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certainty and uncertainty

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certainty and uncertainty Empty certainty and uncertainty

Post by Glides Tue Apr 21, 2020 11:23 am

i think i've found a (potential) way to simplify all of the things we've been complaining about for years. oftentimes people would use physical characteristics as a metric and then you'd see ultra-confident physically unattractive people doing better than everyone else. but this is assuming a unisex non-gendered whatever model for the people who ultimately are like that blue whale who wails at a frequency no other whale can detect.

basically, that person who's less physically attractive than you, who is stunningly good with people, that person is CERTAIN that they will succeed. Not in a narcissistic way, just in the general way. They are certain they will succeed, so they succeed. And it cannot be faked. Oftentimes people say "fake it till you make it" as if it's easy to act successful. That's not actually possible. You can have positive surface level conversations that never brings about close friends, hookups and relationships like we actually want. "Faking it till you make it" only means that people will have a positive opinion of you, not be repulsed by you, and enjoy spending time with you, but they'll never want anything deeper.

It's literally that simple. The people who succeed at relationships, either keeping one partner for a long time or never having a period longer than a few hours to days to weeks that they go without a partner, those people are all CERTAIN they will find someone else. They are born without insecurities and do not suffer the traumatic events required to make someone UNCERTAIN.

Which is what many of us are, including me. I'm always UNCERTAIN. I enter every conversation wondering when it's going to go wrong, and I become so preoccupied with treating the interaction like a line of programming that the conversation never gets deeper than surface level. On a surface level, I have improved with people. On a deeper level, I have not improved at all. This is why I do not have many close friendships and even assume the close friendships I do have will end at any second. This is why attempts at dating have catastrophically failed in every way. I am UNCERTAIN, and other people subconsciously detect I am not CERTAIN like them, and so it never goes anywhere. It's CERTAINTY, the true kind installed since birth, that creates socially, romantically and sexually successful people. CERTAINTY dictates you understand your life is valuable and you are worthy of existence, UNCERTAINTY dictates the opposite.

I mean this isn't like anything that isn't already out there, and I'm writing all of this spitballing out of my ass, but it still provides a model that doesn't devolve into incel bullshit. This is anyone from any gender identity/racial background/what have you who has a chronic inability to connect with other people and likely never will at the rate of other people. It is radically accepting your own failure (therapy terms!) so that you may find a way to stop torturing yourself and learn to live your life at a more limited output than anyone else gets to have.

I put it like this: I have a gluten intolerance. No matter what happens, I will never be able to have very much gluten again for the rest of my life, and the effects of eating anything with gluten in it is so painful that it's not worth it. So I have to apply my mentality towards my gluten intolerance towards my chronic inability to form lasting connections with other people. Is it the fault of the gluten that it hurts me? Of course not. Is it the fault of other people that I am unable to connect with them, leading me to a decades-long severe suicidal ideation? Of course not. But it's far easier to put the blame outwards, as I did a lot of when I was younger.

I want to be more vague than I otherwise would be because I don't want to inform on your experience if you feel as though this applies to you or not, whether you've never had a partner or have had extensive years long dry spells, or just a general feeling that everyone else has a deeper ability to connect to others than you. And it's also not saying "you'll never connect to anybody ever", just "even when you connect to other people, it'll never be at the same level, and something will be obviously missing. There is an entire dimension to humanity you'll never have."

I say this as a 25 year old who's been grappling with that pervasive feeling that I am incapable of connecting to other human beings without antagonizing all of them at once. I go through my day convinced that the relationships I have built will vanish in a heartbeat the way I've had many people abandon me without warning or reason. I always anticipate the worst. Other people don't in the same way. Other people are CERTAIN, and people like me and you are UNCERTAIN of success. And it's only those who are CERTAIN who are complete human beings. But I'll phrase it in a way that only dehumanizes myself and not you, if you feel like this applies to you too, because I don't want you feeling the way I do.

Glides

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certainty and uncertainty Empty Re: certainty and uncertainty

Post by Enail Tue Apr 21, 2020 2:11 pm

Sorry, Glides, I think you're aaaaaalmost onto something but the actual conclusion you've come to is completely ridiculous. The idea that there's a nice, clear yes/no switch so you can know for sure is comforting, in a depressing sort of way, but it's also simplistic bullshit trying to create scaffolding under what feels true to make it pass for something real.

Yes, not believing you can succeed or connect with people, expecting all your connections to disappear, feeling like you can't have the deep bonds other people have, can be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd say usually more because it means you're (general you) always defending or trying to camouflage as who you think they want you to be and never really open up and let people get to know your true self, or because you back off or lash out at the first hint of potential rejection, things like that. But different UNCERTAIN people handle things in different ways, or meet different people, and have different results.

I've known some people like that who easily and quickly form intense, deep connections, in a way I have no idea how to achieve. Like other people who form really intense connections really quickly, those tend to be volatile relationships. But I've also known people like that who just connect with people in a pretty average way and amount, even if they struggle with believing in those connections. And there may be some people who have the kind of total certainty you describe and easily create strong, lasting bonds, but I can't say I've known too many. You're missing the entire middle range of people, which is most people.

Like, you say keeping one partner for a long time is a thing for the CERTAIN, so at almost 20 years with my wife I'd probably qualify. And I have some of what you describe; I'm reasonably confident that I'll be able to connect with some people as I go through life, I mostly trust in the connections I form. But even though I trust in my connections, I still know some of them will end, because that's a thing that happens. And I'm not particularly good with people, the range of people I actually can have a great conversation with or make friends with is pretty small, I just know it's out there. And before I met my now-wife, I wasn't in the slightest confident I'd find a partner; in high school when I came out to a friend, they actually told me "oh, I always pictured you on your own" (not in a mean way, they just assumed I wasn't really the relationship type. I somewhat assumed that too). And my wife was more on the insecure side of things, and presumably she also counts as succeeding under your metric, since she's been with me as long as I've been with her. Razz

If my wife and I broke up, I think there's a decent chance I'd never find another serious, long-term partner. Not because I don't have the ability to connect with people or because I'm particularly insecure (though everyone has some insecurities), but just practically, because the pool of people I connect with for friendship is not large, and the pool of people I connect with romantically is a tiny subset of that. That's not a failing on my part (imo, at least Wink), just practical, there's only so many people who are my kind of people (though my skill at connecting with people is also not as good as it could be, which I guess is a failing of sorts - but it's skill I'm lacking there, not some kind of inner value). I was lucky, not CERTAIN.

And then the idea that CERTAIN and UNCERTAIN are some kind of infallible measure of a person's worth or personhood? That's the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. Come on, Glides, I know you can do better than this.
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certainty and uncertainty Empty Re: certainty and uncertainty

Post by Hielario Wed Apr 22, 2020 9:50 am

Yeah. Please find something more worthwhile to occupy all of that amazing energy of yours, because right now you're just building castles in the air out of a desperate attempt to give logic to a world that doens't have any!

If certainty actually could swing the results of what we do, all of my fucking heterosexual dates would have been raving succeses and I wouldn't be here! And it wouldn't have taken 9 years to get my goddamn degree if I aced exams every time I was sure I was going to! Certainty isn't worth an eighth, and it doesn't deserve you believing in it! It only nudges the results at best, and sometimes not even that, as my entire life proves! Even dumb luck is better than that (at least at my exams!).

Shit! The most confident person I used to know bombed half of his life trying to get out of a rut and I think he's still picking up the pieces!

You're better off doing everything you're capable of, and quietly preparing for the worst IN CASE it happens. You can't expect people to like you, yeah...but you can't expect them to not like you, either.
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certainty and uncertainty Empty Re: certainty and uncertainty

Post by Glides Wed May 06, 2020 2:47 pm

Hielario wrote:Yeah. Please find something more worthwhile to occupy all of that amazing energy of yours, because right now you're just building castles in the air out of a desperate attempt to give logic to a world that doens't have any!

If certainty actually could swing the results of what we do, all of my fucking heterosexual dates would have been raving succeses and I wouldn't be here! And it wouldn't have taken 9 years to get my goddamn degree if I aced exams every time I was sure I was going to! Certainty isn't worth an eighth, and it doesn't deserve you believing in it! It only nudges the results at best, and sometimes not even that, as my entire life proves! Even dumb luck is better than that (at least at my exams!).

Shit! The most confident person I used to know bombed half of his life trying to get out of a rut and I think he's still picking up the pieces!

You're better off doing everything you're capable of, and quietly preparing for the worst IN CASE it happens. You can't expect people to like you, yeah...but you can't expect them to not like you, either.

I think a lot of my frustration and why I want such a clear cut answer stems from the improvements I know I have made and still feeling like I'm massively trailing behind everyone else. And a lot of it is sort of that particular kind of anger that comes with making those improvements and people noticing them and having never noticed before you made the improvements, which means that the only thing they feel like complimenting about you is the fact that you don't have those negative attributes anymore, while other people were able to excel with them.

A big sticking point for me, and something that has always sort of riled me up, is my relationship to weight, now that I've lost weight and for the first time in my life, have had total strangers complimenting my appearance. I'm not like anywhere in the ballpark of a supermodel, I'm still very much a chubby Jew, but I am a significantly less chubby Jew taking care of myself better and dressing better and doing basically everything DNL always advocated doing, and I'm definitely seeing positive attention as a result. Like if not for my crippling intimacy issues and the pandemic, I could probably go out and make up for lost time sexually, even understanding I'll only feel worse forcing myself into contact with people I'm not comfortable with at all. I was even able to figure out that the reason why I so often develop these really intense attractions for my friends is because they're the only people I often feel comfortable touching me.

So ironically there's been a few instances (including the person I most recently "dated") where things could've easily gone somewhere and I was being complimented and told things I'd never been told by even my previous romantic partners and I would just get mad because I understood that if I looked and acted the way I did before, then they'd have no interest in me. And I'm fully aware of how contradictory all of that is, and that I like people who take care of themselves too. I have this really bad habit of waiting a while to respond when on dating apps or texting someone I'm interested in because I don't want to look too eager for their approval. I sort of internalized the concept of "whoever feels the emotion last has all the power," which was 100% the case in my other relationships and being manipulated with it. So now, with new people, I tend to wait minutes to hours to respond. I'm also so used to being ghosted on dating sites that I've began doing the same thing myself because I'll be damned if I'm the one who looks more desperate out of the two of us. Which is, of course, completely opposite the way dating should go.

And this has resulted in a couple of people getting genuinely hurt that I respond so infrequently, accuse me of being too wishy-washy, and break off contact completely. Not the same person I'd complained about previously, who confessed a BPD diagnosis and began to treat me like shit after despite me telling them of my ex's identical diagnosis. I'm also never really talking to friends about my love life so people have gotten really confused that without warning I have a person I'm talking to who I can't meet till after the quarantine.

So now, ironically, despite getting more attention online now that I've made all these self-improvements, I've only improved to the point where people will talk for a little while and then ghost, in the instances where they don't demonstrate characteristics that are huge red flags. I had an experience at a party a few months ago where someone I found quite attractive began to pretty blatantly hit on me, and then I discovered after the fact trying to talk to them later on that they'd only been looking for an ego boost and was already seeing someone (the younger brother of one of my friends, which was really awkward). And nothing progressed past drunken conversation and some brief physical contact, but then I see this person later on gleefully bragging online about breaking social distancing. Whatever, people are assholes and don't even realize it. And I know this is healthier behavior but the healthier behavior means you enter relationships far less frequently than having no barriers at all and dealing with all the shitheads I dated before.

And then I get pissed off at the people who are able to do this and magically find people on the first go, regardless of the context, and I get angrier and angrier while still recognizing it's an irrational anger born out of jealousy. So that's where the certain/uncertain thing came along, because I was trying to quantify how I was having an easier time meeting people online (which would've been unthinkable even a couple years ago) but not being able to progress past small talk and without someone ghosting because they'd gotten their brief ego boost. And this isn't a social media rant because people forget that people pull this shit all the time IRL too, and I've been hitting up essentially everyone other than cis men as far as all of this is concerned.

I don't really know what to do that I've improved to now be a brief ego boost as opposed to someone entirely ignored, and that I still go absolutely insane in the membrane for emotionally unavailable people almost exclusively. I keep trying to subconsciously recreate trauma patterns in all that I do and now that I know they're there, it's not the same as being able to somehow date properly and convince people I'm worth more than a brief flirtation over the phone, and possibly in person once this is all over.

I mean, I'm sure at least one of you is gonna tease me and say "well, you haven't really missed much and this is dating for ya." And I am very clearly and intentionally talking to people within my age range, so these are fully grown people acting the fool. And sure, I'd love it if every person I hit up was immediately so smitten with me, but it's one of those things where I'd rather intentions are stated directly rather than all this vague bullshit (and I'm guilty of it, I know I am). I just don't understand how this shit is so comically simple for some people. I don't know how people just find each other in any context, online or not. And I know I'm hurting myself by subconsciously treating dating as a flaw I'm supposed to fix about myself rather than say the right things so someone will do the job of loving me for a while.

Glides

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