Sombyr

Depends. Nicer to men? Probably. Nicer to women? Hell. No.
Can’t count how many times I’ve seen people call out things like body shaming of men, but do the same thing to women and suddenly it’s a “natural expression of human sexuality.”

I suppose it’s just the end result of any community dominated by an extreme majority of men, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel good and has made me heavily consider deleting my account and just finally giving up on social media entirely.

Most of the time, it feels to me just like a logical conclusion. Like “hmm, yes, this person has traits I generally find attractive. I am thus attracted to them.”
There’s of course a physical attribute to it too, where I feel strongly drawn to the person, but it feels more like the result of the previous logical conclusion rather than the source of the attraction itself.

The one and only exception to this that I’ve experienced thus far was my attraction to my wife. It was an instant click. My first thought after meeting her was that I needed to get closer with her. It’s worth noting I didn’t actually know what she looked like yet (we met online) and barely knew anything about her personality besides she was funny and apparently had similar hobbies to me (though I didn’t know which hobbies, I’d just been told that.)
I didn’t connect it as attraction at first though, because I’d never experienced attraction like that before. I just wanted to be really good friends with her. I was really happy whenever she showed up. I enjoyed every conversation I had with her way more than it felt like I should.
Then slowly those feelings grew, never changing, only getting stronger. At a certain point, when I started to realize every second I was away from her, I was wishing she was there, and every time I was sad or upset about something, she was the one I wanted to go to for comfort, it finally clicked that I was attracted to her, at least in some way.
It wasn’t until we were already dating that it finally fully clicked that I’d been in love with her the whole time.
Physically I’d say my attraction to her felt… I guess like heart burn? That’s the closest physical sensation I can think of. Like that, but not painful. Like a fullness in my chest every time I thought about her.

Also as far as chemistry and attraction goes, definitely different things. There are people I’ve been attracted to that I meshed horrifically with. Just because I like certain traits in theory doesn’t mean I could actually stand those traits in practice.

Bear in mind what you’re about to read is the ramblings of an autistic women. I may be a woman, but the world still looks a lot different through my eyes than it does to other women, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Anyway, definitely not too late to date. That part’s simple to answer.

As far as losing weight, depends really on how much you weigh as for how it’ll effect your dating options. For men, I think gaining a little muscle is more important than losing fat. Even if you weigh quite a lot, if you’ve got a bit of muscle showing through there will be women who find you attractive. I can’t speak for all women, but to me, it’s more attractive when a guy’s body shows that they’re thinking about their health than it is when a guy has a traditionally attractive physique. In other words, a little muscle shows you’re putting work in regardless of if you’re successfully losing much fat. You’ll probably inevitably lose some fat anyway if you gain some muscle, because it speeds up your metabolism.
In the end though, physical appearance isn’t as often important to women as it is to men. If you’ve got a personality that meshes well with somebody, they’ll probably like you anyway.

What you’re doing to meet people is good, but another good way to find people Imo, is through your hobbies. Although that can be tougher if all your hobbies are male dominated. Even if you do meet women into it in that case, I speak from experience when I say we’re expecting to be approached and tend to already have our rejection locked and loaded. If that’s the case, I’d say the best option is to wait and see if they show interest in you first.

Making more friends is also good. Besides the fact that it’s good for your mental health, they can also introduce you to people, and somebody who knows you well is gonna be way better at finding people who will match well with you than anything like dating apps or searching aimlessly. I was introduced to my wife by a friend. They didn’t even intend it as a romantic setup, they just thought we had a lot in common and would make good friends. The romance happened to blossom from that.

I’d end this off by telling you it’s good to learn to be happy being single, but I know that’s harder than it sounds, and sometimes you can’t manage it until you’ve already been in and out of a serious relationship or two. Do take care of your mental health though. A happy man is an attractive man.

I get what you’re saying, but like OP I’m the kind of person who can call myself beautiful but also have self esteem issues. In my case, it’s because I know it’s objective fact that people keep telling me I’m attractive, but I can’t see myself that way. Like, maybe I’m just surrounded by really supportive people who can ignore my shortcomings easier, and one day I’m going to be exposed to the fact that it turns out the majority of the world thinks I’m ugly.

It’d feel like dismissing everyone who’s ever been attracted to me to not admit that on some level I must be attractive, which would be rude, but at the same time I need people to know I can’t see what they see.

Meanwhile I’m too autistic to tell when they AREN’T happening, and just keep talking until somebody respectfully tells me to shut up an take my turn.

When I was little, I had times where I just straight up slept at the dinner table because I refused to eat. My parents learned quickly that if they didn’t want me to starve to death, they were gonna need to make foods I actually liked.
Once they’d been doing that for a while, I got a lot more open to trying new foods, even ones I didn’t like before, because now everyone else was eating and enjoying food I didn’t have and I wanted to be a part of that. Didn’t make me automatically like everything, but it did open me up to a lot of healthier options.

I sort by active because the slower flow of content helps me avoid a social media addiction. I just check the few posts that hit the top of my feed every day, then exit Lemmy for the day.

Fun fact, you can still hallucinate with aphantasia. Or so I’ve heard at least. I guess hallucinating and imagining with the mind’s eye must work with different mechanisms.

https://youtu.be/K3x8Tm7urfk?si=-_GUHpbEJN0BPash

I like your positivity.

Luckily, I am happy most of the time nowadays, just, y’know, in spite of my disorder.

As somebody with schizoaffective, I don’t understand where you’re coming from saying it means I’m the only one with power over myself. In fact, I’ve found even after being well medicated I’m incredibly easy to manipulate. All you have to do is tell me somebody’s trying to control me and instantly I’ve spun a 2000 foot deep web about how they’re doing it. Then you just tell me you have the solution and suddenly I’m eating out of your hand.

And my emotional barrier is paper thin. I only look unaffected by things. In reality if I’m the slightest bit scared or upset, I’m breaking down inside and spinning another web to fill in the cracks. My whole existence is built on delusions and lies I’ve built up to keep myself together, such that even now that I’m in a place where I theoretically could start breaking them down and rebuilding properly, I won’t, because I’d fall apart, and I can’t handle that.

I’ve decided to just be happy being fucked up. Not because that’s right, but because that’s the only thing I can survive.

Unfortunately, don’t think we can do any of those to any significant effect. We’re both on medicaid and non-taxable disability income. In other words, we don’t usually legally have to file taxes unless we had some other kind of income that year because it’s just gonna be a long string of zeros.

What we can do though is file for disability as a married couple, then we can legally save up a lot more money in exchange for being paid slightly less. The requirements for that are just living together and “holding yourself out as a married couple to the community you live.” Well, actually, there is a bit of awkwardness with the wording last I checked that accidentally makes it only apply to heterosexual couples, but I’m sure they legally have to apply the rule to homosexual couples as well. We’ll see anyway.

I believe we also have the same visitation rights as a married couple if we’re ever hospitalized, which is helpful considering we’ve both found ourselves hospitalized as a result of our disabilities a few times. I’m not certain about that though. We had quite a distance separating us every time that’s happened so far, so haven’t had the opportunity to test that.

I hate the whole “its” being converted to “it’s” no matter what thing, but what I hate more is when I teach the keyboard a word, and it STILL won’t let me use it. Taught my keyboard “that’d” and it would autocorrect it to “that’s” every time. And unlike other words, if I went back and manually corrected it back, it wouldn’t leave it, it’d force it back to “that’s” again and refuse to let me change it. Come to think of it, it did that with “it’d” to “it’s” too. Eventually I just switched to a different keyboard with much less aggressive autocorrect, since I still need the autocorrect to type with any semblance of speed due to minor coordination issues.

My old keyboard abruptly started autocorrecting more typos into what I was saying than it corrected toward the end anyway. Probably some shoddy attempt to implement AI auto correction.

Luckily, I did look up the laws for my state, and legally we aren’t technically married, but we do have the right and sometimes the obligation to apply for some marriage related benefits. It’s weirdly inconsistent.

I wouldn’t know. My wife’s the only person I’ve ever dated. Probably wouldn’t just do that with random dates though. My wife and I knew eachother for a while before we were dating and got close even before then. That’s why I was comfortable calling her my wife. I was confident it’d last. Even then it wasn’t until a while in the relationship that we started doing it.

Plus we’d been getting mistaken for a married couple quite a lot, so I figured why not just act like one? Takes off the pressure to actually get married too early, too. After all, what’s there to gain that we can’t gain without it?

It thoroughly confuses me that many people have come to the conclusion that people saying “closeted trans people do X thing quite often” actually mean “all people doing X thing are trans.” I don’t know how half the replies here have come to that conclusion.

This meme is reductive, only talking about it like it’ll be either a trans person or toxic cis dude, but it’s a joke. Jokes need to be some level of reductive to work. Otherwise you’re just describing a funny situation in real life. (Also, reread the meme. They never say those are the only two options, they just say those are two possibilities. That’s not the same thing.)

But yeah, offering to help somebody who you think may be trans acquire resources isn’t a bad thing just because the majority of people won’t end up needing it. Just politely decline it if you don’t. Nobody’s trying to force you to be trans. They’re just trying to help the people that are.

You’d hate me then. I’m not even married nor engaged to my wife. We just call each other that because it feels nice.

As a trans woman, we definitely can get a similar phenomenon, but I can’t vouch for how common it is or if it’s the same thing.

If it does happen, it generally starts a while after your hormone levels get consistently in the right place. Don’t need surgery. For me, it’s even straight up dependant on what brand of estrogen I’m taking. I take injections, and if I’m on 10mg/ml, it happens, but any time I have to take 20mg/ml, it stops. Doesn’t matter that my hormone levels haven’t shifted even slightly.

It is known that it’s the same organs producing it as males have, but why it begins to behave like that and why it doesn’t happen to everyone is, as far as I know, completely unknown.

All you gotta do is push the ends that’re stocking out under once it’s soft enough. No stirring necessary. I suppose you can if that’s easier for you, but I don’t bother.

Editing in real quick though, I’ve never cooked high end pasta, so maybe that’s different. I’m broke, so it’s always the cheap stuff for me

I have never stirred pasta before, and never had it stick even once. Are you sure you’re waiting for the water to reach a full boil to add the pasta? At that point that air bubbles should be knocking it around enough that you don’t have to bother.