Also on a throwaway with only six years until the movie. I never understood why people make such a big deal over this. It's far more important to me to have it be the right person and time than to do it just because everybody else says you should.

I'm fully cognizant of the fact that the right person and the right time may never come. I'm okay with that.

Throwaway; I'm 14 years away from the movie and I couldn't agree more with this point. I still have yet to have sex, any physical relations (cuddling, holding hands etc), have a girlfriend, or really feel real emotional attraction towards another person in a romantic capacity (as I understand it), and yet I feel perfectly fulfilled and don't at all question my masculinity. I used to get upset about not having a gf / being a virgin, but then I realized that my emotions were mostly driven by a desire to conform to some arbitrary social metric of success. Once I realized that, I stopped caring and have been far happier, less stressed, and more social.

I'm inclined to agree with you personally.

That said, I came to see relationships and the intimacy that comes with it as very valuable once I 'tried' it, despite the fact that said relationships were, to a large degree, painful. I learned a tremendous amount from them, and there were a lot of benefits I didn't really understand before.

My approach is that something I haven't tried before is worth trying, especially if it's a 'common' thing. But at the same time I feel doing so because it's a 'common' thing is not the best of motivations.

> My approach is that something I haven't tried before is worth trying, especially if it's a 'common' thing. But at the same time I feel doing so because it's a 'common' thing is not the best of motivations.

I agree and am certainly open to being in a relationship if I find someone that I am interested in. The biggest barrier to entry for me has been finding people that I like honestly. I actually have difficulty conceptualizing what it means to "like" someone (although I assume the feeling is significantly different from friendship and exponentially 'more pleasurable' than friendship).

> I learned a tremendous amount from them, and there were a lot of benefits I didn't really understand before.

Would you mind elaborating?

In no particular order:

I learned a lot of uncomfortable stuff about my behavior in a short time

These were things that I had never noticed before, despite being a very introspective, reflective person (and a psychologist to boot). And I think the relationship was key to that. While my friendships also uncover new truths about myself, I can generally keep things as superficial as I desire, and I have a lot of control over when to see my friends, in what context, and for how long. Relationships (generally) have a tendency to break out of those patterns, uncovering a lot in a short time.

This has proved so beneficial that I don't even regret some of the truly toxic and emotionally harrowing situations I've been in. No pain, no gain, I guess.

For certain things of varying importance, I could rely on my 'significant other'. A form of symbiosis, I guess

I am not a practical or very, uh, physical man. When I'm caught up in something, I forget to eat (or eat healthily), I forget to do my laundry or clean my house, I forget to meet friends (either for my benefit, theirs, or both of ours), or I forget to even just go outside.

And once I break out of this obsession, I often realize in hindsight that it wasn't always worth forgetting that other stuff. And yet I keep doing this, and from looking at my father, this is quite possibly something I cannot break out of without significant effort. Effort that I'd rather spend on other things.

When I was in a relationship with someone who was different enough in these regards, but similar enough to not cause too much friction, my life improved immensely, including the efficacy of the targets of my obsessions. It turns out a balanced life is usually better :).

While this might be an extreme example and you might not identify with this, I think most people have their blind spots, and while my previous point could arguably be 'solved' by fixing the flaws, it is much harder (and perhaps less desirable) to 'fix' these personality traits.

Sex, physical intimacy, and a direct 'responsibility' to another person is generally a fundamental aspect of being human

I am happy alone. Truly happy. I also probably have a lower libido than most. I don't understand people who can't be alone or need sex all the time and will put up with terrible partners or consequences to achieve this.

And yet, I learned that while I am perhaps unusual in this regard, it's quite likely that to some degree I learned to be happy alone, and I learned to be happy without having sex very often, but this might not be my ideal state. And experimenting in this regard has given me a more nuanced view of myself, where I realize that the hug I get might be exactly the one I needed, even though I didn't feel like that before I got the hug (for example).

The bottom-line is that I've known many people in relationships and I've known many people without them. Happiness is perhaps as closely related to being in one or the other category as we often think, but there is a relation, in my opinion.

'Norms' can be at the very least informative as to what is likely a healthy approach. And my personal experience with people who have no (romantic) relationships, or for that matter people who have no friends, is that especially later in life they seem to grow in a way that does not seem to make them happier. More successful perhaps, or more valuable to society, but often obviously (to me) less happy. Loneliness is a terrible affliction, and can sneak up on you.

Whether you want to take the risk of being 'on your own' (in whichever particular form you choose) depends partly on your desired outcome, of course. Newton was a recluse, but perhaps he lived the most fulfilling and happy life he could have led, and at the very least he was very important to the world (in my opinion).

For me, I don't want to take such a risk without having experimented with the alternatives. I might very well choose to remain alone for much of my life, but at least I have (some) idea of what I might be missing out on, and some experience and skill to reconsider my choices later (which can be hard if you have no experience in this regard).

That said, I'm still young and I might be full of shit... :-). Ask me again in a few decades!

(also, perhaps the key point is that I didn't always greatly desire a relationship and I didn't always like the person. Especially the first time, it was a conscious choice to try something big, new, and potentially dangerous, but less dangerous than I had initially thought).

We're chasing each other's posts.

I find it interesting you're interested looking for the correct situation. Have you turned down prior situations where it didn't meet what you were looking for?

I'm quite a bit more broken than an average person—I don't think I could wait for a "right" anything.

Also a throwaway.

I am in the same situation as you. It took me a while to realise it, but I am not good at understanding certain cues and I have no idea what to do about it. I always need to correct my perceptions. E.g "That woman is probably being really friendly because she's just friendly. She's probably not interested." At one point I got quite depressed. Eventually, still curious about sex, I just hired a sex worker. It's legal here and I save a lot of money being single.

At this point I have mostly resigned myself to the reality that I'll probably be single for the rest of my life.

> It's nothing more than a signifier, of which people place a negative connotation on being a virgin.

That's strongly correlated with age. Below a certain age it is expected that you are a virgin, then there is a gray area and then above a certain age it is expected that your not.

Because we define 'normal' as 'what everybody does' being an outlier in this is perceived as negative, as if there is something wrong with you. That does not mean there is (or isn't), it just means that's how it will be perceived, it's a strike against that only gets stronger as you age.

Yes, I agree with you. I doubted anyone would read that much into it, despite the plain existential angst as a backdrop.

The conflation of normal and normative reaches into Wittgensteinian territory, but normative is normal. Hell, even the good end of a bell curve can be seen as a bad thing.

You should be afraid to be forward. You could get accused of sexual harassment. It's totally incredible that someone who was sexually harassed at work gave you advice to "try a small company", because that is completely reckless advice and can lead to potentially illegal behavior.

Edit: I mean incredible in the colloquial sense, not the literal ("I don't believe you") sense.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure what's going on with that. It might have been facetious, we tend to joke about each other.

I'll have to ask her about it tomorrow. There was one thing for her even worse than that, which would make her recommendation even more incredible to you. We're good enough friends to talk about things like that, I wonder if she's projecting her internal views of me on to other people.

No more about my friend, please. I feel wrong alluding to these situations.