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Well, it happened. I've been frivolously accused of sexual assault.
Context: https://www.themotte.org/post/1092/wellness-wednesday-for-july-24-2024/234218?context=8#context
TLDR: I had a crush on an actual neurodivergent nerd girl in her early 30s, concocted a grand romantic gesture, had what I thought was a great evening with her where we kissed a few times. Then the next day she's coldly unhappy with me
I apologize via text but hear nothing back from her. She hasn't seemed particularly drunk, and had lots of opportunity to ditch me.
There's a part 2 to this story,
I run into her again a few weeks later (this is 2024) and she gives me a big ole body hug and invites me to hang out, making me internally panic. There's other people around so I can't really have a frank conversation with her. At the end of the evening, I ask her if she'd like to get dinner sometime, so we can talk in private and I can hash out exactly how she feels about me. She reacts poorly.
Via text she accuses me of acting weird. My attraction to her is waning. Some choice quotes: "I'm so tired of straight guys assuming I'm not asexual, anyways I already have a crush." Never mind her "pretty people dont light their own cigarettes" line, asexual people apparently flirt pretty openly when they've had any amount of alcohol.
We have a pleasant-enough text conversation that firmly makes me dislike her, or rather dislike how leftist queer neurodivergent activist asexual feminism has taken someone I could have liked and made them a shitty person. I leave things at that, the matter has been settled.
This was a year ago. Recently, I run into her at the pub in question, with some of my friends. I give her a cordial hello, find out she's going back to school for political science (read: a degree in activism). I liked her more when she talked about Hellboy and her Fullmetal Alchemist fanfiction. She says something odd about seeing a mutual friend mention me on Facebook recently and it confusing her. I say "I'm glad you're doing well" and take my leave.
The next day I get this banger, which is really the star of this entire post.
>Hey I didn't get to say this because we were surrounded by people but you've never apologized for sexually assaulting me on my birthday last year and I would appreciate an apology as that ruined my birthday and has made me feel not okay about you ever since
I already apologized to her way back at the beginning of all this. I considered replying with a terse apology, a reminder I had previously apologized, and a promise to never acknowledge her again, because I don't feel okay about her either. Instead, I blocked her on everything and will ignore her going forwards. This isnt a good-faith interaction, this is a person either fucking with me, or of questionable sanity. I'm not going to feed the beast.
She could actually fuck up my social life quite a bit if she wanted to, that bar is VERY important to me; most of my non-roommate friends in the city were met through that RPG club and the surrounding social context.
No further encounters after two weeks. Still feels weird to be walking around with an accusation of sexual assault upon me.
I’m sorry about this. From what you’ve said, you didn’t do anything wrong.
Unfortunately, I think the truth is that people who reach their 30s without marrying or being in an LTR on the way to marriage are often that way for a reason. She’s in her 30s, and going back to college for a degree with a tenuous relationship to direct employment — that points to aimlessness. That’s understandable in your early to mid 20s, much less understandable in your 30s.
I’ll counterpoint the cynicism by saying that I’ve never encountered this kind of instability from “geeky neurodivergent asexual” women. Of course, when I found about the asexuality things ended because of the obvious incompatibility. For what it’s worth, your interlocutor does not at all sound to me like their behavior matches the cluster — that cluster of people is usually more shy, reserved, and actually confused by sexuality, not manipulative about it.
It's hard to describe the anecdotes without context, but the asexual people I've met just didn't understand the concept of how a relationship is different from a friendship. I've been asked what is supposed to differentiate them by someone in this category before. I wasn't convinced about the existence of absolute asexuality when I first encountered it, but meeting a few of these people and seeing how absolutely bewildered they are by sexuality led me to the conclusion they they really don't have the sexual feelings that most people do. I've never met the "asexual but romantic" people, which seems to be the identification of your friend here; every asexual person I've met has clearly been as confused by romance as by sexuality, or talked about it analytically and outside the frame of direct experience.
But perhaps what's going on is one of two things -- she has relatively normal sexual feelings, but has general identity instability that makes her uncomfortable with it unless lubricated by alcohol, which seems most likely to me. Or, alternatively, she is asexual, and her confusion about the concept of sexuality manifests as an intense conflict resulting in the craziness you've encountered. Your choice quotes, "I'm so tired of straight guys assuming I'm not asexual, anyways I already have a crush," and "pretty people dont light their own cigarettes" just read as woefully neurotypical and narcissistic in a normie way. This is perhaps a case of a neurotypical person with identity instability latching onto concepts like asexuality and autism and queerness as validation for her weirdness. I'm not a psychiatrist, but this has what is coloquially called "BPD chick energy" all over it.
Talk about mixed signals! That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me think you're just dealing with garden variety crazy. "Let's hang out, but no I won't go to dinner" shortly after "you ruined my birthday"... especially combined with the "made me feel not okay about you" thing you got a year later, makes it extremely likely that this is a person with serious confusion about her romantic identity and desires, who over time built a positive or neutral situation into a decidedly negative one.
You said in your hypothetical rant that she said something like "all us freaks have is each other." Well, that sounds like someone that has made an identity out of weirdness. And I don't think it's healthy. I've certainly bonded with women in that way -- you know, "we have this in common and we understand each other like other people don't." But there's a time and a place, and calling yourself a "freak" when you do that just makes them sound like they're committed to weirdness not as an obstacle, or as a healthy part of personality, but as an active aversion and identitification with rebellion from the norm for no reason.
I'm sorry that a connection that meant so much to you at the time became so negative. But unfortunately the connection you had was always fictive, time-limited. This is not a person capable of stable bonds. There was no relationship to be had with her. And though she holds the power to destroy aspects of your life in her hands, she also seems much more interested in destroying aspects of her life -- including the connection she made with you, which may well have had the capacity to be incredibly meaningful to her, too. You're collateral damage in the mess she's made of herself. I don't say that beacuse I think you should sympathize with her, but because I think you should remind yourself that her own life is hot garbage, and certainly seems lonely. It's not like she rejected you for bigger and better things; she rejected you for smaller and worse things. She's the one who lost.
Yep. 'I hate you! Don't leave me!' is the best description of BPD I've seen. She seems to keep trying to drag him back into her orbit, but when he expresses any romantic interest she gets upset and pushes him away. Weird.
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She didn't say "all us freaks have as each other," that's a line from Hellboy, her favorite film, and also one of my favorites. I'm the one with the identity based around weirdness, which I assumed she also had. I intuited that line would have meaning for her, which is why I wrote it in the inside cover of the Hellboy trade paperback I gave her, which she noticed. The line isn't in the books, it's a very Del Toro sentiment. It's me expressing my sense of betrayal.
I actually do believe that she's neurodivergent, in addition to whatever other conditions she has. We can smell our own. I'm also an aimless adrift 30something.
She's not lonely. She's surrounded by cringe leftist queer activists, orbiters, and whatever a crush is, which I presume is the guy she bangs when she occasionally feels like it.
As someone who’s struggled with “I’m weird and that makes me cool,” I learned the hard way that the best thing you can do for yourself is to develop the ability to bridge your personality and values to normies. Making yourself a permanent outcast just perpetuates feelings of ostracization. I know you feel like an outsider, but I assure you that from your posts, you’re much more relatable and typically human than you think.
Even in your hypothetical rant, you’re attributing to her thoughts and values that she didn’t share. “Whatever happened to the Hellboy quote that I put in the book”, in that context, doesn’t sound like the description of a betrayal — it sounds like you’re upset she isn’t actually what you imagined her to be. You’re accusing her of betraying your perception of her.
That’s why she reacted so harshly to the kissing: you were a fun buddy to her, not a romantic interest. Unfortunately, she seems to have a big problem with actually vocalizing her thoughts and needs, and either accidentally or intentionally flirting as a form of social bonding, which is why you get anger only in texts. It’s genuinely possible that this is the dark side of my anecdote about asexuals not understanding the difference between sexuality and friendship — maybe she honestly doesn’t realize some of actions are clearly flirting, just sees people responding positively and so it’s positively reinforced.
Everything else makes sense and doesn’t seem like BPD or even craziness when I think of it that way: the “friend hug,” the invitation to hang out but aversion to dinner (which would be a date!), and the cold shoulder. I’m not sure she ever thought of you as a potential partner. Maybe she flirted in ways that were honestly ambiguous, but you’re both neurodivergent — are you certain she was acting and you were reading social signals correctly?
I’m still trying to solve the mystery of why I never ended up in a situation like this, and have had generally positive romantic experiences. Probably what I would have done with this girl is awkwardly ask her out in explicit terms, she would awkwardly say no, and even our friendship would fizzle out. I don’t make grand romantic gestures and I only rarely flirt first.
I guess I’m lucky that occasionally women have made their interest known explicitly, and understandably women who’ve liked me enough to go out of their way to make me know it had little trouble with ambiguous interest or attraction. Looking back on your initial thread, I realize I’m basically implementing @gorge’s advice: “It's easier if you go for the girls who are crushing on you, without you having to put in extraordinary effort.” What’s really tough is if you don’t have anyone crushing on you. But women who clearly state their attraction to a man don’t realize how powerful and important they are in the current social context.
I’m sorry if I made you feel judged. My goal was solely to try and relate to your experience and reassure you. I guess I overstepped. But I do think after reflecting that this isn’t a case of “crazy feminism ruins good romantic prospect,” I think it’s that you made a geeky friend and misread her friendship as attraction. I’ve done that many times, and probably would have in this situation, too. It’s very relatable.
It would have saved you both a lot of drama if you’d have clarified your relationship before you kissed her. The current social environment just makes ambiguity too threatening to everyone.
"Pretty people don't light their own cigarettes." This was not a necessary thing to say.
Also, the time to say "I'm not happy with you kissing me" was the first time I kissed her, not the next day
I am not mad she wasn't attracted to me, I'm mad that I'm being accused of wrongdoing, rather than this just being an incident of mutual misunderstanding between two awkward people. I knew I was going out on a limb pursuing her.
Also, "all us freaks have is each other" is the entire fucking ethos of her queer neurodivergent activist leftist community, except that it specifically excludes me as a straight white male. Yes, I was disappointed to find I was wrong about her.
You're taking me a bit too literally here, or really under-selling my self-awareness.
Alright, I'll quit while I'm behind. Best of luck to you.
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