An open letter to a dude on the internet:

[conuly]

It's not the autism. It's not your lack of wealth and youth. Since I assume you would've said if you had some seriously disfiguring condition, I feel safe in saying that you are not that hideous either that you can't get laid.

There are plenty of poor, ugly dudes with limited social skills who have active sex lives with willing, enthusiastic partners. Some of them are even actively hateful towards women and they still manage to find women to sleep with them. I wouldn't sleep with those dudes, but somebody does! A quick perusal of your other comments shows that you're not a vocal misogynist, so you're already ahead of the game here!

But I gotta say, honestly, that your self-loathing pity party is an enormous turn-off. Maybe not for everybody, but probably for most people. I'm well aware that pointing this out isn't actually the same as helping you stop doing that, but I just thought you ought to correctly identify the issue with your sex life.

Comments

[sabotabby]

That's kinder than he probably deserves.

[conuly]

Unusually for most of those people he doesn't seem all that, well, loathsome, once you move past his self-hatred. Lots worse people then him have sex.

[quirkytizzy]

I know several people that need this stapled to their foreheads. Their self-loathing gets to be so big it smacks of narcissism and they become completely insufferable in it.

[conuly]

SERIOUSLY.

It's just - take your personal issues to a professional, get yourself a few hobbies that you enjoy because they're fun (and not because you think you can pick up women that way), take a class or something and improve your life. Even if this doesn't benefit your sex life you'll still be happier.

[gwydion]

*shudder*

[brokenallbroken]

Desperation smells worse than not showering.

[bibliofile]

Showering is an easier fix, certainly.

[silveradept]

That can be a tricky thing to fix - what might be most helpful for that dude is a professional to help them figure out stuff they can build his self-esteem on.

More than likely, it's a constant stream of comparison to others and that rarely ends well.

[conuly]

And yet, I feel confident that nobody has ever gotten professional help thanks to somebody on the internet saying "Dude, you need help".

[silveradept]

Very rarely, certainly.

[calimac]

I don't think self-loathing is always a self-generated process. Be sufficiently loathed by a sufficient number of other people and it'll rub off.

[malkingrey]

There are some people out there who -- without having any visible mental or physical flaws -- nevertheless manage to give off some sort of "do not breed from this specimen" vibe. Maybe it's anti-pheromones or something like that.

[tielan]

If a guy doesn't think he's worth sleeping with, why would I think he's worth sleeping with?

(Also: guys who use the relationship as emotional crutch - as the daughter of my social work mother who did a lot of work with new mothers, family counselling, and divorce courts, my instincts say RUN LIKE ALL HELL IS AFTER YOU. And I just realised that this was my first boyfriend in a nutshell. o.O)

[veryrarelystable]

I don't know how closely your correspondent's present situation really resembles my past situation, but most of what you specify about it here looks familiar. Although back then my autism wasn't diagnosed.

(I'm now in an exclusive relationship and have been for 14 years, so I have the advantages and disadvantages of distance from the subject.)

But if someone had said to me in 1999 what you've said here, I would have retorted something like "What, so it's like a bank loan? You have to prove you don't need it before they'll offer it to you?"

The depression => self-loathing => unattractiveness => loneliness => depression cycle is, from experience, really, really hard to break. I can tell you I would have whole-heartedly agreed with comments like "That's kinder than you deserve." That was the sort of thing I told myself over and over for hours as I lay awake until mid-morning.

I knew perfectly well that my feeling terrible about myself was what made people not like me. That made me feel worse about myself, not better.

I would presumably have benefited from professional counselling, but (a) I didn't have any money and (b) I would first have had to externalize my self-loathing to the point that I saw it as a health problem rather than an insight into reality.

What actually happened was I reexamined my fundamental assumptions about the world. The key thing -- and this is why I'm intruding here to make this comment -- was that I stopped treating my self-pity as a personal failing that I had to overcome by force of will, which turned out to be a critical phase in the cycle.

Please take this into consideration when dealing with people who are like I was.