The Beginning
Who am I, and how did I end up on this quest?
Welcome to The Nerd's Quest, my journey of learning how to meet and date women as a computer nerd on the autism spectrum.
Who am I?
I am a 28 year old male. I’m a computer nerd. I’m on the autism spectrum. I am not a virgin, but only because I see sex workers occasionally. I have never had sex without paying for it.
I have only ever had one romantic relationship in my entire life. It was during my junior year of high school. We never actually had sex, but despite that we still both took it super seriously at the time. It didn't end well, not that it matters. How did I ever get into that relationship in the first place? She asked a mutual friend of ours to help set us up, and I ended up asking her to be my girlfriend over Facebook. That was more than 10 years ago now.
Setting aside my paid experiences, I have had very little romantic or sexual interaction with the opposite sex since then.
How did I get here?
So at 18 years old, I began college as a virgin who had only ever had that one romantic relationship.
Ultimately, I didn’t put a serious effort into dating in college for very long. At the beginning I gave it a try, but I was hit by a string of embarrassing social failures that left me feeling discouraged and rejected. It wasn't just about dating, either. I had failed to make any friends. Freshman year it felt like everyone else was going out drinking and partying on the weekends while I was sitting back in my dorm room, alone and uninvited. Any time I thought about my social situation, I became depressed. I stopped taking care of myself. I started gaining weight. I stopped shaving. I didn't put any effort into my appearance, and I stopped keeping up with a lot of the basic grooming and hygiene I should have been keeping up with. I gave up entirely.
I also hated the dehumanizing aspect of online dating apps and never gave them a serious try. It didn't help that I didn't (and still don't) have good pictures of myself, but that obstacle also served as an excuse to keep putting it off and not try. I kept telling myself I would try out online dating once I lost the weight I had put on, cleaned myself up, and acquired some good photos of myself. These things kept getting pushed back one week, one month, one year at a time.
Still, there were times in college when girls approached me or flirted with me a little, but I rarely had any idea how to respond. I just didn't know what to say. I completely lacked the social ability to further the interaction, and so the interactions would typically never go anywhere. I had no idea how to continue the conversation or move things in the direction of asking her out on a date or asking for her phone number. There was one time where I got lucky and managed to make out with a girl (she made it really obvious that she was into me) but she didn’t want to take it any further or turn it into anything more than just a one-time thing. So when it came to my college years, things were quite grim on the romance front. There was an underlying problem at play here (autism), but more on that later.
Dates, hookups, and relationships weren’t things that were just going to happen automatically. If I wasn't putting in the effort to create these opportunities for myself, they weren’t going to happen. I think this is how it is for most young men, but I could be wrong about that. If I wasn't out there getting after it, these things weren't going to come my way.
After I graduated college, I moved back in with my parents for what was supposed to be maybe just a year. That one year ended up turning into five years, though I'll go ahead and blame at least the last year of that on COVID. I didn't attempt to date this entire time, setting aside a disastrous blind date my mother insisted on setting up for me that I may write about in a future post.
I worked remotely and rarely left the house. I had no meaningful in-person social interaction of any kind with members of the opposite sex during this five-year period, excluding family members. It sounds drastic, but at the same time it's worth pointing out that I only had meaningful social interaction with maybe 4-5 young men during this time as well, so ultimately there was just very little socializing going on in general. I had become a recluse. Things were going okay with my work, but every other aspect of my life suffered severely.
Just as had happened in college, nothing was going to come falling into my lap. I would have to go out and make it happen. Finally, after years of procrastination and complete neglect of the entire social sphere of my life, I decided to start turning things around. It was time to clean myself up, start getting back in shape, and eventually put myself out there again and give dating a serious go.
The first thing I had to do was move out. Thankfully, as things had been going well for me in my career (here’s where being a computer nerd helps!), I had the financial ability to move out of my parents’ house. Staying in my lame hometown any longer wasn’t going to cut it either. I had to move somewhere where I would have a lot more dating opportunities. And so in July of 2021, during the brief window of time where it felt like the United States had defeated the COVID-19 pandemic, I packed up my car and moved to Las Vegas.
My Quest
It is here in Las Vegas that I begin my quest.
But what is my quest, specifically? What is it that I am after?
I want to be able to participate in hookup culture, something I have never done before.
I want to be able to ask a woman out on a date (or at least get her phone number) who I have just met in person.
I want to give online dating a serious try.
I want to be in polyamorous romantic relationships.
There are some serious obstacles I will be facing. I'm a computer nerd, and I'm on the autism spectrum. I don't think either of these facts about myself will work in my favor when it comes to my quest. These are things about myself that I cannot change, and I'm not sure I would even want to if I could. Regardless, this means that I am starting out at a very low level. I'm an extreme beginner. Even some of the most basic aspects of socialization are going to be a struggle for me. There is so much I still must learn about human interaction. This is a very stereotypical thing for someone on the spectrum to say, but when I’m studying human interaction, it often feels like I am an anthropologist studying a foreign culture, one that is baffling in so many different ways. It just doesn’t come to me naturally!
I will be using this Substack to document my journey. I am going to set objectives for myself. I will start out with very easy objectives and gradually work my way up from there, taking one small step at a time towards accomplishing my goals.
Thank you for joining me on this journey. I hope this turns out to be a tremendous learning experience for us all! One with a few laughs along the way too.