Don't quite know where to start, so I'll go back to the beginning. I’m a guy, currently 23.

I was bullied and teased in grade school. Had no friends for years on end, until 8th grade. Those friends I made were a bad, isolated group. Haven't seen them for years as they got into drugs, crime, etc.

I learned early on that nobody gave a crap about me, nobody wanted to hear what I had to say, I was just an annoyance. Zero self-esteem. I felt left behind by everyone else.

Of course, I had no luck with the girls. I was the classic skinny loaner wierdo who physically got tremors and stuttering at the thought of talking to a girl.

Basically my social life was non-existent until a few years ago when I met a close friend in college. He is a true friend, would do anything for me, listens to me. He’s the only person I’ve known who I can say that about.

Since meeting him, I’ve really come out of my shell. I actually go out and do things, meet people, and now have a good group of ‘acquaintances’, as I would call them. Not true friends but good people who I spend time with.

Overall I’m happy now about my social life except with women. I’ve never had a girlfriend and I just get so down on myself and jealous at the thought that all these people around me have that and are having those experiences and I can’t.

Things have been improving greatly though. I had sex for the first time last year, just a hookup. And I am having great success in online dating. I met someone in january(second date of my life), calling her Jane, who I dated for a month. Things were phenomenal but she ended it suddenly. I didn’t know how to feel. I was thrilled with the experience but it felt like just another failure at the same time. I was so close.

I’ve met many more women since her. Not that seeing them was bad, but nothing like Jane. I just need to feel that affection and intimacy. I don’t feel alive without it.

This is huge progress for me. For so long I felt unlovable, unattractive, awkward. I thought there is no way I’m going to go on a date. No way I’m going to have a girlfriend or sleep with a women. No way I will experience intimacy.

But over the last year all that has vanished. I feel confident and hopeful about the future. I don’t feel like a leper anymore. But it’s not enough. It seems like all the amazing things that have happened just weren’t that great in retrospect, never enough.

So I’m torn. Feel good about the unthinkable successes I’ve had, or bad about them all basically ending in failure. Like each success I have sets the bar higher and then when I fall below that, I feel worse than when I had never reached it in the first place.

So right now I’m serial dating, spending money I shouldn’t, not giving school the focus I should, etc. because I can and because I’m desperate to meet someone who can make things good again, if that makes sense. I still miss Jane.