Last time I did these I made a list to sort of sum myself up and let people decide if they want to get to know me. But this time I'll just freely write about what I want without any regard to how long this post gets.

So I'm looking for someone very specific. That's something of a meme at this point, where people are uncompromising, have unrealistic expectations, want something hyper specific or some perfect ideal and as a result, they're always disappointed. This isn't exactly that.

It's not so much about being picky, because I think I'm a deeply ...not picky person. I'm an extremely flexible person. It's also not about being superficial, or wanting someone who looks a certain way. If you could scan the brains of people on the whole planet, I would guess that I'm in the top 1% of people who care the least about someone's physical appearance. You know those trendy jokes women do lately where they ask something stupid like, "If I was a cup of water, would you still love me? If I was an amorphous black mist, would you still love me?"

Yeah. I would.

I once asked my friend, who was doing lots of dating profiles at the time and was telling me how important physical attraction is to him,

"Hey, imagine if your soul mate was actually an alien. It just so happens that the literal perfect mind in the entire universe for you, isn't from Earth and has some strange to us non-human physical form. But if you actually got to know them somehow, you'd just be deeply in love. But physically they just were a blob, or looked like an insect, or something odd to you."

And he was just stunned. He couldn't answer. Even when I said, "After knowing them well, what would being madly in love with this being be like for you in light of your physical attraction criteria?" He couldn't get over something so shallow. Does he have any idea what the deepest, most meaningful intimate psychological connection in the entire universe would mean? I just think he wasn't very creative or imaginative. I mean, I can relate obviously, I have preferences and I may be un-attracted physically to some people, but if you presented to me someone where there was zero room for doubt that this was my soul mate(in a scientific sense of course, as in, most compatible being in the entire universe, since that's a quantifiable question in principle, just not in practice), I just have to admit that the search is over, right? What else is there to do?

(short tangent: Some may be wondering why I care so little about physical attraction. Is it because I'm horrifically disfigured or something? No. I don't think I'm a hideous looking person or anything like that. I've had several relationships, I'd say I'm an average looking guy who has gotten average looking girls.)

Which brings me to one issue I've always had in life:

I relate to basically no one. Of all the people I've known, I have never met someone and thought "This person really understands me, they seem to see the world in a similar way to me, and they roughly value what I value"

I've also not met that many people though, I'm pretty introverted and stay at home/prefer solitude. So maybe I'm not in a position to conclude anything. Anyway...

So I think in order for things to work, I'm going to need to find someone who had a similar level of hardship in life: which is, high. That qualifies a lot of people, since tons of people suffer immensely on this planet. But the problem is, extreme hardship tends to break people mentally-- one way or another. Either they become bad people, completely self-centered, their struggle taught them that they have to focus heavily on themselves as some kind of survival mechanism. This could range from... just your generic egocentric person who is too selfish to not cause those around them to suffer(even if maybe they mean well or are otherwise not so bad as a person), or, to someone with a legit disorder like narcissism or psychopathy, who is just overtly bad to others.

Another problem with people who have very extreme hardships, is this little... dichotomy I noticed, where either the hardship breaks them so much that they can't really function as people at all, so I wouldn't be able to find anyone in that category on reddit/get far enough to discover compatibility, or, they overcome the hardship and then have the craziest survivorship bias, where now they're awesome and they made it and they're on the grind and... all these sorts of things(I'm not being bitter here-- I'm happy for these people, but they've sort of lost the plot in their success. They're high on their own supply, and out of touch with how lucky they are). I'm looking for someone who's kind of in the middle there. Barely functional enough so that they're not paralyzed by trauma, but laid back enough that they would never judge someone for not completely transforming their life.

Okay now we started with this pretty large sub-category of the population, but with those last few details, lots of people are disqualified. But there have to be some left over. And in that group of people, it's possible, and I'm totally ready to accept that it's not possible, but it could be possible, that she's real. I realize how poor the odds are here, so if I were to bet, I would guess I'll never find her, but is there any real harm in trying?

Edit: Almost a month later, I look back on this post pretty critically. I'm talking about "hardship", but what is that even? Who doesn't experience hardship? I feel like even Jeff Bezos has hardship, somehow. Everyone does. So I guess what I'm really talking about is social hardship-- the inability to relate. I didn't use the word "neurodivergent" originally but I feel like that captures it better. Because I'm looking at my life(which is not going well by any kind of normal measure, I don't work, I don't know what my future looks like, I just started therapy again after thinking I was "fine" for many years), and it's hard to imagine a ) being desirable , and b) being able to connect, with someone who doesn't also share this lostness both in life, and in social terms.