While Justin Bailey’s analysis has the ring of truth about it, in my case there were extenuating factors I did not realise until much later.
You see, I have a degree of face blindness. Apparently most people can look at someone and see the identity in their faces. When I meet someone, I usually have to deduce who they are, by running an internal checklist: height? hair? clothing? vehicle? Are they where I’m expecting them? And the biggest one is, do they recognize me? (It’s surprising how much I rely on that.) With someone I know well, this process takes less than fraction of a second. (And even then, I’m easily thrown by a new hairstyle, different clothes, or a new context.)
In addition, I am very nearsighted. So I simply never see many things that others see. Signals, cues, whatever. I never had contact lenses until I was in university.
The upshot of all this is, it takes me a number of months of associating with someone before I am reasonably certain that I can reliably recognize them. If I meet someone once, I will NOT recognize them a second time unless most of the other factors are in place.
Now, I did not know of the face blindness until a few years ago, in my early forties. Looking back on high school, I can see how it had a huge influence on casual social interactions. Any social relations that arose from random light casual contact? Not for me, because I didn’t know who anyone was outside of the repetitive environments of class. They were simply part of the background.
In high school, I was naturally a suspicious type. My social career in senior public school was devoted to avoiding being harmed by bullies, not learning how to be personable. In high school, I had no social referents, no social confidence, and no social experience. So well into university, I had NO knowledge of dating or romance. I believed that I was unworthy, and climbing out of that belief was as undoable as going to California or becoming rich… it needed things I simply could not imagine having.
I look back on it now and see that there were several women I got along well with in university who might actually have been interested in me. One cooked me a meal. Several came to visit me at my parents’ place during the summer.
I went to visit one of them at her parents’ place, and came very close to connecting with her, but at the crucial moment, I fell back: ultimately, I could not imagine that I was worthy, and so I never kissed her. That is my greates regret.
This perception of unworthiness ontinued to dog me. A little later, when I was in electronics school, there were three beautiful women who worked at the Burger King across the road from my friend’s apartment. One was Asian, one was black, and one was a redhead.
We would go over there all the time to take breaks during study sessions at the apartment. My friend actually hooked up with one of them, spending the night with her in his room, while I studied electronics and then crashed on his couch. Man, did I feel left out… Later, one of them said that she ‘wanted to have my baby’; I thought she was mocking me. Why not? I had no other experience.
During electronics school, though, I came close to hooking up with a cute chubby Chinese girl in the other class. That was when things gradually began to shift. I never really relaxed with her, though, and eventually she connected with someone else. I remember she said once how surprised the was that I ‘let her go’.
