True and fair. I still come back to the conclusion that you are doing fine, need to get comfortable in your new setting, and get some practice in when it comes to incorporating your cool experiences into your current conversations.
All good - it just takes time…
Dating books bore me to death, so I can’t recommend anything there. It sounds like you’ve had life-changing experiences but (classic woman, sorry) you’re afraid of them intimidating or overshadowing a potential boyfriend’s accomplishments. I know it’s trite, but if a guy doesn’t want you to be more worldly than him, then it’s not a good fit and will never be. Even if you totally hold back at first, how are you going to be happy when he’s got no clue (or interest in) what you’ve been doing for the past five years?
You want either a local who prides himself on not owning or watching television (he won’t be into pop culture either) or, well, a new immigrant who’ll have a leg up on you on getting used to American culture. Or an ex-con. Or ex-army who’s been stationed somewhere remote for the same amount of time as you. You can reintegrate together!
ETA I’m actually not kidding, except about the ex-con thing.
The older you get, the less you’ll probably find that people talk about music, movies, politics, and current events, and definitely the less “current” you’d be expected to be.
“I’m completely out of touch with that stuff. I’ve been out of the country for too long. What’s good/what do you like?”
Yes, of course it’s statistically true. However, most people don’t date a statistic, they date a person. I know enough couples where the girl is older than the guy that saying:
is just goofy. Does the OP even want to date younger men? How is this even an issue? It seems like the OP is looking for reasons why she needs to date, go steady and get married RIGHT NOW and I’m just not seeing the tendency for men to date younger woman as a reason to do that.
Does that sound dirty to anybody else?
I’ve got THE solution for you. Play World of Warcraft and join a guild. Anywhere you get internet you can get WoW. It will give you something else to talk about, you’ll be queen of the dorks and can have your pick of any of them, and you can bone up on pop culture on vent during raids. You’re welcome.
Speaking personally, when I was talking with all of those returning volunteers, I found their stories to be enthralling. Who the hell cares about Glee? As popular as the show is, most people haven’t seen it and I imagine it isn’t something that you would have watched anyway. All of your experiences are interesting as hell and should be a net plus to someone who you’d be interested in meeting.
For goodness sake, if you can transition from Santa Cruz to a little village in China, going back to the States should be a significantly easier. Of course you’re going to be changed by the experience and a little disoriented for a while but as far as it affects your social life, I thinking you’re making way to big a deal out of it.
Ugh, being some weirdo gamer would be much harder to explain to dates than service in the peace corps!!
[quote=“even_sven, post:1, topic:588639”]
[li]What is a good strategy for dating around? I tend to get myself in relationships, but I’m realizing it might not be smart to keep my eggs all in one basket. If anything, having other guys around would keep me from getting to focused on one during the early stages. But I tend to be picky. Do I just date guys I’m not too interested in anyway to see what happens? [/li][/quote]
You’re picky. You need a large pool from which to select. Speed date. Shove as many short dates into your itinerary as possible whether you’re interested or not. Don’t think of it as a date. Don’t even call it that. Tell him its not a date. You’re not looking for a relationship. You just like meeting interesting people. Maybe go with a group. Always have an out so you can leave early. If you accidentally find him cute, grab him by the collar, drag him home and jump his bones(if that’s your style). If it turns into something long term,life is what happens when you make other plans.
[quote]
[li]This last relationship..I can’t keep Eduardo on as a booty call, can I? We’ll be seeing each other again professionally, and there was A LOT of good stuff between us- just not a relationship’s worth. The issue is that we did develop feelings. Those might be possible to shelve…but that’s not something I should touch, right? And if he couldn’t do it the first time, he’s not going to do it the second time, right? So basically we can’t hang out in any capacity, or can we?[/li][/quote]
Sounds like you’re asking for permission. Do you feel you need his booty fulfillment services? Do you feel less without it? Are you unsure whether or not it will stir up non booty call feelings? If yes, then no. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose(Buddha, OK not Buddha, Yoda).” Decide as the self assured, emotionally confident, liberated woman you are. Boy toy, or not. Pursue long term, or not. If you can’t decide from a stable platform, refrain until you can. Sex drive too strong? Embrace technology, literally. This is the 21st century.
It’s who you are. Don’t avoid it. Be proud. Do you think its intimidating? If so don’t dumb yourself down, build the other guy up. Stroke his ego, inflate his pride. Bring him up to your level. Never lower your own.
(See first answer)You can’t. (Double life maybe? Marry a guy who will say he loves you, cuddle with you, raise your kids, change the diapers, make your mom proud. Make love with him no more than once a week. Save your bone crushing knock down drag out toe curling til the sun comes up all night romps for the Casanovas while hubby puts the kids to sleep. Drink yourself to sleep every other night.)
Dude, you’re hot, smart, and you’ve been all over the world. Get you some Pussy Control
I mean this in the kindest way possible: You have serious issues. It’s nothing that can’t be fixed, but it probably is more than you can fix by yourself. You need to go see an actual psychologist instead of relying on internet strangers for advice.
I think you mischaracterized the problem earlier when you wrote that prospective dating partners won’t be able to relate to your experiences overseas, because those experiences are so foreign and intimidating. The problem, as evident in your last post, is that you have a hard time relating to people here, because their experiences are too foreign for you. May seem like minor semantic difference, but you can easily rectify the latter. The former, not so much, unless you pretend to be something you’re not, which I don’t suggest.
Sorry if I’m coming across as unsympathetic to your issue, but I think this problem is only as big as you want it to be in your mind. Humans are amazingly adaptive creatures when they need to be, and you’ve shown that adaptibility when joined the PC. If your grasp on pop culture has slipped due to your absence, there’s no reason you can’t make a recurring joke out of it (“Michael Jackson died? News to me!”). And it’s pretty easy to catch up on current events, if you really want to do so. Just breathing the air in DC makes you 85% more cognitive of what’s going on than the rest of the country.
You’ve been back in the states since last year, right? Correct me if I’m mistaken, but in that time, you’ve started a graduate program, right? That’s plenty of fodder for a 30-minute conversation right there. You’ve also had a couple of annoying roommate issues that you had to sort out. That kind of low-level drama is relatable to a lot of people and is good for laughs. I’m assuming you’ve had other experiences in the last year you could talk about. Dates you’ve had. Movies you’ve seen. Restaurants you’ve eaten at. Bars you like and dislike.Then there’s funny experiences you had growing up. Also, message boards you post at, blogs you might read. Crazy philosophies you have about life and its meaning. Pets you’ve owned and loved and buried. We are going on 10 hours of shit you can talk about just right there, even sven. That’s not even factoring in the time for the other person to ask you questions and add their own observations on top of your own
I’m not saying you can’t ever talk about your Peace Corps experiences or your difficulties in adjusting, because seriously that would be crazy. But yeah, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that you’d be able to go longer than 30 minutes without talking about the 4 years you were in the Peace Corps. If you can’t do that, it’s okay, this doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or anything. It just means you need to broaden your range and rediscover who you were before you joined the Peace Corps.
Thinking about this, I can think of four couples in my immediate family where the woman is older than the man (including me and my husband).
One thing about DC, you can’t swing a cat without hitting someone who’s spent a significant timeoverseas.:Military, state department, peace corps, NGOs, not to mention the copious amount of foreign nationals, who seem to comprise half the bar I’m drinking at right now.
I would like to retract all of my previous advice up thread, in favor of addressing this;
‘I am what I am!’
When you self reference this way, or feel this way about yourself you need to stop and think. Hard.
You are, in my opinion, way, way too young to be, ‘what you am’, already. What you really ‘am’, is raw material, because you’re young and you’re seeking.
If you already, ‘are what you are’, you cannot continue to evolve into a better creature.
Coming here, asking for advice, wanting to explore new ways of navigating through the world, does not jive with, ‘I am what I am’.
You need to decide whether you’re still young and evolving, or the plaster has already set and you, ‘am what you am.’ You’re confused because you’re trying to see yourself as both.
You’d better decide which, you’d like to be, and drop the other persona. Confusion you self create is the very hardest to get clear of.
(As a person who has also spent years in other countries, from Asia, to S America to the far north, I’m afraid I just cannot relate, at all, to your reintegration issues, or inability to relate to normal experiences, fear of telling travel stories. I reintegrated with ease, still have my past to help me relate to normal lives, and love telling travel stories. I am proud of all I am and all I’ve done. You should be too. Your reaction leaves me scratching my head, I just don’t get it at all!)
Doesn’t every woman get a court-appointed psychiatrist if she hits 30 and is still single?
I actually don’t think therapy would be a bad idea, but most of these feelings seem pretty universal for single women approaching the middle/end of their childbearing years without a partner (and who would like a partner and/or child). They even make movies about it.
Are you telling me this is common?
Hm. When I started dating the man who’s now my husband, we talked about science fiction books (most not published in the last ten years), what meta sorts of things we liked or didn’t like about books and authors, classical music (mostly me lecturing him about it; he doesn’t know very much about it and I know relatively a lot), photography (mostly him lecturing me; I didn’t know the faintest thing about photography at the time), our thoughts about what the educational system should be like (not really current events, more things like me saying, “I think all high schools should require statistics,” and why I thought that), our philosophies of life and the world, experiences we’d had as kids, how we related to our families, funny/thoughtful/stupid things we had read on the interweb that week. Neither of us knew, or knows, the faintest thing about current music or current movies. (Though mr. hunter is even more into geek culture than I am, so sometimes he’d have to sit down and explain some arcane bit of geek vocabulary to me.) We don’t usually talk about politics or current events, even now, as we have somewhat different politics.
(The ex-boyfriend I had before him always wanted to talk about politics and current events. In fact, he wanted to debate them. It got old reeeeally quickly.)
I might add my voice to those who encourage you to think about what you enjoy rather than how you look or what you have been doing. What do you have strong opinions about? What things do you find interesting? Do you ever read things on the Dope or elsewhere and think it’s really interesting or insightful or just want to talk about it with someone? What kinds of things? (Also, roasting goats seems like an awesome hobby. What spices do you roast them with? Anything you can get in the US? Can you roast goats the same way here or would it violate laws? Does this carry over into a general cooking hobby you care about? If not, why not? What did you enjoy about it?)
But yes… if you want a guy who is a partner (which I think a husband should be), it seems like there’s going to have to be some wrestling with the idea that you’re in control. Of course, if you’re looking for a relationship where you can set the tone and not fall more in love than he does, you won’t be happy with someone who wants to be an equal partne, and vice versa.
(But I do get what you’re saying, about re-assimilating being hard. I went to Australia for a month – only a month, to an English-speaking country! and didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to US news – and I came home and we were at war with Iraq, and I was all “what the heck?!” and everything seemed completely different, and somehow everyone had obtained cell phones in that one month. So I can only imagine what it’s like after four years.)
Would you tell a guy to go to therapy if he wanted a number of girls to choose from, wanted to be able to set the tone of the relationship, wanted girls to desire him without him feeling likes he has to always be working at keeping in their favor, wants to be forgiven when he cancels a date or doesn’t call and wanted to make sure he wasn’t getting emotionally invested in women who were not as invested in him?
I think every bachelor in the world would like this.
The rest is pretty standard realizing that those really are wrinkles, if you want to have kids you have one decade to do it at best, and there are people at the bar who were in elementry school on 9/11. I think women dig the whole “delayed adulthood” thing, too. But we run head on into biological realities in a way men don’t. If I don’t decide by 35 or so that I want to have kids and start trying (never had a pregnancy scare, so I doubt I’m ultra fertile.), I may be deciding for my whole life. Even adoption agencies have age limits. I sit around thinking if young women are going to start saving money for IVF the way they save for house down payments.
And if I want a partner to raise kids with, which reallly would be nice, there is probably around a three year lag between “first kiss” and “trying for a kid.” And who knows, maybe it’ll be hard for me to concieve. Add in another year or two of trying for a baby. Adding in some cushion for false starts, it’s not time to freak out yet, but it is time to start thinking seriously. I figure I can screw around fo another year or so.
Face, I have long dreamed of a double life. I don’t really “get” how we are supposed to find one person we want to raise kids with, have hot sex with, grow old with, live in the same house with, and be best friends with. These seem like a lot of different people to me.
About Peace Corps…I’m mostly cool now. These are the things that come up in the first six months or so.
Alice,I am talking about sheer size of the dating pool, not individuals. I’m also looking at differences of, say, 4 years or more. Let’s say the oldest I’ll go is 5 years older than myself (which is pretty true…I prefer guys slightly younger than myself.) At 25, my pool of guys interested in me is from ages 20-30. The oldest among them is willing to date women 20-34 and the youngest will go down to 18. The odds are relatively even. At 30, my pool is at best 26-35. The oldest among them is willing to date from 24-39. That is quite a spread. The young end will date 18-30. I’m competing with 19 years woth of women for 9 years worth of men, and for many of these men I’m getting close to the upper limit. At 45, things look grim. I’ve got a pool 36-45. The oldest is looking at women 30-49. The youngest is dating 26-45. At this point I have wrinkles, kids from another man, no promise of giving the new guy his own kids. And the top end of my pool is deeply narrowed by marriage. Being a woman-on-the-prowl seems likely to be disappointing.
I wouldn’t start with therapy; I’d start with growing up. That description sounds like a guy who might star in a movie entitled ***Failure to Launch ***or something (I never saw the actual movie).
Reality is far messier than that - any guy who wants, let alone achieves, that level of control is more of a pickup artist than relationship material, IMHO.
So you want to be “in the catbird seat” but realize that statistics are starting to work against you…like I said, life is messy.
i guess i’ve been cyber-rejected by your lack of answer? 
however, i now do have advice to give after reading a bit more about your predicament.
sorry but you can’t have your cake and eat it too. you can’t go carousing the world for 4 years during your dating prime, then come back and expect that a line of prince charmings are at the ready to sweep you off your feet. excuse our gender for being exclusively ugly but interesting, or hot but vapid. the same can be easily said for chicks.
i will say there are plenty of guys who secretly love karaoke, the taste of goat, and rock at mahjong. even if they aren’t, if you’re cute enough and inherently cool enough, they’ll learn to love karaoke, the taste of goat, and to play mahjong.
i don’t think you need therapy but there is an element of a high-horse you need to step down from. yeah you love china and africa and all that. fine. yeah you want to talk about it. cool. but, at what point do you reconcile talking about your experiences from dwelling exclusively in those experiences? what i mean to say is i would (and have) find a girl who’s a schoolteacher and talks exclusively about her kids to be inane and not date her because of that. or a girl who just goes on and on about her college experiences 3-4 years ago. or a girl who was just a LITTLE too into her cats. the same can be said about your peace corps experiences. sure anecdotes are fun to sprinkle in but don’t be identified exclusively by that when you date.
in fact, i think experiences shouldn’t be the bulk of conversation on a date. i like to talk about opinions, hypotheticals, and thoughts. the conclusion is less important than the thought path that arrived there. sometimes i bring up myers-briggs test personality types as an icebreaker. or ask what she did in HS, or her political party affiliation and go from there. i’m not actually interested if she’s a democrat or republican, but i do want to see how she thinks. the fact that she works at say… a nonprofit or a hotel is more or less irrelevant from a dating standpoint.