30+ and i've never had a girlfriend--

Depends on what you mean by experience. I've grown quite weary of people trying to mystify the dating world. If you take care of yourself physically, learn how to talk to people, support yourself, and practice good hygiene (basic shit that most people learn early on), then there's really nothing revolutionary to learn. If you want to partake in childish cat and mouse games (Surprisingly, many adults--especially women, like this kind of thing), then dating gurus like Neil Strauss, David D'Angelo, Tyler Durden, etc., will gladly take your money.

 

I'm 48 and had never had a steady girlfriend. I have only had platonic relationships. It was mainly because the women I've met didn't see me in that way and felt safe if I were just their friend.

 

I'm trying to be empathetic and, as usual, not doing a particularly good job of it. Barring some physical or mental disability, I can't fathom why anyone would not have had a a serious relationship by the age of 30?

If I were in a similar situation and viewed perennial singlehood as a problem, I'd try to find out what women like. Actually I already know what they like and can afford to be indifferent about it, but you guys need a robust strategy for pulling yourselves out of what appears to be a prolonged drought.

Do yourselves a favor and watch an old film with Ernest Borgnine called Marty.

 

Agree to a point, but after a certain amount of time, one really has to look at how one is projecting oneself to the world. There is someone out there for everyone, IMO, and it's a shame to see some of the men on here proclaiming to never have had a girlfriend.

It's time to look inward and see where the true issue lies because it starts with the individual. Once you identify the mental blocks that are holding you back, you can start figuring out how to get rid of them, so you can open up your life to someone else.

 

LOL, where'd that photo come from? It actually resembles some of the abandoned factory grounds around here. Another reason I plan to leave, and that's the priority; so right now I'm just open for casual dating (and even NSA though that's probably a pipe dream), not trying for anything serious..

Opening up takes therapy. Therapy costs $$$$$. My employer health care plan's coverage for mental health is minimal (another reason I'm infuriated at the obstructionism regarding the Affordable Health Care Act-- sidebar over).. I'm pretty sour on the idealism that is generally associated with relationship-seeking.

 

Lets agree to disagree here. I don't believe that there's someone out there for everyone and I don't think it's a big deal that some people don't have girlfriends later in their lives. If a girl treated a guy like animal crap and kept asking for money, shoes, jewelry, etc every week or other week (which some women really do in relationships), that would be a problem and he should reconsider associating himself with most of them. The risk would be greater than the reward, depending on the kinds of women he'd come across anyway.

 

In my opinion (barring mental or physical disability as saty said) the only way this is possible is that you want it to be this way, whether or not you realize it.

 

Statistically speaking, there has to be someone for everyone but just because there is doesn't necessarily mean you'll find them. They might live on another side of the country, or on the other side of the world. Even on the internet, most of the women that I've seriously bonded with have been non-Americans. At the end of the day, I suppose it just depends on how important it is for you to have someone and what lengths you're willing to go to. Personally...if I can have sex from time to time I'm good. Upon reflection, I think I kind of like it that way. After you've learned to live with yourself for decades it's not so bad for some of us. I don't even think we'd care if society didn't tell us we're strange and that it's the end of the world if we don't hurry up and find someone.

 

Open up to yourself. Sometimes you subconsciously hide things from yourself but if you allow yourself to, you can piece together your story. For me, most of it is understanding how it happens. When I look back, I was never a ladies man. Even in Kindergarten when guys and girls were pairing off, I was a loner, and the same guys who were the go-getters then were go-getters in high school. When we're kids is when we have the least understanding of our behaviors, our bodies, and our desires. So, when you're quiet and shy at a young age you don't view it as something that you need to work on because it's just the way you are. Then, as you spend more time around your peers you notice that some kids have it (social intelligence), and some kids don't. You don't view this as something that you could ever possess either, you just view it as part of the natural order of things. Time passes and then being quiet and shy actually starts to affect your life and the older you get, the more apparent your loneliness becomes. And while all of your peers have been gathering experience from their elementary and jr. high dating, you find that you've spent your time elsewhere--video games, books, cards, etc. As a young adult, you realize that you're more interested in the opposite sex than you had been in previous years but you have no past experience. It's like trying to get a job with no job experience, and not many will give you a chance to gain that experience. It's not a matter of being strange, or ugly, or retarded. Mostly, it's not having enough interest or understanding early on in a world where parents no longer find mates for their children in systematic fashion.

 

Explain. I have been single for many years since my divorce, and that is not by choice, but a matter of not meeting anyone to pursue a future with. For many years, I met no one, and so began the great online dating debacle.

I do agree that sometimes we keep ourselves from the very thing we want and not realize it. But why? I have taken a hard look at my own situation, and I honestly don't think that's the case. But if I AM sabotaging my own efforts, I'd like to know how and why!! So I can stop!

 

I don't think your situations are similar. He said he is 48 and has never had anything but platonic relationships with women.

 

I asked because someone said a similar thing to me once.

 

From what I know about you based on your posts, you have some reasonable standards when it comes to dating (although I tease you about being :drinkers: ). Also after a long marriage many people who I have known over the years, especially women, are not keen to re-enter the market.

 

Early on as a kid, girls just weren’t into me. On one hand, there were the handful of outright shallow/hostile girls who felt that I was ‘creepy/nerdy/nuh-uh’ material on principle (and of course in childhood, a high percentage of the social behavior of many is reflexively cruel and ill-informed). On the other hand, there were those girls for whom I was a brainy/helpful/creative guy, but I simply didn’t register on their radar beyond anything purely platonic. I was, in some sense, a “librarian”. Nobody’s interested in “going with” the librarian.


Middle school and high school came and went with no tactile progress on girls. Part of it was that I scarcely knew of any girls my age in the neighborhood, and the (parochial) schools I went to were effectively across town, with a student population that went across the county. Anyone you got on friendly terms with could easily live in another city entirely. My family was poor. My mom’s car breathed its last breath in my Freshman year, and after that I was totally dependent on walking or catching buses anywhere I went to. By senior year, I felt that it was a moot point to try and ask any girls out, since the closest thing I had to 4 wheel drive was a skateboard. No homecomings, no other date dances, with the exception of a local community youth-achievement program that was promoting a formal dance [a “male cotillion” or “beau-tillion” as it were] and selected me to be a part of it. I was required to have a date, and I felt totally idiotic at not being remotely close to anyone to dare asking. One of the organizers had a daughter that was age-appropriate, so that was arranged. The event was very nice, and the young woman asked me to be her date at her high school’s prom. I agreed. (things became awkward when I learned that her boyfriend, with whom she was on the outs with at the time, was a close buddy at my own high school. Sheesh.)
I entered college, and thought that I’d have a relatively better time in developing a social circle that included dating. It didn’t happen, and I fell in with a clique of kids that ended up contributing to my anxieties: http://tinyurl.com/84w4vfe

I was deeply ashamed about having initially dropped out of college. It was a specter that hung over me for years, until I finished out my bachelor’s, last year. In the meanwhile, I found steady work in an office environment, but occasionally meeting and working with women I found attractive—especially those near my age—was very privately awkward for me—I knew that many of these women had either a bachelor’s or master’s degree, and at one point or another I was still creaking along taking occasional part time undergraduate classes. I felt inadequate. There was also my ongoing insecurity about being somewhat overweight, eventually being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. I’m maintaining with diet and without medicine so far, but it’s a struggle.
A platonic friendship with a female co-worker “Linda” developed for several years but never yielded anything romantic. In fact it turned out to be very aggravating, because at one point she kept borrowing money and couldn’t pay me back; she was a divorced single mother and very ‘crisis-prone’. Maybe part of it was I initially had a crush on her and felt sorry for her; and the other aspect was my SA preventing me from saying ‘no’ consistently. After a couple of blowups on my part and some lengthy letters sent, we’ve finally come to an understanding. She’s lived out of state for about 5 years now, and we’re on baseline good terms.


Compared to a lot of my peers, I didn’t embrace alcohol by the time I turned 21. Generally speaking, I never really got into the taste of alcohol, so even in my un-legal years it wasn’t a forbidden fruit. So going to bars and clubs just to hang out on principle wasn’t automatically my choice of socializing. To this date, about the only thing I can tolerate consistently are wine coolers and stuff like Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Also, for the first 10 years I lived in Detroit I didn’t own a car. The bus systems here were pretty awful (well, they still are), and especially since I wasn’t intimate with the geography here at first, I was scared to death of getting stranded somewhere late at night if I should go out to some event (and at the time, I didn’t have the money to constantly catch taxis. I’d had my share of getting stranded at shopping malls waiting on a bus that never showed.) Around the time I first got here, a male cousin my age joined the military; after that happened I didn’t have access to his local social circle, and I didn’t really develop one of my own.


There were really no young adults in my immediate neighborhood near the family home in which I was staying (a great-aunt had recently passed away, and an older brother was poised to move out.) Mostly, it seemed to be senior citizens who had upper-middle-aged sons staying with them. If I was 19 at the time, then these guys were in their mid 40s and beyond (though whatever age they were at the time, they looked about 10 years older). None of them seemed to be able to hold a regular job—either they seemed to subsist on doing odd jobs for people in the neighborhood, or they were on some form of disability compensation (or both.) It was also an open secret that most of them had problems with alcohol and ‘other substances’, too. Outside of the jackleg handyman work that my mother or aunt would ask them to do, I pretty much kept my distance from them and didn’t consider them role models at all—I privately vowed that I wouldn’t end up like them—eking out a relatively fringe existence, and having really nothing to show for it.


By the time I acquired a car, getting out to different events I was interested in was a lot easier. But it still wasn’t all that easy for me to just walk up to strange women. Even as I got involved in some social causes I’m interested in, I didn’t attempt to ask out any of the women I thought were cute; I was loathe to be thought of a guy who only got involved for hook-ups.


Having finished college lifted a heavy psychological burden from me. At least now I can broach the intro-conversation issue of “where’d you go to school?” and feel comfortable in saying I graduated from XY, rather than fudging a story on how I’m still working on it. But at this point in my ‘career’, I feel like I’ve been treading water for the past 15 years. By the time I finished out my bachelor’s, I had been doing paraprofessional work (admin. assistant, mostly) for 14 years. I feel I’ve outgrown my current role and there’s literally no room for advancement in pay or promotion in it. My degree’s in communications & media so I feel I’m flexible to fit into various environments. But I’ve been applying for jobs online for a year now—I can’t even count anymore the applications and resumes I’ve sent out. The vast majority I don’t hear back at all, or I get an email that more or less says “thanks for applying, but we didn’t pick you, take care”.

On some level, career stability/reestablishment is my next major burden. I really hate being in Michigan now, but I'm loathe to tell that to anyone new that I might meet now. I'm a career-changer who's looking to segue into something entirely different from what I'm doing now. [FONT=&quot]I try to stay aware of singles-based events in the area, and if it’s not too expensive, I’ll check them out, but often it seems like everyone's already clicked up/paired up from jump street as soon as you come through the door--[/FONT]

 

Hypestyle if you apply a fraction of the effort that you put into making that long ass post to getting a girl, you should be fine.

 

God damn! That's a lot of reading.

 

writing is what I do well.
"kicking game", not so much..

 

I enjoyed the read anyway. I'm sure there are women out there who like guys like that, who are very descriptive.

For me, there are women around that come by and I'm just "friends" with them. Includes white women, but also "brown/middle eastern/indian/foreign" women also. I have some hesistance, however to really initiate anything further. I've kind of realized that I have to sit down and think if going further with women is a good decision to make. I think when I'm 23 to 24 years old, that's a better time to think about women and dating. That's why I don't sweat it that much when other people on here have told me that I haven't had any sex or gotten any "pussy" yet based on the way my posts are written here. And I'd also say those people that I don't think of women as "things" to just have sex with anyway. I'd advise those guys to think the same way too.

 

Writing is really my thing as well. I hope to write a book someday. And you know, Mikey is quite right. There are girls out there who like bookish, literary guys. They're just harder to find.