u/poolnoodlefightchamp

If this post gets negative traction I'm gonna delete it immediately.

To be specific I've been exposed to how negatively women think of us since like, age 15 and it's been seared onto my brain forever I feel. Every media that I consume is either centered around or at least has mentions of how bad of an experience women have with men and honestly, fair enough, I'm not going to disagree. But I feel like it has soured my interactions with women & society for almost 10 years now. I can't talk to a woman without thinking that she secretly hates me.

I've done everything right btw. I got lean, I've been trying to get over a deeply toxic relationship that I had when I was 21, I keep my flat clean, I know how to cook, got my money up, interact with people positively, volunteer for good causes all of that. But I just never know what the woman I'm talking to thinks about me and it makes me turn away before anything even happens.

It's not the biggest problem in the world but at 27 I feel like it's just not a very healthy thing to have. Also I live in a part of the world where marriage is rigid and important and you're expected to be married by 35 if not earlier, I need to at least get to a point where I have agency over this. I also don't think this is something that an older millennial or older would understand at all so it's okay if you don't get it.

I've been trying to do as much good as possible for the people around me, which is a huge shift from my previous attitude of 'what do I have to give to a world that gave me nothing'. Like for example I've been to a couple of urban cleanup drives, last sunday I attended a tree plantation drive. But despite of all of that I still can't justify my existence, neither to other people nor to myself.

I think in the end I honestly don't even know what being loved looks like, so I can't ever be comfortable with it or even recognize it when it starts to happen.

This isn't a rant.

Sometimes I read a lot of these baseline variant of posts that read along the lines of 'I'm 25 I'm so lonely, I have no social life, can't find a relationship etc' and my brain almost filters it out (guilty) because the solution on paper is so simple; Just go outside, make more friends. I already know this, I've gotten over it, there's nothing new to discuss.

But then I realize that I'm in the same boat myself. When I go out to events and attempt to make friends the connections just don't land. People are pre-occupied & uncaring. They hardly make eye contact, never give you more than 5 word answers. The ones that you do connect with don't reciprocate when you follow through. And my hypothesis is that it's because it's not even just me, everyone's in the same boat. Everyone's just like me, they might just not even be conscious of it.

So yeah, keep trying and don't beat yourself up I guess. At least you're trying. Also feel free to share your own frustrations or drop advice. Do be mindful that our experiences vary with age, gender, class divides & life experiences.

And I mean specifically about your country?

Here's mine:

Ban public displays of religion. Religion must be practiced strictly behind doors, whether it be within the privacy of your own home, in your temples/mosques/churches, some mild exceptions are fine like Diwali lights/lamps, Christmas decorations etc. But outside of that I don't want to see you dumping your milk into a river, I don't wanna see you offering your Namaz on a busy street, I don't wanna see some big stupid hoarding of your god blocking my goddamn sidewalk. If you want to do something that could potentially be disruptive, book a field or something and invite your community to it as a public, centralized event.

What's yours?

Walk at night alone without being chased by dogs or without the threat of getting mugged? I don't want to meet anyone, I want to be alone. Is there a specific block? A specific street? A park that'll still be open? Idk, anything will do.

I think I unintentionally took the blackpill & resorted to fantasy.

I'm 28. When I was 21, I was in a relationship that was, let's just put it this way; damaging. I was subjected to her constant mood shifts, she'd have a bad day and I'd have to bear the brunt of it, I had to constantly walk on eggshells just to keep her happy. It was very tiring and I had NO spine at the time. It also didn't help that I didn't have any strong friendships to fall back on and all her friends would always take her side (she also talked smack about those very friends all the time so). The narrative at the time was that it was job to keep things afloat.

I tried dating a bit when I was 24 and those didn't work out either. People who were just not ready to take any initiative, people who seemed interested but their actions just would not reflect their words or their countenance.

The cumulative of these experiences and what I read online (not from red pill stuff, but from women themselves. This could be a whole other post) is that women are just simply not interested and do not want to date men. Even if they are interested, you'd have to be the most neurotypical, most socially immaculate man they have ever met, which I can't seem to become no matter how much I try.

So as a result, at some point I just gave up on all of it and escaped into the creations of my own mind. About what a fulfilling relationship would be like and how we'd plan our future together. The giving up was unconscious, at first it was 'taking a break to work on myself'. And so I did, I tried finding new friend circles, I got lean, worked on my social skills. But in the end when it came to talking to women again, I found that I just didn't want to anymore.

Now that all of my older friends are married and a lot of my younger ones are in committed relationships I've been trying to find out what went wrong, and this is what my findings so far have pointed to. It's probably an extremely niche problem but fuck it, any thoughts?