Hey Ya’ll, I am a 23m who has been struggling with dating their entire life. For a little background, I identify as a homosexual male, and I have never been in a relationship. I have made many attempts throughout my life and nothing has ever been successful. I find that even though I am becoming smarter and more comfortable with not only myself, but with dating, I find that I am always choosing the wrong person. It has become such a routinely process in my life at this point, and I am sick and tried of this cycle and want to break out of it.
To best explain my situation, I feel like I do ‘something’ that will cause a person to question themselves. Whether it’s simply just me existing, or whether it is because we have been hanging out for a while. There are so many different occurrences where I have resisted making any kind of romantic advancements towards another man, but keep feeling this bizarre vibe of: “Something is going on here”. I will always talk to somebody outside of the ‘group’ of people (Essentially, talking to online friends or a close friend that the person in question does not know about) to make sure I am not misjudging the situation. I never assume a person to be interested in me or think differently of someone because of a weird situation, but when it becomes a long list of situations that string together so perfectly, then I start to look at the totality of it all and make a judgement based off of that.
Every single time in every single situation like this, I have given a full list of details to describe what is happening, how it has progressed, and the energy brought in these situations. So when I first talk to someone and say: “Hey, I have a theory that person is gay”, then when I go on to explain why, my friends will always hands down agree without bias that I am in the right. To really explain how I got into this situation in the first place, I would like to share my most recent story of this kind of issue.
I met this guy who I was just being casual with. For story telling, this guy will be named ‘Bob’. Bob is a 26m would send me memes. I sent them back. We then sent messages back and forth, but nothing serious. It wasn’t until Bob started making approaches towards me with targeted intention, standing really close seeming happy, and tried to make small talk or crack a joke. This went on for a while before I started to feel like something was off. After several days, Bob just randomly sent me his number out of the blue and we continued to send memes and casually text back and forth.
We then went to a hiking event with a few mutual friends and Bob would keep trying to make small talk with me. Bob would also push forward a lot faster than the others, often times leaving the group. I noticed Bob kept looking over his shoulder to see who was behind him, and so I started pushing forward to keep up with him. Still, nothing serious was coming out of this, except for towards the end. We were trying to find our way out as we had been hiking for 3 hours now and there was a fork in the road. Bob insisted that the left path was the correct way back. The entire group of 5 others said: “No, the right path is how we get back, we came from this way”. So Bob and I had taken the left path, knowing this was not the correct way back, but I wanted to see what would happen. At this point I was starting to read into things a bit too deeply, but I kept low and just shrugged it off as ‘still nothing’.
After we were done hiking, we were trying to find a place to get food. When we found a place, Bob would stand really close to me and basically be shoulder to shoulder with me as we would talk. This was not a crowded place by any means. Once we got food, Bob then sat next to me and he sat in silence, except for when I would talk to the group. Later, we went to this little carnival thing going on and Bob continued walk with me and stand shoulder to shoulder with me. So up to this point, I have gone from meeting a stranger to now raising an eyebrow as things are starting to feel flirtatious. Before we left, Bob made a very strange comment to me about one of the plushies hanging from the game booths, which was an oversized rainbow poop emoji plushie. He tapped me on the shoulder, leaned in, and said: “hey, you see that? That’s me. You also see that next to it, that’s you”. This is where I felt like Bob was laying bait for me to bite and why I started to take things seriously now. I perceived this as Bob telling me that he is: “Gay shit”. This is to me was too much of an extremely specific situation that I can’t pass it off as ‘nothing’ anymore.
Bob then invited me to go running with him, which I exaggerated to him that I was not an athletic or fit person by any means. I am very much a small, 16 hours a day sedentary computer nerd who did the take home gym packet. He said that it was okay and he would be willing to work with me. We would then go running, had a great day, but then he invited me to workout with his personal trainer. These 2 days felt really nice and comfortable because he wasn’t just taking me to workout, he showed me where he lived, we had actually spent some time together just driving around, and he even took longer ways around so that we could talk a little more. We talked about our lives and shared some general knowledge. He told me about business, I told him about arts and crafts.
Then Bob went away for army training, and at this point I was started to feel despondent because I was liking Bob and appreciated him. I expected that he wouldn’t have his phone, I don’t know anything about the army, but after his 3rd day in, he texted me to check up on how I was doing. At this point, we had been texting, A LOT! At least once or twice a day. Every single day for 2+ weeks. As we would text more and more, I felt like he was portraying more emotion and feelings in his texts from the way he would text. It went from: “Hey, what’s up?” to now a: “Hey, how are you doing? How have you been? How are you feeling?”
My last piece to this story is that I felt like Bob had asked me out on a date. After everything we had been through, he out of nowhere asked me: “Hey, do you like Mexican food?” to which I responded with: “Mexican food? Yeah it’s really good! Why?”
Bob: “Do you want to get Mexican food when I return?”
Me: “Oh really? Yeah that’d be great! Do you have a place in mind?”
Bob: “I do”
Me: “Oh? Where at?”
Bob: “A surprise”
Me: “Mhmm\~, okay, well then, I’ll be waiting.”
(word for word our texts)
Before his return, I chose my words very specifically try and push this idea of me thinking this is a date; “Hey, when do you want to go out, and get food”. I felt like this portrayed the idea that these are 2 separate things. Going out and getting food. The day of our supposed date comes up and Bob tells me to dress up because this is a fine dining establishment that has been featured in things like food awards many times. Where pieces started to crumble is that he had to take his brother with him because of the situation his brother was in. Not only that, but Bob was not dressed up to the standard he had set for me.
I finally had enough of this back and forth in my head and wanted to wait until we were headed home to really ask Bob what was going on. We get back to his place because Bob had carpooled, and I pulled Bob aside to talk to him. I told him verbatim: “Hey, I am interested in spending more time with you. I very much enjoy your company and I find you to be an intriguing individual. I think that I am romantically interested in you, but I feel like you have given me mixed signals, so I was wondering, what is going on?” At this point Bob took a step back, got really red, made a smirk, but made it a note that he was straight and insisted that this will not affect our friendship. Now how this looks is that Bob has continued to insist that he is straight over and over again, being as short as possible with me, if not, leaving me on read. He has made it a note in 3 separate occasions that me asking Bob out will not affect our friendship but it has quite literally ruined everything. (End of story)
So overall, these are the kinds of stories that I am involved in when it comes to dating. I feel like I attract a very specific audience, and I fall for them every single time. I always make it a note to myself that I will not pursue somebody, unless I have every single reason to believe they are gay, or they have told me that they are gay. Once again, I am left sad and beating myself up because I feel like I could have had something serious with this guy if I had just not asked him out. I have gone through so much thinking and pondering over so many details when at the end of the day, everybody that I have told stories like this to always go along the lines of: “Welp, that sucks, sorry. I agree and I can’t dispute that, but you can’t do anything about it.”
What am I supposed to do to stop being so lonely, but also to stop hurting myself in situations like this? I don’t like dating apps or trying to pursue a stranger romantically because I want something to just happen naturally. If we can not be friends in the first place, we definitely will not be dating. So it’s very hard for me to rationalize this idea of going to social outings or using dating apps to try and find someone when all I want is a friend that has now become a boyfriend, if not more.