Hello everyone, I am a 23 years old woman and due to pressure from my family about my future marital status, I recently started questioning myself a lot about my social life and specifically my romantic relationships.
It all started when a friend of a friend took my number from my friend and contacted me saying when he first saw me he found me attractive and wanted to get to know me. My first thought? « WHAT A BORE » I literally thought replying to me seemed more like a homework than an actual talking stage, but I still have it a try. The more we talked, the more draining it became for me and eventually I ended up ghosting him. I felt like it was a chore and started to feel mentally unwell just by trying to think about of what to reply.
Since this isn’t the first time this episode happened, I started to question myself thinking there might be something wrong with me. The pattern I noticed is this: I meet a person, I find them attractive, we exchange contacts and im getting excited about discussing with them. Once we are deep into the talking stage, I suddenly start to feel physically and emotionally drained, the topics of conversation don’t interest me, I keep replying out of « respect » but internally I just want the person to go away, the time I take in between my replies get wider, not because I want it that way but because I genuinely forgets someone has been messaging me. And eventually, my brains start filtering anything that disturb me at my core, my peace of mind and my emotional balance and in the span of few days I completely forget about the person’s entire existence just like that, down to their name and number (if i even saved them in the first place).
It stresses me out so much and when I try to talk to my mom about those feelings, she dismisses me and jokingly say it’s because I am an introvert who used to be extremely timid and I don’t go outside enough.