The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Earlier this spring I met a girl on one of the many dating apps I reluctantly use. It turned out to be one of those life-changing romances you mostly only read about in novels. Most of the time I have trouble feeling comfortable around people, and yet the vibes here were totally instant. We hit it off right away and just sat by the town river cuddling and talking for several hours on our first date, and the second one went even better. I've only felt so instantly connected to and comfortable with someone once before in my dating life and that was a long time ago. After that we slept together, which I would honestly rate as one of the highlights of my life. My judgement is naturally clouded my hormones, but she really was perfect: more than I would dare hope exist.
You've already guessed what comes next. Soon after our fourth date she rejected me over the phone one evening when I was coming home from a trip (ostensibly because of my political beliefs, but you never know).
This has already been a less than stellar year for me due to job-related reasons, but losing her was devastating. I fell into a lighter depression, and I have been low, low, low since the day she left. Only the last month or so have things gotten somewhat better. I still think about her often and I still feel like something that could have been really special vanished for no good reason; but I can distract myself with other activities and sometimes feel like things are maybe okay. A lot of my moments are nevertheless even now spent listening to Townes van Zandt and thinking about death.
The ordeal has also got me thinking and reflecting a lot about my lovelife, especially since the intimacy with her was so exceptionally wonderful. I'm now in the later part of my twenties, and I have had sex a total of four times in my entire life (and that is including this encounter). This is about a couple of hundred times less than I had hoped to have by this point. If someone had told the teenage me that I was in for more or less a decade long dry spell I think I would've been horrified. But it has become this way gradually, day by day without a girlfriend and with no other willing partner, and only now when auditing the records of my life has it really hit me how badly things have gone. The aforementioned girl was younger than me, yet from the conversations we had it's clear she already had way significantly more experience than me in this field. Same thing when I compare myself with my male friends. I am obviously and painfully doing unusually poorly.
By many other metrics things are going decently well for me. At the same time I value women and sex highly, I can't help myself from doing it, and I remember looking forward to having sex when I was teenager. I have since tried my luck on dating apps and in my social circles, and despite all my attempts it now more and more looks like my younger years will soon have passed with very limited success with the opposite sex. Looking forward I am also not feeling optimistic. In particular the prospect of becoming 30+ and attracting women the same age who've already had their fun and now want someone "serious" to settle down with doesn't appeal to me. I don't want to be practical choice rather than a romantic one. I'm sure in this modern world it's terribly entitled and sexist of me to think like this, but I value youth and beauty in women, and it's something that I want to experience more in my life.
In the year that's coming I'll likely try to make some changes to my life and put myself out there, try and salvage the situation somewhat as best I can. I think history is a good predictor of the future when it comes to things like this though, and another miracle-woman like the one I opened this post with seems unlikely.
I don't know what I hope to achieve by posting this here, or what advice or encouragement I hope to hear. Still, a lot of your are cleverer than me: maybe someone here will figure out something smart to say.
I know how that can feel. The explosive sense of intimacy you can feel with a new person, learning rapidly about them and feeling them learn rapidly about you. The way time compresses and someone you know for just a day can become such an important part of your life. I still remember a girl I met at a college visit in 2010, we locked eyes at orientation and had this sudden intimacy, spent the whole weekend talking and kissing. I didn't end up going to that school, we exchanged phone numbers and texted briefly but I never spoke to her again. The weekend was something, but it fizzled out and cashed out to nothing.
I feel for you. That sudden flash of intimacy can cause one to dream all kinds of things in a hurry. But at the same time:
I can count a half dozen moments like that across my life, and I"ve no doubt you'll be able to as well, if you live long enough. These occasions of perfection in chemistry are rare, but not singular unless you choose to make them so. So this woman turned out to be less than expected, or you fumbled the bag, so what, you'll find another. And as for this whinging...
Romance is a capitalist market, you're entitled to what you can get. If you can't get what you want, raise your capital value and make yourself someone who can get what you want.
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