Here is a ridiculous truth: Being attracted to a woman makes me depressed. I’ll meet a woman who is attractive and has a great personality, we’ll hit it off, and I’ll think to myself how awesome it would be to engage in a romantic relationship with her. However, she is unavailable. She doesn’t have to explicitly reject me, but the rejection is implicit because she is married, “has a boyfriend”, or we have met in a context where making advances toward a woman is not allowed. So I’ll be depressed, because I will have had a glimpse of what I cannot have in my life.
Eventually, I will detect a pattern. I will learn to associate some activity with depression and loneliness. Engaging in that activity frequently puts me in contact with attractive, unavailable women. The activity becomes more and more unpleasant because I become increasingly aware of the painful side-effect.
So, I cut the activity out of my life.
Without revealing too much about myself, I can think of three activities that were once a major part of my life, but I stopped doing them, going completely cold turkey*. Two of them I was quite passionate about.
Now, I am contemplating a fourth.
Years ago, when I quit the first one, and then the second one, I thought they were temporary. I thought that I would inevitably meet someone and be in a relationship again. If that had happened, then I would no longer feel lonely and depressed when interacting with desirable women. Thus, I could return to those activities, a healthy male who doesn’t have to view every desirable woman as an opportunity and/or a rejection. However, that never happened (a fact which should be obvious, since I’m writing this blog).
It is ironic, perhaps, that each of these is to some degree a social activity. Technically, I am helping to seal my fate of being alone the rest of my life.
Perhaps instead I should come up with some other coping mechanism than running away. However, the coping mechanisms I’ve tried so far suck.
[* The etymology of the phrase “cold turkey” is fascinating.]