I have given up trying to find a girlfriend. Even though, I am outgoing, have hobbies (I dance, which is actually filled with women), go to parties, talk to plenty of women. But I keep hearing the same thing over and over again: “I am just not so into skinny guys.”
I think this is fair from the woman’s perspective. I for one am only motivated to date attractive women. So, them not wanting to settle for less actually makes very good sense to me. There is absolutely no hate or bitterness regarding that. Fuck all that: ‘all women are whores’-noise.
That being said, I think I should just consider myself celibate by virtue of my own standards. But now bitterness is starting to take hold of me. Bitterness about my life and to me as a person. As I said I am very outgoing and don’t want to become the cynical asshole around my friends.
So how do I stop this?
Edit: I go to the gym on a regular basis.
TLDR: be happy to be alone, truly and genuinely. then it won’t matter if you find a partner, but you will be able to choose them with a clear mind if you do.
I’m basically a complete flip of you physically but I had the same problem for a loooooooooong time. I’m a tall, strong, heavy woman, and all i kept hearing was “you’re beautiful, I just don’t want someone taller/stronger/heavier than me”. I totally get it, I didn’t want to be taller/stronger/heavier than my partner either. But I’m like Fezzik- “it’s not my fault I’m the biggest and the strongest, I don’t even exercise”. except I did do cardio to try to slim down, I’m just built to survive famine I guess. ¯\(◉‿◉)/¯
What I didn’t understand was the ones who said they just wanted to be friends, because i just wasn’t their type, but would happily be fuck buddies, so long as we kept it hush hush. ಠಗಠ
Anyway, eventually after a bunch of very bad attempts at relationships where I took way more BS than I should have because I was just that hungry for affection, I decided I was just better off being single forever. I couldn’t seem to find a decent person who was attracted to me both physically and intellectually, so I decided to just stop looking. Not just stop looking, stop wanting. I actively wanted to be single for the rest of my life, in large part because I was just tired of the pain of being lonely. Like, “Jesus titty fucking Christ, we’re gonna cry ourselves to sleep because we’re SOOOO sad we’re alone AGAIN?! FFS, JUST STAHP!” So I stopped wanting a partner. I found I had so much more time and energy to do the things I was passionate about when I wasn’t futzing with all that stuff. I became the queen of getting shit done, remodeled my house myself, landscaped my yard, built a garden, went to the gym regularly, did weight lifting till I maxed out all the leg machines at the gym, and got close to maxing some of the upper body ones too. I was happy being single. I WANTED to be single. I craved my free time, the peace i found in solitude was better by orders of magnitude than any of the toxic relationships I’d clung to in the past.
After about two and a half years of that, a long time friend/ acquaintance started coming to me for massage ( I’m a deep tissue massage therapist with a focus on injury recovery and pain relief) and we would just talk throughout the sessions. Politics, philosophy, movies, anime, music, goals, food… Just everything. Eventually, after we’d just spent two more hours talking in the car after the two hours talking in the session, he said “Sooo… you know I’m flirting with you sometimes, right?” I turned him down. I said, more or less, “I’m happy single, I’ve had such a garbage time dating that I can’t pretend I’m not a decent part of the problem. I value our friendship and don’t want to hurt your feelings, and I’m not NOT attracted to you, I just don’t want to date ever again.” He was completely chill, said “no worries, no is no even if you’re attracted to me too. if you ever change your mind, let me know.” And he dropped it, never brought it up again… And fuck if that wasn’t the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. We kept being friends and talking and spending time together, talking about goals and wants and life plans and we found that our wants and goals in life were so in line it was uncanny. Importantly, neither of us wanted to get married, neither of us wanted kids, neither of us wanted to live with a partner ever again… It seemed like I could keep my peace, my space, my autonomy, AND have a partner who cared about my mind and emotions while also finding me wildly attractive. So we talked about what dating would look like and agreed to try it. It’s been 2.5 years so far and I’ve never been happier in a relationship. I still think if we stopped being romantically involved I’d probably prefer to go back to staying single, but I’m happy with him as a partner.
I tell you the whole story, kinda long and rambling as it is, because I don’t think I could have found a happy relationship if I had continued to want one with the same frantic energy as I had previously. I don’t think I would have been a person who could be as open and honest as I was with who I was if I’d still wanted a partner when we started to really get to know each other. I don’t think I was a whole person when I was looking for my “other half” and I don’t know if you can really find a good match if you’re not a whole entire person on your own. If I could distill the idea down to it’s core, I think it would be: be happy to be alone, truly and genuinely. then it won’t matter if you find a partner, but you will be able to choose them with a clear mind if you do.
That was a very moving story. I going to try this. Hell or high water I will try. Not for the possible prospects but for me. Thank you for sharing!
Also:
I like these.
( ๑‾̀◡‾́)σ» then you also may like these
Yay! I’m glad it helped. X) As to the faces, I use Gboard and there’s a ASCII art library in the list of emoji/gif options. It’s quite entertaining. (￣³￣) ⊂(・﹏・⊂) ᕦ(ಠ_ಠ)ᕤ (ノ｀Д´)ノ彡┻━┻
This is the right mindset!
I wish I could upvote this more than once
Well, technically no one is stopping you.
“I just don’t want someone taller/stronger/heavier than me”
I hate this so much. It’s the inverse of women who will only date tall men.
Speaking for myself, I like women. And that means all kinds. It’s so hard for me to imagine seeing a woman who falls outside the “standard” and being turned off by that alone.
I stopped being so upset by it once I started examining social systems and propaganda. If you’ve been conditioned your whole life to think of women as weaker and smaller and someone to be protected to maintain your “manly state”, someone who doesn’t fit that mold is a threat to your subconscious sense of self worth. Same for women who don’t want to date shorter men, “if I’m not the property of someone who’s the biggest and the strongest, I’m worth less to this society.”
‘Society’ thinks men who are smaller than their woman are weak, and that the woman must be defective or she’d be with someone who ‘fits’ better. They’re dead wrong, but that’s the unexamined subconscious judgement that our society has conditioned into people. It’s easy to be less upset with individual people when you realize they just haven’t had the space to examine the abusive systems they’re forced to exist within.
Comments like these are why I love lemmy.
It’s true that the more you want something, the harder it can be to obtain lol
Sometimes you just have to be zen about it and then it can happen naturally.