An Open Letter

I went to the Chess club today with A Because we were supposed to have other plans but they got canceled. Afterwards when I dropped her at home, she invited me in because we were in the middle of a good conversation, and she said that I can meet her cat. She had a super friendly cat named Duchess! We continued talking for another two hours or so.

At one point she mentioned that her type had changed recently, and she was looking for someone who was smart and a gym rat, but also not obsessive about it. I don’t think she solely meant it in this way, but I feel like it was kind of directed towards me, because she knows that I am smart, I had just taught her chess, and she also knows that I go to the gym a lot. She also even directly complimented me on several things, and even made a comment about how hard it must be for me to have all of this female attention (sarcastically).

It is kind of interesting to notice how that is the case. In the last three months there have been A, A, K, L, A, S, and maybe even some others that I’m not remembering right now. These are all people that have showed interest in me, and aside from one of them, I did not even enter a talking phase with them because I was not interested in them past friendship. Even though I am not looking for a relationship with these people I think it is a positive sign to recognize that this many people want me. Regardless of anything else, I want to hold onto that mentally. I think you’ll be really useful for counter conditioning myself against the childhood idea of me being undesirable.

I think I’ve also accidentally learned that a lot of women tend to chase me more when I’m not interested. I chalk it up to people who use other people as a source of validation, that face this rejection. I think when they do not receive that validation from someone that they respect in some way, it makes it almost a need to because otherwise it would mean that they do not deserve it. I would like to give myself credit for being a desirable partner, which I do know that I am, but I do feel like this is a big factor. I also do think that the reason why I do not fawn for these people I rolled out as someone I am interested in for some reason or another. I do feel like I have overcame my savior complex to some extent, because nowadays when I meet someone who has some sort of trauma or issue that I feel like I can relate to or I can help with, I’m able to step back a little bit and decouple my inherent feeling of value from romantic interest. I also recognize that sex is fairly abundant, but it’s also just something that I’m not interested in enough to compromise other things for. I’m really grateful for that. It does feel weird to be the single version of myself where I’m really not sexual, especially given how I am in a relationship. It feels like there is this part of me that has somewhat atrophied, because I don’t have some kind of primal need for sex or anything like that, because if I did I would then have sex with the people that are available to me. But partially because of the stress and fears that I have around random hookups, but also because of the fact that I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything in life without sex right now, I don’t feel like I need to have sex. This makes it easy to turn down proposals or anything like that. And I’m really proud about this, because I could see the roots of this when I first went through my breakup and I wanted to be very intentional about not seeking external validation. I didn’t want to go and show off to someone else to continue feeling wanted and attractive. Instead I remain single and didn’t find a way to replace that need. And because of that, I am completely fine without it which is almost like a superpower because I’m comfortable waiting.