Fear.

Rare have been my attempts to form a romantic relationship with a complete stranger. More often, romance grows from an existing friendship or at the insistence and aid of mutual friends. My most recent foray into online dating is proof positive of my record. This sort of dating is awkward and mysterious. Attempting to piece together a judgment of someone without background or corroboration is immensely challenging. It is in these circumstances that my social inadequacies become nakedly apparent. I have no framework of what is and is not appropriate, wandering through conversations blindly and attempting to access some reference that is not Sex and the City when it comes to which behavior is accepted when.

It all leaves me feeling as if I am ill equipped for adult relationships. I either spend months with someone I dislike, pretending that I can ignore everything about them that makes me cringe, only because they seem so deeply infatuated with me. I remain evasive and non committal, not because I am but because the truth is somehow more frightening than feigning mutual attraction. It's somehow safer, though infinitely unfair. Perhaps the biggest casualty of my mental imbalance was the billionaire who I was initially so disinterested in but became so entangled with that I eventually was unable to discern up from down, love from hate.

And then, when I actually like someone I convince myself that they could not possibly like me. It's as if I've come to expect that relationships can only be one sided. Of course, this is just a mechanism employed to avoid disappointment and pain but no matter how much introspection I devote to the problem, I cannot seem to overcome it. To further complicate things, I seem only to be attracted to those that are more aloof, detached and guarded than myself, people who on the surface are completely functional but who allow no one to penetrate beneath their surface so that what you get is a mere projection of a person.