I don't know how to reply, except to say that I woke up and had coffee and read your post and basically want to just go back to bed and cry, because that is totally it, I do not feel like I have the capacity to be in a honest and trusting relationship, at all. I called myself cynical in my original post, but it is sort of a weird thing, because cynicism is kind of an anticipation of bad events, and I have never actually correctly anticipated any of the ways boys have hurt me in the past. So I maintain this kind of angry, cynical wall on the outside just to hide how horribly afraid and insecure and naive I actually am, and I end up walking on eggshells when it comes to admitting to someone that I have my own needs or expectations, because I am so sure that doing so will irritate them and push them to drop stuff with me and leave. Which is actually a horrible thought to have about yourself, that saying something like "Maybe we can date?" would cause irritation in somebody else, but also if I am honest with myself it is totally what I believe, and I really have trouble imagining how someone would want to be in a relationship with me, at all.
This post is sort of a mess and I'm stopping because I sound really pathetic and also feel really terrible.
I know
exactly how you feel. In fact it goes beyond dating. I have to really rev myself up to call people, as I can just imagine them thinking "God, there's John again, calling without a good reason."
Anyway, people are acculturated to believe that the status of being in a relationship is inherently greater than the status of not being in a relationship (here in America at least). Think of the old woman, the "spinster", living alone, or the 35-year old virgin (and I'm not necessarily just talking about
this guy). We see the old woman and we think of how sad it is that she has no one in her life, we don't stop to consider that she might like it that way. We hear about a 35-year old virgin and immediately think "there's got to be some reason why no one's fucked this person yet", and we don't ever really think it might be because of some benign thing. If you are alone, there is something wrong with you.
And so we feel a lot of pressure to be in functional relationships because if you hit that 35 year mark and you haven't gotten your V-card pulled, or you haven't had some solid affirmative status vis a vis romance at any point (slutting it up and settling down with one person are both far more accepted and desirable things than being chronically single), then well it's got to be something about
you that's preventing things from being right in the world (ie your being successful in the world of interpersonal relations like every upstanding member of society) If you haven't found the right person yet you need to lower your standards. If you don't really like the idea of sex, you're just messed in the head because you're silly or maybe you were ruined by formative experiences. Thing is, if you're not one of those few asexuals who don't really care about relationships, you
want to be in a relationship, and you can feel the stigma growing and growing, you can anticipate having to explain your unusual history to prospective partners who you know will wonder, at the outset at least, if they haven't stepped on a landmine by getting into things with someone who
really should know the ropes by now, who probably has some huge deal-breaking problem that they're trying to hide. You'll go out there and pitch yourself and it will feel as though you're trying to sell investment bank stock circa November 2008. And the risk with that is that you can resign yourself to being alone and thus create a self-fulfilling prophecy in your loneliness. Your age really doesn't matter because even if you're 22 you're anticipating that point at which you're 35 and (supposedly) hopeless. The pressure is always there.
Anyway Clara, if you feel like you're not in a place where you can feel good about the people you want to date and yourself, perhaps you should take a bit of time to yourself and try, futile as it may seem, to let go of the desire to be in a relationship for a little while. Rehabilitate your view of potential partners. Hang out with dudes who would in some possible world date you, who won't ogle you. Even though I struggle a lot with my self-image, I feel completely different when I'm with the best of my friends, because they're amazing people, and they wouldn't be hanging around me so much if there wasn't something about me that warranted that time. I don't know, I suspect that forcing yourself to grin and bear it and rush into a relationship with someone at this point won't alleviate your fears. I think your best route to peace is taking it slow. Eventually you just get so fed up with being frustrated with yourself that you can submit to different modes of thinking, which is a brave thing to do, and really hard, but I think that people are more capable of it than they care to admit to themselves.
