First, the cliche to "just be yourself" means that you are talking to someone who doesn't have a clue how to help you but doesn't want to admit that he or she has no good advice to give. I spent years "being myself," and the only conclusion that I could draw was that women didn't like me for myself.
To some extent, that conclusion wasn't true. As I've said many times, I'm not good in most small group situations. I don't come across well in the typical party situation or after church situation where groups of four to eight people are standing around and talking. When I'm "being myself" in those situations, I'm allowing women to see the weakest part of who I am.
My strength is in one on one conversation, and the person that people see in those conversations is much better than the person that they see in the group settings. In reality, the person is the same, but the qualities that make me strong in individual conversations make me weak in groups. If I were ever going to have success with women, I should have been asking them to get together with me for one on one conversations. These conversations would have led to friendships which in some cases would have led to dates, but I doubt that I would have had much success going directly to the date scenario. Unfortunately, when I was your age, the church really seemed to discourage this kind of direct pursuit of relationships. Instead, we were supposed to get to know each other in group settings first. That strategy assured that I would always fail.
My advice would be to try to decide where your area of strength is and then try to meet women in that situation. If you are better in groups, you should meet women in groups. If you are better alone, you should try to meet them alone. In college, I knew a guy who didn't play basketball with the fellowship group very often. His reason was that he wasn't good at basketball and didn't like doing something where he couldn't be good. I remember thinking that it was somewhat cowardly to avoid any situation where he couldn't be a star. However, the fact is that by avoiding situations where he didn't look good, he made himself very popular with the women in the fellowship. He ended up marrying the woman whom he liked. If I'd been able to do as he did, I'd be a much happier man today.
I don't know that I've helped you at all, but those are my first thoughts.
Bill
I'm not either. In groups of...well more than two, I am off in the background and I become taciturn right off the bat. Some of this is from my experiences in high school and middle school where I had few friends, if any at all, and any wrong move would have humiliated me.