I’ll begin with a brief self-assessment and then ask for your thoughts.

My goal is to create meaningful relationships, to find companions, fellows, friends.

I have been searching for this for some time and am trying to come to terms with my failure. I am 53, lost my Dad almost twenty years ago and my Mom seven years ago. Work took me away from family. I lost my wife almost four years ago.

I was searching for deeper friendships before my wife died. Her death enhanced my desire for more meaningful connections.

I made friends at work and we meet periodically. I made friends at my place of worship where i help out.

I tried dating, and the relationships that started fizzled.

I am grateful for the work friends, whom I see about once a month or two months. We usually discuss a book, which is kind of like work (I’m a teacher by day).

The relationships I formed in dating did not last. I started to wonder if I was dating just for the sake of dating, so I stopped for over a year now. I feel less stressed, but miss opposite-sex companionship.

I honestly did not enjoy dating app culture and do not want to return to it.

Daily life is usually okay and sometimes excruciatingly hard. I am raising a teenager on my own. It’s fine most of the time. It’s unbearable when things go wrong. I know context would help, but I am protective and don’t feel like saying more now.

I am trying to get to the bottom of my difficulty in forming deep friendships. And to get to the point, this is about truly loving another and others, and to truly be loved by them. Not just romantic love, but depth – someone you yearn to communicate with in some way, every day. Yearning, desire, not only sexual, maybe not sexual at all, maybe very personal. It is a huge deficit in my life. I feel respected, definitely – but am frustrated at repeated failures in sustaining true loving relationships.

(If you’re really supposed to get 8 hugs a day, I get 1 a week – maybe. That was not easy to share, though I figure I’m not alone).

I have to own my decisions to end the handful of romantic attempts of the last few years. I could have continued trying. And sometimes I was the one rejected and/or ghosted.

What has gone wrong? My assessment.

– Maybe I’m unpleasant or narcissistic or both and don’t know it.
– Maybe my willingness to express my emotions about grief and loss are hard for others.
– maybe people are busy with their lives and mean well and it has nothing to do with me
– Maybe love is rare and scarce and I was fortunate to have it when I did, for as long as I did
– Maybe I need to learn how to accept that this is as good as it is going to get and I should pour out thanksgiving if it happens to change at some point.

I have read that loneliness is a scary epidemic in the world, especially in my native country. So maybe this is less about me and more about society, our rules and taboos, the way we construct idealized people in our minds, sometimes with the assistance of digital media.

One should learn from failure, so I keep trying, and am willing to try new things, inasmuch as my schedule permits it (and everyone is busy). At some point, when is the effort no longer worth it? I’m going to continue trying, but I am discouraged.

I welcome your thoughts.

Omyk