Yeah no. This is just the exact same advice I can’t use. I know all this. I don’t think you understand my problem.

For me “warmer waters” means less people. Even when doing things I like in an environment I enjoy, the presence of people, or even a single person, puts me off. Always.

I like going to the gym, but I like it best in the middle of the night at the 24/7 gym when no-one else is there.

I like to move to music. I hate dancing with another person.

I enjoy multiplayer games, but I have zero interest in in-game chats of any kind.

I could go on.

The things I like, I enjoy MORE alone. Doing any of it in a way that introduces the possibility of getting to know a new person significantly reduces my desire to engage, or ruins my interest entirely.

The person I’m looking for, who enjoys the same things I do, isn’t someone I will meet while doing things I like in the way I like doing them. Because doing them in a way where I might get to know someone, means doing them in a way I do not like.

I do not enjoy the process of getting to know someone, there is no context where it becomes painless and effortless, because the thing I don’t like is the fact that another person is involved. Every word they say might be exactly what I want to hear, but it doesn’t alleviate my desire to be somewhere else, even as my excitement at meeting someone I might like, grows.

I don’t “value” my alone time. I literally can’t get enough of it. My alone time is so inoffensive to me I feel basically no need to change how I live my daily life, just so I can eventually find someone whose company I can simply enjoy once I get past the chore of getting to know them.

And the energy investment for me to make friends is insane. I basically have to feign wanting to be in someone’s company until I know them well enough for it to be true, and that’s a process that continues for me well past the point of my realising I like someone.

Even as I start wanting the company of a particular person, once actually in it, I want nothing more than to be alone again. It takes me years for that go away completely with someone, and during all that time I have to resist my desire to leave/kick them out, because if I do, things will never progress past that, and into the phase where I just… enjoy having a relationship.

I like this advice. It’s true. But some of us simply don’t work the way it precludes.

For me to find another person like me, I’d have to be making an “expedition” into warmer waters, fully intending to leave them as soon as provisions run out. And then during that, run into someone else doing the same. That is astronomically unlikely, especially due to how rarely I can scrounge up the provisions for an expedition.

I’m far more likely to run into people who are comfortable living in the warm waters. That’s not a problem. As long as they don’t mind visiting me in my cold waters, they can make for excellent relationships.

But it does mean people like me can’t directly apply this advice in the way it is presented.