ok lets do this one more time

[Glides]

i never ask.

that's it. my friend who's very good at dating said it's the secret to his success. he's not scared of rejection at all, and the idea of one rejection is so utterly world-ending to me that i never try. that's the only reason i'm going to die alone. because i'm terrified of rejection and no amount of exposure therapy will ever change that.

[Hielario]

Your friend probably hasn't spent their whole life being told they're less than nothing by the whole world. Or annoying, or perverted, or wrong, or weird, or disgusting... Am I wrong?

The advice from people like that should be taken with a fuckton of salt.

[Glides]

i keep being told i should ask when i feel ready. i'll never feel ready. i want it so bad but i'll never feel ready. i hate this.

[KMR]

I don't agree with the advice that you should wait until you feel ready. Anxiety and fear don't let you feel ready. Anxiety and fear make avoidance feel like the easiest option and make you default to that.

It's a fallacy to think that you have to get to a point when you no longer feel anxiety or fear before you can take action. Those feelings may never go away and you'll just get stuck in a loop. The solution is instead to push through the negative emotions and do the scary thing anyway, even if it makes you feel profoundly uncomfortable. It's way easier said than done, obviously, but you have to be able to think about it in those terms. Being brave isn't about not having fear, it's about doing the scary things even when they scare you.

When you start doing that, it usually gets easier over time. And not necessarily in the way you think. It doesn't mean that you'll stop having anxiety. It doesn't mean the situations will become less scary to you over time. That might happen, but it might not. But it can make it easier for you to get accustomed to pushing through those feelings and taking action. It can make it easier to deal with the mental discomfort that accompanies that.

My advice is to not focus on the idea of relieving and removing your feelings of anxiety, but on learning to accept and manage them instead and not letting them get in the way of you doing the things you want.

[Glides]

I don't agree with the advice that you should wait until you feel ready. Anxiety and fear don't let you feel ready. Anxiety and fear make avoidance feel like the easiest option and make you default to that.

It's a fallacy to think that you have to get to a point when you no longer feel anxiety or fear before you can take action. Those feelings may never go away and you'll just get stuck in a loop. The solution is instead to push through the negative emotions and do the scary thing anyway, even if it makes you feel profoundly uncomfortable. It's way easier said than done, obviously, but you have to be able to think about it in those terms. Being brave isn't about not having fear, it's about doing the scary things even when they scare you.

When you start doing that, it usually gets easier over time. And not necessarily in the way you think. It doesn't mean that you'll stop having anxiety. It doesn't mean the situations will become less scary to you over time. That might happen, but it might not. But it can make it easier for you to get accustomed to pushing through those feelings and taking action. It can make it easier to deal with the mental discomfort that accompanies that.

My advice is to not focus on the idea of relieving and removing your feelings of anxiety, but on learning to accept and manage them instead and not letting them get in the way of you doing the things you want.

If anything, I am defined by my cowardice and inaction. I kept on telling myself next time I met a person and felt something towards them I immediately would tell them, and then I made stupid excuses for six months while not getting a single signal in return. Which makes me think DNL's advice is horseshit, because what if you can't read body language? Whatever, this forum stopped being about him years ago.

The only tiny shred of consolation I've had throughout all of this is another person in my current friend group who is a literal kissless virgin. And every time it comes out, everyone is completely taken aback, because dude is a very classically handsome person, a black belt in two martial arts, borderline genius intellect, graduated from college with every academic honor you can imagine, incredibly social and kind and considerate. And he's not even a little bit problematic when it comes to this status as a kissless virgin aside from taking it out on himself and having an incredibly low self esteem despite the ridiculous amounts of accomplishments he has and how clearly physically attractive he is and how obviously he gets attention from women (which works out great for him in theory, being a cishet straight white guy). And yet, he can't ever figure out how to get any farther than clearly demonstrating he has close female friendships. The current group I'm in is a way more diverse and queer-friendly group than I'm used to, so I'm no longer having years and years of people constantly mocking me about my lack of experience, which only made it worse. That's the only reason why I haven't gone off the deep end. Ironically, the last person I dated was someone who had previously spent years mocking me for my lack of experience before it seemingly not mattering to them. But again, unbelievably toxic former social groups + extensive and mostly repressed sexual abuse + near constant bullying as a kid + gender dysphoria like a motherfucker creates a person too shattered to be properly considered as a human being, who has posted here since 2013. I've been here for SEVEN FUCKING YEARS.

And retroactively, this guy who is, on paper, the last person who should be a kissless virgin, is saving my ass. Because even though I'm like a year older, barely employed, with no real accomplishments to my name, a total wet fart of a person, somehow I have more sexual experience than him and it's not fair at all. Like, let's be real, I have been such an utterly selfish, cruel and manipulative person in the past that my perpetual loneliness and suicidal ideation is probably karmic punishment for all that cruelty. But this dude, kindest guy I know, an absolute sweetheart to everyone, kinda looks like Tom Holland with a deeper voice and darker and longer hair, and yet is absolutely terrified and has never been with anyone. The most deserving of love with the least of deserving. And yeah, one of the jokes is that we should date because my sexuality is less defined and he knows I'm understanding of that anxiety, but honestly, that's the most reductive thing I tend to hear nowadays. And granted, he's a really good-looking dude, but I don't really vibe with him that way. And as someone who is 100% not into AMAB people (though he's as much of a genuine ally as straight cishet white dudes get), it's reductive. Point being, this guy deserves like a sexual wonderland more than any of us, and somehow I've been with more people than him. God is a sadist.

If I could ever make myself do the scary thing, my life would be so much better for it. But the anxiety has always been completely in control. I have too much to lose by doing scary things.

[Hielario]

How did you manage to do self-destructive things in the past with such a sky-high anxiety?

Also: Yes, a lot of the doctor's advice is useless if you aren't neurotypical. I have similar problems.

[Glides]

How did you manage to do self-destructive things in the past with such a sky-high anxiety?

Also: Yes, a lot of the doctor's advice is useless if you aren't neurotypical. I have similar problems.

Lots and lots of alcohol and drug use. I think. Who knows.

Most of today's therapy session was talking about how the majority of people seem to either be attracted to hyper masculine features, hyper feminine features, or both. But not neither. I'm still in the long hunt to figure out Why Nobody But Abusers Are Ever Attracted To Me, and that is my latest theory as to why I could die and nobody would notice. Because it doesn't matter how many friends I may have, only in the context of a Romantic Relationship does my Reptile Brain understand that this is another person telling me I Deserve To Be Alive.

Which is how my exes got me.

So that's the new theory: I'm too genuinely androgynous. Not the fake bullshit kind I see a lot of famous enbies have, like Jonathan Van Ness or someone like that. Like actual androgyny where you resemble a fat mannequin more than a person. JVN is femme. I'm truly neither. I mean, I'm sure that's why nobody but abusers are attracted to me. Yet I obsess and fixate over it, and my therapist is at a total loss with what to do with me. And I've tried talking about this with a couple friends and they just weakly say that someone out there loves me. And the only people who are told there's someone out there for them are the people doomed to never be with anyone again. I had my chances and I only got chances with abusers.

Anyway, I'll spend the rest of my life trying to crack this uncrackable code, because my brain won't let me do anything else. Hopefully it's not very long, as I've been posting here for seven years straight and that's when you know you're a bit fucked. One non-abuser, please. On the house.

[Enail]

Androgyny of all sorts tends to be a more niche taste, so it can be tricky to find the people who are into it, but it doesn't mean it's not attractive, just that it's a smaller pool.

And I think signalling cues around gender play a big role for queer ppl, they're sort of an easy flag to ping the attention of people in the group; in the same way as femmey men and butch women get more easily noticed, JVN's beard-and-heels type cue combos are probably more likely to catch the attention of people into non gender-normative presentation than an enbie who isn't sending strong cues either way, but that's a different thing from whether the latter can be equally attractive to the right people.

[Hielario]

Like actual androgyny where you resemble a fat mannequin more than a person.

Oh THAT flavor of androginy.

You might not be completely hopeless. I can say for certain I fell head-over-heels for someone who fit that description to a T (and that included spending a big quantity of time masturbating about how much I wanted to do her after the first date). A lot of that may have been her personality and getting attention, but... said mannequin looked soft. And huggable. And had compatible genitals. A soft body I wanted to hug and penetrate. She felt...¿peaceful?l. ¿Relaxing? Like a pair of slippers that you got in the mall: nothing visually impressive but god you know they're going to feel so nice when you put them on after a long day. Evoked peace and confort in a sexual sense, to me.

We had to stop dating because we weren't compatible in that way. Siiiigh. Some of the best dates my straight side has had.

[Glides]

Androgyny of all sorts tends to be a more niche taste, so it can be tricky to find the people who are into it, but it doesn't mean it's not attractive, just that it's a smaller pool.

And I think signalling cues around gender play a big role for queer ppl, they're sort of an easy flag to ping the attention of people in the group; in the same way as femmey men and butch women get more easily noticed, JVN's beard-and-heels type cue combos are probably more likely to catch the attention of people into non gender-normative presentation than an enbie who isn't sending strong cues either way, but that's a different thing from whether the latter can be equally attractive to the right people.

I think that's where the frustration lies, and maybe I'm just extrapolating something that's not there to solve the mystery of why I'm invisible to people, or at least not in that way. Platonically, I am way more desirable than I used to. I've reached the point where if I'm getting a hug, it's a pretty close hug for several seconds. I can make people laugh a lot. I know my appearance has improved. It's almost like romance is the final frontier I need to find a healthy way of life for. Platonically, I've reached the point I've wanted to reach. Romantically, I never have, even as I feel like I don't want to be strictly monogamous. I already have dynamics with friends where we're non-sexually intimate with each other and I'm not complaining about that at all, but I'm the selfish bitch who wants more.

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