I Want to Date So Badly, but Only One Kind of Infuriating Person Is Attracted to Me

How to Do It Make it stop! Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Alliance/Adobe Stock. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Stoya and Rich here. It’s anonymous! Dear How to Do It, This question has to do with unhealthy/unproductive relationship patterns. I was homeschooled K-12, and while I have made huge progress in the subsequent years in developing social skills and a sense of implicit social cues and boundaries, I think I do still have some aura of mild weirdness (the neurodivergence probably doesn’t help). Not to a non-functioning degree—I’m a pretty decent conversationalist, I’m funny, I can small talk, I’m an excellent listener, I’ve been told I have “a lot of emotional intelligence,” I dress well, etc. This is all to say that I get along generally well with most people, but this seems to really have affected the type of people I attract. They are almost always frankly, flakey, fellow-neurodivergent people who will disappear for long stretches without warning, because they get socially overwhelmed. I cannot stress how many times this has happened to me, for both friends and otherwise. I’ve had many experiences where I thought I’d alienated them and they gave up on me, and then eight months later, I get a text and they respond to the four or five texts I’d sent before giving up, and they act exactly the same as when we last talked, after I’ve fully grieved the relationship I thought I’d fumbled. I do like a lot of these people and sympathize with being bad at keeping up, but when the way people who do like you interact with you is functionally indistinguishable from someone who did decide you’re annoying (something that’s also happened), it’s deeply confusing and I’ve realized it’s a dealbreaker for me, datingwise. I need consistency. However, consistent people don’t seem to be attracted to me. How do I attract people who have space in their life for me? Is being generous with my time and support inviting people to take but not give back? —Obscure and Dissatisfied Dear Obscure and Dissatisfied, Don’t blame yourself for other people’s flakiness. We live in a flaky world. People have been conditioned to avert their eyes from what’s in front of them to their phone or to what could be walking through the door, a potential next best thing. How other people treat you is not something that you can control, but what you can do is offer an alternative to this fickle regard of other people and their feelings. Be the consistency that you wish to receive. Let people fade out when they need to, and accept their fade back in with warmth. Don’t let their behavior dictate yours; then you’d just become what you are bemoaning. Where you make friends can sometimes be a predictor for their reliability. For example, if you’re meeting people in nightclubs and bonding in 3 a.m. coke-fueled conversations, don’t expect that your bestie status will survive the night. Friendships tend to require time to cohere anyway—from the new people you meet, you should be expecting intermittent associations anyway. Latching on too quickly and leaning in too hard to build something substantial can result in pushing people away, as unfortunate as it is. This is true for dating, too. Things can go from comfortable to suffocating if they move too fast. On one hand, of course you’d want anyone who is serious about dating to come in with the time that the process requires, especially if they want an actual relationship to come of it and aren’t just, like, playing dolls with human bodies. But whether or not they really do have space for you, and not just the potential for it, comes down to how you gel. It depends on chemistry. In fact, dating is the process of determining whether or not you have space for someone in your life. If that hasn’t happened, there’s a good chance that you just haven’t met the right person. Keep being you, keep being generous with your time and support. Believe that someone will properly appreciate it eventually. —Rich More Advice From Slate My wife wants me to go down on her and is growing increasingly irritated with my refusals. Advice Sex