(for tl;dr, skip to last paragraph)
Dear loveforum,
I'm a 21 year old college student from a small country in eastern Europe. I have always struggled with relationships - in truth, I never had one. I'm also a quite asocial guy - what I do all day is play an online video game (which I love doing) or I study when I have to. I smoke pot frequently with 1 or 2 pals (I'd say 2-3 times a week on average).
Now after I managed to approach this lovely girl like 3 years ago and got burned pretty hard by her (basically she was annoyed by me cause I approached her two times and she wasn't interested in me), I gave up on the romance thing. I figured with my background I couldn't really get a woman that I would like but that would also like me back, so I kinda stopped thinking about it. But in my subconscious laid the desire to be liked - in reality I was, and am, a quite needy guy.
So recently I was approached by some woman at uni. She wasn't even good looking I thought, and she was quite withdrawn - moreso than me, but she was new to the faculty for this year. In any case, she just asked some regular stuff about class, and I managed to talk a bit with her for a while. Turns out she was 10 years older than me, and I enjoyed the conversation with her. Being so desperate subconsciously, I immediately started envisioning myself with her - that's what happens when I think I have a shot at someone who I like at least a bit initially, and her being older also kind of attracted me. I knew this was very bad and it can't turn out well, but I decided I'm gonna try to interact with her more in the future and see what happens - potentially it could be a dream come true.
Anyway, I had my rational fears about her being much more mature than me and not really being insecure as me as I initially perceived - I mean we're talking about a 30+ year old and she probably has a life of her own and doesn't really care about the kids here at uni. But I kind of supressed that because of my developing obsession over being with her. Eventually I approached her again, and even managed to have a drink with her inbetween some classes. Sounds good, but the thing is I couldn't really get her to open up about more personal stuff - we talked about some, but because of my lifestyle I can't really talk about that much, and my social skills are quite poor and I wasn't really being interesting to her. So of course I couldn't build the rapport, and other conversations after that one were getting harder to maintain, let alone make interesting.
Afterwards I've noticed she barely approaches me or asks me questions related to stuff other then class, and that depressed me. A similar situation as before happened to me - I was basically all into someone who couldn't give two shits about me. It was painful to think about.
TL;DR version - I'm a no life nerd who wants to be a more interesting person, potentially seducing semi-attractive older women, or at least being able to be friends with them. The problem is I don't want to do things just to impress others - I don't see it as a good long run motivator. But most semi attractive women won't really be into a socially awkward guy who plays alot of video games. What do ?