It’s not that I can’t. The problem is that when I’m with someone, I deeply yearn to be alone. I’d love to have my life for myself, with no responsibility with no one else - just me.
But then, when I’m alone, I feel like a failure, like I need a relationship to feel complete, and I fucking hate that. So I end up in another relationship, and after two years I can’t stand it anymore, and the cycle repeats.
What the hell. Has anyone suffered from something like that? How can you be alone and not feel lonely? How to kill this need to be with someone?
EDIT: Thanks for all the answers, I’m taking every single one into consideration. Please, keep them coming.
This seems like the key question. Relationships or not might not actually matter here.
What does it mean to you to feel lonely? What kind of lonely is that?
To me, it’s a mix of feeling like a failure and feeling that nothing quite matters. I mean, I do get to do things I enjoy, and I enjoy it a lot, but I never feel satisfied - I just feel empty. It’s kinda like having a feeling of obligation to be with someone, and that’s there’s something wrong with me for being alone. Like a nagging voice in the back of my head saying “this is not ok”. I don’t know if this makes sense.
I can understand it all and relate to some of it, but nothing in that description sounds like “lonely” to me.
When you feel like a failure, do you picture someone who is judging you to have failed? What expectation of theirs are you not meeting?
When you feel empty, what’s missing for you?
When you feel obliged to be with someone, obliged to whom? What did they do for you that leads you to now feel that you owe them something?
When you feel like something is wrong with you, who is judging you as being wrong? What expectations of theirs are you not meeting?
Whose voice do you hear saying “This is not OK”?
Maybe these answers will reveal something to you to help you make more sense of your feelings.
Peace.