Tried to give up but I just can’t

[Tired]

yeah, i remember reading somewhere: "you don’t get love as a reward for existing".

thats definetley true for guys, men, but for women, they are guaranteed it for just existing.

This isn't true, because you confuse attention with love from what I understand.

If women were guaranteed love for simply existing: there would be no abused women, no neglected daughters, women would not find themselves trapped in violent relationships because they are afraid of being alone (or afraid to leave because they can be punished for that), older women would not be abandoned by their partners and families, disabled, mentally ill, or unattractive women would not be completely invisible. Many women suffer from loneliness, sadness, eating disorders or low self-worth.

Just because someone craves you sexually, stares at you, or finds you useful doesn't mean you're loved, respected or cared for... Women are not unconditionally loved. Many women get a lot of attention while being unsafe, unheard, dismissed or disposable. When there is no love, attention becomes a huge risk and it is extremely scary.

I do understand why this belief feels comforting. It turns male loneliness into a story where someone else is unfairly advantaged, instead of something complex and painful that doesn't have an easy villain.
It is not wrong for men to talk about being lonely and many of you do suffer a lot. But pointing fingers at women while pretending they're "guaranteed love" doesn't help anyone.

 

[Tired]

This thread got hijacked.

I am wishing you luck pursuing a romantic relationship, Markness, hope you find your other half one day. Just never give up! We have a saying on Russian which means something like "the water doesn't flow under the lying stone," so continue doing whatever you can to get out there, meet new people.
One day it will all be worth it!

 

[Wizardry]

This isn't true, because you confuse attention with love from what I understand.

If women were guaranteed love for simply existing: there would be no abused women, no neglected daughters, women would not find themselves trapped in violent relationships because they are afraid of being alone (or afraid to leave because they can be punished for that), older women would not be abandoned by their partners and families, disabled, mentally ill, or unattractive women would not be completely invisible. Many women suffer from loneliness, sadness, eating disorders or low self-worth.

Just because someone craves you sexually, stares at you, or finds you useful doesn't mean you're loved, respected or cared for... Women are not unconditionally loved. Many women get a lot of attention while being unsafe, unheard, dismissed or disposable. When there is no love, attention becomes a huge risk and it is extremely scary.

I do understand why this belief feels comforting. It turns male loneliness into a story where someone else is unfairly advantaged, instead of something complex and painful that doesn't have an easy villain.
It is not wrong for men to talk about being lonely and many of you do suffer a lot. But pointing fingers at women while pretending they're "guaranteed love" doesn't help anyone.

I think what he's getting at (though admittedly crudely) is that there are structural barriers that can block a subset of men from ever being able to enter the dating market at all during their whole lives, where fewer women experience comparable barriers. Specifically, the male dating role demands social and non-verbal skills that are commonly deficient in autistic individuals, and as such, autistic men are disproportionately represented in the group that seldom or never get to date at all despite wanting to. A life-long inability to enter the dating market isn't the only kind of dating problem a person can experience, but other potential dating problems are downstream from being included in the dating market in the first place.

 

[Tired]

I think what he's getting at (though admittedly crudely) is that there are structural barriers that can block a subset of men from ever being able to enter the dating market at all during their whole lives, where fewer women experience comparable barriers. Specifically, the male dating role demands social and non-verbal skills that are commonly deficient in autistic individuals, and as such, autistic men are disproportionately represented in the group that seldom or never get to date at all despite wanting to. A life-long inability to enter the dating market isn't the only kind of dating problem a person can experience, but other potential dating problems are downstream from being included in the dating market in the first place.

I think the disagreement here comes from what we mean by "access." Yes, more women are included in the dating market in the sense that they receive attention or offers. But inclusion alone doesn't determine outcomes and whether that attention moves into safety, care and love.

For many women it doesn't. Access to the dating market has not protected women from lifelong loneliness, abusive relationships and being discarded as they age or become disabled. So while some men have a close door in front of them, many women can open the door and enter the room, only to find that the room itself is hostile.

Both genders end up being about not getting real love - it just happens differently.

And if we're specifically talking about neurodivergence... The world doesn't accommodate ND people well, regardless of gender. There are no opposing realities. There are different consequences of the same stupid gender norms and ableist expectations.

Acknowledging one does not require denying the other. And saying "women have it easy" just isn't true.

That's all I have to say in this thread.

 

[Matthias]

There are more men who have never dated or had romantic relationships than women, though women who haven't dated or had romantic relationships certainly exist as well. What this likely implies is not that women are dating multiple men at one time, but say that the amount of heterosexual men who have dated and had relationships is 90% and the amount of heterosexual women in the same position is 97%, all of those 97% of women dated somebody in that pool of 90% of men when they did date.

There may be a roughly even number of single men and single women at any given time, but that doesn't mean that there's an even number of men and women who have never dated at all.

I agree but I think it still means there is someone for everyone. If 90% of men can get a date, women aren't the problem. It seems there has to be something wrong with the 10% of men who can't get a date. If they can identify what's wrong and fix it, they should be able to get a date.

 

[cooljethro]

Humans invented drugs that help with this decades ago. SSRIs, a common class of anti-depressants that affect serotonin levels in the brain, can kill or greatly reduce sex drive and help people feel calmer and more content being alone. Some people who take these drugs lose interest in relationships because they no longer need them to cope with the distressing emotions they used to experience when they were alone.

While drugs, such as SSRIs, help in the short-term, it's not healthy to avoid people over the long-term because you'll miss out on the numerous benefits good relationships provide. It's kind of like taking drugs to suppress hunger caused by a lack of food. You'll feel better (less or no hunger) but suffer from a lack of nutrients and calories that eating more food would provide, which would adversely affect your health.

Fortunately, if you're not ready for a relationship, there are therapists that can help you improve your character and mental health to help prepare you for a relationship (make you relationship material) or help you find others who are in a similar situation as yourself.

SSRI's were never intended to kill sex drive. This is an unwanted side effect of this type of drug, both from the perspective of the user of such drugs and also the businesses that profit from these drugs. There is nothing like "this class of drugs lowers your sexual drive" to put a person off of taking something like that for their intended use - depression or anxiety or both - and sometimes OCD and thus, hurt the amount of people who might use them and in turn, lower pharmaceutical profits.

SSRI's don't stop people feeling lonely. Their usage might reduce the need for other people, in that a person with a lower sexual drive might not need a relationship as much, but that is something different than an SSRI directly stopping a person from feeling lonely.

 

[Wizardry]

I agree but I think it still means there is someone for everyone. If 90% of men can get a date, women aren't the problem. It seems there has to be something wrong with the 10% of men who can't get a date. If they can identify what's wrong and fix it, they should be able to get a date.

The notion that there's either something wrong with the women who aren't dating those 10% of men, or that there must be some personal failing with the 10% of men themselves is a false dichotomy.

Like I mentioned in another post, structural disadvantages regarding even being able to enter the dating market at all disproportionately affect men, specifically due to gendered dating expectations. The most obvious example of this is with autistic men, where there is a mismatch between social skills and non-verbal cue difficulties, and the skills required to decode subtle interest, pursue and escalate dating. Obviously not every autistic man is unable to start dating, but autistic men are disproportionately represented in the group who want to start dating but are never able to precisely because there is a mismatch between the social disability that is autism and the skills required to succeed in the male dating role. Even autistic men who do start dating tend to do so later and have fewer partners throughout their lives than allistic men. As autism is a social disability, autistic women can be negatively affected in dating as well, but the female dating role doesn't demand as strong social skills to even get their foot in the door as the male dating role does.

Another example of structural disadvantage is fatherlessness for boys, lack of a male role-model and lack of relationship role-models. Most people inherit dating scripts without even realising it through their role-models and relationship role-models during childhood and adolescence. Those figures are meant to teach children and teens implicitly and explicitly about romantic relationships. When people (and especially boys given the demands of the male dating role) lack these role-models, guidance figures, and reliable sources of relationship advice, they're left to fend for themselves in the domain of romance. Not everybody can figure it out for themselves like that, and this is especially true in cases where both autism and role-model absence intersect with one-another. We acknowledge structural disadvantage in economics, ethnicity, disability, and women's issues, but acknowledging structural disadvantage as it relates to dating makes people uncomfortable. Even the most intersectional leftist tends to default to a bootstraps mentality for romantically disenfranchised, structurally disadvantaged men.

This is before we even talk about expectancy collapse in life-long singles and late-entry friction that make it even harder for late-blooming men to enter the dating market.

Expectancy collapse refers to the perceived unlikelihood of romantic success based on experiential evidence. It is a prerequisite for experiencing a grief state in response to permanent romantic absence (if you feel like you can get a relationship if you tried, a grief state doesn't make sense). Expectancy collapse makes it so that even when there are romantic opportunities, they're more likely to be doubted as real, and floundered due to inexperience even if they are recognised. People who date and have relationships don't tend to have an experiential reference point to truly understand what expectancy collapse feels like.

Late-entry friction refers to the friction that occurs when one tries to enter the dating market later than the expected time. Heterosexual men are especially penalised for this, with a non-trivial amount of women finding romantic inexperience years into adulthood to be a red flag or deal-breaker. This is another structural barrier that can perpetuate the problem.

I'm absolutely not saying that entitlement or coerced relationships are the answer, because they're categorically not, nor am I saying that there is anything wrong with women's choices as it relates to who they date, but framing dating failure for men as necessarily a personal shortcoming harms men who have already been harmed enough by structural disadvantage. Everybody who wants love should try to be a romantic partner worth dating, but sometimes that's necessary but not sufficient on its own.

 

[Hypnalis]

I agree but I think it still means there is someone for everyone. If 90% of men can get a date, women aren't the problem.

The traditional response to that is: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

You need to start from accurate data if you want to draw a valid conclusion.

If 90% of men can get a date, women aren't the problem. It seems there has to be something wrong with the 10% of men who can't get a date. If they can identify what's wrong and fix it, they should be able to get a date.

None of that is valid. (except the first "If"

BTW even if the 90% was meaningful, you still can't draw a conclusion.

Some people have less than ten dates in their entire lives (i.e. 0 to 9).
Some can have as many as they have time for, and in these strange times there's a small minority who can achieve that over quite long time periods without ever dating the same person twice. That's only possible because of dating apps OFC, otherwise it would take too much effort to find new partners.

Regardless of the outliers, if you really want to draw some conclusions you need to get data by useful intervals, and you need to address the fact that the process is neither random nor evenly distributed.
And as I already indicated elsewhere, you need to nail down the specific people that are relevant to the discussion.
e.g. exclude people in LTRs.

Bur wait .... the data for XX's in LTRs isn't consistent with the data for XY's in LTRs.
It's affected a bit by hypergamy, but it looks like a lot of men in the 18-29 age range are opting out of "non-OTS dating" and relationships, and a lot of women are sharing men, but think they're in a relationship - i.e there are many "side chicks" who think they're in a committed LTR.

This is a natural result of hypergamy and unreasonable expectations. It's definitely funny that that's predominantly XX behavior, but it's not fair to blame the individuals whose collective behavior drives this mess,

It's just a consequence of behavior that makes sense on a small scale, but not on a large scale.
This is a way to think about it (it's the first thing Economists think of, and it's close enough).
Externality - Wikipedia

 

[thejuice]

Like most things in society, relationships work on the Pareto Principle, which observes that wealth, resources and advantages are funneled upwards to the haves and away from the have nots.

In the relationship context, think of all the Kings and Queens, their legitimate partner and the accumulation of low status concubines behind the curtain. They send poor, single men to die in war on their behalf to hoarde more spoils like women, slaves, treasure and territory.

The poor dying en masse solves the risk of an uprising of cranky, frustrated, disenfranchised men that may have otherwise lived to question the inequality of society. Those that survive might have a chance at starting families and those officially recognised as heroic were rewarded political power. Being the first to scale the seige ladder in battle was prestigious and a chance for a stake in the power game.

Throughout history we see the evolutionary programming that made males want to replicate with a variety of females, that drove the female preference for a strong, high status male that will take care of her during the vulnerable time of pregnancy. They wanted someone able to invest in the child and were prepared to share a male that's prescreened. Naturally there was no sympathy for the males that missed out on a chance to procreate, that's how biology meant it to be, nature isn't sentimental and better to accept the fact rather than rebel against it in anger; male disposability is built in and all the spoils go to the males able to out compete others, personally merited or otherwise.

Humans have been polygamous for millions of years so it's carved in to our DNA, like water dripping on rock. Monogamy is monotheistic dogma from the last few hundred years; sensible in a time where we had no DNA test to ensure the right child inherited their father's wealth. Lifetime pair bonding is so unnatural to homosapiens that it had to be enforced upon threat of social exclusion and burning for eternity in hellfire.

Today promiscuity, cheating and divorce isn't taboo anymore, there aren't any real social consequences. It's actually treated more like empowerment in pop culture and the family is portrayed as a miserable, outmoded trap. Social media and dating apps have scaled up hypergamy, cheating and divorce to unprecedented levels, men are alienated, and there is a 50% divorce rate and 20-70% estimated rate of cheating.

Why are we trying in vain to make something work that doesn't. Monogamy is just an anomalous blip in the timeline. Even today, roughly 150 out of 1200 cultures are monogomous. I expect Western society will finally begin to recognise the new state of affairs and move towards temporary pair bonding, polygamy and a communal upbringing of kids. Old habits die hard but the toothpaste is already out of the tube, we aren't going to give our freedom and technology back. Religion has no power to shame people back into pair bonding for life.

 

[Matthias]

The notion that there's either something wrong with the women who aren't dating those 10% of men, or that there must be some personal failing with the 10% of men themselves is a false dichotomy.

Like I mentioned in another post, structural disadvantages regarding even being able to enter the dating market at all disproportionately affect men, specifically due to gendered dating expectations. The most obvious example of this is with autistic men, where there is a mismatch between social skills and non-verbal cue difficulties, and the skills required to decode subtle interest, pursue and escalate dating. Obviously not every autistic man is unable to start dating, but autistic men are disproportionately represented in the group who want to start dating but are never able to precisely because there is a mismatch between the social disability that is autism and the skills required to succeed in the male dating role. Even autistic men who do start dating tend to do so later and have fewer partners throughout their lives than allistic men. As autism is a social disability, autistic women can be negatively affected in dating as well, but the female dating role doesn't demand as strong social skills to even get their foot in the door as the male dating role does.

Another example of structural disadvantage is fatherlessness for boys, lack of a male role-model and lack of relationship role-models. Most people inherit dating scripts without even realising it through their role-models and relationship role-models during childhood and adolescence. Those figures are meant to teach children and teens implicitly and explicitly about romantic relationships. When people (and especially boys given the demands of the male dating role) lack these role-models, guidance figures, and reliable sources of relationship advice, they're left to fend for themselves in the domain of romance. Not everybody can figure it out for themselves like that, and this is especially true in cases where both autism and role-model absence intersect with one-another. We acknowledge structural disadvantage in economics, ethnicity, disability, and women's issues, but acknowledging structural disadvantage as it relates to dating makes people uncomfortable. Even the most intersectional leftist tends to default to a bootstraps mentality for romantically disenfranchised, structurally disadvantaged men.

This is before we even talk about expectancy collapse in life-long singles and late-entry friction that make it even harder for late-blooming men to enter the dating market.

Expectancy collapse refers to the perceived unlikelihood of romantic success based on experiential evidence. It is a prerequisite for experiencing a grief state in response to permanent romantic absence (if you feel like you can get a relationship if you tried, a grief state doesn't make sense). Expectancy collapse makes it so that even when there are romantic opportunities, they're more likely to be doubted as real, and floundered due to inexperience even if they are recognised. People who date and have relationships don't tend to have an experiential reference point to truly understand what expectancy collapse feels like.

Late-entry friction refers to the friction that occurs when one tries to enter the dating market later than the expected time. Heterosexual men are especially penalised for this, with a non-trivial amount of women finding romantic inexperience years into adulthood to be a red flag or deal-breaker. This is another structural barrier that can perpetuate the problem.

I'm absolutely not saying that entitlement or coerced relationships are the answer, because they're categorically not, nor am I saying that there is anything wrong with women's choices as it relates to who they date, but framing dating failure for men as necessarily a personal shortcoming harms men who have already been harmed enough by structural disadvantage. Everybody who wants love should try to be a romantic partner worth dating, but sometimes that's necessary but not sufficient on its own.

Everything you mentioned involves a personal shortcoming that people have the power to overcome. "Structural disadvantage" sounds like an excuse to blame one's problems on someone else. For example, why can't men without fathers seek out older men to guide them? Why can't people who've used scripts that failed ask others for help or read books to learn how to approach women? The fact that something is a dealbreaker for some women doesn't mean it is for all women. I think the reality is many of these men are 1/10, unwilling to date women in their league (the bottom 10% of the dating market), and aren't willing to put in the work to improve themselves.

 

[Matthias]

The traditional response to that is: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

You need to start from accurate data if you want to draw a valid conclusion.

I noticed you didn't provide any data.

BTW even if the 90% was meaningful, you still can't draw a conclusion.

Some people have less than ten dates in their entire lives (i.e. 0 to 9).
Some can have as many as they have time for, and in these strange times there's a small minority who can achieve that over quite long time periods without ever dating the same person twice. That's only possible because of dating apps OFC, otherwise it would take too much effort to find new partners.

Regardless of the outliers, if you really want to draw some conclusions you need to get data by useful intervals, and you need to address the fact that the process is neither random nor evenly distributed.
And as I already indicated elsewhere, you need to nail down the specific people that are relevant to the discussion.
e.g. exclude people in LTRs.

Bur wait .... the data for XX's in LTRs isn't consistent with the data for XY's in LTRs.
It's affected a bit by hypergamy, but it looks like a lot of men in the 18-29 age range are opting out of "non-OTS dating" and relationships, and a lot of women are sharing men, but think they're in a relationship - i.e there are many "side chicks" who think they're in a committed LTR.

This is a natural result of hypergamy and unreasonable expectations. It's definitely funny that that's predominantly XX behavior, but it's not fair to blame the individuals whose collective behavior drives this mess,

It's just a consequence of behavior that makes sense on a small scale, but not on a large scale.
This is a way to think about it (it's the first thing Economists think of, and it's close enough).
Externality - Wikipedia

Blaming women for your problems is not going to over well with them and won't help you get a date. The only person you can change is yourself so blaming others for your problems practically guarantees you won't make the changes you need to succeed.

 

[Matthias]

I know my last two posts probably sound harsh but I'm not trying to be mean. I'm just a big believer in personal responsibility, hard work, and not making excuses. I believe every problem has a solution if people are willing to seek it out and put in the work necessary to overcome it.

 

[Wizardry]

Everything you mentioned involves a personal shortcoming that people have the power to overcome. "Structural disadvantage" sounds like an excuse to blame one's problems on someone else. For example, why can't men without fathers seek out older men to guide them? Why can't people who've used scripts that failed ask others for help or read books to learn how to approach women? The fact that something is a dealbreaker for some women doesn't mean it is for all women. I think the reality is many of these men are 1/10, unwilling to date women in their league (the bottom 10% of the dating market), and aren't willing to put in the work to improve themselves.

"Personal shortcoming" implies fault in the individual for the disadvantage. Nobody chooses their neurotype, nobody chooses their parents, and nobody chooses the gendered dating role they're supposed to occupy.

Addressing structural disadvantage requires first acknowledging that it exists. It's not always obvious why one struggles with dating when others don't. Fatherless boys and people without relationship role-models don't tend to instinctively know what is missing. It's only through comparison to other people that they can figure that out, and it often isn't obvious. Many internalise blame and inferiority themselves precisely because they don't know what is missing, so they assume there must be a personal failure.

Structurally disadvantaged people can appeal to others to help them, but those others have to be willing to do so. Many who end up never dating aren't well-connected and may not have people willing to invest in them in that way, even if they do figure out that they've experienced disadvantages that most don't.

Once expectancy collapse and grief start to set in over romantic absence, dating becomes much harder, and it only gets worse with every passing year after that.

You seem to be personally invested in the idea that dating is inherently meritocratic, that people earn their outcomes. I don't expect to convince you otherwise as there's no real incentive for you to adopt an alternate view even if it's the truth.

What I will tell you is that I have experienced every single one of these structural disadvantages I've spoken about, and I know for a fact that if I hadn't been so disadvantaged that I'd have been able to start dating long before now. It took me far too long to realise that there were actually girls interested in me in my teens, but I could never perceive their interest due to autistic difficulty with non-verbal communication, lack of relational scaffolding or guidance from my single mother and very small family, and early onset of expectancy collapse. I've had women interested in me as recently as the last few years, but I'm terrible at escalating precisely because of the disadvantages I mentioned paired with chronic grief over perpetual romantic absence.

If you think the disadvantages I'm singling out are trivial then I can only assume that you experienced nothing like them and likely don't have well-developed enough theory of mind to imagine yourself in someone else's more disadvantaged position, or you're too invested in the notion that dating outcomes are meritocratic to conceive of the possibility that that might not always be true.

 

[Jonn]

This can result in men with major character flaws, mental illness, and other undesirable traits pursuing women with average or better attractiveness, good personalities, or successful careers without realizing these women are so far out of their league that they will never be interested in a relationship with them no matter how hard they try.

Well, it worked for me.
"Never say never!"

What worked for me was having something a woman outside my league wanted.
And that was primarily: Emotional stability and supportiveness.

 

[Hypnalis]

I noticed you didn't provide any data.


Blaming women for your problems is not going to over well with them and won't help you get a date. The only person you can change is yourself so blaming others for your problems practically guarantees you won't make the changes you need to succeed.

I noticed that your key "data" was that the number of XX's and XY's is approximately equal.
Which is correct, but does not support any of your claims.
Nor does it provide any insight into the differences between ASD XX's and ASD XY's.

You haven't earned the right to ask (or trick) me into doing your research for you. That discussion can't start until your claims start matching the real world.

Blaming women for your problems is not going to over well with them and won't help you get a date. The only person you can change is yourself so blaming others for your problems practically guarantees you won't make the changes you need to succeed.

This is just fantasy. You could read everything I've written on this site (even in DMs), and you wouldn't find any evidence that I blame women for my dating problems. Because I don't have any dating problems.
What you would find is that I've "aged out" of dating quite long ago. Judging by your approach to this topic, it's quite likely that happened before you were born.

In general I have some sympathy for young (or inexperienced) people who are influenced by the more toxic modern ideologies. It's hard to be clear, rational, and accurate in these times.
But that stops when someone lies to me.

Don't do it again.

 

[Matthias]

"Personal shortcoming" implies fault in the individual for the disadvantage. Nobody chooses their neurotype, nobody chooses their parents, and nobody chooses the gendered dating role they're supposed to occupy.

Addressing structural disadvantage requires first acknowledging that it exists. It's not always obvious why one struggles with dating when others don't. Fatherless boys and people without relationship role-models don't tend to instinctively know what is missing. It's only through comparison to other people that they can figure that out, and it often isn't obvious. Many internalise blame and inferiority themselves precisely because they don't know what is missing, so they assume there must be a personal failure.

Structurally disadvantaged people can appeal to others to help them, but those others have to be willing to do so. Many who end up never dating aren't well-connected and may not have people willing to invest in them in that way, even if they do figure out that they've experienced disadvantages that most don't.

Once expectancy collapse and grief start to set in over romantic absence, dating becomes much harder, and it only gets worse with every passing year after that.

You seem to be personally invested in the idea that dating is inherently meritocratic, that people earn their outcomes. I don't expect to convince you otherwise as there's no real incentive for you to adopt an alternate view even if it's the truth.

What I will tell you is that I have experienced every single one of these structural disadvantages I've spoken about, and I know for a fact that if I hadn't been so disadvantaged that I'd have been able to start dating long before now. It took me far too long to realise that there were actually girls interested in me in my teens, but I could never perceive their interest due to autistic difficulty with non-verbal communication, lack of relational scaffolding or guidance from my single mother and very small family, and early onset of expectancy collapse. I've had women interested in me as recently as the last few years, but I'm terrible at escalating precisely because of the disadvantages I mentioned paired with chronic grief over perpetual romantic absence.

If you think the disadvantages I'm singling out are trivial then I can only assume that you experienced nothing like them and likely don't have well-developed enough theory of mind to imagine yourself in someone else's more disadvantaged position, or you're too invested in the notion that dating outcomes are meritocratic to conceive of the possibility that that might not always be true.

I didn't mean to imply fault. I think a better term may be character weaknesses. I agree with much of what you're saying about structural disadvantage but I prefer a more specific term, such as poor upbringing or inadequate parenting. Instead of two loving parents building their character throughout their childhood, they had an absent father or a mother who didn't take the time to instill good values and build up character through consistent discipline. If parents don't challenge their children enough, they end up getting discouraged easily and don't know how to deal with their emotions. If parents are too critical, they learn not to ask for help. However, I don't consider these disadvantages to be an excuse because people can and have thrived despite growing up in the worst of environments.

 

[Matthias]

Well, it worked for me.
"Never say never!"

What worked for me was having something a woman outside my league wanted.
And that was primarily: Emotional stability and supportiveness.

You may have underestimated your desirability because emotional stability and supportiveness are characteristics most women find desirable. Desirability is also subjective. Many women might find a guy between a 2 and a 4 but other women might find that guy to be 7+ due to everyone having different interests, values, and desires. I think this is especially true with autism, where some people view merely being different as undesirable while others are able to see the good in it.

 

[Wizardry]

I didn't mean to imply fault. I think a better term may be character weaknesses. I agree with much of what you're saying about structural disadvantage but I prefer a more specific term, such as poor upbringing or inadequate parenting. Instead of two loving parents building their character throughout their childhood, they had an absent father or a mother who didn't take the time to instill good values and build up character through consistent discipline. If parents don't challenge their children enough, they end up getting discouraged easily and don't know how to deal with their emotions. If parents are too critical, they learn not to ask for help. However, I don't consider these disadvantages to be an excuse because people can and have thrived despite growing up in the worst of environments.

Just because it's possible for some people in some circumstances to thrive despite being disadvantaged doesn't mean it's possible in every circumstance or at every stage of life without proper support. Moreover, just because it's possible for some people in some circumstances to thrive despite being disadvantaged doesn't mean the disadvantages they faced never existed or didn't affect their trajectory.

What you're getting at with poor upbringing or inadequate parenting is better encapsulated by lack of relational scaffolding and lack of instillation of relationship skills. Children and teens learn these skills both implicitly by watching their parents and other couples interact with each other and absorbing social scripts and expected dating behaviour, and explicitly through instruction, guidance and advice-giving from parents and other invested adults. It's not a character flaw for an individual to not have skills that were never modelled for them or taught to them.

Furthermore, you didn't acknowledge the intersection between autism in men and a male dating role that selects for social ability and non-verbal cue deciphering. The existence of autistic men who are able to date prove that autism in men in and of itself is not a death sentence for one's dating life, but the fact that autistic men are disproportionately represented in the group that want to date but are seldom able to strongly suggests a role mismatch between what is expected from the male dating role, and innate deficits in establishing and escalating relationships and reading social cues that autistic people tend to have.

My dating difficulties are not reducible to just lack of scaffolding, just autism, or just the male dating role, but rather how all of these factors (and probably more) interact with each other.

If I had had:

Strong Romantic Scaffolding + Autism + Male Dating Role = High chance that the scaffolding would have offset some of the difficulty, I would have had sources of relationship guidance to turn to when I needed advice, and I would have absorbed dating expectations and scripts through osmosis

Poor Romantic Scaffolding + Non-Autistic + Male Dating Role = Less innate disadvantage occupying the male dating role, high chance that establishing relationships and reading non-verbal cues wouldn't have been as difficult as it was with autism, high chance I would have started dating anyway. My brother is not autistic and he had the same upbringing as me, and he was able to start dating early. Autism absolutely confers additional disadvantage.

Poor Romantic Scaffolding + Autism + No Male Dating Role = Likelihood that when girls were interested in me as a teenager, they would have been more explicit about it and it would have registered as interest. Full pressure to decode non-verbal cues and escalate would likely not have been put on me. High chance that overt interest + less pressure to be the one to escalate everything would make it so I was able to start dating earlier.

This is why the term structural disadvantage is appropriate. It doesn't just refer to one disadvantage, but multiple interacting disadvantages. When they stack on top of each other like they did in my case, success becomes much harder to achieve, and it's reasonable to acknowledge that rather than blame myself for an outcome that required multiple structural disadvantages to intersect with each to occur the way it did. For a long time, I did blame myself for my dating outcomes, but I now see that this outcome with the disadvantages I faced in the environment and circumstances that I was in was an inevitable sum of its parts in the absence of appropriate intervention or a stroke of luck that I didn't have.

When you're dealt a crappy hand, sometimes it doesn't matter how you play those cards, you're going to lose anyway. You must still play the cards to the best of your ability to win, but you do so whilst acknowledging you were dealt a crappy hand and because of that, winning is harder and less likely than if you'd been dealt a decent or good hand. Interpreting losing as a personal failure when you were dealt a crappy hand to start with is not logical or emotionally healthy.

 

[Markness]

This thread got hijacked.

I am wishing you luck pursuing a romantic relationship, Markness, hope you find your other half one day. Just never give up! We have a saying on Russian which means something like "the water doesn't flow under the lying stone," so continue doing whatever you can to get out there, meet new people.
One day it will all be worth it!

Thank you for your kind words. I really hope one day that all the time will have been worth it. I definitely know that not doing anything will certainly lead to nothing. I’ve just made attempts and sometimes things look promising but then what I hope for doesn’t happen.

 

[Matthias]

Just because it's possible for some people in some circumstances to thrive despite being disadvantaged doesn't mean it's possible in every circumstance or at every stage of life without proper support. Moreover, just because it's possible for some people in some circumstances to thrive despite being disadvantaged doesn't mean the disadvantages they faced never existed or didn't affect their trajectory.

What you're getting at with poor upbringing or inadequate parenting is better encapsulated by lack of relational scaffolding and lack of instillation of relationship skills. Children and teens learn these skills both implicitly by watching their parents and other couples interact with each other and absorbing social scripts and expected dating behaviour, and explicitly through instruction, guidance and advice-giving from parents and other invested adults. It's not a character flaw for an individual to not have skills that were never modelled for them or taught to them.

Furthermore, you didn't acknowledge the intersection between autism in men and a male dating role that selects for social ability and non-verbal cue deciphering. The existence of autistic men who are able to date prove that autism in men in and of itself is not a death sentence for one's dating life, but the fact that autistic men are disproportionately represented in the group that want to date but are seldom able to strongly suggests a role mismatch between what is expected from the male dating role, and innate deficits in establishing and escalating relationships and reading social cues that autistic people tend to have.

My dating difficulties are not reducible to just lack of scaffolding, just autism, or just the male dating role, but rather how all of these factors (and probably more) interact with each other.

If I had had:

Strong Romantic Scaffolding + Autism + Male Dating Role = High chance that the scaffolding would have offset some of the difficulty, I would have had sources of relationship guidance to turn to when I needed advice, and I would have absorbed dating expectations and scripts through osmosis

Poor Romantic Scaffolding + Non-Autistic + Male Dating Role = Less innate disadvantage occupying the male dating role, high chance that establishing relationships and reading non-verbal cues wouldn't have been as difficult as it was with autism, high chance I would have started dating anyway. My brother is not autistic and he had the same upbringing as me, and he was able to start dating early. Autism absolutely confers additional disadvantage.

Poor Romantic Scaffolding + Autism + No Male Dating Role = Likelihood that when girls were interested in me as a teenager, they would have been more explicit about it and it would have registered as interest. Full pressure to decode non-verbal cues and escalate would likely not have been put on me. High chance that overt interest + less pressure to be the one to escalate everything would make it so I was able to start dating earlier.

This is why the term structural disadvantage is appropriate. It doesn't just refer to one disadvantage, but multiple interacting disadvantages. When they stack on top of each other like they did in my case, success becomes much harder to achieve, and it's reasonable to acknowledge that rather than blame myself for an outcome that required multiple structural disadvantages to intersect with each to occur the way it did. For a long time, I did blame myself for my dating outcomes, but I now see that this outcome with the disadvantages I faced in the environment and circumstances that I was in was an inevitable sum of its parts in the absence of appropriate intervention or a stroke of luck that I didn't have.

When you're dealt a crappy hand, sometimes it doesn't matter how you play those cards, you're going to lose anyway. You must still play the cards to the best of your ability to win, but you do so whilst acknowledging you were dealt a crappy hand and because of that, winning is harder and less likely than if you'd been dealt a decent or good hand. Interpreting losing as a personal failure when you were dealt a crappy hand to start with is not logical or emotionally healthy.

It sounds like you're trying to justify your lack of success. While that may help your self-esteem, I think focusing on the past and other external factors is harmful. I see @Markness and others frequently discouraged when they focus on the past and all the disadvantages they perceive because of it. I find it more helpful to focus on things that are within my power to change. I've noticed that people who think this way tend to be more successful in life while those who attribute their problems to external factors outside their control tend to feel helpless and much less successful.