I have only recently realised I have major imposter syndrome when it comes to girls.

Let me preface this by saying I have never had any true success with people of the opposite gender at all throughout my life. Since I left school last year, I’ve been consistently trying to change this. I am quite tall (6ft) and most people say I am reasonably good looking - Im only mentioning for context to this post.

The realisation came upon reflecting on the past year of consistently trying to be successful with girls. There have been countless times when I have gained a very good opportunity for success, only to throw the opportunity away at first chance. There is always I different reason I create for myself at the time. Mostly, whenever the opportunity arises for potentially having sexual relations, I feel partly as though I have “won”, since I have created interest of a romantic/sexual nature from a girl to me. A lot of the time this is enough to satisfy me and cause me to stop trying, which as I’ve realised, is mostly out of anxiety of continuing. After reflecting, this anxiety, while usually masked as an array of different situational reasons my mind makes for why its fine to stop trying and be satisfied, comes out of not believing I deserve to gain the reward of sex or potentially a causal relationship.

An example of this would creating interest through talking or messaging and at this point finding a reason to temporarily end the irl interaction or in the other instance messaging much less frequently or tuning down the interest in another way. This sounds extremely stupid and counter-intuitive but frankly, I had no idea I was actually intentionally doing this before very recently, upon which I have realised that this is a major problem in why I am so unsuccessful with girls.

Whenever the opportunity arises for sexual relations with someone, I feel subconsciously as though I do not actually deserve it. I theorise this is purely imposter syndrome: because for my entire life I have never had success with girls, and I have the purely subconscious perception of myself that I am not cool, socially tuned or otherwise of high status. So, if an attractive girl is interested in sex with me, she must be wrong and I have somehow tricked her by putting up a facade. In reality, I do not continue past this point because I am scared my “facade” will crumble as I get closer to sexual relations and the girl will see the image of a pathetic virgin with no attractive qualities and either reject me or not enjoy / feel awkward spending time with me.

I have only come to a full realisation of this within the last week, where within this time I have essentially let three different, almost set in stone opportunities for sex with very attractive, clearly popular girls go completely by, through not actually acting at all on them overall from the perception that they are way out of my league, even though they also want sex with me.

It took me an entire year to realise this very important and major aspect of my personality. Hopefully through this realisation I can realise when I am deliberately choosing the comfortable route of not going through with something, and force myself to continue.