What people answering you don’t understand is the difference between fighting for love and fighting for the CHANCE for love. This is like the difference between struggling to win at a slot machine and struggling to get in the casino. Then people try to convince you that there’s a system to it. Please, as if we don’t know the rules - shower, groom yourself, be assertive but not pushy, read the room, show interest in their interests but don’t interrogate, complement their efforts, be charming and make them laugh. We can follow all this to the tee but all we ever hear is “Yes, but not you”. And don’t get me started at the cowardism. There’s never constructive criticism, at best there’s a " no" at worst there’s a lie.
this.
I’d not be so resigned if I’d had some genuine interest turn up at some point. But the only person I’ve ever gotten a second date from (and a brief relationship for a few months), later told me he meant and felt nothing of what he said he did, over text, on Christmas morning 2020. Even he couldn’t articulate why, he just didn’t feel anything for me despite everything I’d done up to that point to be up to par for him. Everyone else disappears like a fart in the wind well before a second date.
I know love is not all sunshine and roses, and work and effort is involved, but I suppose not everyone who wants to work can find a job, either, as my recent job hunt has illustrated. Only problem is, Walmart and McDonalds accept everyone, and the consequences for working at either are a lot less than the consequences of dating someone who will “accept anyone”.
I am reminded of the quote by Stephen Gould, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
likewise, there will be plenty of people who live and die alone who are just as good a partner as anyone else can hope for, but who just don’t get lucky. Me, I’ve had my relationship woes, depression, cancer, losing my job and having my career derailed recently because of cancer, all kinds of fun hints that I am just not lucky and not meant for the things I want out of life. And I guess I just have to learn to be okay with that.
Probably too damaged to be good enough for anyone decent, now, anyways. And definitely too damaged to open up to anyone in any meaningful capacity, in any reasonable span of time – most partners expect you to let them in and lean on them in turn, and I’ve learned by now not to let anyone in.