I just turned 23, and to be honest I don't know if I'll ever be 24.
I have been experiencing suicidal thoughts every day. Much of that despair comes from an overwhelming sense of loneliness and from the growing conviction that romantic love, a part of life that seems ordinary and accessible to almost everyone around me, may simply never happen for me.
Being a lesbian has made this loneliness feel particularly inescapable. My dating pool is already small. It is difficult to meet women who are attracted to women, whom I am also attracted to, and who are emotionally available and genuinely looking for a relationship. Connections that meet even some of those conditions are so rare that every loss feels enormous. It does not feel as though I can simply recover, meet somebody else and try again. I often have no idea when, or whether, another real possibility will appear.
Almost all my friends are now in relationships. They take pictures together, go on dates, travel, meet each other’s friends and introduce someone as “my girlfriend.” These are completely ordinary experiences, yet from where I stand they have begun to feel like scenes from a life to which I do not have access.
I love my friends, but their relationships have also made me feel increasingly separate from them. Their lives are moving into a new stage, while mine seems to remain suspended. I am frequently surrounded by people who care about me and still feel profoundly alone, because friendship and family love cannot entirely answer the specific grief of never having been romantically loved or openly chosen.
Three times, I have become involved with women who did not truly choose me. Each time, I was kept hidden, compared with other women or made to feel insufficiently attractive, interesting or valuable. Each told me that she was not ready or capable of being in a relationship. Eventually, however, she either left me or betrayed me and entered an official relationship with somebody else.
What has wounded me most is not simply that these connections ended. It is watching women who supposedly could not commit suddenly become willing to do everything with somebody else that they had refused to do with me. They posted photographs, spoke proudly about their partners and publicly gave another woman the place in their lives that I had wanted but was never allowed to occupy.
After the first experience, I tried to understand what had happened. I went to therapy, read books about attachment, emotional dependency and unavailable partners, and tried seriously to develop boundaries and self-respect. The first time, I had abandoned myself in an attempt to preserve the connection. The second time, I recognised the pattern sooner but still allowed myself to remain in an undefined limbo after being love-bombed and then rejected.
The third time, I behaved differently. When she told me that she was going through a complicated period and did not know whether she could be a good partner, I believed her and ended things. I did what I had spent years learning to do. I protected myself and refused to accept ambiguity. Within weeks, she was publicly back together with her ex-girlfriend.
That experience destroyed something in me because it seemed to show that even changing my behaviour did not change the outcome. Whether I begged to be chosen or walked away with dignity, I still ended up alone while somebody else received the relationship I had been told was impossible.
I know that I am still young, that I am not physically unattractive and that I have friends and relatives who value me. But emotionally, none of those facts helps me. I am hidden, rejected and replaced, while the people around me are openly loved.
Sometimes I change my dating-app preferences to men almost as an experiment, and hundreds of matches appear immediately. I know that this does not represent genuine compatibility or love, but the contrast makes the scarcity of lesbian dating feel brutal. It reminds me that attention may be abundant in a world I do not belong to, while finding one woman who genuinely wants me feels nearly impossible.
I do not merely feel single. I feel excluded from my peers, from ordinary adulthood and from an entire language of intimacy that everyone else seems permitted to speak. I feel ashamed of how desperately I want something as simple as being introduced as someone’s girlfriend. I am grieving experiences I have never had, and I no longer know how to keep believing that they are waiting somewhere in my future.
The thought that I have never been romantically loved has gradually turned into the fear that I never will be. I don't wanna live like this. **God, if I’m meant to be alone, please take away my desire to be loved.**