Thanks! Though it’s worth noting that I tend to exaggerate. During that 3-year period, I actually did do some long-term projects and kept my attention on them; I just wasn’t satisfied with the overall impact of them on my life because I was playing things way too safe.

This post is basically me taking a common self-defeating pattern I exhibit and calling it out as silly, perhaps to better help me recognize and challenge it within myself. It is one of the final things holding me back from ditching the dopamine machine and returning to the real world.

I was doing good for the past couple of days, but recently, I had a relapse. My brain’s excuse was: “If you go cold turkey, you might never get to experience these feelings ever again, since you could die before forming the relationship required to feel them legitimately.”

It sounded compelling on its face, but then I realized that all of the time I spend indulging myself in various ways eliminates time that I could be spending on pursuing real connections. Using technology to partially fill the void was consuming all of the time that I could have spent actually filling said void. That’s what inspired me to make this post—recognizing just how counterproductive that mentality really was.

The answer that my mind seems to be converging on is: “We can use the power of local community to help insulate ourselves from outside forces and replace technological addiction with genuine social connection to achieve a more natural and healthy state of existence.”

Or, put simply, “Friendship is magic.”

It doesn’t answer existential questions about the future, but I think it makes them less relevant by making the present nice enough that work towards the future is less of an emotional sacrifice.

I want us to be compatible in sexuality, personality, values, communication, life situation, and overall life goals. In other words, I want anyone who I can make a relationship work with.

I don’t believe in defining rigid categories so much because it neglects so many edge cases. I would prefer to evaluate each situation on a case-by-case basis. For example, if I said that I only wanted to date introverts, I’m filtering out ambiverts or even some extroverts who I could be compatible with. I just need someone who I can create a balanced relationship with, not someone who passes dozens of logical heuristics. I’d rather see if we have chemistry and compatible lives and go from there.

The central miscommunication of this post, as evidenced by the comments section, is that I was posting vibes hoping that others could relate to them, whereas others, perhaps more analytically-minded, interpreted my words more literally as a blueprint for a real relationship, rather than what I intended for them to be: a freeform expression of romantic interest, disconnected from any of the implementation details.

I’m not ready for a relationship. I have no plan yet. I’m just excited to figure out how to make one happen in the future. That’s what this post was actually meant to be about: feelings, not practicalities.

But I will say that, while my post came across as obsessive and manic, most of the time, I imagine us leaving each other alone and quietly doing our own things. We’d only briefly interact a few times a day for a few minutes at a time. Those narrow time windows are where the actual emotional intensity is, and that’s what my brain zooms into and talks about, as if the whole relationship looks like that, when they are really just the absolute peak highlights.

If I learned anything from this thread, it’s that I am so glad that I never became active or had a decent following on mainstream social media. I couldn’t imagine what a mistake like this on a site like Twitter would do to my mind back when I was younger. At least here and in real life, your mistakes are confined to a relatively small group.

I write a lot because I have a lot of ideas that I want to express. I try to do some trimming, but I don’t like to dilute my ideas too much. But I could definitely be more mindful about how much the audience cares to read and throw more of this in my own private journal.

I exaggerated what I said on purpose because I thought it’d fun to try expressing myself differently and not being so restrained, but clearly that style is reminiscent of the overly-attached girlfriend meme lmao. So, I’m gonna definitely keep that feedback in mind.

I experience strong emotions in general, and that’s something that I need to learn how to manage—when to be more emotionally restrained versus when to be more expressive. Clearly here I just splattered raw emotions all over the page, which ends up being fantastical and disconnected from reality compared to what a relationship actually looks like.

I have a duty to my future partner to manage my emotions in a way that upholds a stable relationship, or leave if it’s not going to work out, which means that it is most certainly against my self-interest to actually come across how I did here.

So then why did I make this post in the first place? Idk, it was kinda fun to write, even if it’s suuuper exaggerated. Just kind of my own form of artistic expression to look back on and say “Wow, I was so weird and whimsical in my early 20s. How cute.”

Genuinely curious how this is a “yikes”?

Is it because I sound like some overly idealistic person who will have his dreams crushed?

Or because I sound so ridiculously overly sentimental compared to the jaded cynicism that pervades the entire Internet?

Or do I sound like I’d get psychotically attached to someone because most people show more restraint when they talk about romantic feelings?

I don’t know how to interpret this comment otherwise.