southsamurai , 7 hours ago

Ehhh, I’m out of the dating world, so this is all past tense.

But I was the biggest hurdle, with the second biggest being my unwillingness to date assholes.

See, I’m big, which is not a huge hurdle since plenty of women (I’m hetero) like big guys. Power lifting rather than body building, so that cut availability down a little more. I’m also hairy as fuck all. Not necessarily to unusual levels, but definitely towards the high end of things.

Then, I have resting psycho face. When I’m just chilling I look slightly angry. When I’m deep in thought, I look like I’m plotting murder. This is as described by people that love me, so I inconsiderable imagine it’s more severe to others.

In other words, I don’t look approachable. And, in truth, I’m not always. I don’t like crowds, so if I’m at a bar or other casual meeting spot, I’m unlikely to be happy at unexpected contact. Even when that contact is from someone attractive to me, and ready to mingle, so to speak. So I don’t go to those kinds of places on my own impetus, which means pretty much all contact is unexpected.

Then, I would run into the expectations of the typical kind of person that wanted a hookup with sasquatch, which isn’t my preference to begin with.

So my dating was never a random thing where I’d just meet someone and ask them out or get asked out. It was always after some degree of comfort had been established.

So, my biggest hurdle was the need (on multiple levels) to gain enough interaction with someone for there to be a date to begin with.

Not that I lacked such opportunities. Despite being self contained, and introverted by the usual standards, I’m a friendly person and enjoy the company of people I like enough that I can meet new people via old contacts fairly often.

And my main job had me interacting with people other than my patients often enough that I would be able to establish some friendly contact that way too.

But it was a struggle to get past the initial contact and get to dating even then.

Strangely I did do plenty of dating. It just wasn’t an easy thing. Like 8/10 times, it would be someone asking a friend about me rather than anything direct. Knowing me, my friends would kinda screen things out so that the obvious incompatible folks didn’t get disappointed, and that meant the ones that they thought were good matches usually were.

The other 2/10 were usually from work related gatherings or hobby related gatherings.

It was really rare for me to meet and date someone without that kind of slow introduction