I can relate. I was never very successful to begin with, but looking back it was just an amalgamation of poor circumstances. However, I think what you are describing has something to do with the "free love" of the hippies.

There isn't a need to follow the cultural stereotype that is ingrained in our heads by heteronormative cartoons and sitcoms during our youths. Marriage and long-term relationships are losing favor to casual hookups and friends with benefits. The staggering amount of divorces may also have something to do with this.

Also the desire for a beautiful partner is a very egotistical one. "I have a hotter wife, therefore I must have more money and be better than you." We still enjoy sex however, and it can be a very fulfilling activity. In many cases I still cling to the idea of a single partner. I happen to be pursuing a bisexual woman right now, and let's say I'm successful; I wouldn't mind if she still slept with other woman as part of our relationship. Other men might get odd as she might form another attachment...

Social interactions can be difficult. I have posted before about social interactions, and the consensus was that the path to insight is very often a lonely one.

its weird here too

Michael James offers some relevant direction here (a clarifying aside, valuable in its own right, takes up roughly the first half of the piece, the more thematic part follows after that).

As "out there" as it might sound. Do some research online about abstaining from masterbation/porn if you do that sort of thing. It has done things for my life that DMT wouldn't even reach.

Heres my 2 cents.

relationships have always ended up leaving me miserable and heartbroken, and I have spent years with people and still don't feel like a single one of them ever really looked into my eyes and saw me...often people look at you and they see only what they want to see..and then later when that falls away, all they can see is the illuminated faults which we all carry but are not who we are..and that is what is most heartbreaking. I think there is a point where you have to realize that what is imperative is that you are able to see yourself...once that happens the way you interact in the world changes..and everything changes. The broken relationships are just mirrors. Mystics have been looking into those mirrors forever.

Do I still want to be with someone? well, yes...and I go out and meet women and I enjoy it...but I am not actively seeking them out...I meet them at festivals and events and some of the most awesome people I have encountered in my life this year have all come to me through that venue, both old people from my past and new ones. I have also spent a lot of time alone over the past year, and that's been fine. It has been the most transformational year of my life.

I will forgo having a wife, children a family etc if it means I would have to sacrifice my own truth in life, because it just becomes another road to misery and stagnation. Movement is not something you think about, or contemplate. Proper movement in life is akin to water flowing over the thrush of a cliff. Water does not swim upstream...dams block water and generate stagnation as do dams in our lives when we fight against the natural flow of our being. This is essential to understand when one begins to move towards self realization and authentic expression.

In any authentic and true relationship, all those involved should understand and respect this.

I think the endless one night hook-ups leave people feeling just as empty. The extreme of another extreme, is still an extreme...kinda like how a godless god is already half way to atheism...so balance in the cosmos is a theme woven into the core.

Life holds presence..but you have to show up for it. It begs us to be it's lover..and then it loves you back. This is the Divine relationship of the diversity of one in poetic communion with and expression of the unity of the cosmos and dreaming of the planetary body.

For me, it is like this...

I have always been the kind of guy who could fall in love with a sunset and cup of tea, rocking on a country porch peering into a burning violet ocean of cloud so immense a man could drown in it’s gaze. You know, those moments in life when for a brief second you get to drop the character act of the collective milieu, and finally settle into the fit of your own skin. I like the country folk, there is something about a person who has the dust of life settled into they’re very bones…it’s a relieving breath of authenticity. There is a depth to the world, hidden within the deep corners, it’s back alleys and ghettos that speaks on it’s own accord. For those who can smell it, these places are of the other, where time no longer moves to the pace of the world as it is, and instead skips to a of rhythm of it’s own. You can hear it in the music of the folk, like a kind of calling up magic…calling up what? - it’s like a shape you cant quite describe because it’s contours wont seem to fit into any box you try to put it in. There is a solidness to the common folk, not a density, so much as a sense of “here n’ nowness” that tends to speak volumes without having to utter a single word. I adore the makeshift do-it-yourself style of the simpler life, when things simply are what they are and function as such out of necessity more than convenience.

Someone somewhere once said that autumn is a time when the great mother puts on her best dress and does one more dance before settling into the long dreaming sleep of winter. I love that. I love the almost ecstatic foreboding sense of clarity as the world winds down towards the eve, when the trees are in a fiery bloom of reds, yellows and oranges and the long nights slowly creep in…I love early morning walks on windy beaches, wool-clad as the fall breeze whispers her love songs into my ear. Some folks don’t like that kind of thing, but I do... There is a closeness, you know, in that moment…like the truth one revels in, in those silent moments with a lover where the poetry of life is no longer a distant abstraction but a felt presence, a tapestry of experience who’s irony reveals a greater mystery…a mystery not to be solved, but simply to be present with for the sake of the Big Mystery itself which binds together the wonder that is the fabric of our dreams.

Whatever you find in life, trust that it is an open invitation into a relationship of reciprocity with the numinous.

Wow... That is one of the best things I've read on the nexus. Great post jamie

hello paradiseofrave,

i have had the complete opposite of your experience. I have been single for a long time, maybe 10 years, and i was quite happy being so. One day i was shown that i was wrong and that i was missing out on parts of existance that are very important. I had never really been lonely but over the last couple of years, as i have delved further into the madness, i have had an increasing feeling that being alone isnt the way to be, at least not for me at ths time. This theme then began to manifest itself as at least a small part of most experiences i have.

if you dont mind me asking what type of relationship person are you? i ask as i see alot of serial monogamists/obsessive codependents, these people seem to have no ability to spend more than a week on there own and if they do their world starts to fall apart. If you are anything like this maybe it is not a lack of relationship that is required but maybe a more balanced approach to them.

at the end of the day you have to do what makes you happy, and as long as your not deluding yourself or hurting anyone then you should persue the path you desire and if anyone tries to tell you your wrong then then can go whistle.