20 & Involuntarily Celibate

[DerekB]

Hey everybody, so for those of you who didn't read or don't remember my previous thread, here's the (very) short version:

I'm turning twenty years old next month. I've never had sex, kissed a girl, been on a date, or even held hands with a girl.

Its incredibly depressing. I was interested in girls from a very early age. It was never a matter of not being interested. Before I go any further into this, I'd like to tell you all a little bit about myself. For starters, my personality type is ENTJ. I am considered by those who know me to be very intelligent and highly intellectual. The lowest I've ever tested in any part of a standardized test is the 95th percentile. I am an excellent speaker, and am very comfortable in front of large groups. I have been a little overweight my whole life (207lbs, 5"10", waist size 36). People tell me they think I'm a really nice guy, and as a rule they enjoy being around me. Also, I come from (some) money; I'm not super-rich but my parents are worth a bit more than two million currently (age 50). I'm Jewish, though I'm about as non-religious as people can be, and am perfectly happy making jokes about it with my friends.

My mom and dad were, I think its fair to say, somewhat strict when I was growing up. My dad is a very straight shooter, and would not tolerate mischief or misbehavior. Not that this was an issue for me. I've never been in trouble my whole life. No detentions, no calls home from the office, not even a speeding ticket. My dad used to tell me the same thing every day as I left the house on my way to the bus stop with my brother: "have fun and be confident". Its quite ironic, because I can honestly say that I don't know what its like to have fun, or how it feels to be confident. I cant remember the last time I was legitimately happy, and its been that way since long before even my Bar Mitzvah.

The first time I asked a girl to dance, I was thirteen. We were at a week long sleep-away summer camp. I figured since nobody there knew me very well, it wouldn't be a big deal to get rejected. She said no, and when I walked away I heard her laughing at me with her friends. I waited two years after that before trying again, this time when my class was on a 2 day trip to D.C. I asked the second girl at a dance my school held for us while we were down there. She said yes! Which is great, right? Well, it would've been, if she didn't say that she was just going to take a break for a while, and we'd dance later. She never came back, nor did she ever intend to. I brought it up a while later and jokingly told her she "owed me a dance", to which she laughed and agreed. The next dance I went to was a few months later, I saw her across the room (keep in mind that I don't dance, I've never felt comfortable doing it, so I was one of the losers who stays outside of the dance hall or stands on the outskirts of it. I've never danced in my entire life, I just don't have that innate "goofiness" in me that others seem to) and when a slow song came on I started to go over to where she was, but before I got there she started dancing with somebody else, so I stopped and went back. The next slow song I went over, but before I got to where she had been, she had moved to the other side. The next thing I knew, my best friend Alex came over and whispered in my ear that one of her friends had asked him to ask me to stop "following" the girl around the dance. I was equal parts mortified, upset, and enraged, and I left immediately. I cried myself to sleep that night, and I never went to another dance.

Throughout this time in my life, my parents had only an inkling of how bad things really were for me. My dad was a ladies man growing up, and was very popular in general. He would ask me most nights at dinner (we ate dinner together as a family every night) if there were "any girls at school". I didn't have the heart to tell him, so I would usually either ignore him or say something jokingly such as "like I'd tell you". He eventually put some of the pieces together, though he misunderstood the problem and thought that I just didn't have must interest in chasing girls. My dad would often make one way bets with my brother or I (score a goal in a hockey game and he'd pay $50 per). One night when I was fifteen he offered me $100 if I went out with a girl. Eventually he turned it into $500 and he'd pay for the date. Finally, as a senior in high school it became "if you bring home a girl I'll give you the Jaguar (Jaguar XKR Supercharged Convertible). Despite these offers, I never did (and believe me, I liked that car).

When I got to college, I had hoped that things would change, but alas, they did not. I did, at the behest of my father, join a fraternity. He felt it would be a good way to force me into social situations and parties, and I agreed. So now, despite being a full-fledged brother in whats considered the top fraternity on campus for over a year, I've never even so much as danced with a girl at one of our parties (or ever). My fraternity brothers, despite not fully comprehending how deep this problem is, have practically begged me to go dance with some girls on the dance floor.

I have never, not in my whole life, felt "loose" or "silly" or whatever you'd call it (you probably know what I mean). I physically can't bring myself to do it. Here's an example: We throw a lot of parties, some of which are whats known as "socials". Socials are when brothers are assigned big sisters (sisters in the sorority we're having the social with) and it is their job to basically get us drunk and make sure we have a good time. Now, I was going to avoid the whole dancing part of the party all together, planning to just stay by the pong tables all night, but at one point a pledgemaster (this was back when I was pledging) came over and told me he wanted all the pledges to ask their bigs to dance with them. I did, and she said yes. But when we got out onto the floor, it was...well...brutal. I really just couldn't do anything that would even resemble dancing. She really tried to get me to dance, she brought over two drinks which were equivalent to four beers and had me down them, hoping it'd loosen me up. It didn't, at all. Then she took my hands and tried to sort of teach me how to move them when dancing. I just couldn't do it, they might as well have been limp noodles because the second she let go they went straight back down. I honestly felt bad. At one point she told me she 'wasn't looking for a relationship or anything serious and just wanted to have some fun dancing with me', because she had inferred that I was expressing a disinterest in her or that I thought she was coming on to me or something.

When it comes to things like parties, I am extremely uncomfortable, and am invariably subjected to a constant barrage of people asking me things such as "are you having fun", "are you ok" etc. I just never really learned how to act in this type of situation. I never went to a single party before college. I had some "friends" that I would talk to at school and be friendly to, but Alex was really my only true friend. He was very much my polar opposite. Where I was reserved, he was exceptionally outgoing. He would go to all the parties, drink, smoke marijuana, dance with girls. He'd had sex before he was sixteen. Right now, he's relocated to Miami, where he's more popular with the ladies than ever. In contrast, I'm nineteen, and have never even held a girls hand. He's told me countless times that its all in my head, that I'm reasonably good-looking and just need to get out there, but I can't. I've never been able to.

The worst part is, my inability to have a relationship with a girl is causing a myriad of problems outside of my "lovelife" (or lack thereof). I can't spend more than thirty minutes without thinking about the fact that I'm alone and seemingly always will be. It distracts me from a lot of things I should be doing instead. Heck, its 5:00am here at the time of this writing, and despite the fact that I have a macroeconomics final at 2:00pm I'm here writing this. I feel depressed all day long, every day. I pretend to be happy for the sake of those close to me, and they have no idea what kind of emotional toll all of this has taken on me. I've even (on a purely theoretical level) contemplated suicide. Frankly, there's only two reasons I haven't seriously considered it (and never will). The first is the dwindling hope that someday things will get better for me. The second is that I don't believe that there is an afterlife, and the only thing I can think of worse than continuing to exist this way is ceasing to exist at all. But make no mistake, I have a hard time justifying getting out of bed each day, because the last 7,300 times I've done it, it hasn't been worth it.

At this point I've essentially given up. I don't believe that I will ever have any type of relationship for any duration with a girl. Even though they all love me to death, I feel like I've broken my parent's hearts, let down my little brother as a role model, and most of all let down myself as a person. I've lived through most of my youth without enjoying a second of it. I'm so behind in terms of life experiences that it seems virtually impossible to catch up or even begin on the path to catching up. I feel bitter towards the world and everybody in it. I'm not sure what I'm looking for here in the way of replies. Advice, I suppose, though frankly I don't expect it will do me much good at this point.