Hi all, first post on this site.

I don't have a lot of people in my life that I feel comfortable talking to and I'm getting sick of all these thoughts just bouncing around in my head. I'm hoping I can relieve a bit of the pressure if I just spit it out on paper, or in this case a forum full of strangers that I found on google.

I'm almost 28 years old and I basically feel worthless. I haven't had a relationship in almost seven years, not even a single date and it's REALLY driving me nuts lately. Most of that time I can chalk up to just not leaving the house at all, but there was a span of about 2 years (ending about a year ago when I lost my job) where I actually was going out and feeling much better than I do now and before the span. For the later half of those 2 years I was trying as hard as I thought I could to meet someone, but it always seemed like every woman I met had a boyfriend, wasn't interested or seemed interested at first, but quickly lost interest.

I have really mixed feelings about how attractive I think I am. Up until I stopped going to the gym a year ago I was really in shape (not much worse now, just lost tone). I'm 5'7" which doesn't really help but I don't think I'm ugly. I've had a decent number of women tell me that I'm attractive, but it's always my friends' girlfriends. But I often feel physically sick when I see photos of myself. I feel like if I were truly attractive, there would be at least SOME women paying more attention to me over the last seven years. I mean, I'm not expecting them to throw themselves at me, but it's like... nothing.

I often make up mock conversations in my head about why I haven't been able to find someone. I imagine someone I know asking me, and then I go through the reasons and it usually sounds something like this:

"Well I don't really feel like I have any quality that women look for. I have a boring part time job, I'm not tall, I can't cater to the girls that like badboys, I'm not full of confidence, I don't really have any impressive skill like guitar playing or whatever, I'm terrible at conversation, I'm not really that good looking, I don't have any ambition, I'm not successful, etc."

As far as my professional life goes, like I said I lost my job about a year ago due to lack of work coming through. I really liked the job although I wanted to do more with it. I've always found it really hard to push my education. I dropped out of college because I just couldn't get into it and the loans were REALLY piling up. I've been slowly teaching myself new software programs associated with my field to try and stay current but its a struggle to get the motivation. It's a struggle to get motivated to do anything really.

There is a lot more bouncing around in my head, but I think I'll stop here for now.