The closest I ever got to dating a girl

It started in 2016, at a Baha'i event. I was 24, unemployed, having graduated nearly a year earlier. The event was one where they gathered young adults together to recruit them to teach children's classes.

The first thing I noticed there was this completely gorgeous 10/10 blonde girl there. She was 16 years old, and 3/4 white and 1/4 Iranian. She was attractive in a conventional way, more conventionally attractive than any of the popular girls I went to high school with. Despite being dressed casually, she was noticeably stunning.

The first thing they did at the event was some kind of game where put pieces of paper in a bowl and dumped them on the floor in the middle of the room, and we were supposed to grab pieces of paper containing our name from the pile. I forget the purpose but it may have been some kind of ice breaker thing. I remember being shocked when the attractive girl kept putting the papers with my name into my pile. I kept thinking about how she had the option to just ignore the papers with my name on them, but she instead made a conscious decision to place those papers into my pile - I started to wonder if this meant she was interested in me.

But she is not the focus of the event...

Later on in the event, I met this other girl. She was 20 years old and half Iranian and half Chilean. She was overweight and nowhere near as attractive as the other girl, but I remember thinking she was cute in a way. She started talking to me about how she moved to town a few months ago, and how she was in the same college class as my sister. I remember thinking that it felt very natural and easy talking to her. I think it was a combination of her making it easy to talk to her, her being less attractive than the first girl so that I was less worried about 'messing things up', and her being young which made me enjoy talking to her.

Later that night, I could not get her out of my head. I remember thinking that it felt like something magical, supernatural, and mystical had happened. I had a feeling like I was going to see her again. I then proceeded to masturbate to her.

The next day I got a text from a number I had never seen before. It was from her. She said she had gotten my number from the organizer of the event, and asked me if I wanted to teach children's classes with her. Her exact text was:

"Hey <my name>, this is <her name> from this weekend xD. <event organizer> gave me your number so I could ask if you'd be interested in doing some <name of children's program> this weekend at 10. Lemme know! I hope you've had a splendid week so far." (October 25, 2016)

We started teaching a children's class together. Every week I would pick her up at her college dorm and we would drive together in my car to the house where the children's class was being hosted.

In the beginning she kept inviting me to various events. In our drive to the first children's class, she told me her cousin was visiting in a couple of weeks and she suggested that when she arrives the three of us should take a day trip to the mountains. I hesitated to agree because I felt like I had just met her and the idea made me feel uncomfortable.

One thing I will mention about the children's classes themselves: Instead of using the official program, I made my own lessons for us to teach. Despite the fact that back then I fully believed in the Baha'i administration and its infallibility, I just had a visceral dislike of the official Baha'i curriculum, and felt a need to teach lessons emphasizing things I personally believed were most important.

The next week when I was driving her, she asked me to another event: The Hackathon. I guess she must have seen me as being a nerd, so she asked me to an event she thought a nerd would enjoy. I forget exactly what answer I gave, but it was not an enthusiastic yes. This is something which I came to regret deeply in the weeks to come.

Even though in person I did not seem to show that much signs of interest in her, the reality was that when I would go home I would think about her constantly and obsessively. I would daydream about her, and all week I would look forward to seeing her. She was the highlight of my week.

And as time went by I started to view her as being more and more attractive. At one event that we both attended, I remember looking at her from across the room and being struck by how attractive I perceived her to be. And I felt a sense of comfort, pride, and happiness that she was going to be mine. I started thinking of how everyone is going to be so jealous of me once she is my wife. I would often daydream about our wedding and of having children together. This Wikipedia article does a good job of describing what I was experiencing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence

With her in my life, I felt just happier overall. I felt like I was experiencing the normal baseline of happiness that is natural to experience in life. And I experienced lots of more complex emotions that seemed bizarre to me. For example, I had this feeling like she was an old friend, whom I had known for a long time, or like she was family, even though I had only known her for a couple of months.

Although I had been very depressed about being unemployed before meeting her, I felt much less depressed and better able to function after meeting her. I credit the clarity of mind that her presence gave me as being what resulted in me landing my first job. Because when I had my interview I was more confident and better able to function, and I believe I may not have performed so well if I was depressed as I was before meeting her.

One day as I was driving her to our class, she made some kind of a joke about her vagina to me. I did not laugh. I thought it would be improper to laugh as at this point in life I was starting to think of myself as being a man of God. So the remainder of the drive was kind of awkward.

Over the next few weeks she started to become less nice towards me. Whereas before she seemed to agree with everything I said, even stupid things I would say, she now would disagree with me on things. At one point, she even wanted to stop using the curriculum I had been making and switch to the Official Authorized Baha'i  urriculum for children. We ended up doing this, and it hurt me deeply.

I started thinking reflecting on what happened that caused her to become like this, and I figured that I probably did a bad job of making my attraction to her clear and this was causing her to lose interest in me.

I figured that the only shot I have of winning her affection back is to compensate by trying to "undo" the instances where I failed to communicate my attraction to her. I brought up the hackathon and suggested we go to it together. After much insistence I got her to agree to go to it with me, but at the last minute she backtracked and said she couldn't go. I also tried to compensate for that time when I didn't laugh at her sexual joke by telling her my own sexual jokes to her when we were alone, to show that I was a sexual guy. But she seemed uncomfortable when I did this.

A couple of weeks later we were with some other friends and she announced to the group that she was dating this guy who approached her while she was in the library.

I was in denial about this for a few weeks. I thought maybe she would eventually leave him and then come back to me. But when the reality finally sunk in I was absolutely devastated. I think we can agree that although emotional pain is bad and maybe in some ways worse than physical pain, it is normally less intense than physical pain. Unlike physical pain, emotional pain typically does not send a person into a state of panic where he feels an immediate need to make it stop. But in this case it did. I felt like I needed for the emotional pain to stop now, and that the only way I could do this was by committing suicide. I was legitimately suicidal for the first time in my life. I started thinking about suicide methods but they all seemed too painful. But then I remembered one that didn't seem so bad. The method was to get a hose and feed it from the exhaust pipe of my car to the car window, and seal everything with duct tape. This didn't seem too painful, and it would get rid of the intense emotional pain I was experiencing.

But just as I was starting to get serious about these things I noticed an email from the job I had interviewed for a few months prior. "Oh great," I thought, "another rejection, just one more reason to commit suicide". But then I opened it up and saw that it was in fact an offer for a reputable job 2000 miles away in what at the time seemed like an exciting part of the country. Even with the job offer, I was still depressed for the coming weeks, and I thought to myself that I would rather have the girl than the job, but I was at least no longer depressed enough to kill myself.

After I got the job offer, I started to think that maybe now that I have a job maybe the girl will want me now. This restored my hope for a while. Even a couple of months after starting the job, I would fantasize about her regaining affection for me, and then I would fly her here to live with me. I didn't lose hope completely until a couple of months into my job I sent her a text making my feelings very clear and explicit to by text and she made it clear that she did not reciprocate.

When I was recovering from this I found it very difficult to talk to anyone about it. But my sister eventually figured out what was bothering me. She laughed at me and told me that I could do better and that the girl infatuated with is not very attractive. After she said this, I started to think objectively about the way she looks, and I realized she is in fact not very attractive. When I started to recognize this, it made me feel immensely better. Here is a picture for reference:

https://picallow.com/161451-2/?usp_success=2&post_id=161451&form_id=27

But what my sister was wrong about was that I could do better, because now 7 years later I have still not met anyone else. She on the other hand, has a boyfriend:

https://picallow.com/161454-2/?usp_success=2&post_id=161454&form_id=27

My lack of success with women during all this time makes me think that maybe my suicidal feelings were justified. I felt horrible, because the reality is horrible. If messing up that opportunity with her is what results in me not reproducing, then my failure with her is the most consequential failure of my lifetime.