How can I cope with celibacy?

IAAT, IANYT.....Paying for a therapist is not "exchanging money for intimacy". I suspect that somehow, at some point in your life, you've been led to believe that the persona you've described is what you are destined to be. This doesn't need to be the road you follow. You're a drowning man being offered two choices... choose the swimming lesson.....

I've basically concluded that the probability of finding a woman who is interested in me is so close to zero that realistically I should expect it never to happen. You're very young. There's no good reason you've articulated that you should "conclude" something so drastic and tragic. It's almost melodramatic. Lots of weird-looking, downright unpleasant guys find women, surely with your sensitivity and thoughtfulness you can do the same. And yet, anyone I approach has no interest in me. I'm physically very ordinary, or so I think, and I've noticed this pattern when trying to make anonymous, sight-unseen online dating work as well. I'm simply personally unappealing. Your main problem is that you not only lack confidence, you're self-deprecating in the extreme. That's why women aren't into you, dude. Nobody wants to be with someone who openly but passively dislikes themself like that. I spend a lot of time reading anything I can find about relationships, how women experience the world, and how people like me are generally perceived. You need to stop doing that. You're being way, way, WAY too navel-gazing, self-pitying, and also paradoxically insufficiently self-interested. Start spending your time reading about things that excite you and make you feel good. At this point in my life I don't believe that it's ethical for me to approach a woman in real life for basically any reason That's delusional and neurotic. You need to start learning the difference between healthy, polite boundaries and complete segregation. I'm morally opposed to exchanging money for intimacy, so prostitutes, and maybe therapy, aren't options. Since you're a virgin, you might not realize that prostitutes don't generally offer intimacy, they offer sex. Therapists don't offer intimacy either, exactly, though you may be emotionally open with them. You wouldn't know either of those things because you've never had business with either group! tl;dr: you should see a therapist to help you disassemble the edifice of doubt and restriction you've built up around yourself. You've surrounded yourself with bizarre, unnecessary personal commitments to solitude and unassertiveness that are making you miserable. Stop indulging those histrionic commitments and start getting help from a mental health professional. Do it tomorrow. Do it. You will be much, MUCH happier, I promise.

I've lurked for a long time now and finally there's a thread I can comment on. OP has described me to a T. I'm turning 30 in a few months. I've been lonely for a long time now and here some of the things I do: work 80 or more hours a week, write a technical book on the side, solve math puzzles, learn physics and play guitar. You can fill up a week with activities like this quite easily. And I also drink by myself; probably to excess. I used to go to bars before until I couldn't. Alcohol didn't help my loneliness, the empty glass just magnified it a lot. I know my lack of socializing is affecting me at work. They think I'm weird and offputting - I'm not invited to work parties or like, and, frankly it doesn't bother me anymore. I've spent nights awake fantasizing about a life that could have been; chances I should have taken and risky avenues I've left unexplored. When I'm doing all the "intellectual" stuff to keep busy, I develop a superiority complex that all these other sheeple could never do what I do or think the great thoughts I have. It's just more fantasizing, that's all. Maybe I'll outgrow it, I don't know. I'm looking for another project. I'm thinking about learning another instrument. On the plus side: I'm financially independent because of the amount of time I've spent working. I could buy whatever I want, but stuff doesn't makes me happy. Never did. There's no prize for living a hermit's life. The Buddha doesn't show up and grant you some divine understanding. The life you'll live is simply a consequence of the choices you'll make. I'm future you and I feel the same way I did when I was 10, 15 and 25. That's all I really have to say.

I’m 38, when I was 25 my situation was very, very similar to yours. My luck with women was 0, I was pretty much convinced that I was unattractive, not that great a person, and that I was doomed to be alone. I wanted intimacy desperately, and my failure to obtain it was a constant source of angst. I was depressed. Here’s how I turned myself around (a lot of this has already been said): 1. I started seeing a therapist. Self-loathing is not an attractive quality. My depression shaded all of my actions and interactions. There are usually organizations that offer therapy on a sliding scale, even free. Ask around, you’ll find one. 2. I started exercising and watching my diet. To this day I still hate doing that, but losing 30 pounds and getting in shape is good for a billion reasons. 3. I shaved my head (I started balding at 18), figured out some facial hair that worked for me, and got a funky pair of glasses. Strangely turned a blech face into one that women actually found intriguing (I still don’t truly believe it, but the empirical evidence backs it up). Point is, a decent haircut can do wonders. 4. I learned to dress better – very few guys seem to focus on this, especially among the techies, so this is a way one can really distinguish himself – it’s shocking what a sport coat and a funky pair of sneakers can do for a look. 5. I focused on the things I was interested in, and made me happy. I wrote a novel (never published, but it was the accomplishment that gave me confidence). I travelled a lot (travel gives tons of time for introspection, broadens your view of the world, makes you interesting). 6. I volunteered, which made me feel good about myself and improved my self-worth. It also let me meet some really cool people. (Look for an organization like New York Cares or something in the Hands On Network). 7. I changed how I viewed dating. A date is an opportunity to meet someone and get to know them, that’s it. This person may end up being your friend, may end up being an acquaintance, may teach you something you never knew and then disappear into the ether. If you go into dates with the idea that this will lead to love or be a failure, then 99.9% of your dates will be failures, and that’s just depressing. 8. I figured out how to interact with women on an actual, rather than theoretical level. This involved me embarrassing myself, a lot. There were probably 100, or 1000, interactions that were more awkward than they should have been, but had I not done that I wouldn’t have become much more confident and pleasant in the following 1000 interactions. The only way to get better at interacting with people is to interact with people. 9. I threw myself whole-hearted into dating. I found OK Cupid to be an excellent dating site. Yes, there’s an almost constant flow of rejection, but once you accept that rejection isn’t about you, it’s ok. (Here’s the thought experiment – has there ever been a woman who might have been interested in you, but you just weren’t attracted to for some reason? There was nothing wrong with her, she just wasn’t right for you. She wasn’t a bad person, you just weren’t that into her. So, reverse that and it doesn’t feel so bad.) Anyway, for the past decade or so I’ve led a pretty interesting life, I’ve made some amazing friends, and I’ve gotten to a place where I’m quite happy. And about 6 months ago I got engaged to the woman of my dreams. It took about 13 years to find her, but it’s not like I was sitting around like a potted plant, and the pay-off was totally worth it.

Really, the whole problem is in the first sentence: "I've basically concluded that the probability of finding a woman who is interested in me is so close to zero that realistically I should expect it never to happen." Here in England, the word we have for a mathematically incorrect probability statement such as this is "bollocks". The rest of the post is just icing on this cake, even though you do try and justify this - logically incorrect - probability. So you're not Brad Pitt in the looks department, nor do you think you have the instant crowd-pulling magnetism of Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dude, welcome to Planet Male, population Most Of Us! And most of us (plain and a bit dull males) have relationships, mess some of them up, and do better than others. If we can do it, you can do it. You've got to get out of this rut, and not let it dominate your thinking for longer. Every month you spend in this relationship no-mans land in your head is a month WASTED when you could be doing all the relationship fun things. I don't know the best solution for you, or even the best first step. But you need to get it sorted, get this ridiculous and incorrect assumption, which is stopping you from having a rumpy life, out of your system. Do not waste any more time. Try stuff others suggest here. Start trying stuff today.

You know, I just had this flash of insight about Ask Metafilter advice: it is so intensely CBT-influenced/commonsensical that it tends to neglect the individual's past in favor of a sort of one-size-fits-all advice. So for instance, it's very easy to give advice that actually sounds (to me at least) kind of belittling and cruel - when someone says "you are unwilling to accept that you are not Special, so you do this hurtful thing to yourself to make yourself feel special", that's very....well, it may be an apt diagnosis but it's a surface one. If it's true, the question then becomes what is it about your particular experience which gives you this desperate need to feel special, a need so deep that you'll torpedo your romantic life to achieve it? That's not something that everyone does! There's this - I think - violent and cruel impulse in certain therapeutic mindsets, where the common trope of "you are not the only one with these problems, they are solvable" gets turned into "you think your problems make you special and unique, but really they just make you self-aggrandizing". In therapy, as I was saying upthread, I've done a lot of talking and thinking about how I ended up as I am. Some of what I think I've figured out is pretty silly - a couple of hurtful but comparatively trivial things that happened to me when I was seven or so, for example - and much of it is fairly small potatoes compared to being beaten or sexually abused. My life isn't memoir-worthy. And yet, it's been enormously helpful to look back at those things, to bring all those memories into my contemporary consciousness. It really does rob them of much of their power, sometimes because they seem silly and sometimes because I can feel compassion for my younger self that was denied to me at the time. I really strongly urge you to think about your teen years and your childhood, try to figure out how you think of yourself now and why. I mean, in a sense no one is special. But you're the only you that you have. In a sense, no one is the hero of their own story; no one is the hero, but you're always your own narrator. There's nothing wrong with paying careful and compassionate attention to what you feel and think. On the therapy front: is it that you feel that paying for a therapist is wrong because it's like paying for a friend? Two thoughts: one, when you've been pretty lonely, the kind of concentrated and compassionate attention you get from a good therapist is part of the healing process. Unfortunately, under capitalism money has to be involved - but very few people are therapists because they want to get rich. People are therapists because they want to help others heal. It's an unusual relationship - it's not a friendship, but it is about compassion, a kind of closeness. (If you read science fiction or fantasy at all, you might want to read Le Guin's Always Coming Home, which isn't SF per se; the "bringing in" that is the main healing process in that book is very like therapy.) You might think of therapy as almost a collaborative artwork - it's work that you do with someone else. Also, therapists do things for you that friends can't and that it's not fair to ask friends to do. A therapist can listen and listen and listen, and you can ask that of them; a therapist can put pressure on bad ideas that you have while a friend may feel that doing so is unsupportive.

You sound like a person I'd get along well with, actually. Thinky. Moral. Able to put aside your immediate personal wishes because of your ethical beliefs. That's good. It makes me sad that a thinky fellow such as yourself can't seem to meet a girl. (I mean, if you're around Minneapolis by some weird chance, feel free to memail me and I can point you in some "how to meet people" directions.) Here are some thoughts: 1. You sound a bit like a good friend of mine who is now a bit older than you, has many delightful qualities and couldn't seem to date. My friend eventually met this great girl who was herself perceptive and unusual and who sort of got the whole thing rolling. I'm pretty sure my friend felt a lot like you do now prior to the relationship. Post-relationship (for it ended) my friend has been able to date other people much more easily. It can happen. 2. I find myself wondering what your upbringing was like because you sound a bit like me. One of the things I've had to work at in therapy is disentangling my ethics from my neuroses, and it's really difficult! Your question makes it sound like you have some of the same issues - how do you separate "as an empathic and smart guy, I know that approaching women is kind of fraught and being a bitter/entitled jackass is gross" from "I am afraid that no one will love me and I need a moral system that makes sense of this"? I was brought up in a very authoritarian (though loving) way which placed a lot of weight on "being good" and very little weight on "asking for what you want and need", and was brought up very much against the whole idea that you can have [harmless] things just because you want them, not because they are good or evil. Like, I feel like I have a good ethical system, mostly, but I also sometimes turn my ethics on myself, hurt myself pointlessly (with ideas!) and make myself feel bad. Or I use my belief system to rule things out when actually I am scared of them or scared of failing. 3. Fear of change is a really big unconscious thing for me, and I've found that I am often more at home being "the one who is miserable and lonely because they deserve it and besides, fate" than I am trying to change. This is unconscious and difficult to root out. Is this a possibility with you? 4. If you don't want to/can't go to therapy, try writing. Write about your childhood, what you think your identity is, how you'd like your life to be, important things that you can remember. In therapy, I ended up basically narrating my whole life in great detail with speculation about what made things the way they were, and it helped me a bunch. I often had to narrate and re-narrate, like peeling an onion, to get to some deep stuff. (Some of it stupid! Stupid things from childhood can mess you up!) 5. If you really ever get desperate enough, you can establish a moral and non-skeevy relationship with a sex worker. There are independent people out there who are smart and nice and sexually confident who will be fine with creating an intimate and recurring professional connection with you, if you're pleasant and kind and offer fair pay. How do I know this? From knowing some sex workers socially. In a way, it's like having the same hairstylist for years - it's a professional relationship and it has limits, but it's not impersonal or exploitative. 6. Based on what you write, it sounds like a part of you doesn't want to change - you've pre-emptively refused all the most direct ways to tackle your situation. Did something hurtful happen to you when you were younger and you're still in some ways frozen into that identity? What was your family like? You may not be conscious of this part of you - it's not that you're lying or being a hypocrite when you write. It's not that your beliefs about intimacy are wrong, bad or insincere; it's just...hm, they are a bit like a kaleidoscope - you might need to sort of turn them a little bit to make them work for you. 7. On a practical level, everyone I know who is awkward made friends and got dates via political or cultural activism. I would never have had a date in my life (I'd still be hung up on Anne, the most beautiful girl and weirdest girl in the world of suburban Illinois in 1991) if it weren't for zines, comics, science fiction and activism. You don't sound like you're holding out for a cheerleader heiress, so if you can hang around that type of milieu long enough, some awkward girl will meet you, like you and awkwardly invite you to coffee. I mean, I have awkwardly invited many people to coffee, and if it was awkward it was always because I had intent.

I don't believe that it's ethical for me to approach a woman in real life for basically any reason, because the likelihood that she will feel annoyed/harassed/threatened by me is so high and can't be reconciled with the very low probability that she'll respond positively, making any such action on my part selfish and harmful. This is not a healthy attitude towards interpersonal relationships. You sound like a thoughtful person, and I posit that you have the ability inside yourself to make judgement calls on whether a given instance of approaching a woman is ethical/appropriate or not. I think you would benefit from taking on activities that put you into contact with women. Popular culture not withstanding, I would guess the majority of relationships do not arise out of an "approaching a woman" scenario. Relationships or no, I think this attitude needs recalibration. You can be celibate as a doorknob and you'll still be really missing out if 50% of the population is a no-go for conversation.

There's a lot in your post that makes me sad and I think you're operating under a lot of mistaken assumptions, but to start with one- At this point in my life I don't believe that it's ethical for me to approach a woman in real life for basically any reason, because the likelihood that she will feel annoyed/harassed/threatened by me is so high ... assuming you are not crossing any lines (ie any uninvited touching, overt sexual innuendo), a woman can feel however she wants about you approaching her/hitting on her, but that's her problem, not yours.