Very cool, if true

I’ve known for years that I come across as a good listener – I’d never really worked out why, but people I hardly know have always found it really easy to talk to me. There have been dozens of occasions where people I’ve hardly met have ended up talking to me about all sorts of normally private things until the early hours of the morning. At the same time, I’ve always found it very hard to progress from ‘good listener’ to ‘partner’, something which has puzzled me.

I'm exactly the same.

I liked being around them because I found them ‘fascinating specimens of humanity’, and thus wanted to be with them. But while I developed emotional attachments, I’m not sure that I was actually engaging in the same way that most people do. Certainly I wasn’t paying enough attention to them emotionally – a very common thread in my relationships has been girlfriends complaining that I didn’t appreciate them, that I didn’t pay them enough attention, that I didn’t appreciate them in the right ways, etc. I tend to think of girlfriends as friends++

Everything you wrote resonates exceptionally well with me, except that I enjoy providing reassurance and doing emotional and practical care-taking (cooking, doing laundry etc...), as long a people don't ask too much (ie, I won't do more for someone than they are willing to do for themselves and if someone looks incapable of taking care of themselves practically or emotionally in any sort of long-term fashion, I rapidly detach them from my life, since I wish to have friends and romantic partners, not emotional or monetary parasites [which is also why I am childfree]).

I’d find a new friend, spend vast amounts of time with them while I learnt all the things that this new person could teach me, and then become bored and move onto someone else. I was a serial friender. This didn’t mean I stopped being friends with that person, but it did mean that I spent less time with them as I found someone else different again, who could teach me more about these strange things called ‘people’.

I'm like this except with my closet friends (Aaron, Dawn, Becca (imester), and (more recently) Alice (amberite). I hang onto the few people that I deeply care about, but I consider everyone else to be somewhat temporary additions to my life, in part this is because until I move to Portland, I moved from one city to another every 3-7 years.

This stemmed from me having pretty much no friends up until second year at university. I had a couple of people I hung out with a bit, but nobody I actually felt close to. People in general baffled me and I didn’t really have much of a connection to them. On first making real friends at university I suddenly entered this new, strange world. In retrospect I then spent about 3-4 years floundering about, getting on ok most of the time, but not having any idea what was actually going on and making the occasional godawful mistakes. I had no idea at all what was and wasn’t reasonable behaviour and it took me that long just to get a basic handle on things.

The degree to which this described my life is rather uncanny.

I'm fascinated by the similarities and the (seemingly fairly minor) differences that I see between us wrt friendships and romance.