31M, single. I'm American, and have lived in the Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia for most of my life. I am fit, have a career, my own place, am conventionally attractive, but have struggled with dating my entire life. I have only had one romantic relationship in my entire life in my late twenties (about 1.5 years) that was not healthy, and ended very poorly. My ex-gf in question was not even from Virginia. She was a west-coaster who had been living in Germany for sometime, and we only met in Virginia by complete chance due to her visiting some family here.
I love Virginia, and it feels like home. I have a lot of family here, and many friends that I have close, amazing relationships with. But dating has never worked out for me. I personally feel that it's because I don't "fit" the dating scene here. Many women here in the American south are looking for more stereotypically masculine, traditional men. Though I am straight and very comfortable in my gender identity, I am a very feminine guy. I am slender, not muscular, have long hair, and often dress androgynously. Sexually, I'm a bottom, and am attracted to more forward, dominant women. I have been involved in the kink/BDSM scene for many years, and though I'm very reasonable about it and it's not my whole identity, I wouldn't be happy with someone totally vanilla.
I have multiple, platonic female friends who also feel that I am at a major disadvantage in this area, and are often inviting me on trips to places such NYC, Minneapolis, or Portland—Basically, places that have a more heavy "alt" community that is far less vanilla. I was recently in Minneapolis for a week, and noticed pretty much right away that just going to bars, I was meeting and making conversations with the type of women I'm attracted to right off the jump. Here where I live, I go to bars and events every weekend, and I'm lucky if I have a good conversation with a woman once every 3 months, and even if I do it never goes anywhere anyway.
As I'm entering my 30s, I've become very lonely, and am tired of being single. I want to date and find companionship, but it's increasingly feeling more and more like in order to do that, I need to go somewhere where there are more people similar to myself. But in order to do THAT, I need to forfeit proximity to my family, who all live local, and all my closest friends. I'm not naive. I know what distance does to friendships, and have experienced it when friends have moved away in the past. Distance nukes friendships, or at the very least, severely dilutes them, and I hate it. Moving away would be a huge sacrifice in terms of the social circle I've built up for myself.
Worse yet, I feel that if I were to move somewhere else in order to date, and did not have success (1-2 years, still single, still zero prospects), I would feel like I basically self-destructed my entire life and social circle for no reason, and would feel even more alone than I did before.
Has anyone else ever struggled with this sort of thing that would like to offer thoughts/advice?