You might also quite reasonably be confident in your professional and personal-friend lives, but be lacking some of that confidence in dating, since you haven't done it for years. These aren't transferable domains for a lot of people.

I was on dating sites and apps for several years before I started having any luck finding much, much less something serious, and every moment of it was valuable practice in an area that didn't come naturally to me at all. My career situation also improved throughout those years, sometimes faster than my dating skills, and I quickly learned that having a nicer car did me 0 favors while I was still uncomfortable on a date in the first place. None of that professional practice applied - was I going to talk about load balancers and HA strategies on the date?