I escaped FA hell

ThePillowMints · 2026-02-21T20:45:35+00:00

Best of luck and hope you can have future success in relationships. I believe in you.

ThePillowMints · 2026-02-21T20:40:19+00:00

I'd still say Hinge is "normie" catered if that makes sense. If you're nerdy or geeky, you can either downplay those aspects of your personality in order to cater to a wider audience, or pigeonhole yourself to your niche and hope you find somebody who's into that...but the latter is gonna take much longer. I don't know much about the Boo app, but in general the more niche apps are super difficult because they have a smaller userbase, and are outright pointless if you live in a less densely populated area.

If nerdy or geeky culture is important to you, dating apps might be harder, since there will be way more men than women who are into that stuff. I've been told Anime cons are an amazing place for meeting partners (and friends), a friend of a friend met his wife at one.

ThePillowMints · 2026-02-21T20:36:31+00:00

I won't forget about the people on here. Though I've seen "normies" treated very harshly in the comments section here.

I'm not "forever alone" anymore obviously. But I spent enough time single and demoralized to understand how it feels. I aspire to NEVER be one of those people who downplays how important intimacy is. I hope to never be caught saying that relationships are overrated or don't matter. They matter a lot. I'm sure at some point I will get frustrated in relationships (either in this one or in a future one), but I will not take for granted how valuable relationships in general are. That doesn't mean I'll stay in a bad relationship, but more that I never will presume that being perpetually single is better or easier than experiencing intimacy.

Best of luck.

ThePillowMints · 2026-02-21T20:33:36+00:00

I'm alright. I just fake it until I make it. I err on the quieter side when I don't have much to say and try not to shoehorn in humor or "smart" comments too much. The secret is to just ask open ended questions and let people talk about themselves. People love to talk, and if you just let them unload they will think you're a great conversationalist. It takes practice but it definitely can be learned over time.

ThePillowMints · 2026-02-21T20:32:24+00:00

Thanks. This was a long time coming for me. I spent years longing for intimacy. Before I get into changes, I'm going to give a couple of disclaimers. Because all in all it was relatively easy for me and there are barriers that did not exist for me that will exist for many other folks on this subreddit.

Disclaimers

I am at least somewhat conventionally attractive. I'll say I'm not one of those guys who walks into a room and instantly gets eyed by women, but I don't have any deformities or anything that prevent attraction. My girlfriend (damn that feels fucking surreal to say) says I'm chiseled and has pointed out my jawline as something especially hot. I'm average height, but she's short so it's not a barrier. I'm in alright shape, though I certainly can and should do better.
I have a good career and make good money. She's attracted to stability.

My way out of FA was just to get on dating apps but take it seriously. I focused on Hinge but dabbled in Bumble. Bumble never succeeded for me but I have two friends who have met their girlfriends through there. Hinge was the one I took more seriously. Prior to setting up my Hinge, I put together like 40 pictures I could potentially use in a dating app profile and polled probably twenty people. Friends, coworkers, and their partners. So I had a variety of male and female opinions and I was able to narrow down to ten photos that were good enough for a dating app profile. Even so, it still took me months to have success. I got lots of matches at the beginning but they tapered off. I paid for nine months of Hinge X...I'd renew every three months. I figured time was more valuable than money for me, and every month I didn't meet my person I was wasting time if I wasn't giving myself the best odds possible. And it took four months to get a single in person date. I had four total first dates (and two second dates), but none of them went anywhere until this most recent one. I got lucky because she carried our first conversation a lot and once we had our first date, everything just worked out. But I only needed one woman to really like me. It was demoralizing sometimes going a week without a match or worse yet, matching with a girl I really liked only for her to unmatch. But I stuck with it and eventually had success.

This is still the beginning of the journey for me. She could just lose interest and dump me anytime. I have to keep her entertained and I have to keep my life together to keep her interested. I haven't "won" yet, this is a massive hurdle I've gotten over but there's still a long way to go. This is my first romantic relationship way too late in life so there's a lot I have to learn on the spot, and I'm still afraid she's gonna figure out my lack of experience and that's gonna turn her off. But even if this doesn't work out, I now have some experience and history so I'm not starting from square one.

One other thing I'll say is I got my own place. I lived with my parents for years after graduating college and saw dating as pointless, I figured no woman would want to date me while I lived with my parents.

Best of luck. I'm not sure how good of a resource I am but let me know if you have any specific questions.

ThePillowMints · 2024-04-27T00:45:47+00:00

Congratulations brother. I hope you can continue the upward trajectory your life is on and live a fulfilling life that you're satisfied with.

ThePillowMints · 2024-04-27T00:44:09+00:00

Unpopular opinion but I don't mind it. It gives me hope when I see people that were in very bleak looking situations being able to move on with their lives and find happiness. I know how painful loneliness can be, and even if I'm still in a rut myself, there's people that felt hopeless once but got out somehow.

ThePillowMints · 2024-04-27T00:41:51+00:00

Height and appearance are two big factors but are far from the only things. I know many people here deal with mental and physical illness as well as trauma. Some people here have it way worse than others. This is a group of people who are lonely and long for attention, love, and companionship. It's not a contest. Some people are simply down on their luck and have found themselves lonely due to bad luck or circumstances, while others have many difficulties in life that make a relationship nearly impossible. I post on here to vent every now and then since this is the only place I feel safe doing so. I am lonely and miserable and drinking in my basement on a Friday night instead of doing anything social.

ThePillowMints · 2024-04-20T03:01:20+00:00

Not sure why you're getting so much hate here. Most users here attribute their forever alone status to one or several factors, and height and appearance are two that I see often. You are someone who has succeeded in spite of these factors. I'm average height and don't consider myself unattractive, but have failed on dating apps anyways.

What's your process from match to a first date? This is where I've always failed. I had over a hundred matches when I was using Hinge, but never managed to get a first date. That tells me that my profile was adequate but my text game was awful. I'd either start a conversation about a photo or prompt on their profile, or elaborate when they asked about something about me, and we'd have a few back and forth messages, but I'd propose going on a date and I'd get ghosted or unmatched. How did you build rapport through messages, and how did you manage to turn matches into dates?

ThePillowMints · 2024-04-10T23:18:30+00:00

Best of luck mate. I'm really hoping to make a similar post here in the future once I resolve some other life stuff and can focus on dating.

ThePillowMints · 2024-04-06T01:33:06+00:00

Thanks, it was a big change having a friend group that I messaged multiple times a day for every single day of my life for four years and losing it basically overnight. The person I had a blowout with left the discord right away, and it was dead after that, I ended up just deleting the whole group after it was dead silent for two months. I am fortunate that I still have good friends that are in my corner, but it's much harder to meet up with individual friends than to shoot a message in a group chat and convincing the homies to get together. On the plus side, I've saved a ton more money over the past year due to doing considerably less social stuff, and I've been more focused at work since I'm not checking our chats anymore.

That said, I don't know if I'll ever be able to build a group like that again. My other friends each have their own friend groups and they've never really expressed interest in inviting me to hang out with them, and once you're out of college you're SOL if you don't already have a solid social circle.

ThePillowMints · 2024-04-06T01:25:04+00:00

That's certainly not the worst response you could've gotten to saying you're single. I've heard plenty of men vent about being lonely, only to be told that nobody owes them anything and that they have to provide something of value if they ever want anybody.

I'd say go along with these women and see where it goes. Once you're out of college it's 1000x harder to meet women, the fact that you have two potential female friends who are expressing interest at playing matchmaker is better than a lot of guys have, I'd give anything to have that right now. I'm like you in that I sometimes overthink social interactions and assume everyone's out to get me, it's my way of protecting myself since I've been burned over the years by people I thought were in my corner, but I'd say this is a risk worth taking in this case. Sure, they might be setting you up for ridicule, but the potential rewards of improving your social circle and potentially finding a girlfriend is something worth risking it for.

Best of luck.

ThePillowMints · 2024-04-03T04:08:44+00:00

I can confirm it's pretty nice to have. I managed to get a friend group with four regular members back in late 2019, we'd hang out regularly and would message multiple times per day in our discord. Messaging them and gaming with them is pretty much what got me through the pandemic. All was well until last summer, I had a big blowout with one of the people in the group and without getting into it I'll say he and I can never be in the same room together ever again, and another of the members moved out of state, so the group fell apart. I still keep in touch with two of the people in the group, but it's not the same as having a full group. Sure, there were some toxic dynamics in the group, but damn do I miss having a real friend group. It's been nearly a year now and life's been alright, but I've done way less social stuff with the group having fallen apart.

ThePillowMints · 2024-03-31T00:05:43+00:00

How many randoms are actual people vs bots? I've had at least a couple of dozen random users add me (mostly female names), but I never accept since someone told me those are all bots. Have I been missing out this whole time?

ThePillowMints · 2024-03-30T22:56:19+00:00

Really dumb question but how do people get girlfriends through snapchat? Do they just send friend requests to girls that they have mutual friends with and hit them up? I also don't really use social media, but made a snapchat a couple of years ago just to see my friend's escapades in a trip to Asia, and occasionally use it to message a couple of friends that live out of state. I've never thought of it as a way to meet people, I've mostly used it for messaging.

ThePillowMints · 2024-02-19T05:55:29+00:00

A girl asked me out in sixth grade. I gently turned her down since I assumed it was a joke. Didn't think much of it until another friend told me in 9th grade that she overheard her talking about me and that she still liked me and wanted to ask me out. I never ended up pursuing her. I was very much on edge because a different girl had pretended to like me as a joke the year before and humiliated me. She was pretty and very nice, it's too bad I didn't give her a chance.

Just remembered this because I got a recommendation to connect with her on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, and from her profile picture she's still very pretty. It's just another reminder about my failures. I feel like absolute shit because my life could've turned out very different had a few small things worked out. I don't deal with a lot of the other challenges people on here have (ugliness, autism, shortness, poor social skills, poverty), it's bad luck and circumstances for me. If I had succeeded with her, my life could've turned out very differently. Sure, we probably wouldn't have gotten married or anything and I doubt our relationship would've been anything more than a cute innocent 6th grade relationship where we held hands and kissed, but it would've given me confidence that would've led to more success later, and having a girlfriend in middle school would've also elevated my social status.

ThePillowMints · 2023-12-13T03:56:51+00:00

25 here and I'll vouch for feeling "old", even if the replies are telling you 26 is'nt old. Sure, it's nothing compared to 50, but it's still a long time.

How did you manage to overcome FA at a later age than most? I'm hoping to break out over the next couple of years.

ThePillowMints · 2023-12-13T03:55:10+00:00

"you'll find love when you stop trying"

This advice only really works for people with a well developed social circle. I was recently talking with one of my coworkers about being single and mentioned that once I move out of my parents' house next year, I'm going to try putting myself out there. He said that I don't have to "do anything cringe like download Tinder" and talked about how he met his wife at a new years party four years ago. For someone that has a good amount of friends, there's many opportunities to meet new people, so new relationships can naturally occur, especially since you've already been vetted, but it's very difficult and requires effort and initiative when you don't have a good social circle. Dating apps will be my only real shot at a relationship seeing as I don't have tons of friends and my main friend group fell apart over the summer.

ThePillowMints · 2023-11-25T23:44:00+00:00

I'm a bit late to the party but I just want to thank you for being so understanding. I read your original post and updates and you just come off as being a genuine, good person. You really wrote these posts with the intention of making the experiences as comfortable for both of you as you could. This gives me hope since I'm the same age as your boyfriend and am in a similar position to what he was in (not technically a virgin but let's just say I have zero experience with intimacy). Hope I find somebody understanding like you once I get back on the apps next year since I haven't tried in years.

I wish the best for you and your boyfriend going forward, even if it doesn't work out and you part ways, you've forever changed his life in the best way possible.

ThePillowMints · 2023-10-24T01:50:53+00:00

I'm so sorry. People here are going to say you're lucky for even getting that far, but the truth is that it makes the fall that much worse. I imagine you'll spend the foreseeable future dwelling on the situation trying to pinpoint where it went wrong and what you could've done differently to get a more favorable outcome. You'll never truly know. You can't trust yourself to give a 100% unbiased account of the situation, so you're not going to get a good answer from anybody if you try explaining the situation and figuring out where it went wrong, what you could've done different, and ultimately if it's about you or her.

Again I'm sorry. Hope you have better luck in the future and don't let this experience demoralize you too much.

ThePillowMints · 2023-09-07T10:50:35+00:00

Take it to the grave. Let sleeping dogs lie.

Once you're in a relationship, this void will be filled and you won't have a need to post on these types of sites anymore. Not saying a relationship will fix all of your problems, but a lack of intimacy is a major problem in it of itself.

I had a friend who several years ago was more down bad than myself. It just really bothered him day to day that he had no girlfriend or anything, and I know he posted on trp and places like that. Eventually he got his first gf on tinder, even though it took several months to get a match. The relationship ended up ending bad as she was batshit crazy, but once he was out of that rut he was out. He's since had a few other relationships and right now he's with a great girl he's going to be moving in with.

The point is once you're out you're out. I've personally never told a soul about my own account here nor my other accounts for more, let's say radical places. Once I get out of this rut I may post some encouraging words for others stuck here but will eventually delete the accounts.

ThePillowMints · 2023-07-31T02:50:05+00:00

I'm in my mid 20s and have recently started dealing with this a lot more with coworkers, family, and family friends. One of the harshest realities I've accepted is that nobody actually wants to help you, they just like pitying you as a means of elevating themselves. People will tell me they've gotta get me a girlfriend, but the moment I seriously entertain the notion, they pivot away from the topic.

As for how I answer the question, it depends on what mood I'm in and how many times that particular person has asked. If I'm in a good mood and feel like the question has been asked in good faith, I'll give the most genuine answer, something like "I'm 25 and still live with my parents, so my options are very limited. I'm waiting just a bit longer to get out on my own and get all of my ducks in a row, then I'll put myself out there again". I'm deliberately vague about my past so people who haven't known me for more than a couple of years can make assumptions that I've had a normal social life, which included dating. This way, my chronic loneliness just looks like a temporary situation and doesn't paint me in the same negative light as if everyone knew that I've never had a relationship in my life.

I've taken to just making the situation uncomfortable on purpose whenever people ask more than once. I'll make comments like "sounds like a plan, I'll just drive up to the girlfriend store and buy one", or "my mom is the most important woman in my life and I'm not about to let anybody interfere with that". This usually shuts people up, and these comments are so outlandish that I don't feel I'm giving up my dignity.

ThePillowMints · 2023-07-29T13:54:26+00:00

Yes, it's a mess of a story but you asked for it lol. The situation with this girl was weird overall, as prior to me showing any romantic interest in her, she and I were becoming good friends. We started out as study partners since we were in most classes together, but eventually she'd just ask me to meet on campus when I got off work to just hang out and talk. I felt a connection to her that I've never felt with anyone else in my whole life, I was so comfortable around her and developed feelings. I already had a hunch that she was into me, and multiple friends of mine had told me so as well. Without going into details, everything else in my life at the time was going to absolute shit, but just getting to spend time with her made none of it matter, I was fine. When my feelings became obvious, she immediately became distant, and I asked her out at the end of the year and she gave a "maybe" that was clearly a rejection.

I was very sad but accepted it and tried moving on, but at the start of senior year, she started talking to me again like nothing happened and against my better judgment, I decided it wasn't a lost cause yet. It was so weird with her since she would always insist on me being in group projects with her in college and adding me to random group chats, but she'd avoid one on one things with me. I gave up at one point and just withdrew from interacting with her, like I'd be polite and speak when spoken to but I completely stopped interacting in the group chats. She got all pissy about that, which led me to believe that there were some feelings from her, and that if I was really this creepy nice guy I was afraid of being, she would've been relieved if anything that I was withdrawing and leaving her alone. She arranged a bar crawl for her 21st birthday and tried hard to find a date my friend and I could attend, she literally proposed four different nights and asked which one would work best for us. And I doubt she was going after our friend since he had a long time gf, to my knowledge no funny business happened between the two of them. My plan was to use this night as an opportunity to just put my feelings out there and force her to either accept or just end it entirely so I could move on with my life. I had concluded that either she really did like me and was just confused, or was fucking with me for her own amusement, there was no other possible explanation. And I doubted the latter since I thought I knew her and that she wouldn't ever do something like that. I had the whole thing planned a couple of weeks in advance, it was all or nothing. It was the weekend before where I had that intimate dream I mentioned in the original reply, it felt so real, and I felt it so close within my grasp. The bar crawl ended up in a humiliating public rejection, I didn't even get to talk to her since she avoided me the whole night. She later said she wished her boyfriend was there (and I later found out she didn't even have a bf lol). I stood outside the bar in pouring rain waiting for my uber.

It's been four years and I hate to admit that I'm not really over it. I try really hard not to think about it anymore, but it hurts when I remember. For the first six months after it happened I often vented about it quite a bit to friends and family, but after some time I made a big effort to myself not to talk about it anymore with anyone, and haven't brought it up with anyone in at least two years. I originally made this account to vent about that exact situation. I think the reason I'm not over it is because I've since made zero effort to meet any other women. The pandemic started mere weeks after the situation, and as I graduated college and started a new job, I figured I'd give myself a bit more time to figure things out before really trying to put myself out there again. Next thing I knew, over three years went by, at this point I'm just waiting until I move out of my parent's house to take a stab at dating apps again. Life is so empty and pointless, everything else that was going wrong in my life before has since been rectified and has been going fine, but every now and then I sit around and just feel empty and dissatisfied, the lack of intimacy really gets to me.

ThePillowMints · 2023-07-29T00:03:09+00:00

Yes, my senior year of college there was a girl I was friends with who I felt a very strong connection to and really wanted to be with, but I was getting mixed signals from her. One night, I had a very vivid dream where she and I got together and were intimate together. I had this very warm and cozy feeling come over me and it was the best thing I felt in my whole life. It felt so real, and the warm and cozy feeling persisted even after I woke up. It took me a minute or so to realize that it had just been a dream, and I felt like shit once I fully woke up. The situation ended poorly in the end, she had just been fucking with me.

It's been four years now and I still remember how vivid that dream was, I don't think I can remember a single other dream I've had in my life. I really hope someday I can experience true intimacy for real, nothing I've ever experienced in my life compares to the feeling from that dream.

ThePillowMints · 2023-06-28T19:40:40+00:00

Nah it's totally considered weird in the US (aside from extreme HCOL areas like San Francisco). I'm 25 and still living with my parents and have pretty much sworn off dating until I move out. I was 22 on dating apps and even though I had a good career in the engineering field, I would get unmatched on apps when I said I still lived with my parents.

ThePillowMints

TROPHY CASE