Hi!

First of all, I just wanna express how grateful I am for this community. I've been lurking here for a while and love how supportive and intelligent you all are. I grew up without a proper female role model and this subreddit has taught me so much about learning to be more feminine (or has been good at reminding me at least to try).

Okay so, I'm 21 and have never been in a relationship before. Hopefully some of you could offer me some advice ❤️❤️

I'm beginning a 16 month teachers college program soon and while I'm reasonably excited about it, I'm also incredibly stressed about how I'm gonna meet someone, since, as you probably all know, teaching is dominated by women. Since I'm planning to start working directly afterwards, I feel that this final year in school will be my last real chance to meet someone my age.

My biggest issue is probably that I'm not proactive about making friends despite liking people a lot. I have a few close friends and that's always been enough for me. It's not that I'm exceptionally socially awkward (though I was rather poorly socialized growing up and my people skills could definitely use some work), I'm just extremely creatively oriented and therefore prefer to spend time alone.

I also eat an extremely restrictive diet to manage health issues which makes socializing as a young adult pretty tough--I can't really eat out anywhere (unless it's super upscale, which as a student, I could rarely afford) and I neither drink nor smoke.

The issue is that my best bet to meet someone is through mutual friends since I'm not too keen on online dating. I don't even have a social media presence which I know is strange for my age. I'm just not too interested in curating a portrait of my life online and find it super disheartening when people wanna hang out just to be able to post about it later, which I suppose is another reason why I've found it hard to meet new people that I'd find worthwhile to make friends with. I feel that my generation is so incredibly shallow and then feel like such a pick me girl when I think it lolll

In short, now that I've come to better understand myself, I've determined that I'll need to be with someone just as reclusive as me for us to get along in the long term. So the trouble is how I should go about meeting someone like that--he'd need to be introverted but not socially awkward, if that makes sense. Otherwise I probably wouldn't find him very attractive to begin with. And I feel like this is already an awfully unrealistic standard without even getting into other traits that matter to me like looks and competence 🤣🤣🤣

Is it the case that I just need to change? I'm open to try but frankly, I'm not confident that I can...

In short, I would really appreciate any advice on how I should go about meeting a high quality introverted guy as a gen z hippie of sorts. Thanks in advance!