I feel completely invisible
I feel completely invisible
Turning. 28 soon and I feel like for the past year or two men haven't liked me at all.
Like legit no one even notices I exist, men have zero desire in speaking to me. They never hold the door for me anymore, they never let me go in front of them if I only have 1 item and they have 20 in line, they've never gotten up to let me sit on the subway, even if I was in visible discomfort.
I don't know if it's because I moved to eastern Europe or I've just become significantly uglier enough to where I just don't matter anymore to anyone.
I meet men at work sometimes or in person and they've never asked me out, never asked for my number, never been friendly to me. I feel so hideous because it didn't use to be this way
If a guy does "show interest" it's to lead me on and have me as a back up and blow hot and cold, mostly cold the whole time and then ghost me
I wouldn't necessarily put this on you, to be honest. I've noticed an overall decline in empathy and basic politenes all over the place... As a Romanian, I can say that it's all the more pronounced around here, as people are falling for the same shit that's been propagated in America - hyperindividualism and fuckboy-ism...
Most people don't even respect their neighbors anymore, let alone strangers. It's so bad that, as a person who enjoys being polite, I get a ridiculous amount of compliments for having basic decency, but only from older people. People my age and younger (35 and down) are mostly just annoyed and tend to mock me. A lot of my former friends even tried to get me to be as much of a dick as they were.
Idk americans honestly seem way nicer/friendlier to me especially the ones I've met online. Here nobody cares if I die
What exactly do they do to get you to be a dick? I am genuinely curious cause it seems like I've heard similar
I definitely feel like me being in a good mood genuinely pissed people off, even in brief interactions to the point where they just want to ruin my day so badly
Oh, of course, there will always be exceptions! And I do believe some level of decency/empathy is intrinsic to human beings, it actually takes work to become a knobhead. Plus I suspect a lot (if not most) of us who dive deeper into online socialisation are a form of refugees, precisely because that shark stuff doesn't float well with us. I'm generalising, but it's my suspicion.
As for trying to get me to be a dick, it was little things, chipping away at my behaviours and approaches with pointed observations, stuff like "I don't understand why you're so polite, I would've blown up in their face" when attempting to defuse an argument with patience and communication, repeatedly hammering home that my being polite is a weakness to be abused and nothing more, talking shit about people with whom I've had minor disagreements, telling me to stop caring about others, and so on, and so forth. And there was a time when I almost started believing them, because so, so many people told me the same story. I almost gave into it, because I was deeply unstable in my faith in myself back then. Gotta say, feel ashamed that I questioned my values for... that...
As an extreme example, one of my closest friends once got pissed off with me - and I mean to the point where they were yelling - because they were insisting that I select an activity (they were trying to get me to acknowledge my preferences in a way, I guess), when I genuinely didn't have a preference. I'm easy-going, the company is more important than the context to me, but it's like they simply couldn't understand or accept that about me.
I'm geuinely sorry to hear that... It really does feel like a lot of people are trying to drag others into the mud with them, especially out of envy... I can say with 100% honesty that, while I understand exactly what's happening, I simply... don't, can't understand what's happening. It feels like one of those not-quite-nightmares, where things look the same, but make no sense.