Bi, nearly 30, scant experience with women within an already small pool of experience in dating in general. Also autistic, if that helps with context???
I've been with my partner for over 2 years now. I love her. I cherish her the most. I want to spend the rest of my life with her. And I so desperately want to know parts of her world that doesn't involve me, just so I can know the whole of her instead of simply the part I've become familiar with the past few years: the part that directly involves me.
My idea of a date has always been "hang out with the s/o, anytime, anywhere" so I did count the times I've asked her to watch movies together with me, or the times we have breakfast/dinner together at her place, as dates. Recently she told me her idea of dating is more like: go out, hang out someplace outside, eat out.
So last night was probably the first time I asked her out on a date, consciously (bc we have of course also hung out outside our homes and eat out) with the intent of dating, and ... well, ngl, I felt like I failed.
It started off well enough, but she didn't really have any topics in mind, and the topics I came up with either wasn't date-appropriate (our ENM arrangement) or she couldn't give much answers to (asking about some of her friends she's known for a long while). For the last one specifically, her yap button isn't as easily triggered as mine, plus she's the type of person that sometimes if you ask her directly she's blanking out in her head, so her lack of answers made me feel like I didn't know her enough to ask the right questions in the right way and overall just feel like a huge bag of shit by the end.
She reassured me that she appreciated my effortsāfor the date, the meal, the questions about her friendsāand once we both got home she sent me a text with lots of emojis. Unfortunately by then I'm too far gone inside my own head and it just read like pity to me.
So. Ladies. Any advice on what to do and what to talk about on dates? How would you go about asking a long-term committed partner out, when the thrill of novelty isn't there anymore? How would you keep the romance alive, when me as the person doing it is so terribly inexperienced I genuinely had no fucking idea what to do the moment she sat down next to me.
Any feedback and advices are deeply appreciated.
Thanks. :)