(no subject)

[abigailbrady]

so. i am 29 this year. compared to where i was 10 years ago, i have changed a lot. i am a fully functioning adult human being with a job and a flat and friends and everything. this is good.

i have not ever been in a relationship/dated anyone. as an abstract concept this doesn't particularly upset me. i am, as noted above, a self-sufficient independent person. i can appreciate the argument that having had no relationships is better than having had bad ones. and y'know, if that was the end of the matter i don't think i'd be unhappy. but it's not.

because every so often someone makes the mistake of being nice to me. and i get painfully infatuated. and i then get rejected. and then i feel like shit for a few months, and then it happens again with someone else. i would like this to stop happening. if it could stop happening by someone actually liking me for a change this would be nice. it doesn't seem very likely though, does it?

people tell me they have no idea why people aren't interested in me, but that they are sure it is just coincidence. i don't believe that. there are clearly influencing factors. i am very worried that i'm missing huge chunks of appropriate human behaviour in my socialisation (i ought to have learned all this in my late teens/early 20s, when i was otherwise occupied), and this is just an area of life which will remain forever closed to me. this idea upsets me, because what little of it i have experienced i liked. i would like to have hope, but hope has caused pain.

i am left confused and upset.

so

• what is wrong with me?
  
• are people not interested in me because they assume i am happily single?
  
• are people not interested in me because they assume there must be something wrong with me?
  
• are in fact people interested in me and i am not noticing it? (note: if so please tell me)
  
• should i make effort to meet more new people?
  
• wouldn't it be better just to go and hide?
  
• am i just hanging out in the wrong social circle to meet people who might be interested in me?
  
• given how bad i am at dealing with rejection anyway, wouldn't it be a really terrible idea for me to put myself in a situation with even more potential for that?
  

in conclusion: argh. answers, suggestions and proposals welcome.

Comments

[kake]

No, I'm not sure "more rejection" is the way to go either.

When you say you get rejected by your objects of infatuation, what do you mean? Do you mean that you approach them and they turn you down, or something else? If you do nothing, does the infatuation eventually go away on its own?

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

avoiding talking about specifics, generally, yes. i will wait too long hoping it will go away, but it won't and then allowing myself to think about it as genuine possibility makes it worse. Leaving it alone will fade away eventually but it is prone to reignition.

[kake]

I'm not quite sure which of my many questions the "yes" is in answer to there. Where does the rejection come in?

I wonder (this is of course complete speculation and may be entirely wrong) whether part of what makes the infatuation last so long is that part of your mind sees it as being necessary for a relationship to develop.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

yes is the answer to "Do you mean that you approach them and they turn you down".

what happens may be summarised as:

abi is hiding in her shell.
person comes along, thinks "ah, why is the abi hiding in a shell? that is so sad. i will try to get her out of her shell."
abi thinks "ah, person likes me. yay"
person says "no, no, not like that!"
abi thinks "tsk. well, why did you think i was hiding in the shell, eh?"

[kake]

Hm, yeah, I can see why that can be a bit scary — I don't mean for you, but for the person making overtures of friendship. It could be that you're just being too full-on too fast, and so potentials never get to develop into actuals because you've scared them off.

(Again, this is all speculation because I barely know you and have never seen you IRL; please feel free to tell me if I'm talking rubbish and not being helpful.)

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

that is somewhat time-compressed. i don't know how it seems to the other people.

(we ought to fix that, you know)

[kake]

Yes, hard to tell re timing... but it is at least possible that this is the problem? I would say also that I'm not sure infatuation is the best state to begin a relationship in, so that's another reason for waiting for it to wear off before you approach someone.

Before anyone misinterprets, and jumps on me for being anti-romance: I see infatuation as being different from NRE — New Relationship Energy — the former is more of an internal thing, if you see what I mean, while the latter comes from interaction. This is part of why I don't think infatuation and relationships go together very well; infatuation doesn't tend to be about what the person is really like, but rather about an idealised version of them. (Of course, we may be using the same word to mean different things, in which case I'm being useless.)

(Yes, we should fix it. Would you like to be on my London stuff filters? Not that I've been using them much recently — I will try to do something about that.)

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not quite meaning that. It's not coming from a vacuum, it comes from interaction and positive feedback about deepening friendship which I have just misread. Obviously I am speaking in generalities here. But that is basic pattern.

(Uh, sure)