Self confidence really is key. Unhappy people make bad choices (see my first marriage-- as a first relationship it would have been okay for a couple years, but I never should have married him). Also, healthy people want no part of that when they meet someone who is holding a grudge against the world or some significant subset of it (like, say, women or American women). Everyone has baggage, but the ones who are working to unpack it are the ones worth knowing.
Also, you're probably tired of hearing it by now, but 23 really is too young to talk about doomed, except as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Life is seriously weird, man. My husband was about 35 when we met, and hadn't had very many relationships at all; his first one was in the last year or so of university and it didn't last much past graduation. Anyway, while he was in university near Toronto, I was living in DC. When we met, he was still near Toronto, and I was in New Mexico finally working towards my degree. So, how the bleep did we meet? I had a friend in DC who was Canadian, and she had to move back home when health issues coincided with losing her job and car trouble. After moving back to Canada, she met my husband and they became friends. Then, a couple years later, they both decided to visit her friends in DC with the Daily Show rally as an excuse. I did likewise, he friended me on Facebook after, and then we started talking politics. The rest, as they say, is history. Ultimately, it happened because he saw a chance to do something cool with a friend and took it, then followed up with me after the event. I was only able to attend because I was honest and reported my final check to the unemployment office when it finally came, and they withheld 8 weeks' of checks until bureaucracy agreed that it wasn't from a new job and gave me all that money at once, just in time to pay for a plane ticket home.
Tl;dr: Weird things happen and you never know when or where you'll meet someone, as long as you keep getting out there.
Post edited January 31, 2014 by dcgelfling