I can't see myself having a romantic relationship..

I have some rather large difficulties with myself that have been developing and receding back and forth over the past couple of years. One of the most prominent ones is affecting my daily routine and my attempts to get better. The only way to describe it, is that I can't myself having a romantic relationship ever in my life.

The concepts of love and romance are placed really high in my life and they are standards that I use to measure the worth of my own life. Whenever I feel in love or infatuated, I am able to function a whole lot better than outside of it. As a result love is in roughly 90% of the things I do, just to keep myself in a state that I can function.

However, my self image is already seriously damaged and a couple of weeks ago it suffered another blow. Since that point I've been unable to find a single argument or reason why anybody would ever want to start a romantic relationship with me. It's not twisted sense of reality, because I can see myself getting into social contacts or having a good time. But anything involving love and romance is sort of blocked out directly.

While I'm not a therapist or anything, I'm assuming that there's a chance that this came from some sort of defense mechanism or way of coping with my depression. But I don't know how to deal with that. It's already affecting my behavior in that I'm being a lot less productive, that my depressive episodes are becoming more frequent and that I'm generally more sadder. I don't know what to do...

I can't exactly ask a girl out or something, because I don't know anybody. On top of that I live in the middle of ****ing nowhere, am too broke to move and there's absolutely nobody around my age living here. And even if there is, within this local culture people think that you're going to kill them if you say 'hi' on the street. It stresses me out so much...

What can I do?

I can't help you with this because I have the same exact problem.
But I thought that maybe it would make you feel better to know that you aren't the only one that feels this way.
Or maybe you will think I'm an idiot for replying without being able to give any advice...
I don't know, just thought maybe it would be of some consolation

I don't think that you're an idiot for replying without being able to give advice. It's a pretty difficult situation, so I can imagine that it's hard to find advice for. It does help somewhat to know that it's more common to feel this way than I thought. At times it feels like I'm the only person in the world that feels this way.. so thanks for that, MarcyCJ.