I have found this area of life the hardest of all.
I am very easy around people and chat and make friends very easily. I find it easier to talk to women and many of my male acquaintances have considered me a bit of a flirt, though I was just being friendly. Yesterday alone I manage to swap twitter/email addresses with a lady I met in a queue and would have swapped facebooks as well if I had one.
That said, I am 27 and have never had a boyfriend or girlfriend, even for the briefest of times and have only had a few sexual encounters, none very long and all of them leaving me with much feeling of pleasure or satisfaction. As comfortable as I now feel with myself, in this area I feel rather diseased, wrong and damaged.
As my younger sister now has a long term, serious boyfriend and my cousins are all marrying up and bringing up children (something I'd love to do) it becomes more glaringly obvious, especially within family circles, that I have never had any of these things and find myself obfuscating to cover up what appears to be a huge hole in the middle of my life.
I try and comfort myself that so many of the people I admire were lifelong bachelors but I can't get away from the fact that my dream life would be as a househusband (and as a male-body, I would be husband to the larger world). I love the idea of making a nice house and picking up kids from school and talking to them about stuff and cooking dinner and doing my writing in the gaps. It's a fantasy, real life would always be harder, but it's what I would like. Maybe both males and females sense that from me and find it off-putting.
Though the crux of the problem may be that I don't know whether I am a boyfriend or a girlfriend, that I am not totally sure as to the meaning of those terms and as I get older it gets harder to approach someone knowing how much catching up I have to do.
On the up side, I do know one person that I could share my life with and it is possible she might be able to share hers with me (we lived together as housemates for a year and it was one of the best experiences of my life) but at the moment all those other things in life; cash, careers, the needs of our families, are keeping us apart. I feel a thrill each time we meet but i find it hard to stay in close contact with her. Our relationship has not been very romantic and certainly not sexual, we used to sit in our jammies on her bed and watch crap telly but I could imagine myself spending my life with her.
There is one other person, a bosom buddy from university. We lived in each other's pockets for two years. However, in the 6 years since we have met up only three times. In each of those three times the meeting was so easy, like we had met up after the distance on an afternoon rather than several years apiece. This could never ben a romantic or sexual relationship though, I know I cramped his style when we went out and although he does swing both ways we are more comrades in arms than any kind of lovers.
Thanks for bringing this up Kinkly, I didn't realise how much it had been playing on my mind until you did.
