were in the military together, in tech school, which is a commonplace for brief, intense, relationships to form. She was brilliant. Well read and literate. A deep thinker, and a singer. Fell in love, went wild for 6 months, got engaged but she backed out of it. I never forgave myself for not being good enough to keep her.

Somewhere along the way, there was a lovely boy who was a hairdresser. I definitely felt strong affection for him. But I'm too heterosexual for that to last long.

Three years later I met the woman who I eventually married. That has been a really rough road on occasion but 33 1/3 years later we're together still.

So up until my 30s, I had exactly 3.5 relationships that involved what I thought of as love. All of them were entirely random chance. A different roll of the dice and maybe no lasting relationships. I have no idea if I got lucky or if I ought to have had more.

Parents were never close nor supportive. No girlfriends all until I was a senior in high school and then it was just a sophomore looking for a senior prom date. Broke up over the summer. After that, infrequent one night stands between very rare close relationships. I was a very sexual being, so along the way, there was lots of masturbation and perhaps a lot of risky behavior with drugs to enhance the feeling.

Relationships do not "fix" anything if you aren't ready. Even then, they just give you something better to think about than yourself. They didn't make me less autistic or less ADD, though they helped with the depression. (It is still waiting in the wings for an opportunity to reclaim center stage.) They expanded my world to include other things that kept me focused outside of myself.

I had to be able to get on without any close relationship for most of the first half my life. It can be done. You have to accept yourself as being viable on your own. You have to accept your unfulfilled desire as being perfectly cool. What you do to keep the demons down are affirmations of life and not failures. You do not need to love yourself but you do need to accept yourself and not wallow in regret for what you are not.

And then, if you are open to it, you might run into the one in a thousand woman who is the right fit for you. If you don't, life is still good enough.