I think you’re making too much out of this. You don’t have to put expectations on dates. You can tell a guy you just want to get out and meet people. If the guy isn’t what you’re looking for, maybe he’d match up well with some you know. He might know someone better for you. Stop looking for another infatuation, you need to meet more people so you have some perspective. Your biggest problem is ending a cycle of behavior. You will meet someone else, you will feel love again, and as you grow that love will be so much more than you have experienced before or are expecting now. Sorry to be so blunt, that’s my nature, but quit thinking of excuses, get out and date.
Let me get this straight, you think everyone who is dating or in a relationship, did a little weigh up of benefit/cost analysis before falling in love? Okay, that’s screwed up.
If you think turning 20 means you must transform into such a creature you’re nutty. Most people do not do as you are assuming. They meet, develop friendships, that blossom into more intimate relationships when, after differing amounts of time and experiences, for different people, they feel mutual love and respect.
I’m not seeing you as a special snowflake for desiring this. Most of the women I have known felt/feel, exactly as you do.
If you don’t want to ‘date’ ‘strangers’, how exactly do you expect to find this next great romance? How do you spend time with your friends? Why is it not permitted for a new person to come into those activities? How is that different from dating exactly?
Pining for what was, to love like you once loved, worrying about getting old - (Oh to be 19 again!)
Women who are afraid of intimacy seek these intense, infatuation situations, where a real relationship is functionally impossible because the object of affections is a much older, a teacher/boss, or gay. You can enjoy the oxytocin high, without any threat of needing to become emotionally or sexually intimate. I’ve seen it a million times with extremely intelligent, somewhat socially awkward women. (since I went to Stuyvesant I know a lot of them).
You say you loved “purely” because you had no thought of your feelings being returned. I would say you loved in a way that felt emotionally safe, understanding there was no danger of your feelings being returned or the other person expecting things from you.
It’s not “pure” it’s just a coping mechanism.
If I don’t want to “get out and date” perhaps because the rate at which dating relationships are supposed to develop and the rate at which I am able to develop feelings are incompatible, I am “thinking of excuses”? The reason I made this thread was precisely because someone else gave me the same unsolicited advice; said older woman could not for the life of her figure out why I don’t go on dates. Well, turns out, I don’t like conventional dating.
Tell you the truth, my mom used to get alarmingly upset about my ex and tipsily weep about how she thought I deserved to get “swept off my feet”, and I rolled my eyes and explained that we were damned well grownups who had a grownup relationship. And then I dumped him and met my fiance and got seriously goofy and she’s still all “I told you so”.
So yeah, grownups can do that whole gigglefest thing.
You just touched upon my deepest fear - I have intimacy problems after watching my mother struggle with a silent depression in an unhappy marriage. You are probably right too because it is always an older, caring man I fall for. I don’t have fear of sexual relationships though - I seek them out pretty deliberately. I just start feeling depressed when people seem to expect me to want to go on dates with their son or friends, eat dinner, talk on the phone (I hate that), and have sex with them soon after the first time I meet them, and then expect me to deal with the expectation that this is either going somewhere or ending.
And I went to Bronx Science! I do consider myself pretty intelligent and pretty introverted (not socially awkward per se); I am able to turn on the extroverted exterior on cue but it feels insincere. Another reason why conventional dating won’t work for me. Pretending to feel connected to someone I just met is just that - pretense. Dating relationships move much too quick for me.
Ok, I get it. You are trying to date, and you don’t like the process. Welcome to the world of dating! You’ve also revealed your intimacy issues, which I suspected were more of a factor than the infatuation thing.
So what’s a date like for you? Are you getting dolled up to the max, wondering whether each guy is the one? You can certainly tone down the expectations. I’m too old to tell you the details of dating these days, but your problem is nothing new. You have to have a way to meet people, spend time with people, learn about people. I can understand that can be annoying, as a young man I remember it being that way. You just don’t sound very different from a lot of men and women I’ve known over the years. Some people are into dating, and like it. Others find it as unproductive as you do. But it is the way to meet and get to know people. I wish you the best of luck. I think you’ll stumble across the right person eventually, just as almost everyone else does.
I guess the short version of my story is – don’t concern yourself too much about not attaining your dreams of your earlier years, because over a longer time your dreams and your understanding of the world will change.
I’ll tell you my story of angst – maybe it will put things in a little perspective, maybe not. At 15 I was seriously thinking about suicide because I felt entirely alone and unloved and looking back I pretty much was entirely alone and unloved. But I made what still might be the most mature conscious decision I ever made. I decided I didn’t have enough knowledge and experience of life to make such a drastic decision at that age. I decided to put off suicide until I was at least 30, when I would have a better appreciation of how things really work.
I never forgot that decision, and thought about suicide quite a lot again as I approached 30. But by that time, I wasn’t nearly as concerned about what other people thought of me, and I wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed about myself anymore, so I couldn’t justify suicide. I was still alone and unloved (my couple of relationships by that time had been disastrous), but I was getting comfortable with being alone.
Over the following years, I’ve had some periodic thoughts about suicide. I’m 54 now, and I’m STILL alone and unloved (though I have at least gotten into a very solid friendship with my sister). Now there are two reasons I haven’t killed myself. One is that I don’t want to burden my sister with any guilt or hardship of dealing with it. The other is that the world just isn’t worth killing myself over. I’ve come to realize just how little power any of us ever has in charting the course of our lives – it seems to me that we are blown around by storms of reality beyond our control, and blaming myself for my failures is kind of nonsensical.
My personal experiences of love and relationships has on the whole been more bad than good, and I don’t really expect to ever be in one again. I feel I’ve been humiliated enough in trying to get in relationships with women, so I’m not making an effort, nor have I seen any evidence in a very long time that I’m attractive enough to women for them to pursue me.
Having read through this, I think I’ll stop before I depress you beyond recovery. 
I didn’t “date” my husband until we were already dating. We worked together, went to the same college - we talked a couple of times in the break room, played frisbee in the parking lot after we got off work, went to the grocery store when it was the only thing open in the middle of the night. I asked him to be my boyfriend before we’d ever so much as had dinner together. He told me he loved me about a week after we’d started dating, and eight years later I haven’t stopped being infatuated with him.
You don’t have to follow a traditional dating path if it doesn’t work for you. You just have to find someone who also doesn’t want that path. Of course, that part is easier said than done.
Tangent:
Can we all, as a species, knock this stuff off?
- Hey, turns out people without kids have lives that contain meaning too, believe it or not.
- This kind of buildup really makes parents feel like crap if they have a baby and for whatever reason don’t have that “hit with a Mac Truck” wave of love and adoration the moment they see their tiny faces.
- I don’t think we need to give people who just want to feel loved the idea “Hey, go have a kid”. That’s a terrible idea.
And also, it’s really disrespectful to completely dismiss someone else’s feelings as not real or invalid simply because they have no experienced the same milestones in their life as you have. Strikes me as extremely patronizing.
Ugh, yes. I’ve seen a mess of quotes from teenage girls and teen-moms-to-be citing some variation on wanting unconditional love from their baby and to be able to love him/her back as being an apparently extremely good reason to intentionally go out and get pregnant as a teenager. :smack:
I completely get what you are saying about the expectations of “officially” dating someone.
But you are exactly where you are most likely to have those friendship-turns-to-romance relationships: college. Most people in college spend time meeting people in classes, clubs, parties, roommates friends, etc. They hang out for a while in these completely platonic settings, then maybe mutually decide they’d like to go out, having already an idea that they like the other person. Sure, some people will go out to parties, and bars and hit on each other, but that really doesn’t have to be the way to do it, and I know plenty of people who never dated anyone that way.
And if you are asked out in one of these friendship settings before you think you know the person, you can simply say, “I think I need to get to know you a little better, first”. An interesting result of that is it makes you start to look at the other person a different way, and sometimes leads you to end up liking them after all! (Sadly, there is no guarantee they will still be into you after your rejection, even if it was mild and kind)
Unfortunately when you grow up a little more, the thing that replaces school is a job, and in many jobs, this friendship-to-romance is harder to find. In many jobs, you regularly work with only a small number of people, so you’re less likely to be meeting someone your interested in. Or you may have to worry about the hierarchy of the system and not being permitted to date people who work above or below you. It’s still possible, but harder and less likely.
But your still in college, which isn’t a whole lot different from high school, in this regard. You may have more people trying to “officially” date you right away than you did before, but there are still plenty of ways for a relationship to develop more naturally.
Yeah, hate to be a downer but you won’t ever find it as easy to even make friends as in college.
-The quantity of friends is high in college, but I found after college the quality is much better.
Conventional dating isn’t a requirement for meeting new people. That just means you will have to expand your activities to include other people without it being a date.
In other words, get out there and make yourself available for friendship. Or hang out online and wait for someone <most likely, many many MANY someones> to grow that online relationship over time until you feel you just have to meet them.
1 out of 20 of those online things will work into something translate-able regarding ‘real life’. The rest will be handy hooks to hang expectations on, or to use as an excuse to not go out there and see who’s actually available, as opposed to lying to you on the 'net. Not that people don’t lie in real life, but at least then you get to the meat of the matter sooner, and waste less time.
This. Take advantage of your college years. If you’re interested in grad school or some other sort of professional school, take advantage of that. Do hobbies and things that interest you and where you may be able to meet people that will share your interests and where that initial interest may flower into love.
I’m one of those people who doesn’t like dates, doesn’t see the point, is sort of scared of them. (I mean, I get that people go on them and they work for some people! Just… not… for me.) I’ve been on exactly one date in my life (and that one was kind of awful even though we were sort-of friends beforehand) and I’ve always had love grow out of friendships. Always.
I hung out with a group of friends including mr. hunter for a year. We were friends, nothing special, but friends. One night we got to talking… and then we got to talking more… and over about a week we got to be what I’d call close friends… and then in a month or so we were both so head-over-heels in love it was ridiculous. (This was before either of us actually said anything about it to each other, but it was pretty obvious to everyone.) I was 24 at the time. And a very good friend of mine from high school got married recently with a very similar story (only she knew her now-husband for even longer before they got together); she was over 30 at the time. And, hey, now that I think about it, something similar happened to my husband’s aunt at age 70. So being upset about this at 20 is ridiculous.
I think you’re overthinking this. The quote is actually saying the same thing you are: that adults tend to (not always; see rest of thread) fall in love over a long course of getting to know someone rather than instantaneously. They just used the word “date” because a lot of people do get to know people by dating, but I think the author of the quote would agree with you that getting to know someone in a non-dating context would fit as well.
I understand what you’re saying. I’ve been where you are. My story is similar to yours - I fell in love with a friend when I was fifteen, and even though nothing ever happened, that was OK by me. Even if I couldn’t be with them, I could love them, and that was enough. (And Hello Again’s comments about intimacy issues hit home for me.) A few years later, I got over it and accepted that it was going nowhere, and like you, I’m still good friends with them. I tried going out on dates and didn’t like it, for much the same reasons as you describe, so I stopped going on dates. The next bit is where our stories diverge. I made a new friend and, some months later, I fell in love again. A few months after that, it turned out she’d fallen in love with me too, and we got together.
The people talking about how you got no return in your previous infatuation aren’t being mercenaries, with a ‘what can I get out of this?’ attitude. They’re trying to tell you something I realised for the first time when I got into this relationship - that my previous, unrequited love was, well, incomplete. Your feelings for the one you’re infatuated with are only the tip of the iceberg. The stuff that happens next is what they mean by ‘return’. Things like saying “I love you” whenever you feel like it and knowing you’ll get an “I love you too”. Realising that while you always knew they had the power to break your heart, you also have the power to break theirs, and the responsibility not to. Being able to give and get affection without trying to downplay your feelings. You always wanted them to be happy, but now you are the one making them happy, just as they’re making you happy. (At least, I think that’s what they were talking about.)
In conclusion - falling in love is still possible. You don’t have to play the dating game if you’re not into that, and if you do want to date people, you don’t have to follow the ‘rules’ about when to have sex and so on.
The infatuation you felt in high school was not love. It was a certain blend of chemicals rushing through your head. Those chemicals have a fairly short shelf life; you won’t ever feel that way about one person your entire life. They are designed by nature to last long enough to get you knocked up. That feeling of chemistry with someone is nature’s way of telling you you’d have healthy babies with him.
In my opinion, real, long-lasting love is something you do, not something you feel. Being passively entertained by the chemicals in your head is more akin to being on drugs.
I wondered about that baby response…like, what does wanting to be in romantic love have anything to do with babies? I don’t love children, they annoy me. And I am YOUNG, in college, unattached, POOR. My classmates are people at Columbia University- hardly the haven for teen pregnancies. Don’t worry - I won’t have a baby yet!