General ► Dating Experience [NOT AN ADVICE THREAD]

[Ðari]

Before you bless this thread with your wonderful as well as mundane stories and experience here's a few ground rules.

• This is NOT an advice thread.
• This thread is made for others to talk (as openly) as they wish about personal dating experience.
• I'd appreciate and respect if discourse is civil and vitriol see's it's way out of the thread.
• Nobody likes talking to someone who only means to burn everyone else or as many people as possible, don't be that guy/girl/they/it please.

Where to start? Honestly, I'm in my thirties and didn't really have much to model after when it came to actual relationships. Things I'd always tried to avoid were being a pick-up artist and really comb through people more deeply before asking them out. Back in 2016 I reconnected with an old friend from NY that I talked to from time to time throughout the years. Living in NJ, I thought about dating them more than a handful of times but was dealing with a lot of other things regarding my work-life balance. I was more or less going through my breakout period as a late-bloomer and really only just then starting to figure out what I wanted to do with myself as well as my life.

I'll be real with you, my friend of many years had the best of intentions, but not for a second did they realistically make a good "partner". Very intelligent and encouraging, but their emotional volatility and natural defense mechanisms made it seem really impossible to be more intimate with them. I'd endured a lot of criticisms to my own masculinity throughout this process as if to say I wasn't exuding any real masculine energy or whatever the hell. It became insufferably one-sided as far as any real efforts or intentions to progress the relationship itself. They were self-aware enough to recognize they just weren't meeting my expectations in the simple fact that on the financial end, they couldn't reciprocate as well as running into emotional wall after wall and (honestly) refusing to budge or be vulnerable. That letdown wasn't terrible, if I remember right July of 2017 they made the call to end the relationship and placed it on their level of maturity and feeling like they fit the dynamic I was attempting to build.

 

[Sonofjafar]

First dance in high school a girl asks me out. I show up expecting a nice evening wi to my crush and she tells me she’s gonna be going with some other guy. Then SHE blames me for being mad about the situation.

 

[The Conquerer]

I'm in an interesting relationship. I would say my partner and I are exclusive. I'm 31 and she's 44, so quite an age gap, but we click on multiple levels. We are also interracial and in her community, especially as far as it concerns her father, it is heavily frowned upon for her to date me. However, I feel as though we are well beyond the infatuation phase. We see each other on an almost daily basis. Though our cultures are vastly different and she is 12-13 years older than me, we click on many levels.

Even though she is a grown woman, can make her own decisions, she knows for sure her community, and her father, will consider her a disgrace. We hide our relationship because of that. Can't say the baggage that is attached to her is what I ever imagined I'd be dealing with, but I can't stop seeing her, and she feels the same. We were friends before any of this started, just bar buddies. Then she made the first move, I didn't move first because of all of the things she talked about regarding the barriers. At first, it started with just being intimate, but it evolved into something much more. I, at first, kept her at arms length because it was such a taboo and never thought it would manifest into what we have today. Then, one day, she confessed her feelings to me. I reciprocated because, even though I didn't want to admit it, I felt like she did.

We're starting to think that the only way we could potentially move about without her always looking over her shoulder, she knows a lot of people and those people know her family, is to pick up and leave some distances away. It's a work in progress, but I'm open to take chances. I've been with I would say, a fair amount of women before. I wouldn't say a lot, but definitely enough where I'm counting on two hands. Only a few have been impactful in my life. She is one of them, and she is the one who I've considered actually changing my life for. Though, there are doubts in my mind that she will not want to throw her family and some of her friends away for me in the end. I may be opening myself up for hurt... But to love, is to take necessary risk I believe.

 

[Ðari]

I have a bit of a story to toss up here, surprisingly this dates back to 2009 - Present. The person I'm referencing I haven't dated since it'll be around 10 years this year. While not a dating story per say, the post-relationship dynamic has been a rollercoaster to say the least and well, everyone's tired now.

As an ex, I can confidently say that I never really infringed or interfered in any relationship my previous partner had. We've had many conversations over the years, but when I was entering my aforementioned relationship in the OP dating back to 2016, I went through a cut-off period from this person, and despite being friends for years, it was the first time in a long time we didn't speak to each other outside of a period of 48hrs we'd conditioned each other to.

I will say that with this ex in particular, I never grasped at the potential of being as forthcoming as I later learned to be with literally every other person I came to know in my life after them, romantically and non. Our attempts at reconnecting have usually devolved into old patterns of behavior, excluding information, and not really being nearly as open if open at all anymore with the other and it's become noticeable. Slowly it's felt like our friendship has been a hole thats slowly been filled up with dirt over time, leaving less and less room and opportunities to actually see the other person as another human being and impart kindness and experiences with.

Sadly, our friendship is so...non-existent now to the point mostly due to still subconsciously feeling/remembering that I at no point ever allowed myself to be really vulnerable and they've largely moved on, preferring virtual friends they likely will probably won't see the fulscope of vulnerability of. A prime explanation i was provided was that, she simply didn't really understand the reaches of my own internal conflict and honestly, theres nothing to understand when the associated conditioning and trauma after a while is self-inflicted. Incredible how your mind can cage you to such an extreme it can effect how you are with a particular person of interest, yet I struggled with specifically just her, and it effectively cost me any shot at any kind of friendship with them then on in the present day.

 

[Deleted member 246005]

I have had relationships before but I've been a screw-up in love.

I'm early 30s and I still live with my parents. So I'm just waiting to move out before I date again. My parents aren't good yet at being parents for adults. So moving out felt like the next best step.

I have depression and no real job prospects beyond retail so moving out takes priority.

I do have penpals that are women and interested in me so I'm not that unlucky...

 

[kirabook]

None! Unless you count a couple of weeks in middle school dating some boy. I hated every second of it. I didn't hate him, but I hated the entire experience. I remember the first time he asked me to hug him and the the dread that washed over me must've been visible across my entire body. I felt bad when I dumped him.

I should've realized then that I was aroace, but I doubt my younger self knew such a thing existed. I was constantly told "Don't worry, I'm sure you'll want to date people when you're older." and I believed that up until a few years ago. But no. I never have.

So that is why I have no dating experience.

 

[Max]

My senior year of high school I started seeing a girl, and we were together for about 5 years. We ended up at the same college, I was in my third year of college and she in her first, and she changed a lot once she started going to school there. She joined a sorority, started drinking, and just kind of went through a personality change. We went through a period of 3 or 4 days that she was too busy to see each other or talk, and then once the weekend hit she came over and broke up with me. She basically said she wanted to wait to break up with me until the weekend so that it wouldn't affect my school or work day.

Fast forward a couple weeks. I ask her if we can talk, I told her it just seemed crazy to me to throw 5 years away without even trying to talk about any problems we might have. She came over, and when she knocked on my bedroom door she seemed frightened. Like, when I opened it she was backed away from the door with a scared look on her face. When I asked her what was wrong, she then said she was afraid I invited her over so she could "find" me, as in like, thinking I'd invite her over and off myself. I was baffled. I just let her leave after that and let it go, I couldn't believe she thought my life revolved so much around her that without her I'd kill myself.

After a couple years I was ready to try and get back in the dating game. I thought online dating was such an awkward idea, but my friend convinced me it was at least worth trying and if I didn't like it then I could just stop. My first date off a dating app was a catfish, lucky me. Saw another girl off and on, she was fun, but we didn't click romantically.

After sifting through dating app dates for a few years and a failed attempt at a thing with a coworker, I ended up meeting a girl on facebook dating of all places. We hit it off really well, and after a couple weeks of chatting we went on our first date. I've now been married to her for a year and a half