Dear Nate:

You are 21, friendly, likeable, and you don’t have a problem with making friends with girls and getting their numbers, (“I’ve made friends with so many girls this semester and gotten so many numbers… I have plenty of friends and people really seem to like me“).

You are a single guy, and you like your space, freedom and independence as a single guy: no girlfriend to invade your space, no girlfriend to interrupt you doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, how and with whom (“I’m really always in my own space doing what I want, when I want, how I want, with who I want, and I like it like that“).

Many of the girls you meet have no purpose, or if they have a purpose, their “purpose is loving somebody“. They are girls who need a boyfriend and who will follow their boyfriend. But what you want is a girlfriend who is not a follower, but a leader; a girlfriend who has a different purpose than loving someone, and who is focused on that purpose, not on you. You.. need a girlfriend who will not need you at all (“I want… a leader. I want a girl who… absolutely doesn’t need me… and passionate about her purpose“).

Having a girlfriend who will need you, a girlfriend who will rely on you would be too much pressure for you (“I can’t handle that pressure“),  the idea of it freaks you out (“someone who relies on me too much or seems like they’ll rely on me too much doesn’t sit well with me and freaks me out“).

You remember little of your childhood, much of it spent alone with your grandmother who “needed help because well she was old“.

It seems to me that, as a child, your parents were absent a lot (perhaps working, perhaps they were not married and busy otherwise), and you spent a lot of time with your grandmother who wasn’t able to give you much attention and companionship. And so, you were on your own a lot, playing alone, entertaining yourself, doing what you wanted to do, when and how you wanted it (“I’ve always kind of been on my own devices and independent I don’t even know how to have someone else“)… as long as you behaved well, and you behaved well, so you required little attention and supervision by your older grandmother and absent parents.

You ended your 4th post with: “I have a habit of just ignoring girls who like me because of how picky I get, but if they like me early or easily, suddenly I just don’t like them back anymore… I barely can meet girls who check off my list. I just wish somebody would love and validate me, instead of it being the other way around, but then when that happens, I get defensive because I don’t trust it, or just plain uninterested in it like some sociopath.“-

– I think that as a child, being left alone a lot (if this is what happened), you got used to solitude and found comfort in it. You got habituated to solitude. Fast forward, a bit too much togetherness feels very uncomfortable, it freaks you out.

And so, solitude is your preference. But you are not anti-social, you still need people, and a girlfriend, but in limited ways, such that will not interrupt your solitude too much. This is why you want a super-independent girlfriend, one who will be passionately focused on a purpose other than love, other than you.. so that she’ll leave you alone a lot, alone in your comfortable solitude.

anita