So, I’ve been working on my social skills through the help of this community and my own efforts for the last 9 months or so. I feel like I’ve largely been successful in most areas except two: texting, and women.
I have plenty of platonic female friends; in fact, for a while, I had more female friends than male friends. (I’m 22m if it matters). But I’ve had basically zero experience with flirting, approaching women, or talking to women in a way that makes them want a relationship with me. I always seem to do something that makes them see me as just a friend. The main reason for this, I think, is that I was in a very long, very toxic relationship, that started near the end of high school and continued until the summer before my senior year of college. Before that, I went to an all-boys high school and was generally an awkward kid, so I didn’t really interact romantically with girls much during my formative years of middle school, high school, and college.
The other issue, which also compounds the dating problem, is that I am terrible at texting. I much prefer to talk on the phone or talk in person. But dating apps, the place designed for people like me who don’t like approaching women I don’t know, are designed solely around texting ability. I’ve had no trouble getting matches, but I get almost no dates out of it because I’m so bad at texting. I just always feel like I overthink everything and end up seeming boring or just saying very bland, unoriginal things. And when I ask for a date, usually I either get ghosted immediately or I get ghosted during the planning. (I’m not including people who don’t respond b/c I feel like there’s a subsection of women who just use dating apps for entertainment and would obviously never respond to my openers).
I guess I’m just wondering how I can make my texting on dating apps better. How can I get girls who clearly have some interest in me (having already swiped right) to agree to meet up and/or go on a date? Is it just a numbers game where I should just try not to let the misses bother me so much? Or is there a nuance to it that I’m missing?
1 comment
If you are a man, it’s normal, you are going to have a bad time dating. Nothing wrong particular with you, it’s an overall phenomenon among young men, look around. Doing things you can do, attempting to do anything to get girls/dating does not go well, did not go well for me. There are things we could do, relatively nicely, maybe focusing on them for now, would be a better option.