It’s not that I can’t. The problem is that when I’m with someone, I deeply yearn to be alone. I’d love to have my life for myself, with no responsibility with no one else - just me.
But then, when I’m alone, I feel like a failure, like I need a relationship to feel complete, and I fucking hate that. So I end up in another relationship, and after two years I can’t stand it anymore, and the cycle repeats.
What the hell. Has anyone suffered from something like that? How can you be alone and not feel lonely? How to kill this need to be with someone?
EDIT: Thanks for all the answers, I’m taking every single one into consideration. Please, keep them coming.
Gotta find someone with whom you can be alone with.
Meaning you can be alone with this person. And that you can be alone with yourself in their presence as well. Someone who can respect your alone time, basically.
Otherwise, when single, you gotta learn to take care of yourself as if yourself was someone else. That’s how I coped when I was single. Treating myself all the time to little gifts, taking care of myself, even going out with myself by myself like a date night.
“6:30, dinner with myself. I can’t cancel that again!” -The Grinch
How can you be alone and not feel lonely?
This seems like the key question. Relationships or not might not actually matter here.
What does it mean to you to feel lonely? What kind of lonely is that?
To me, it’s a mix of feeling like a failure and feeling that nothing quite matters. I mean, I do get to do things I enjoy, and I enjoy it a lot, but I never feel satisfied - I just feel empty. It’s kinda like having a feeling of obligation to be with someone, and that’s there’s something wrong with me for being alone. Like a nagging voice in the back of my head saying “this is not ok”. I don’t know if this makes sense.
Have you tried dating yourself? Straight up… when you’re in a relationship and you do all these things for other people and your emotionally available and youre whatever blah blah blah… when you’re single do you do those things for yourself? You take yourself out? Do you buy yourself nice things? Do you treat yourself well? Are you interested in things and pursue things as a hobby? Like is there anything you do for yourself?
I try… I do play guitar and I like to draw, and ride my motorcycle, but then… I don’t know, I feel empty. I look at these things and enjoy doing them a lot, but when I stop I start asking, what’s the point? Nobody will see this or hear this or whatever. Why even bother? When I’m alone and go to a show or watch a movie I always enjoy the moment but get that dread after the deed, the “you’re doing this alone and this is wrong” feeling.
Okay well that’s the part that should change… when you play guitar… you play guitar good! Do you ever let yourself know that you love the way you play guitar? You like to draw… do you ever tell yourself that you love your drawings? Do you ever draw for yourself? Do you ever tell yourself that you’re going to draw something for you? When you ride your motorcycle do you think about yourself? Or do you just wish that you had somebody on the back of your motorcycle? Do you ever look at what you’re driving past? Nobody will see this or hear this… except you… why do you bother? Because you love you… what about you? When you’re alone and you go to a show or watch a movie… do you ever thank yourself for taking yourself out to a movie? You should love yourself… I feel like you’re screaming for yourself to love you and you don’t hear yourself
It sounds to me that you need to learn to love yourself first, so you feel comfortable being single until you find the right person.
They say you have to be able to love yourself before you can love someone else
This is definitely an issue, I do have low self-esteem and getting older is not helping my case. Everything physical is getting harder to do and taking a toll both physical and mentally, which is a tough pill to swallow because I was always very active. Getting old sucks.
Getting old is amazing!!! Hurting sucks…
I’m a person who needs a lot of alone time. It took me a while to learn how to set boundaries with partners. That balance wasn’t easy for me to find. Do you feel like it would benefit you if you got more alone time in your existing relationships?
I think so, yes, but then my girlfriend likes to be around and is really upset when I ask to be alone. She’s not wrong thought, because if left by myself I can disappear for a long time…
What does upset mean? Its a bit different if she’s concerned for you vs if she can’t be alone. My wife was concerned for me when I was playing Minecraft until 4am every night during a stressful time in my life. She can’t be alone when she’s in my office during the middle of the workday telling me ten different YouTuber’s life stories. :D
I hope you find the balance that you’re looking for. If your girlfriend feels more social than you, its not necessarily bad to have her call her friends or something. I regularly tell my wife to “call Susan” or something like that when she wants to talk about something that I don’t have any bandwidth for or interest in. As long as you make an effort to connect when you can and don’t neglect her, I think it’s a fair ask.
This is something I have to take into consideration, thank you very much for your reply.
Look into “avoidant attachment styles”. (And, really, attachment styles in general.)
Perhaps even look into avoidant personality disorder and/or schizoid personality disorder. (I’m not diagnosing you or anything, but what you’re talking about is something I’ve heard frequently in relation to schizoid personality disorder. I’m not quite as familiar with avoidant personality disorder, but it’s sometimes described as “a lesser kind of schizoid personality disorder.” Also, don’t confuse “schizoid” and “schizophrenia.” They’re very different things.)
This isn’t the answer you asked for, but perhaps a relationship with someone who likes their personal space as much as you do would work out. It might not be the most “traditional” sort of relationship you could find, but it might work out well.
But more to your question, the best answer that I can come up with is therapy.
I read about those you pointed out and the avoidant attachment style ticks some boxes… It’s definitely something I’ll bring up on the next session, thanks!
That’s really interesting, I’ll look into it. I’m doing therapy for a year now and decided to ask here to see if you people could give me insights to talk to my therapist. I’ll take these to her too, thank you very much.
Sounds like you could benefit from therapy
You’re right, I’m doing therapy for a year now but things works really slow. I’m talking a lot about this with my therapist, and thought that asking here could bring me some insights to discuss with her. Thank you for your reply, I really appreciate it.
Relationships are about giving. It’s a cliche, but the more you put into a relationship, the more you’re going to get out of it. And I don’t mean this in the transactional sense. I don’t mean you do something nice for your partner then they do something nice for you in return. It’s more like: the more you value the person, the more you will feel fulfilled when you do loving things for them. It’s easier to understand when you’re doing it. This didn’t mean you sacrifice all of your own wants and needs for the other person. However, a “me first” mindset is looking at a loving relationship backwards. You should want to make the other person happy, they should be a big priority in your life. A person is not a product that we buy and then hope we like owning it.
I learned these things the hard way. 35 years later and I still have deep regrets.
I have trouble giving, specially after surviving a long abusive marriage. I divorced years ago but I guess some scars still remains.
Sounds like you do want to be with someone; you just have a habit of getting with people who aren’t a good match for you.
I’ve had partners that made me feel like how you describe being with someone. My current partner does not make me feel like that.
It sounds like you are a sociable introvert who other-thinks things. I know because I am one.
I’ve thought about it quite a bit (obviously) and I think the issue arises from the tension between enjoying company but also needing your own space to unwind. That’s all compounded by the over-thinking as you chew over what people might think or what is expected of you.
For the last few years I’ve been free of responsibilities and realised that if I wasn’t entertaining myself, no-one else would. For example, I’d avoided going to the cinema on my own (I thought people would judge me for not having company) but all that meant was I wasn’t getting to see the films I wanted to watch.
The solution is a form of mindfulness (or running out of fucks to give - however you want to pitch it to yourself to make it work). You worry less about what people think, because, largely, they don’t care (the exception might be going to animated children’s films on your own - you definitely get some odd looks then). I now have a few WhatsApp groups were I let friends know what I am doing and if they want to tag along that’s great. This has the bonus of events getting bogged down in negotiations and actually seems to result in note group events - for my birthday I just booked a bunch of tickets to a stand-up comedy tour and let everyone know. I had takers for them all within a day.
Relationships are trickier but if you can find someone who also likes company and their own space that would be ideal. It is a tricky balance to strike.
That’s your unconscious-mind playing games with your life, same as mine does with mine.
It’s essentially a variant of “addiction”, aka Kahneman1 mind ( imprint-reaction mind ) trying to make your life obey its imprint-reaction programming.
Read both Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow”, in order to understand the pseudo-reasoning that Kahneman1 mind ( he calls it System-1, but that presumes his work’s context, which normal-discussions don’t presume ), and how its mission is undermining correct-reasoning ( Kahneman2 mind ).
AND read Kegan & Lahey’s “Immunity to Change”, about our unconscious-mind’s mechanism that fights off growing-up, & how to intelligently counter its sabotaging of our lives.
It’s essentially a kind of “demagnitization” that you need to do, of your unconscious, but if you don’t systematically use real leverage, you’re not going to win.
Every time I see an image of a cute, intelligent, driven, wonderfully diffierent-from-me woman, I’m wanting to be wrapping our lives together, but…
… relationship depends on having common core-identity.
Some people have such alien/different core-identity, due to life-experience, that that potential got broken.
You can’t make an intact window out of random shards of broken glass, right?
They’re separate, and they don’t become unitary, the way molten glass does, just because you put them adjacent to each-other, right?
Some people have been too changed by experience, to be able to value what normal-identity values.
My life-mission is to remove my Soul/Continuum/CellOfGod/ChildOfAllgod/ParticleOfBrahmanFieldOfOriginalAwareness from Universe-containment/entrapment, so that no more of this reincarnation abuse/bullshit contains future-lives that it has.
Aversion-therapy was successful, in other words…
How could any woman want what I want?
That’s nonsensical.
You can’t have the savage intensity of aversion to “remaining in world, living in relationships, gently earning human meaning” that I have, & somehow be “in” relationship with woman who is wired into needing that kind of meaning…
Not only is it idiocy, it’s abuse ( it would be abuse for me to be in-relationship with anyone, given my ripping-Soul-from-endless-stream-of-Universes NEED in me, that my core is ).
So, while your reason is different from mine, we’re both fighting-against the “magnetization” of our unconscious-minds & our Kahneman1 programmed imprint-reaction/instinct minds.
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understanding { the books, one’s own unconscious, experience-induced-understanding of studying one’s unconscious, as it sabotages one’s life, in order to protect its dominion over our Eternity, through hobbling our strategy/intent }
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finding the deliberate & strategic means of communicating with our unconscious, using techniques given in those books
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keep earning the demagnitizing of our unconscious-minds, our Kahneman1 minds, until each of us wins ( any addiction, it’s the same rules, whether addiction-to-relationship, or addiction-to-dysfunction, or addiction-to-chemical, or addiction-to-class-status, or addiction-to-money, ANY addiction is using these mechanisms, so the method for dismantling them is, strategically, the same )
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endure the life-scale process ( no point in pretending that one’s unconscious-mind can be force-rewired in mere-months: it took decades for our unconscious to form, and it absorbed many-decades of culturally-accumulated inertia in the early years, it’s going to be a slog, and only enduring-persisting can work, and the life-accomplishing can be worth it, whatever it is that one is working on earning ).
and that’s it.
No “magic bullet”, no “magic pill”, just competenly-demagnitizing one’s unconscious-ignorance from one’s life, and making one’s life hold to a non-default “river” path.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll rather be in a relationship yearning more more me-time and solitude than be a single feeling alone and lonely. Both come with its pros and cons but to me the the scale tips towards a relationship though in my case the relationship I’m in is quite low maintenance so it’s easy to manage.
You might want to see a therapist, this sounds too complicated to ask a message board.
Make a list of all the things about relationships that annoy you. Put the list somewhere you can find it. Whenever you feel alone read the list.
If this doesn’t work you actually value relationships enough if its probably worth pursuing one.
Can you explain a bit more about why you feel it is easier to learn how to enjoy being alone than learn to enjoy being in a relationship?
I defintely struggled with giving up my independence, and still find it hard to be responsible for/to another person. But I finally ended up in a relationship with someone who was also independent and we were in a very casual relationship for five years before we started to admit that we were a couple and another few years before we realised how much we now loved each other. I guess all I’m saying is relationships don’t need to be one way. I have a friend who only dates people who live in other cities / countries, because that way they only see each other occasionally and at pre-arranged times, and that works for them.
But if you really feel you are happier on your own and it’s just internalised social pressure that makes you want a relationship then you could try developing “singleton pride”. Part of the reason gay people historically got into “gay pride” was to help the overcome their own internalised homophobia, because even if you don’t agree with something you still absorb it in your upbringing and it can be hard to get past it.
So, you could try directly telling people that you’re single for life and that your happy with that choice. If you’re worried that society will think you’re a failure for not having a relationship then confront that fear immediately and get it out the way. You’ll realise that most people don’t care, some people will actually be on your side, and the people who do actually think worse of you are wrong so you don’t need to care about their opinions. But if you’re not confident enough in your decision to proudly stand behind it, then of course doubts will sink in and you’ll repeat the loop again.
