I’m an unwanted socially isolated loser and tired of living

I’m a 28M who lives in a small retirement town and it’s hard to make friends and date around here. I have to drive 40+ minutes to the nearest college town just to do something fun and not be surrounded by old folks. I try going to mixers in the college town. I try doing bar trivia. I have little hangout spots there that I like to go to. But the social scene there is so thin that I run into the same people at totally unrelated events. Plus one of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about making friends there is that so much of the population there is transient. I try to be outgoing and make conversation with people too. All I have to show for it is constantly being left on read, constantly being the one who has to reach out and make plans, being ghosted/canceled on, and being made to feel unwanted/disposable.

I’ve never been with someone before and I’ve only ever been on like 3 dates in total. I tried speed dating here in town and in the college town and those ended up being a dud too. All of my matches ghosted me (and one of them canceled our date last minute). The closest I’ve come to an actual relationship was talking with a girl (now 33F) who lives 2 hours from me on a penpal site a couple years ago. We hit it off instantly. She and I would talk every day, she always complimented me, and she was just fun to talk to and made me feel wanted and cared about. This went on for about 3-4 months. My therapist told me that this girl could potentially have been romantically interested in me. I should add that during this time I was dealing with a terminally sick parent and social/geographical isolation.

Then Christmas comes around. I fly out of state to visit my mom and the conversations slow down. I had been burned before by other girls like this so I saw the writing on the wall. I tried to save the situation by confessing my feelings. But I just made it worse. She tells me that we aren’t compatible and that we have nothing in common. She also told me she didn’t want to lose me as a friend. I pulled back since I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere but I didn’t want to cut her out completely, she made that choice for me. She ghosts me a few weeks later. A while after that, I wrote her a long heartfelt text message telling her I missed her and how painful it was for me that we couldn’t talk anymore. A year or so later, I tried to reach out to her on IG and she blocked me. When everything went south, I told my therapist what happened and she said “she probably just liked the attention you gave her. She had to have known romantic feelings were involved.”

Honestly, I do harbor anger and resentment toward this woman for how things ended, but I feel sadness and grief more than anything else. My stepmom, who passed away from cancer around the time this girl ghosted me, was the last woman who made me feel seen and heard. She was basically my de facto mom for half my life. And this other woman 2 hours from me made me feel that way too. Losing them both at roughly the same time destroyed me emotionally and mentally.

I don’t have as much of a connection to my new stepmom or her family and we’re almost always around her family and her kids. I have offered to meet up with my stepsiblings and they left me hanging and I never heard from them. And they don’t invite me with them to go places and hang out even though they know I don’t have any friends or a romantic partner (and probably never will at this rate). I don’t feel seen and heard in my own damn house. Right now, I am trying to move to a large city back in my home state where my mom used to live so I can find a better job and have more social opportunities. Whenever I would go up there, I would shoot the shit with people at bars and met a ton of people that way (some who I still talk to). I actually got hit on by women up there. Also, I feel like my dad and new stepmom low-key don’t feel like I’m ready to move out because they don’t think I’m “done cooking” because I’m neurodivergent. They say that’s not true, but they make little comments that make me doubt that. And I’m having my boundaries violated more and more. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time hiding in my car smoking pot because it’s the only place I get any peace. I had to finish undergrad online because I didn’t have a car and I couldn’t afford to take classes in person so I missed out on social opportunities in college. The friends I made at the community college here all moved far away or ghosted me or were bad people I had to cut out of my life. I also recently cut out my best friend because I found racist posts on his Reddit account (recent posts that were only days old). The few friends I do have are foreigners on the Internet or people back in my home state.

I just want to feel like someone outside of family members gives a shit about my existence. I wish that woman I was talking to before my stepmom died would unblock me and let me talk to her again. Why won’t she just let me talk to her again??!?! I miss all of my online situationships and I miss feeling wanted and seen and heard and I’ll never have that again. I wish every day for one of them to allow me back into their life, but I know it will never happen. Of course, I care more about them than they do about me. I’m tired of living and I’m very angry at myself for still being in this situation and still not having found someone else yet. If I actually was interesting and had money and had qualities women want, maybe they wouldn’t have left….