I am also the person who wrote about being raped on a date, who you responded to below (thanks, by the way). And I wrote elsewhere about how I am still dealing with things that transpired when I was growing up. It's true that I don't consider myself to have had a difficult life filled with abnormal people; nevertheless, your implication that I have never dealt with hardship and am speaking from a place of arrogant naivete is misplaced.

I acknowledge that I am very much affected by what I experienced in my past (adverse experiences can, by the way, make one less sensitive to emotional difficulties and more prone to risk), but I actively work on not letting those experiences color my every interaction and define my future by, along with other things, not engaging in self-defeating behavior. Rather than investigating situations that I find suspicious (e.g. by doing a background check on an online match who is acting strange), I simply exit them. This has proven a very effective strategy for me - as I said, the proportion of bad dates I've been on is very small. I also accept that risk in dating cannot be minimized to 0. After my sexual assault, I took time away from dating to process, and over that time came to the conclusion that becoming significantly more guarded would be tantamount to not dating at all. I've changed some of my behaviors - I don't drink more than one or two drinks anymore, and I go to my place alone if I'm tipsy - but performing background checks on everybody did not seem useful, especially as, as I've noted, there was nothing in that guy's web presence that indicated that he was a rapist. But mainly, because of the way I grew up, I spent many years too scared to do a lot of things I wanted to do, which deprived me of many needed opportunities, so now I'd rather try something and screw up than not try and regret.

I appreciate that others deal with trauma differently, but I think you yourself forgot about that when you accused me of what you accused me of.