Thank you for all the responses. Just a few thoughts, possibly verging into TMI:
Regarding the points about shared interests: I don’t want or expect to meet someone who shares every individual interest of mine, but I do feel it’s pretty important that they at least overlap in some key areas. I absolutely appreciate that emotional and psychological compatibility are crucial aspects of coupling that exist independently of hobbies and careers; that said, sharing and talking about the subjects and activities I’m passionate about is one of the most meaningful ways of connecting with someone, to me; if I can’t conceivably carry on hours-long conversations with them about something we both feel strongly about, it’s doubtful I’m ever going to feel that connected! Moreover, I just find it hard to get comfortable with someone who isn’t sufficiently into broadly overlapping cultural/subcultural spaces, e.g. some combination of arts and nerdy/weeby shit. It only really hit me in the last couple years how much more common and available people like that are in urban areas than where I’ve lived most of my life.
My living situation at present and for the last several years has made in-person socialization a lot more practically difficult than I would like. I live in the middle of a suburban state without a car or driver’s license, and since Covid hit the opportunities to either go to in-person public gatherings at all or get an appointment with the DMV to get a license have dwindled massively. My work is locally based and doesn’t pay nearly enough that moving to a city could be a serious consideration - I can’t even pay my rent without some support from a parent. I do live about an hour and a half from NYC and would like to find more excuses to go up there on weekends, but with work tiring me out every week and without any social roots in the city - and with Covid panic in the air - it’s tough to arrange for. The monetary cost of regular transit adds up, too.
Intertwined mental health and neurological issues (was recently diagnosed with a sleep disorder, which has been evident to me for years) also make working and socializing more difficult. Ofc it’s never easy to say with certainty which things I could ameliorate by pushing myself harder out of my comfort zone or changing my perspective and which are the things for which pushing myself would only result in further frustration and self-reproach. Interacting with other people tends to make me viscerally uncomfortable and defensive, and I feel like I have a gut-level misanthropy that makes me identify the worst and most threatening qualities in people very quickly (myself included). I’m enough of a neuro-atypical weirdo that interacting with most people bores and exhausts me, and then makes me feel guilty and self-conscious for feeling bored and exhausted even though they didn’t do or say anything wrong. Every so often I encounter a very rare (maybe 1:100? 1:500?) person with whom I feel some kind of instant affinity, which I then quickly get self-destructively obsessive about and terrified of losing.
I’m a neurotic! Anxiety definitely pushes me away from doing a lot of things which, if I did them, might actually be rewarding. My lifestyle for most of my 20s (i.e. until the latter part of last year) was so reclusive, pessimistic and risk-averse that I could probably use to push myself a bit harder to actually find out what’s good for me or not instead of just theorizing about it from a dug-in place where everything seems intimidating and impossible. (That I’m seemingly trapped in an inflexibly codependent practical/financial situation and that I may have an actual neurological condition depriving me of physical and mental energy could definitely be a contributors toward feeling this way, though certainly part of it also comes from within me.)
On a positive note: baggage aside, on a good day I don’t think I ought to be completely undesirable to potential partners. I don’t think I’m catastrophically ugly, though movie-star looks will never be my primary attractive quality (nor would I want them to - I can’t imagine the existential crisis of always wondering whether people who act attracted to you really care about the you beneath the skin; in my few romantic brush-ups where I felt like I was being used for someone’s emotional satisfaction rather than valued for who I was, it was demoralizing and terrible). I too am weird and intense and passionate about things that matter to me, and that kind of hard “atypical” idiosyncrasy is as inevitably attractive to someone as much as it’s offputting to others. I definitely have complex and strongly held thoughts, opinions and feelings going through my head (though maybe I’m overly disorganized and self-conscious about actually expressing them). I’m articulate, analytical, self-aware, emotionally literate, and monumentally bad at being deceptive or insincere. When I actually do open up to someone, I try very hard to be empathetic, compassionate and emotionally available. I identify with people who feel outcast and unseen, and I think my own experiences give me special understanding and patience for personal struggles that might get some people labeled as “difficult”, “broken” or whatever. I feel like, stepping back and trying to look it objectively, there’s gotta be someone out there who finds my good qualities attractive and rare enough to outweigh the bad! And it seems likely that that person would at least broadly align with the qualities I myself find attractive too? I’ve had just enough romantic near-misses over the years that, unless I’m really thinking about all this the wrong way, it at least seems like that could be the case… Just spitballin’ here…