Aspie men and (lack of) relationships - our struggles

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Any particularly "tribal" society you have in mind cause I can't think of many tribes that openly encourage their young men to kill each other to then gain access to women? Even in the natural world with our evolutionary cousins the Chimps will not openly kill each other unless the alpha male is directly challenged. The non-dominant males will still have access to sex because women are driven to seek a "backup plan" That is why most familes have at least one sibling who has a differing father. There are very few true "nuclear families" outside of a myth perpetuated by western societies.

ToS, i appreciate this thread. it has really provided guys with a way to talk openly about their experiences and do some reflecting. the vulnerability and openness in this thread is quite sexy, actually.

sorry if it comes across like a pat on the head, but i'm impressed with the work you are doing here.



(it's great that you are not letting the thread get derailed too)

N-3... check.

Here's a chronological overview so far:

I went to a summer camp when I was fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. I remember arriving at age fourteen feeling like I was attracted to women, but did not really want to be intimate with them. The camp was a place where people experimented with dating, with an emphasis on "scoring" a lot of people, which just amounted to making out. The residential assistants assigned to us even had a game where the objective is to have the group with the most "points", where a score with a unique girl counted as a point. So I soon changed my tune and wanted to have a part in this, but none of the girls I was interested in seemed interested back even in retrospect. I often had my heart set on one or two girls from that program and would shun everyone else after they rejected me or started dating someone else. Often people took the liberty of trying to "set me up", typically without success.

In the end I never dated or "scored" anyone in the program, and am the only person I know from the program who wanted to but couldn't. In the meantime I heard some gossip coming back to me in secondary school that many girls didn't like me, seeing me as unpredictable and creepy. Needless to say I was regularly upset over the whole business and spent much time on message boards and with internet friends venting my frustrations. What I would have done differently then would have been to widen my horizons a bit, and not take rejection as personally.

When I was 17 I had a single semi-date with a woman one year older than me. It went terribly, and I'm not even sure if she understood my intentions. Nevertheless just going through with it gave me a little bit of confidence, which turned into too much confidence. I thought (as I was told by my parents) that I should be more patient and just meet people as my usual charming self, and since I think I now know the signs of interest, I should also know when to ask for phone numbers and date and so on. I had the notion that the women who knew me in high school were not right for me and I should meet the woman of my dreams in college.

I ignored the advances of a girl I had a crush on a couple of years prior because I was startled by her overt interest in front of my friends and hers, and put off by her apparent depression. I was instead holding out for a couple of other people who in retrospect were probably unaware and not interested. Not doing anything about that is perhaps my greatest regret with respect to these matters.

Then, at 18, I started college. I got one phone number from a fellow first-year student I had just met on the first day. I was delighted coming home after that experience, but the event had given me too much confidence in myself - I decided that I should see first if women in a subject area closer to mine would be as interested, and eventually the texts we sent each-other just stopped. Another regret, though it probably wouldn't have meant anything anyway - but at least I could have tried harder.

Within a year I stopped taking for granted the idea that I would eventually meet the woman of my dreams just by meeting a bunch of people and being my usual charming self. Yet curiously, after that point dating suddenly became an apparent underworld in which other people quietly did things that I was totally unaware of. None of the women in the same year as me in class, or people I met in parties as friends of friends, really showed any signs of interest. I can speculate as to the reasons why but I'm not sure which factors were more relevant than others:

* I didn't go out all that much, or drink. Maybe I should have gone out on an at least weekly basis.
* I never got seriously involved with any college society, which restrained my social circle mostly to my classes and a few friends-of-friends. I was never really prepared to help out a society committee in arranging or do anything, though in retrospect I probably should have made myself more useful.
* My social circles and classes were male-dominated. I hardly knew any women as friends.
* I'm not a good conversationalist. I try to initiate conversations but often end up at a loss for words. I wonder if I make many people uncomfortable in this way.
* I'm not exactly Brad Pitt.

In graduate school there's not really much room for dating anyway - few social opportunities, women are in the minority in my program, and there's little contact between people in different programs. Many arrived already very committed to long-term partners. I knew people who had much more success as an undergraduate having occasional casual dates, or not dating at all. I also had trouble managing my time and getting all my work done, so I sacrificed many nights out and more casual social ventures in order to get assignments done. I understand my predicament but see it as largely out of my control. I don't really understand how academics could find the time to meet someone they eventually marry.

I never even knew how to approach girls or women as well as not knowing when any were interested in me. I thought that becoming friends with them could eventually lead to deeper relationships but I didn't necessarily expect it and never thought that remaining friends was a bad thing. Little did I know that the very act of becoming friends first generally lands you in the friends zone. As a result, the people who I were interested in got their own boyfriends, and I never even got a single date because I never asked.

I think it's mainly because I probably always seemed to show lack of interest that resulted me never having any relationships.