Reposting my comment from the first thread:

My best friend for about a year or so in high school was this girl who I met lone when I was 16. I told my parents I met her at a national convention I attended that summer. We met in person once, when she flew to New Orleans to attend some event for incoming freshmen at Tulane, where she was planning to go to school. But that didn't end up happening. I don't remember why, but she decided she didn't want to go to Tulane anymore. At some point after that, she got mad at me for something, and said she never wanted to talk to me again. I don't think I got out of bed for a week after that.

I think in the end, it ended up being better, though. Looking back, I question some of the stuff she would tell me. One thing in particular is she claimed one professor (sociology, I think) at the college where she was taking some classes told the class to "take advantage of having a vagina", which she interpreted as meaning to go have sex. I didn't find that weird at the time, but looking back that just seems like something really unbelievable that someone would actually tell a high-school-aged girl to do something like that. I don't know. There just seem to be lots of things like that which make me think now she wasn't all she seemed to be from our copious amounts of online chatting. Anyways, she ended up joining the army, got shipped to South Korea for a while, and now from what I can tell via Facebook, she's married and has a kid. So definitely not something I would have wanted to deal with.

So fast forward a few years. College hasn't been much different, I'm not the most outgoing person so I don't have huge numbers of friends. But I'm super busy with school/work, so I don't really mind. Plus, I'm living with one of my cool uncles (he's 8 years older than me), so it's not like I'm totally cut off from the world. It's my senior year of college. For some reason, I decide to reach out to a friend I hadn't talked to in a while. She was about to graduate from UT (Texas). We start talking on Facebook for a couple hours every few nights. It's at the point where I'm starting to look for jobs, and she happens to mention that one of her good friends at the time had just gotten a job with a growing company that looked good, and that they're hiring. So she talks me up to her friend, who talks me up to the recruiter, and I end up getting an interview (after initially receiving a reject letter from the online application site). Phone interview goes well, so they schedule an in-person interview for a few weeks away. Company will only pay for me to stay one night in a hotel, so she says I can sleep on her couch the rest of the weekend. I drive in on Thursday, interview is Friday and goes well, she shows me around Austin Saturday, I drive home Sunday.

I ended up getting the job, and moved to Austin a few months later when I graduated. We start hanging out a couple of times a week, usually going get dinner somewhere, then going back to whoever's apartment was closer and watching The Office on netflix for an hour or two, til it got late and whoever needed to get home. This goes on for a while, til she moves about 20 minutes further south, to be closer to her job, and subsequently stops wanting to come visit me in my apartment. It's about a 45 minute drive on weekday evenings due to traffic on I35, so that's somewhat understandable, but it also seems like almost every weekend she was busy, too. So eventually we just pretty much stop hanging out, and then a few months later she gets a boyfriend who she's still dating, about 2 years later.

Part of me wishes I had tried to make something more out of it, but another part of me was terrified it would backfire. At the time she was my only real friend in Austin, so I was extremely worried something would happen and I would need someone for something, and not have anyone to ask for help. Plus, there were things that I interpreted as making it more likely she wasn't interested: She had at some point in a conversation stated she was not looking for a relationship; Every time we would hang out and watch Netflix, it was like she made a point of sitting as far away from me as possible, be it on the floor, the other side of the couch. Anyways, I'm just a bumbling idiot, so probably should have done something about it. That train has long since left the station, so I've moved on.

In the 2 years since there have certainly been times when I've wished I've had to hug and talk to, but by and large I really like living alone, so I haven't made much effort to put myself out there and find someone new. I have accounts on some dating sites/apps, but I have put almost no effort in, so the results have been terrible, as one might predict. It's what I prefer, though, because it's really hard for me to put myself out of my comfort zone like dating would require. I'm terrified of actually messaging someone, because there's a chance she could respond and show interest.

I have a decent idea of what I would need to do to make something happen, but at this point in my life I'm totally comfortable just waiting around and seeing if the proverbial angel falls from heaven into my bed.