Are you involuntarily celibate because of your looks?
Out of curiosity, how would you rate your looks from 1-10?
~3.5/10
I'm pretty sure if you removed my aspergers/ASD from the equation I would have ascended at some point. I was an outsider from the moment I set a foot into elementary school. Or even before that, I would run away from the kindergarden / pre-school because I couldn't stand the other children.
By the time puberty came around I was a social outcast positioned towards the very bottom of the hierachy. I was also mentally damaged by what going to school each day did to me. And it only got worse, much worse, after that. With puberty the demands on social skills increased and it was not feasible for me to somehow pretend like I could keep up with my peers.
I left school after more than a decade of bullying without finishing it despite the intellectual demands for doing so being an absolute joke. I really wanted to finish because I still had ambitions at the time but continuing on the same path might have let to me either killing myself or going mental.
I did spend some time institutionalised during this. It was good they had bars in front of their windows because without my PC to cope with and alone with all my misery I genuinely wanted to die while I was in there. And I did try to escape once. I even got through one of their security doors by sitting next to it and dropping a penny when someone came and went. When the doors closed it made a loud
clunk! but the woman didn't notice or care, there was frequent noise in there because patients were prone to throwing or dropping things. But around the corner was a second door and I obviously couldn't sit there and drop another penny so I went back inside.
I begged my parents crying and on my knees to take me out mutiple times and sonner or later they agreed. I will never forgive them for putting me in there in the first place. They had never managed to help we with any of my problems, my father had actively made them worse, he was the reason I couldn't relax at home and hid in my room most of the time.
My mother was loving, but unwilling to take responsibility or plan ahead. She just let things happen as they came. And her way of "supporting" me when I complained that I didn't fit in was to either deny the problem "everyone goes through that at your age" or pretend like it wasn't my fault, "the other kids are just stupid / immature". I was basically my own parent, no one else would worry about the future and make sure things didn't go horribly wrong. But I was too young and inexperienced to make good desicions, so that didn't work neither.
My mother would be the kind of person to present and obese boy trying to lose weight a cookie and sweet milk when he was getting really emotional while dieting. She might say something like "oh it's ok, just take them now, just this once, you can start eating healthier tomorrow". She wants to make her child happy but with no regards to long-term consequences. If my father was indifferend to anything going on with me, my mother was unable to take some distance and see anything other than my emotional state in the here and now.
I think if I make some money and get some surgeries I might get into 4-5/10 territory, assuming they go well and I don't end up looking uglier than I did before. But my autism won't go away and I have found it impossible to communicate with girls all my life. And I don't mean I can't talk to them, I have overcome much of my innate shyness by now, but I struggle to play the social games that are part of dating and flirting and small talk and so on.
The kind of social interaction I enjoy most, which is information-dense one-on-one talks about something interesting, seem to repel women outright. They are interested in people more than things or facts and like to socialise for it's own sake. I can sometimes pretend to be normal for long enough to get make a female aquaintance, but it always falls apart sooner rather than later. And it's extremly taxing on the mind, I'm masking extra hard while I talk to women, there is basically nothing left of my real self involved in the interaction. It's not something I could keep up even for a few weeks, let alone over the duration of a long-term relationship. It's also why I'm a bit worried abotu SEAmaxxing. Over the langage barrier communication will be even more difficult and even more based on body language and things like shared situational humor.
Guess that was a bit more than you asked for, but I felt like venting a bit after I started writing.
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