I like your Tyler Durden reference! I think your life so far would make a good novel, especially the way you tell it.

Re: romance: the more practice you have, the easier it gets. The fear of failure/anxiety about going there again is very understandable, but disappointing romances are a fact of life if your life is to include romances. There's a saying about kissing a lot of frogs before you find your prince and I think it applies to princesses as well. The two situations you described in your post are probably far more common than you might think.

I also really doubt that something you did had anything to do with that last woman telling you that she wasn't interested after all. She sounds like she had a lot of baggage in the first place. It's generally best, I think, to avoid people who want to start dating you before they've broken up with their current partner. They very often *don't* wind up leaving their partner and just string along whoever they are seeing on the side. Some people like to taste forbidden fruit, and once they've had a bite of the apple, they want to move on to pears. The trick, I think, is getting enough experience to recognize people who play those kinds of games.

You're taking very good steps and all of the positive changes you are bringing into your life will work out for you one way or another. How do things work over there with regard to school? Can you go back at this point to study something else? I have found that classes are a wonderful way to meet people.

In terms of having crummy parents, one of the biggest problems I've had is a sense that I don't know what normal is. I don't know where boundaries should be. I've found it helpful to read up on dysfunctional families, narcissism, adult children of alcoholics to kind of open my eyes up to various patterns that I might have carried from my childhood into my adult life. I have no idea if that is relevant to your situation or not.

Realizing all this stuff at 25 is way better than realizing it at 60, right? You still have plenty of time to correct your course.