Jaded and Frustrated

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I would like a bigger circle of female friends, but mostly because it will likely help increase my chance of getting a relationship. If I had a relationship, I don't think female friends would be any more important to me than male friends, and at this point I have no active desire to expand my circle of male friends.

I get the feeling I might be more interested in pursuing platonic relationships when I have a romantic relationship. That might not make sense to other people but it's the impression I get. I think some of the reason I'm not really interested in friends is I risk being exposed to other people's relationships, or getting into conversations about relationships and sex that trigger my sensibilities. That's not the only reason, but it is one of them.

Hmm, it seems a problem that without self-esteem, you wouldn't be able to learn stuff, interact with the opposite sex and get to know them better. That is a shame, and quite possibly getting in the way of your getting a relationship. I've just known men who have a decent circle of women friends *usually*, but not always, tend to get girlfriends far more often.

Wait until your 32 and still hopeless

People told me same thing when I was his age and look I’m still in same situation 10 years later.
Op should know very likely his life will never get better. It’s what I’ve learned. For those of us unwanted it never gets better.

I thought along the same lines at the age of 29. As a result I ended up in a relationship with someone who was mentally unstable and had the reasoning skills of a toddler. I stayed WAY too long because I thought that I would be too depressed being single against and years later I realized it was the opposite: because I had such a poor self-image, she found me like a magnet. In other words, it wasn't a fluke or bad luck we ended up together.


I certainly understand where this feeling comes from but what if a potential girlfriend were to read this? Would you want to be in a relationship where the girl sees you as the only thing keeping them from killing themselves? Surely you can see how unhealthy that would be.

I am telling you as a married man who had some of the worst luck with the ladies relationships are not a panacea. You keep saying about how everyone in relationships are happier and that's why they are in them but that is simply not the case and it was extremely difficult leaving my crazy ex even though we never lived together (took 6 tries to finally do it for good). A former coworker recently got his divorce finalized and tells me he has never been happier than he is now being single and he isn't the first person to say this. Yes, a relationship is great with the RIGHT person: with the wrong person it can be downright miserable. I am still feeling the effects of my crazy ex girlfriend who I threw myself at out of desperation to be "normal" many years later.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... ate-blauel

An example of a marriage that didn't make either party happy. It wasn't an awful one, it just didn't meet the needs of either one.

Rocketman: Elton John’s Forgotten 1984 Wedding to Renate Blauel
“She was the classiest woman I’ve ever met, but it wasn’t meant to be,” John has said of the short-lived marriage. “I was living a lie.”

Well, a low self-esteem doesn't come from nowhere.

I think you have your priorities mixed up in a lot of ways. Putting getting a girlfriend at the top of your list isn't healthy. You should really work on yourself, first. I agree with the others in that you should try to learn to drive, build up some platonic friends. You can't build a relationship out of nothing. That's like trying to build the house before the foundation. Especially for those of us that can't get away with using some app to introduce us to people and somehow manage to hit it off. The rest of us need to take time building from the ground up.

Maybe you should try talking to some of your feminine acquaintances more casually, more often? It's not a bad way to start, at least. As far as the job thing, goes, I don't really know how the Australian job force works tbh. Can't give a whole lot of advice there, except for how things can work in the USA. But if you can get a high education, you should. Do they have trade schools there? Basically like accelerated classes that pursue one specific thing like welding. Most trade skills get you decent money.

I've never had a relationship "in the real world", as it would be. It sucks. And I get how hopeless it feels at times. Sometimes I think I'll never know what real intimacy is like. So in other words, I get that it sucks; but at the same time, I don't see any point in panicking about it. I just continue to reach out to people I've met and get to know them. Bound to find the right people eventually, you know?

Save your money for lessons with a paid instructor. Nobody in my family has ever helped me learn to drive either.

Just because a girlfriend is the most important thing to me on the list doesn't mean it's the one I expect to achieve first. I understand the case you're making about how I should piece together some of the other aspects of my life first before focusing on a girlfriend, and to some extent I agree, but the truth is I started wanting a girlfriend well before my living, driving and working situations ever warranted much consideration, when I was 12, and it's a desire that has never been satisfied, and never gone away.

A lot has changed since I was 12, but the desire to have a girlfriend has been unwavering and consistently unfulfilled, and to add insult to injury, I had to witness my peers develop the romantic aspect of their lives while the romantic aspect of my life has remained an unattainable daydream. Unfortunately, growing up, falling behind in some aspects relative to my peers and having different expectations placed upon me by myself and others as an adult man has done nothing to waver my unfulfilled desire for a romantic relationship that has been present since I was just entering puberty.

Sometimes, I wonder whether there's facet of my emotional development pertaining to love and dating that has been stunted in a similar fashion to that of the gratification I hoped to achieve from having my first romantic experience as a teen. As a result of my complete romantic and sexual inexperience, I feel as though there is a part of me that never made it to adulthood.

As it relates to platonic friends, my interest in them is pretty much dead. I had a real interest in platonic friends in my teens, but that was where the interest piqued. I still retained some interest after high school and into university, losing more interest but there was still some there when I bombed and dropped out of university, and it's kept on a decline since then. I had an awful start to the year 2018, and since then, my desire to interact on a platonic level has been at an all-time low, to where I'll oblige when people ask me to hang out with them, but I seldom organise hanging out with other people because I just don't feel compelled to pursue platonic relationships. If none of my friends contacted me to hang out, I could go months without seeing any of them and not be fazed.

If I was to start trying to make platonic friends, it would only be in the pursuit of a girlfriend, and for one, I don't think that's fair on them, and I also know I'd be disappointed and frustrated at wasting my time when it inevitably doesn't work out for me.

Farunel wrote:

Maybe you should try talking to some of your feminine acquaintances more casually, more often? It's not a bad way to start, at least. As far as the job thing, goes, I don't really know how the Australian job force works tbh. Can't give a whole lot of advice there, except for how things can work in the USA. But if you can get a high education, you should. Do they have trade schools there? Basically like accelerated classes that pursue one specific thing like welding. Most trade skills get you decent money.

I've never had a relationship "in the real world", as it would be. It sucks. And I get how hopeless it feels at times. Sometimes I think I'll never know what real intimacy is like. So in other words, I get that it sucks; but at the same time, I don't see any point in panicking about it. I just continue to reach out to people I've met and get to know them. Bound to find the right people eventually, you know?

I don't feel as though I've established a robust enough rapport with my female acquaintances (whom I could count on one hand, by the way) to reach out to them myself. With most of them, I met them through friends, and the established dynamic is that I only see them when I'm with the friends I met them through. Anyway, I have no romantic inclinations towards any of them (and vice versa), and as mentioned before, developing platonic relationships that don't have the capacity to develop into something deeper don't interest me. The only way I would be interested in pursuing a platonic relationship is if I believed that through that pursuit, it could lead to a romantic relationship. Like I said before, I think once I have a romantic relationship, I think I'll be more likely to be interested in platonic relationships, just like once you finish priority tasks, you feel more free to move onto tasks that are not as important. You might think that's backwards, but it's how I feel about it.

It's definitely something I'm thinking about doing more than I ever have.

I've saved up a bit of money throughout the last year since I started working full-time, but I don't really like spending it, which is likely one of the reasons I've had success saving it.

I guess I worry that first, driving might not end up working out for me because I may not be "cut out" for it, then if I pass that hurtle, I'll need to have 100 hours of driving lessons, which would cost a fair bit, and then after I've done that, it's all for naught if I can't afford to buy a car, registration, upkeep, petrol, etc.

From my perspective, the optimal way to go about it would be to figure out what I can do for a career that will earn me more money, start working towards going in that direction and then if I'm going to be earning enough money to comfortably afford a car, the prospect of learning to drive seems more appealing, and like it will have a greater pay-off. I'd even probably be inclined to have my learning to drive coincide with commencing my trajectory towards a better-paying job, as the outcomes would hopefully complement each other.

My instructor told me that the average amount of time of paid tuition required to pass the driving test is forty-five hours.

[Color=firebrick]I understand that there is the chance that I'll end up in an abusive relationship, but everybody has that chance, and it doesn't stop everybody else trying to get a relationship. I'm also not too bad at recognising red flags in other people's relationships. Whether I'd be able to remain objective enough to see them in any prospective relationship I try to get into is another matter though. I get the feeling that if it seems like only a minor red flag, then I'd probably still try anyway, but if it seemed I was going to be treated in a way I don't appreciate, I wouldn't stand for that.


So the thing that makes me want to kill myself isn't that I'm not in a relationship right now, but that I've never been able to get a relationship. If I had had a normal dating history, being single just for the time being would be much more palatable as it is for most people who are currently single, but that hasn't been how it's worked out. I'll never be happy while I've never had a girlfriend.



When I said If relationships weren't enriching in some way, nobody would get into them, the point I was making wasn't that everybody in every relationship is better off than they would be if they were single. The point I was making was that if there was nothing potentially enriching about relationships in the first place, nobody would strive to get one, yet almost everybody does. So clearly most people view a relationship as being potentially better than no relationship.

People who win the lottery sometimes overspend and actually end up in debt. That's not going to deter people from wanting to win the lottery and hoping they have a better go of it.

My uncle is very shy, I don't know if he's on the spectrum, but he acts a lot like us.

He took a quilting class. I know it may sound ridiculous, but he ended up making a ton of women friends and he loved it. There's NOTHING saying that a guy can't learn to do anything he wants. The women also loved him being there. He made a gorgeous quilt too.

I'm responding to what you said before, just didn't want to clutter the chat with quoting everything. I understand that you aren't interested in platonic friendship, but it's hard to create something out of nothing. But I guess it kind of comes down to what kind of relationship you are looking for. I've only really dated long-distance, myself. So I am not necessarily a great point of reference. But the idea of trying to start a relationship with someone off the bat of meeting them sounds extremely daunting.

There's so many more expectations, you are now trying to weave something that may or may not work. You have no idea how it will go because you wouldn't be very familiar with said person you are trying to date, I mean, what the hell do you say to someone you don't know? Where are the boundaries? Wouldn't you feel pressured understand them and find common ground with the risk of being rejected? Whereas, if you are friends beforehand, it comes with less hangups. You probably already have a pretty good idea of how you mesh with someone if you've already been talking with them for a bit.

I feel like this puts more pressure on both people, instead of learning about them naturally you are forced into more contrived circumstances, as well as a bit less of an impersonal one. It's not like there's an existing bond to lean on there, so you will more likely be judged more severely for character flaws.

In any case, all I am trying to say is that you will be more hard pressed to find the right person if you're going straight for it, rather than taking your time to get to know someone without expectations. However, these are just my own opinions. And you've already read the opinions of many others at this point. I doubt you will be swayed by anything we have to say, and this seems more like a rant than a call for advice. There's no problem with that, of course. So nothing more to do than wish you luck.