I will be turning 24 in a few weeks and the fact that I’ve never been in a relationship is causing me lots of shame and distress even though everything else in my life is going great.
The general advice people on reddit give is “improve yourself”. That might have been useful advice back when I was a complete mess with no direction in life, but I have improved tremendously since then. I am studying for a master’s degree, I have a job that I love and have lots of friends. I’ve even been taking better care of my body by regularly working out, eating healthier and quitting smoking. People started looking up to me and praising me, but all of their compliments mean nothing to me because I still feel like a failure for not having success romantically even though I always wanted to be in a relationship. I thought that if I improved to a certain point I would finally be “worthy” of love, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The whole world of dating confuses the shit out of me. I don’t understand how people can enter relationships with people they barely know. I have very little interest in casual hookups and it takes a lot of time to develop feelings for someone. The only girls I’ve developed feelings for are close friends. Even then I have no idea how you go about transitioning from friendship to a relationship or if that’s even possible.
People also say how “I don’t need to be in a relationship” and I partially agree with that sentiment. At this point in time I don’t need a girlfriend, I am fine with being alone and I don’t need other people to have fun, I can do that on my own just fine, but I really want to have a family someday and can’t imagine myself in my 40s without one. That’s why being a virgin at age 24 is causing me so much pain and anxiety, the older you get the harder it becomes to actually start. No woman is going to want a man in his 30s without prior dating experience, which is why I’m going through an age crisis for the first time in my life. I know it’s still not too late for me to change my situation, but I am at an age where it’s expected to have had at least one girlfriend in my life and I’m not sure if any woman would want me because of that.
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