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Comment by Almaviva | Hacker News Reader

Variations of "you'll just meet someone" and "dating will get easier in your 30s" and "the important thing is you do well in school, and everything else will follow". Fuck that. Someone should have shaken the shit out of me when I was 18, forced me to go to a school with a normal gender ratio, and gotten me to strike while the iron was still hot while I still had some sexual attraction to women, and never take for granted any time a woman is vaguely interested.

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Right there with you. My life would probably be much better had I spent more (well, any) time drinking and partying in high school and college. The traditional advice to be responsible and avoid peer pressure is correct for the majority of the population, but geeky introverts need to develop social skills much more than we need to incrementally improve our GPAs.

"dating will get easier in your 30s"

Supposedly this really is true for men. Not for me yet.

> Supposedly this really is true for men.

This is not just untrue for me, but dramatic and stark in a way that has surprised me a lot. I have some really awkward hair loss and I get mistaken for a college student at age 34, and that doesn't help. To a couple orders of approximation, women now have absolutely and universally no sexual interest in me, and this just wasn't true in my 20s. (This is despite me having more money now and being lot more sure of myself, more comfortable with people, less shy, and in better physical shape.)

I know it's childish, but the ambiguity in the phrase "while I still had some sexual attraction to women" amuses me.

Someone should have shaken the shit out of me when I was 18, forced me to go to a school with a normal gender ratio, and gotten me to strike while the iron was still hot

Why is it someone else's responsibility to make you live your life the "right" way? I thought your bad advice post was fine up until you were blaming other people for how you lived your life.

This post is asking for blame!! Someone can take my anecdote for what its worth in a way that may help them out (I hope). Yes I'm whiny but also have some altruism:)

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