Thanks for taking the time to read and reply Mark.

It most definitely has to do with the fact that my mother would beat me until her arms were sore as  a child. I was brought up by a single mother and her girlfriends and only saw how the scorned and made fun of any man that would approach them. The few times I tried I was either rejected for being “too nice” or flat out laughed at. Thus I never approach a woman. In that sense I dont “choose” this women. I only accept or shy away from women who clearly show interest in me.

I have been in therapy for a couple of years and with it I have been able to calm my anxiety and constant rumination. However even though now I know it is my gender’s role to initiate the courting process, I refuse to do it because I think if women want true equality, they should also risk rejection on approach instead of passively siting and expecting the men to come to them.

I am aware that I have a LOT of limiting bliefs. And there must me some others I am not even aware of. So like I stated above, I have made my peace with giving up the expectation of ever finding “love” so to speak. What concerns me now is coping with the longing in a healthy way.

thanks again for your time.

Hi Anita,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Indeed my experiences may be random, but since about 70% of the women I have been with end up lying or cheating on me, I surmised it’s either something with me or I just have very bad luck. Regardless, yes, I have chosen to give up on having a relationship with a woman. I still have friends, both men and women and plan to continue hanging out with them. So solitary is not a term I would use.

The longing will always be there, I have  found. It is just like thoughts, we cannot eradicate them, we can only learn to not be controlled by them. By coping with it in a healthy way, I mean a way in which the longing and anxiety does not lead me to alcohol or cigarettes or dope as it has before. I know it is possible since monks and nuns have done this for millennia, I just don’t want to have to go into a monastery to deal with the pain of not having someone to love and be loved.

Hi Anita,

I would like to ask why did you remove the part in your response where apparently you seem to think you know my feelings better than I do, by stating “you made this choice under the distress in which you still live, so I don’t trust it, personally, to last beyond the distressing life circumstance you are living in.”

My knee is as healed as it is going to be. So that is not a source of distress. I did feel angry at first, but with me, for being naive and stupid enough to believe a woman yet again.

As to my ex, long story short, I should have know from the beggining she was not to be trusted. We started out when she was my college proffesor and she hired me to be her assitant. In day when I had just broke up with a girlfirend at the time she kissed me and we started an affair (she was married at the time). The affair lasted untill I stopped it because I fell in love with whom would become my wife for 7 years. Through that time we were only friends, and would occasionally catch up by phone. During that time as well, her husband found out of her multuple affairs and divorced her. A couple of years later my ex-wife and I decided to part ways because she wanted to settle and have kids, and I still wanted to travel and did not want kids.

After that my ex professor and I started to go out again utnill we decided to settle in a open relationship. She had thrown the idea around a couple of times, and I knew she was not a woman of one man, so better be upfront about what we are doing than lying and cheating around. Or so I though. Turns out it seems at some point she felt ashamed of all the other men she was seeing in comparisson with the girls I would see, and decided to start hiding it.

Since we had known each other for a long time I noticed something was off. She would tell me I was making thing up, she would tell me I was wrong for feeling jealous or suspicios. She would tell me I needed therapy and that I was an emotional retard and needed to trust her. She would ask me to make time to call her during the day, but when I asked her to do the same she would always have an excuse not to. Eventually, thanks to my first therapist, I confronted her about all this and we decided to go into couple’s therapy.

While in therapy I directly asked her if she was seeing someone else and she would deny it. Later I found that she even met with one of the guys on the very same day I asked her that question.

So in the interest of time, I finally found out she had at least 4 other lovers besides me. At that point I completely cut off communications with her and fell into a depression that almost drove me to suicide.

From that experience I have been learning to deal with my mind through Samatha, Tonglen and Charnel Ground practice. However not letting any woman close enough to hurt me like that again is a top priority for me and a matter of self preservation.

In that regard, I really dont appreciate when you imply that I dont know how I feel, and that this will ony last while I’m in distress.

I hope this satisfies your curiosity, and the conversation has been enlightning in that it has helped me to get clear in why I dont want to be with another woman. But we have completely evaded my original questions and I know for a fact how helpful you can be to others in the forums, since I have been reading for a long time.

Thanks again.