I'm going to die alone. With cats eating my face. Or in some piss-stained care home because I'm the youngest member of my family, upon where my sole joy in life will be in being as cantankerous and appalling an oldiewonk as I can envisage because that will be the only joy left to me being sat in a beige lounge all day and a beige bedroom all night while underpaid people who don't give a shit have to wipe my arse for me, and I'll be too aged and nobody will be alive to care who ought to, and all my money will end up being frittered away on the fees for same and/or stolen in tax or the inevitable tax raid on private pensions to plug the hole in the Ponzi scheme that is the British state pension scheme.
How do I know this? Because I'm 38 years old, and a divorced sperglord. My chances of finding any relationship as a result of this are as close to zero as practical unless I'm prepared to allow myself to be the poor ninny who is taken advantage of emotionally and financially again. After all, that's how I ended up being married the first time. Too cuntstruck and in the last chance saloon to realise that Heather's family were basically running cult recruitment game to get her off their hands and onto mine.
Now I escaped her in 2016. I avoided all things relationship wise for 2016, 2017, and 2018, mainly because I was too full of venlafaxine to care and also because I didn't want to mistreat someone by taking out my frustrations at being taken for a fucking mug by Heather on them. Then in 2020, lockdown entered the chat. So that was off. I did have a call with a girl called Serena who I found on an interest group in the autumn but that didn't go well. I thought it did, but she decided to ignore me forever afterwards for reasons I couldn't fathom. I don't know. But anyhow. Fast forward to 2023 and I'm starting to fuck off the fat and I kind of want to find someone.
My success rate continues to be 0. Across every conceivable method.
Basically, I seem to just make people hate me without meaning it or even saying anything. I would go places. People would be affable and nice and suchlike but they'd look straight through me, refuse to answer things to the point where getting them to talk about themselves (which It Says Here is what people like to do) was like interrogation, they'd not be interested in anything I had to say, or make excuses and lie about needing the bog just to escape. They wouldn't even give me the chance to listen. It was like they hated me on sight because I was physically disfigured in some way. Like I had a massive suppurating open sore right in the middle of my face. Or I'd get into conversation with them, run out of things to say, and not be able to make them like me the way other people could so easily.
I've known I'm a sperglord since 2005 incidentally. I don't think we're supposed to say "sperg" or "sperglord" any more. I think it became "on the spectrum" then "neurodiverse." Whatever. Don't care. I'm sticking with sperglord and if you don't like it you can jam it up your dad's cunt. As a student someone tried to diagnose me with it formally but I rejected that because there is a stigma about it and I didn't want to have this black mark following me round forever in adult life. I'm not the only autist to think this way; some googling has revealed a lot of people who also think this. For instance, had I a formal diagnosis of autism it would be an impediment to a lot of things in adult life. It would be something that employers would either patronise me about (more on this later) or decide makes me less qualified. It would be something that would raise eyebrows if I were to apply for a shotgun certificate. It would be something that would be used against me if I were to want to adopt children in later life. Yes, I have a client interacting job, but I can get away with it because I know what to say and where to say it and I generally can get through things no problem. Nobody's asking me to empathise with them, they're asking me how to molehill mountaineer or tunnel them out of a hole they've got themselves into or fuck someone up through the Courts. I'm quite good at that. I can do the whole "I'm sorry to hear that" pabulum when it's about something sensitive like death or suchlike. I know enough to do that. But it's clearly not enough for social events. It just isn't. Whatever I do is wrong, and everyone refuses to tell me what is right. It feels like they're actively withholding secrets from me to let me blunder around so I'm less competition from them, but this of course cannot be correct.
What will happen is that I go somewhere and they'll all notice or detect me coming, men and women both, and they'll sort of circle the wagons. Like, they'll bunch up as if they know I'm some sort of a threat or to exclude me. If they don't and I try to talk to them they'll either look through me like I don't exist or treat me like I'm an annoyance, like a flickering fluorescent tube or something. If they don't do that then they'll make small talk, refuse to be drawn into anything more involved, and fuck off. It's like they hate me on sight. They can smell that I'm wrong somehow. On occasions I do get meaningful conversation, they get bored or annoyed or refuse to make anything further. And I don't even say anything contentious or anything. I hide my power level at all times, before you start dredging up my writeups here like a basement dwelling Reddit user. I am not stupid. Or they'd lie to staff that I was "making them feel unsafe" without explaining how or why or what and having me slung out.
I've tried the apps. 0 respond rate to anyone I matched with. No reasons given. I have tried this for years. I don't know why I expected different. Dating apps aren't designed to foster long term relationships. They're designed to dangle the prospect of sex in front of you so you continue to pay subscription fees, like a good little consumer. I've tried other sites as well that aren't app based. Once again, less than 5 percent respond rate and after a few messages they'd get bored or upset and block or ignore for no adequately explicable reason. Nothing I did made any difference on any level whatever. What a fucking toilet.
I then was pointed in the direction of a "Traditional Matchmaking Agency" who expressed interest in signing me up given I'm 6' 3" and was a solicitor. However they wanted £600-£2,000 per annum to introduce me to 24 possible persons per year. Worth it? I was considering getting a subscription but then I read the small print. If you purchase a lower tier membership, you are limited to being matched to people on that tier or below. Therefore, it was quite on the cards that they'd take my £600.00 and go "sorry Hazelnut, but we have nobody else who is as stingy as you so we can't introduce you to someone at this time. Oh dear, how sad, never mind." To prevent this, I rang them and asked them for a table of how many people were on each membership tier, grouped by age range, to assist me in making an informed decision as to which membership package to purchase. I wasn't asking for personally identifiable information, but me asking them this made them have a funny turn, snap "maybe you should try online dating" and slamming the phone down. And then spamming me with text and e-mail advertising for all their functions despite this.
Try interest groups? Lol, all my interests are sausage fests. Heavy metal? Almost entirely men; the women at gigs are usually with their other halves. Old computer hardware and stuff? Absolutely entirely men. Women are too sensible to trawl through Greedbay trying to find an era-appropriate motherboard for a Pentium II 450. Pinball? Also a sausage fest. In fact just even trying to talk about it to women makes their eyes glaze over and their foof snap shut like a cigarillo case. Gym? Okay, this is not quite a sausage fest, but it's not exactly a particularly effective place to find someone. Where I go, most people are more interested in getting through what they do and suddenly wandering over to a lady between sets and trying to chat them up just isn't done and also seems creepy, because it implies you've been ogling them while squatting in tight pants the past five minutes. (While they're squatting in tight pants, not while I am. I mean, I don't skip leg day, but I don't wear tight pants.) I've tried to branch out into book clubs and things but I've never felt welcome therein. I went to a writing group at one time and it felt like I was systematically excluded once again. Nobody was interested in anything I had to say or any ideas and they just looked through me like I didn't exist.
Work? Not bloody likely in the days of Me Too. The days when office parties were considered boring if they didn't result in it raining disciplinaries on 2 January are long gone. It's just too high risk. There was a colleague in the account floor who did get all flirty with me for a while recently but she had a fiancé at all material times so I figured it was a trap and didn't try anything. My career is not worth risking for two minutes of after hours squelching noises.
Friends? Since the business with Heather I've kind of lost contact with a lot of them because I don't live in London any more (thank fuck, it's a stabby shithole) and besides, it didn't really help back then either. Heavy metal, like I said, is a sausage fest.
Which leaves... what exactly? Where do I find someone who isn't out to take advantage of me because cuntstruck and last chance saloon? Good fucking question.
(And before some wit goes all "have you tried therapy," the answer is yes. It was a waste of time and effort because I. it was just talking at this person who gave exactly no ideas or advice whatever but was happy to take my money, and II. the only solutions they came up with were basically giving up and "coping." I don't want to fucking cope you cunt. I want a solution. If I wanted to cope I'd just go back to taking the venlafaxine and return to semi-sentience and feeling numb. I hated that existence. And besides it didn't solve anything. It was just a chemical cosh to keep me fat and content with being taken advantage of. I'm not trying pick up artists either. They're all fucking grifters. Trust me. I almost fell in with them as a student but thankfully got out before handing over any cashola.)
I was very recently pointed to some specific apps and sites for "neurodiverse" people. I had a look. They were barely used. And cliquey. There was nobody in my area or indeed within 200 miles. It occurred to me that this was probably because such apps and sites as these are just warmed over reworks of other off the shelf sites whose developers just want to get into a niche market and plunder its cash and data. Also, why should I be forced to settle for a fellow sperg anyhow. I am not a fucking condition you fatherfucking pusbag. Stop treating me like I'm some sort of special needs donkey and start treating me like a human fucking being. I have a brain that doesn't work on social things. It does not mean I'm stupid. It does not mean I ought to be manipulated or used as your morality pet. It does not mean you need to treat me like a ticking timebomb either. It means that I have difficulty with some things. That is all it means.
But yeah, that's me. I'll probably get some smug comments about how I deserve my current state for some reason, but those people can get fucked, eat shit, and die painfully. If however you have something constructive and relevant and worthwhile to add, feel free to /msg.