Me. I'm just wired to like things nobody else cares about or that you do on your own. I made all my true friends through the military and they're literally scattered across the earth, and it's hard to find things I genuinely like doing that have any sort of local pull. I go to a tiny traditional church that's just me and like a dozen sexagenarians (good people, but not in a position to "set me up") because they genuinely preach what I believe there, I used to go to a different church's young adult Bible study to socialize a little but they quit meeting shortly after I joined so I never made any lasting connections and I haven't found a good one because the local trend is people meeting in small groups in their home. I play Warhammer with randoms a couple times a month but I'm not a "nerdy nerd" so I sorta don't fit in the game store crowd that well and I prefer painting to playing anyway. I go to the range alone, I run 5Ks whenever I have the opportunity but I tend to just run and leave, I drive hours to visit Revolutionary war sites or art museums or scout for deer season some weekends, I read and keep up with housework on other weekends. I go to the gym at least 4 nights a week after work. I don't like bars or cold approaching strangers, and in spite of being in a medium sized city the local meetup scene is dead (there's basically just a class for flipping real estate, a bar meetup for new age mystic types, and a soccer league). I just can't bring myself to do the first two, the latter is meh for me and it sucks away my time to take day trips when I feel like it on weekends but still keep up with my gym schedule. I would absolutely love to do something like a language class but those aren't really available in my area. Most of the feedback I get from friends and family is that I'm not doing anything wrong, but that just can't be true because I'm not getting results. But when I break down what my options are, it's basically literally change my faith to chase women, restructure my fitness routine around something I don't want to do, or harass strangers. Yes I've tried dating apps too. It's a shitty feeling when you get to the bottom of that 100 mile radius stack on all the apps with nothing to show for it but a reminder that you're not anyone's choice. I know my singleness is my fault for not forcing myself to be normal. I can't though. I can't make myself spend precious reading time going to bars and hitting on women I have nothing in common with, I can't "fake it until I make it" because I'm the world's worst liar. I'm not bad, I'm not boring, but I manage to simultaneously be nothing special and the lone crazy sock in the corner of the drawer. I'm not willing to be someone else to feel wanted. You know I was summa cum laude with quadruple minors once upon a time, I would have even finished it all early if the Army hadn't forced me to do a full four years of college. But somehow I'm too stupid to find a way out of this crap. "When you least expect it" is such a hollow fucking phrase when you've just been watching your romantic expectations drop off a cliff since you were old enough to like girls. Yes I'm on rant/upset mode, but this isn't day to day me. This is just one aspect of my life where I come up short. I try to be a stoic about it and restrict my shits given to what I control, but I'm not made of stone. I know that even if I could get anywhere I'd fuck it up right away, because I would pin way too many of my hopes on the first woman to give me any attention at all and I wouldn't be capable of opening up fast enough to keep someone interested. I know I have plenty to offer, but I have no clue where outside my comfort zone to go to get the results I want. All the advice I've ever gotten is platitudes, mediocre networking tips dressed up as "dating advice" because maybe if I invest years of my life into building connections it may lead to other connections that may or may not work, or "(don't) be yourself". Man I just wanna throw myself into the other goals I have without a voice in the back of my head reminding me that no matter how high I achieve I'll never have someone to share it all with. Working without anyone else to support is such a drag. That's enough emotional vomit for tonight I guess.