It’s also difficult to build or maintain a relationship when depression is your co-pilot, dripping poison in your ear about yourself, about how others supposedly feel or even just whether this is worth the effort
And your list of supposed drawbacks – you’re autistic, you’re approaching being a literal 40-year old virgin, you live at home and have mental health issues – makes it sound like your question is very much like the latter.
Well, let’s take a few of these on, in order of importance and relevance. But first, I want to give you a phrase to keep in mind that will be relevant for pretty much everything we cover: “perfection isn’t necessary or even desirable”. Perfection is the hobgoblin of a scared mind, the idea that only the best of the best will ever do when in reality, nobody wants that nor would even know what to do with it if they had it. Perfection is necessary when you’re tuning a piano. Are you a piano? If not, then “good enough” is, in fact, good enough.
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This is one of those times where that question is going to be important. If your depression or anxiety aren’t under control or managed – and please note carefully that I say “managed” and not “fixed” – then you’re going to have a much harder time, on multiple axes.
Social anxiety, for example, is going to make it harder to talk to people, to put yourself out there and to trust yourself enough to actually shoot your shot. It’s very difficult, and I speak from experience here, to be genuinely connect with people or to be your most authentic, polished self if you’re mentally analyzing every word, intonation and micro-expression for meaning for fear that you’re doing something wrong.
These are going to be the biggest drawbacks to your dating life, primarily because they’re the ones that are going to have the greatest effects relative to your goal
But if you have a reasonable handle on those – you’re working with a therapist, you have medication that helps or you’ve been practicing your CBT exercises – then that’s not an issue that will prevent you from dating. It’ll be something to pay attention to and make sure that it doesn’t slip its leash, but if you’ve got more or less under control, then you’re fine.
Now, I do think that getting some practice on your social skills is going to be important, especially if your anxiety has made it harder. But working on being more social in general will help you with meeting people you might want to date. You don’t need to be able to mask yourself so thoroughly nobody would ever know you’re autistic or anxious; you just need to be reasonably social and able to navigate social situations.
Next: you live with your parents. This is going to be a handicap mostly in that it makes it harder to bring someone home for loud crazy sex like weasels in heat in a burlap sack. Otherwise, it’s not going to be nearly as much of a handicap as you might expect. Living with family isn’t nearly the dealbreaker that you’d think. Living in a multi-generational household is very normal in most cultures in general. In the US, it’s becoming increasingly common, especially as rents skyrocket, housing inventory gets snapped up by corporations and short-term rental schemes and inflated prices mean that many people can’t afford to even make a down payment on a home.