My Chess Journey and open to suggestions

My story with chess really began about a dozen years ago. My friend in college was a Math major and he was also really into chess. After college he motivated me to get my own chess board and start practicing. I went to visit him one time and we sat and played a few games and he was always amused at my strategy, which at the time was not much of a strategy at all, but it was always friendly competition. He didn't put me down for being a beginner, we still enjoyed the games. And afterwards I took his advice and bought a chessboard. And then a couple years after that I came across an old chess book in a coffee shop titled "The World is a Chessboard" - I think this is actually a rare book as I have not had any luck finding it again. It was written in the 50s and it approached chess as an inspirational game with a rich history.

But I realized over the years I didn't have many people to play chess with, so the chess board became more of an improvised table. It's one of those somewhat heavy wooden chessboards and to this day I still use it as a table. About 3 years ago I joined this chess community and had a few games but I kind of forgot about it after a while. To me chess sometimes felt static. My skills weren't improving and I guess a boredom set in and I moved on. And then a few days ago I was watching a comedy thing about the Spassky tournament. After that I watched a chess documentary and I felt motivated to play chess again. I remembered I still had my membership here so I came back. But as soon as I came back I had quite negative experience with players who want to win as quickly as possible, one told me to resign even though the game had barely started. Maybe some people get into chess to take out their anger on other people, but I think that goes against the spirit of the game. 

I think I am still learning chess, I'd like to improve my openings. I am not interested so much in the competitive aspect, by that I mean I am not focused on crushing the other person just to make them feel crushed. I still don't quite understand yet how to check mate, so my end game I suppose still needs a lot of work. I thought maybe I should study some openings, although I haven't yet been able to implement openings very well because as I am working on my opening the other player has already beaten me. 

My last thoughts here are that chess is many things, but I think it should always be a friendly game and there should always be respect between the players otherwise it ruins the experience. I'd like to preserve what got me into chess from the beginning, the inspiration and motivation that made it worth learning. 

Of course this is not just a story about chess but I am also open to suggestions.