Dating: How's your luck? - Page 930

This is more a rant than anything else so feel free to just skip it. I just have to vent a bit about my frustration with dating. You hear everywhere that university is one of the best phases in your life in terms of dating, which is probably true. It just hasn’t really worked for me so far though and realize I am getting a bit anxious because of it, because I feel like my chances will only get worse.
The good part about this is, it led to me trying to change things up for a little over a year now, the bad pat is that it only made me realized how screwed I am. My biggest problem is, that I only seem to be really attracted to features you usually only discover after knowing someone for a bit and me in general not really relating to anyone unless there is some special reason for it or they really amaze me.

I am now 27, attending university in a field with very few women, currently doing my bachelor thesis. Probably will go for my master degree right after this, so at least I got 2 more semesters. My hobbies also are either not really a great way to meet women: gaming, reading, extensive discussions about complex topics (which actually isn’t that bad for meeting women, more like being bad in general for meeting other people. It seems like there aren’t all that many people who enjoy discussions), I draw a little bit, am generally creative and I enjoy programming and everything around computers. The only expectation is probably that work out on a regular basis, though I am not enjoying it at all, I just need it to relieve stress. I also haven’t really seen women at the gym I go to since it is not really a casual one.
So casually meeting girls on campus/through my hobby’s isn’t really working, but I already realized that during my first year. At first I tried to replace one of my hobbies with something else I might also enjoy but with a less male dominated audience, but wasn’t successful. I didn’t really manage to pick something up that didn’t made me miss the time I was missing out on my other hobby. I also tried to work out less/cut it completely but soon had to realize that this doesn’t really work.
I don’t drink alcohol and don’t see the point in going out just to drink/eat something with friends but I tried it anyways. For a while I joined different friends/people I know, whenever they were going out over the weekend, which made me meet more people but overall it wasn’t successful. It is just something I can’t really relate to and even though I occasionally enjoyed it, overall I always had the distinct feeling of rather doing something else. I also often had great trouble connecting with other people I met that way. This might sound a bit condescending but while talking to them, a good chunk just made me feel like they just more or less where there because they didn’t really what else they could do. Which is a major turn off for me in every regard: people that don’t seem able to do something that is truly worthwhile (to them) with their time. I still occasionally join them, because you never know and also because they keep insisting. At least I am entertaining I guess.

I also went to a bunch of events from faculties that have more women in it, but also without any real success. I even tried just randomly striking up conversations which proved to be rather difficult. Not in terms of opening the actual conversation, but rather choosing the other person. I really don’t care that much about appearance, or at least I believe so. So I just followed a simple routine, checking out if someone sticks out as somewhat special, either by their behaviour or how they dress/ the people they are with. If there is no one left that seems obviously interesting, just remove everything that repels you from the list and go by opportunity.
This is probably the “casual dating” approach. My gripe with it is that of course people tend not to be totally open towards strangers. In the end I didn’t had any real success, I got some new friends but that’s it. One of my biggest annoyances was when I met someone that actually had some interesting hobbies or something like that, but they didn’t told me about it until very much later, at which time I already had written them off/already got bored. Or they get bored, since they got some expectations themselves and expected more than hanging out for a bit.
I often read in here that it is important to get physical relatively fast and after my experiences I feel the same, at least when dealing with random hook-ups/causal dating. I tried it for a bit and definitely got better results in terms of it was much more often me who decided that it won’t lead to anything, but at the same time I wasn’t really comfortable with it. It didn’t have to force myself to do anything, but it was rather a case of not having anything against it then actually wanting it. So I ditched this attempt as well.

The last thing I tried was dating apps where of course my more reserved approach in terms of physical contact got even more hindering, but overall it wasn’t a much worse experience than my other attempts. Though the competition is much higher, and even though I am pretty fit, my face is probably just average and I also don’t dress in any striking fashion. Previously I mostly banked on my character and charm which doesn’t really work if your supposed match never matches with you because there are simply physically more attractive people out there. Plus the expectations with those dating apps are often much different. Also I don’t really enjoy spending time with people that are very dependent on validation form outside and my experience so far told me that you seem more likely to meet people like that on these apps. This is also the only approach that I stopped pretty fast. While it was much easier and more efficient, it also seemed to yield the worst results and I felt like it was affecting my general attitude in a bad way.

At this point I am trying to come to some form of conclusion to make this at least a bit constructive. I feel like my anxiousness isn’t all that unjustified, I will probably not be able to meet that much people that easy after university which I can spend lots of time in a casual fashion. Later on, university gets replaced by work and dating your colleagues seems like a bad idea. If everything goes smoothly, I will also be 29 then, and the fact that I really would like to have children makes me feel a bit more pressured as well.

One big problem is that I am probably too picky but I don’t really know what to do about this. It’s not like I am dismissing people because of a certain trait, I am just rarely interested in someone. You could say it is hard to persuade me that you are worthwhile to pursue. The problem with being attracted to really awesome people is probably that they are really awesome so they have a lot of options to choose and there is a lot of competition. I am possibly just fishing way out of my league. Going at this from a perspective of “look, you are not really that awesome, so why don’t you just settle for something like X, it is probably the best you can do anyways” doesn’t seem very healthy though, plus it seem completely alien to me since as I said, I am not rating people and have a lower limit but idk. And with growing age, the chances that awesome people are still single only get smaller. Not really a helpful thought.

I accepted that dating is a numbers game, to somewhat ensure success, you basically have to try a lot, but given my lack of success and discomfort with this approach makes this difficult as well. I know that there isn’t really anything bad about dating multiple women at once or multiple women in rapid succession, as long as you are open about it, but I never really felt comfortable while doing so. I felt like the person you are dating or semi-dating deserves more than you split attention. Idk, probably a bit too much idealism on my part but unfortunately something I not really seem able to change. The pool of people I get in contact with on a regular basis won’t grow so there isn’t really another alternative to casual dating, as long as I want to increase my chances. I guess I just have to ignore my discontent on this. Though this still leaves the problem that so far I never had any real motivation to pursue someone when coming from this angle.

I probably try harder to replace one of my hobbies with something more social that I enjoy. As I said, I already tried though due to being very limited financially and timewise due to having to work while attending university, this was mostly limited to semester breaks, and even then there were a lot of financial limitations. At least that’s something that should improve after I finished my studies and therefore something that I should keep in mind.

Going out more/socialize more: I don’t really like going out for the sake of it, though I was able to convince one of the groups I go out with to add a place with board games etc. to our regular locations. It is at least something that I enjoy most of the time and where I am able to meet people that seem more to my taste. Quite a lot of them have beards though, but it’s a start . Other than that I could probably try to propose other social activities / do some on my own. Not really having anything particular in my mind though, with lots of stuff like this it is a bit unfortunate that doing them solo doesn’t work quite as well. Like the board game place, sure you can go there on your own and usually find a group where you can join in but overall it is much better if you are with a group of people and then just merge with another group.

Meeting more people with similar interests: This is pretty hard since most of my interests are not that social. The most social thing is probably gaming and programming, which both are meh in terms of dating / meeting people in general, at least when it comes to gaming. Programming works quite well for that, but only for a very special group.

I also would like to add, that I am not depending on a relationship, even though it might appear otherwise due to my rant. I have a lot of stuff that I enjoy on my own or with friends but I would also really like to have a family at some point. And I also greatly enjoyed whenever I was in a relationship, which should always be the norm, but I was really enjoying every bit of it and it felt just natural to me. I know that I am really good at and feeling really well in the role of a partner and I greatly enjoy the feeling of supporting someone to excel. So far I was in 3 relationships which lasted over a year and which I would describe as serious and I take some pride in the way those ex-girlfriends speak about me/our relationship up to this day.

It is not that I need a relationship to be happy, but I have come to realize that being in a relationship brings out some of my best qualities while also giving me some happiness that I so far wasn’t able to get anywhere else. To me it just seems like something really worth to achieve. And at the same time it greatly frustrates me, that most of the things my female friends complain about in terms of relationships/partners is stuff that I seem to be able to fulfil so seemingly without much effort. That and the annoying cliché of having a reputation of giving the best relationship advice in my group while also being single, even though this might be a bit exaggerated.
Working on my fear of running out of time is currently probably the easiest and most realistic thing to do and avoiding to become desperate. In the long run I either have to find a way where I naturally come in contact with other people on a regular basis without any expectations or intentions and otherwise find a way to change some circumstances that made the attempts described above ineffective. And I guess while not having any success, at least it make me understand my perception of attraction in a better way and what definitely doesn’t work for me.
So yeah, rants over.