romantically invisible, no one could've predicted this

[Glides]

this isn't really a rant, and i know it's the trap that got me in trouble last time around.

latest theory as to why i only attract abusers and literally no one else: i am an especially passive person.

i am not particularly aggressive or exciting, i don't work in a field that's particularly interesting. i'm not particularly confrontational.

to be fair, i'm also not sure who i'm attracted to either, which is the irony of it all, because i want EVERYONE to be attracted to me but i don't want the responsibility of being attracted to anyone. the only person i actually felt attraction to is in turn dating someone they describe as "running ten miles a day straight and only eating a banana and a coffee." that's the verbatim description.

i think it's just a fixation. i think my way of processing attraction is an unhealthy fixation that in turn makes me invisible to people. people see me and people are happy to see me, but nobody is interested in me. platonic validation doesn't hit quite the same way. but i think that's just how it's designed. but i want to be exciting and fascinating to people, i want people to feel giggly and stupid and all the ways i've felt whenever i've had a crush, and i'm not sure if i'll ever solve that particular puzzle. i was 17 when i started posting here and i'm 25 now and all i have to show for it is being a rape survivor (which sounds fucking comical because i don't feel like i survived anything). the vast majority of my sexual experience was nonconsensual, and that's the irony to end all ironies. i barely got any "real" sex despite having had "plenty" of the physical act, it's just that most of the physical act was very one-sided on the part of abusers.

it hurts worse now because now i know what the physical act consists of but it's like being given water that's radioactive or something. sure, you got to drink water but your teeth fell out and your skin ripped off. and so far it's ONLY been abusers and people who actually took advantage of you. it's only been the people who bashed your head into car doors and screamed into your ear so loud you'd thought your eardrums would pop.

so now i have no idea how to navigate this, still feeling "owned" by the previous person and not knowing how to get anyone else to pay attention to you the way you want. and nothing has done anything to stop reinforcing the fact that dating still seems comically easy. not only are people GOOD at finding partners when you're not, THEIR partner DON'T abuse them. and so on. now i have a new thing to reinforce on top of everything i used to beat myself up about.

i mean i know there's the thing where you can only attract people if you're already dating someone, because you're not constantly consumed by this desire to be with people, BUT THEN HOW THE FUCK DO SINGLE PEOPLE DATE IF NOBODY WANTS TO DATE SINGLE PEOPLE? i can't solve this equation. and it still makes me mad, and i know tomorrow or even today i'll fixate on the amount of money i'll make, and i'll fixate on this to the point where i do literally nothing else but sit for hours obsessing over a status symbol i lack, because i still view all of this as status. i am always last place in the race and if someone loves me, even an abuser, ONLY abusers apparently, then i will no longer be last place and all the last places in the world will have been worth it. but without a person, without the exact job, without the exact this and that, there is nothing i could do that would ever make me DARE love myself, especially when the only person who ever said they loved me bashed my head into a car door.

if all the other people with depression and trauma get to date, why not me? who knows. i could default to "i'm ugly" but that feels like a broken record to claim ugliness because even the abusers thought i was just good enough to smush faces with. i am attractive enough for abusers but too ugly for non-abusers. hyperbolized statement, but i literally can't disprove that. i literally have no evidence to disprove it. and i know that my passivity and my vulnerability and my desperation make me catnip for them. i read a post on facebook that said that abusers take in any person who accepts them, that they have to be invited in. and that makes sense. i invited them in. i had no boundaries whatsoever, but having boundaries now makes me so lonely that i'm almost willing to be abused again if that means i can feel loved for a split second sometimes.

i don't know how to do this. i'm still jealous of people who easily find partners and then have the audacity about having one partner rather than none, and most people simply assume i don't want to date anyone. it's easier that way to come off like an aro than anything else. that way nobody sees me as desperate. and i'd honestly date anyone. and that's the problem. i'd let anyone do that. and i don't know how to stop being desperate and feeling uncomfortable in my own skin. nearly ten goddamn years and i still haven't cracked the unsolvable equation.

[Hielario]

I think you're on to something here, because... parts of this remind me a lot of something I've been ruminating for some months now about my own miserable experience.

Long story short, there are very few women about whom I can safely say that they have been actually physically attracted to me at some moment (not that their attraction ever lasted enough to actually fuck me). And ALL of them turned out to be either mentally unstable or untrustable.

And I don't know what's so wrong with me, or with how I act, that makes it so the only women who want to touch me are the fucked up ones. Is it because I'm overjoyed the moment they pay some attention tome? Because I'm more patient with them than most? Because I don't mind their quirks?

[Glides]

I think you're on to something here, because... parts of this remind me a lot of something I've been ruminating for some months now about my own miserable experience.

Long story short, there are very few women about whom I can safely say that they have been actually physically attracted to me at some moment (not that their attraction ever lasted enough to actually fuck me). And ALL of them turned out to be either mentally unstable or untrustable.

Maybe it's because we'll take ANYONE that we end up attracting women every other regular man or enby will run away from. Do you also feel like you're more accepting or patient than the regular person since you've been treated like shit so much?

I'm not strictly attracted to cis women, and I most recently almost met up with a trans man, but he ended up being into some really bizarre kinks and that kinda did it for me. In my experience, trans people seem to be more forthcoming with how they feel re:attraction, but I don't think I have a preference one way or the other, though I would've never dreamed of hooking up/dating a trans person pre-realizing that about myself for a whole host of internalized BS. I can't play by the normal dating rules of treating it as a game where one pursues the other, and I've said over and over again that I can't read body language, and this resulted in me not knowing that my last partner had been into me for EIGHT YEARS (even when I was underage and she was not...*YIKES*) before things ever happened, and she'd spent almost a decade waiting for me to "pursue" her and got really fed up when I wouldn't. I have to be directly told and I'm also too terrified to admit attraction to anyone so it's a no-win.

Another problem is that at this point, I don't really want to have sex with someone the first time I've met them, I don't really want to hook up with anyone unless I know exactly what I'm getting into, and most people, regardless of gender, have no patience for that shit. It's not because I think no one should hook up, it's because I know that I am terrified of human touch and have to get comfortable with them and that I'm so oversensitive that I can have a panic attack just from being touched. And most people claim to be understanding about this, but in execution most get really impatient and complain about how "unsexy" it is that you can't prostrate for them that very moment.

I definitely WAS more accepting before my ex. I absolutely was. I think about the few times I'd made out with people before my first sexual experiences and if that was me today, I wouldn't touch those people with a ten-foot pole. It's not that those people were unattractive or anything like that (the very few times things have happened, jokes are always made that said people are proportionately more attractive than me), just that they were just thoroughly awful human beings all around. I think a lot of people's attraction to me then was knowing they'd have a power dynamic over me no matter what, most sexual touch I experience pre-sex (which Old Me did not even recognize as sexual at the time, or wrong, or me being taken advantage of) was nonconsensual as well. I was used to people, male and female, grabbing me by the crotch and forcing me to kiss them. It was definitely a weird subset of the really toxic social groups I was in at the time, and how I couldn't recognize that all the explosive anger I was displaying on here was because I'd internalized how I never got to have pleasurable touch while everyone else did. And it's not that it was JUST me, per se, but nobody else ever talked about it. I think, for reference as a huge contrast, is the amount of consensual intimate (non-sexual) touch my current friend group practices compared to before. My "first kiss" was not by choice. The first time I had sex was by choice, but after that I was pressured into it.

And so now I can look back and recognize how much pain I was in and not knowing what to call it or what to do with it, but these circumstances means I'm entering my mid-twenties having almost no concept of what a healthy relationship looks and feels like. So improvement has only made me feel more alone because I don't tolerate people's BS anymore. I internalized the idea that I could never experience intimacy on my own terms. And that's the loneliest feeling of all, because I'm almost certain I'm the only person I know who has that particular feeling. That if I ever get to have it, this means that I'm only getting the faint bit that you'll get when someone else dictates it, regardless of what you feel about it.

[Hielario]

Jesus christ, your last partner was a fucking idiot! And oh god I've been there so hard. I fucking can't tell either unless they put it on the most blatant way (half the reason I've fucked men, seriously).

And...yeah. That will happen. Even discounting the stupid shit that comes out when one's horny, most will thoroughly underestimate any problem that you have. And misrepresenting themselves is how most of humanity survives. Makes me feel like a goddamn saint by comparison and now I'm angry both for the shit you've gotten and for mine. Aaaaaargh!

Also...that feeling of fury about having to beg for scraps and lacking control...well i have a similar one. One of the reasons for doing what I did (what my straight side did?) last february was having some control for ONCE about what happened with a woman. Although mine mostly springs from being discarded so much, and being unable to expect things like consideration or honesty, not from having things forced on me.

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