Thoughts on being single? Why a relationship?

[Uncover]

Hi, 

I'm a 24 years old young guy. I recently, ~3 weeks ago, me and my girlfriend broke up. I didn't have a girlfriend before her and I was craving one for so long. We've been together ~10 months. Now I find myself browsing facebook, instagram and tinder profiles like crazy hoping I would find another. The thing is that no girl wants me. This adds to my persistence. Now a thought crossed my mind. Like, what am I doing? Is it really necessary to be with someone? Why I'm trying so hard to have someone in my life? No, I don't necessary need a girlfriend for sex. I'm not good at it, the girlfriend I had was only disappointed with me because of this. I'm good with jerking off from time to time and that's all. So what else for would I crave a girl so much? Love? What is that? Usually the feeling of being in love fades away in time. And I can't really love truly. I have so many preconceptions and even hate towards some people, so how can I be capable of real love?
To be with someone to only satisfy some needs? I don't like that. So what reason can I have to seek a relationship? I'm not even decided whether or not to marry, even though all my relatives ask me about this. I think I don't want to. My parents keep on repeating me to marry or otherwise I'll end up alone at the old age. Should I be scared of it and marry? I can't grasp the deep meaning of a relationship. Why seek another? How do you see it? Plus of that, the relationships are full of problems, like a lot! I'm good alone. 

Thanks,

Uncover

[Spiral]

Been single for three weeks?

I advice you stay away from girls for a while. Focus on yourself instead. Even if you find one now it’ll probably not work out. Besides people tend to not be let’s call it “their most attractive self” after having recently broken up.

Edited August 26, 2019 by Spiral

[RawJudah]

Being single is not a problem at all, but you will get lots of people tell you otherwise. Ignore it...

Being in a relationship takes a huge amount of self development. 

So develop yourself first before getting into a relationship again.

Also, you are still young, in your 20s you most likely are emotionally immature, so just focus on yourself and make yourself a valuable human being.

[NoSelfSelf]

I think wanting girl has many reasons..most common to want a girl is that you escape from every day stress hoping to feel good and cool off or boost your self esteem etc..

[Ibn Sina]

Focus on your goals, strive to become a high value person, earn good money. Then the more you get older, the more attractive you become. That solves the 'I am not attractive' problem. For men, attraction and hard work are related.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with being single. If you are happy being single it's okay no matter what other people tell you or may judge you for not having a girl. If you are unhappy, only then you should not be single. 

' Girls don't want me'
Unless you are extremely good looking, super rich or something , if you are just an average joe, then sitting on your couch doesn't make girls fall for you (only if you were a girl then there would be a higher chance of this happening). For the average guy, it takes work. Ask them out. Improve yourself. Become a funny entertaining guy that makes girls feel good. That's how you become attractive.  'Girls don't want me' is just succumbing to defeat, instead of taking it as a challenge.

[LastThursday]

On 25/08/2019 at 7:49 PM, Uncover said:

Is it really necessary to be with someone? Why I'm trying so hard to have someone in my life?

Three things to be aware of:

1. Societal programming. There is immense pressure from society not to be single, and you have been brainwashed into always seeking to be with someone.

2. Sexual attraction. Basically biology. You have been programmed by evolution for billions of years to reproduce, so that your genes survive in perpetuity.

3. Being god incarnate, you can choose to ignore 1 and 2 and focus on more productive things - like realising your true nature.

[Sunder]

On 8/26/2019 at 4:49 AM, Uncover said:

Like, what am I doing? Is it really necessary to be with someone? Why I'm trying so hard to have someone in my life?

So what reason can I have to seek a relationship? I'm not even decided whether or not to marry, even though all my relatives ask me about this. I think I don't want to.

This may be a contentious thing to post, as my view appears to be similar, but in some ways counter to many of the things I see posted here.

At 24, I think there's at least two things overlapping, with confounding factors. One is hormones. The obvious and easy answer, but not complete. But I also think there is a deeper need based on Maslow's heirarchy of needs.

Being taught about this in my 20s really changed my life. I did a course in mentoring and counselling troubled youth with a charity, and this was taught then. If you're not familiar with it, it's a theory that first you need to meet your needs in a heirarchy, before being able to seek your next level needs. The heirarchy is: Physiological, safety, love/acceptance, esteem, self-actualisation.

I've learned in my life, that the level on your heirarchy isn't one way. It goes back and forth. At 21, my esteem needs were met by being a good junior employee, by 23, that wasn't enough, I wanted to self actualise, and my esteem wouldn't be met unless I was recognised as a senior employee. Likewise at 21, I was happy to casually date, or not date. My acceptance needs were met with a mix of male and female platonic friends. By 25, as friends were getting married, I started to wonder what was wrong with me. Both my esteem and my sense of acceptance had taken a hit.

Of course, starting to feel unloved, I questioned my esteem. Do women not love me, because I have nothing of worth? I tried a lot of things that I thought women wanted - Being the funny man, being the tough guy, being the rich man. At the time, all of these were personas, they were fake, but all of them taught me skills that the real me uses when appropriate (like using humor at work to get teams working together), so I don't regret it. But I was trying to build my esteem, before I had a solid base of love and acceptance for who I already was. It didn't work.

And here's the thing I think is contentious. I think many modern relationships are a fake fulfillment of the love/acceptance level. If I can take the analogy, trying to build esteem with the way modern dating works, is like trying to find belonging and love when you are still living in a halfway house. Sure, the need for safety is met for tonight. But tomorrow? You haven't fully met your need for safety.

This is the Tinder generation. My dad was my mum's first boyfriend, though my mum, was my dad's second. I dated about 5 women before I got married. (I'm 41) My younger co-workers? I ask them how the girlfriend is - Half of them have a different one each time I ask. Relationships rarely last more than 3 months, so you've done well to do 10. At my parents generation, sex before marriage was taboo. In mine, teen girl magazines were advising to get to know him at least 3 months. Now, the advice column is that if it hasn't happened by the 3rd date, move on. I believe this puts unrealistic pressure, and a false sense of love into relationships.

So - my sense is that with modern relationships, it's difficult to build a true fulfillment of love and acceptance. At the extreme end, for dating apps, your "esteem" is repeatedly judged on nothing more than a photo and a few words. It's a lose/lose situation. Swiping left and not matching is a rejection. Swiping right isn't love or acceptance. At best, it's "I'd like to give this guy a go". But the flip side is the dating pool appears to be unlimited. You used to meet friends from school, from work, from church, or from clubs and pubs - all of them are fairly limited groups of people.

In those situations, you get to know a person more before asking them out, or rejecting them. and even if you end up "rejecting" someone, it's not necessarily a loss of acceptance. We're in an age now when "Friendzoned" is an insult, but in my dating era, there were girls that were just friends you never thought of asking out, and there were girls you were keen on. You could totally feel befriended, accepted - yes, even loved non-romantically by women, even if nobody dated you. It was reinforcement that you were a decent man, you could be accepted, and you just hadn't found the right one.

This is my opinion only, but I feel sorry for anyone who is not superficially attractive (Looks, money, power, charismatic), in today's dating scene, because it's fundamentally broken, but it's telling everyone who is not in the top 10% by however you judge, that it's YOU that's broken, and that's very sad to me. This is why I meet so many people - especially men - who say they don't want to get married, or aren't sure. Not even sure how it benefits them, or what they could offer a life partner, yet their behaviour is misaligned with their words. They have real needs - both physical, and emotional, that they deep down, want fulfilled, but physical needs are met with porn, and they don't realise they're drinking salt water, expecting it to quench their thirst, but finding it only makes them thirstier, and eventually say "No thanks, I don't want any more water, I'm not actually even sure I get thirsty any more". It's the game that's broken, not the players, but the game makes the players think they're the ones that's broken.

My advice to you OP - Get your love and acceptance needs met elsewhere first. Male first, if you don't already have 3 or more good mates that you know have your back, then female platonic, when you are ready. Choose female friends whom you enjoy their company, but don't find them physically attractive, and make it clear you're not pursuing them romantically. Get to know personalities you like and don't like, get to know how your personality attracts, or grates against women, find out what you're willing to change, and what you're not. Then, when you feel confident that you have a solid group of friends meeting your love and acceptance needs, start dating again.

[possibilities]

Relationships are so, so important, but no relationship is better than a bad one. 

In order to develop an effective feedback loop with the contents of consciousness a person needs to have a partner to relay ideas with as authentically and reciprocally as possible. This improves learning, love, understanding and overall growth all simultaneously without which, someone is left to their own devices, of which, usually goes wrong when you don't have the right information. 

In an ideal situation, two consciousnesses coming together could actually strategically improve one another's intelligence overtime in the way that they interact with one another, this is analogous to two scientists having a conversation but I'd argue that it is extremely far off from reflecting this idea at its potential but is nonetheless still a useful example, this is because information is processed and transformed continuously thus there is a continual upgrade of syntax. This is essentially the origins of all languages, in so saying as much, perhaps in the beginnings of language formation or just the ideational growth of anything that required a collective effort there was an intelligence and relationship explosion through those periods. 

Intelligence and socialisation have often gone hand in hand in our development as a species because we needed the insight of one another in order to grow and develop our perspectives of things further and further, the absence of which whether due to not being around the right people or due to a lack of social stimulation altogether increased the likelihood that there would be a de-stimulation of intelligence and overall external technological growth, the latter instead being replaced by external to internal dogma in the context of centralised as opposed to de-centralised intelligence.

I wish you all the best and farewell this will be my last comment on this site  . 

Much pleasure it has been learning from everyone.

[Tim Stretton]

I simply cannot add any further to the brilliant comment by Sunder (many thanks for that, Sunder!).  I think that he is right.  I think that we go into too much detail and perfection into relationships when the ‘life is too short’ element is quite sufficient in life.

I do feel for you as I have been there myself.  I could have rejected my ex-girlfriend for similar reasons, but as I am a gentleman/good man, I didn’t.  I loved her regardless of her capabilities in the bedroom.

I would say that if you get rejections from women for those reasons, they say, very respectfully to those same women, they are not worth pursuing, as they could quite easily ‘pull the plug’ on your relationship at any moment!  You deserve better, in the nicest possible way of course.  Take your sweet time and build on what you have and someone will actually love you regardless of what you have or not, and not just what (they want?) you (to) bring to the table.

Happy days!   

Edited August 30, 2019 by Tim Stretton