Dear Silent Rossi:

I don’t think that you are rambling, not in my perception.

“It’s pretty obvious that such issues are not to be solved by someone outside my head” – someone outside your head (such as me) can help you move closer to being able to solve issues. It is also true that someone outside your head can hurt your ability to solve issues. It is important to be selective, on an online forum and in real life, as to whom you choose to interact with, and whom you choose to not interact with.

Solving emotional issues is not possible for a person to do all on his own, all inside one’s head.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a profile where a girl would write anything at all. They would just upload photos and wait for messages“- I had experience over 10 years ago with two online dating services (match. com and plenty of fish. com) where long written profiles were the norm. I don’t remember ever seeing a profile consisting of only a photo. I’ll add a significant clarification: I looked at people in their 40s and 50s at the time, a different age group than what you’ve been looking at.

“It just seems to me that getting rejected by ten girls in real life is a more enjoyable experience than sending similar messages into the void and waiting days for an answer” – if you ever decide to pursue online dating (and it is up to you, I am not invested in you pursuing it), “waiting days for an answer” would be a painful and ineffective strategy. You don’t wait in the context of an online dating site.

“My conditioning was that having sexual desire toward women is bad… Sexual desire is malignant intent, and expressing it to anyone is unspeakable crime. Sounds ridiculous and silly, but to me it’s a fundamental truth about the world” – I had a similar conditioning in regard to sexual desire and expression. I am not free from this conditioning but I am not tormented by it anymore. I am willing to discuss this issue with you in a delicate kind of way, nothing too straightforward, of course.

“I remember there was this time when I was in a better mental state and I asked a girl out. It turned out she was married, but she took her time to thank me and to let me know that she was flattered and grateful. She seemed sincere. My mind won’t register such information. Sexual desire is malignant intent” – one possibility that comes to my mind is that  when you were a boy, you innocently expressed an interest in a girl or a woman, maybe in a word, a sound or in a facial expression, and you were terribly shamed for it.

anita