Love and emotional unavailability...

Sorry. It was not obvious from your post. I'm just being a good American by not assuming that everyone is heterosexual.

Everyone's different. We don't all live for the same thing.

Not to mention, "what we live for" often changes over the years and decades, especially for people who have children.

 

Sounds like you've come in contact with some pretty incompetent psychologists (or other kinds of therapists). Many of them are very good.

Like any other profession, you should talk to people who have had dealings with them. Find out A) whether they felt that they were genuinely helped, and just as importantly B) whether what they needed was sufficiently similar to what you need so the same professional is likely to be able to help you too.

In my experience and observations, Jungians are the most effective. Their paradigm of "archetypes" appears to resonate very strongly with the way humans behave. It ought to, since it's based on studying thousands of years of our behavior and distilling out the constants.

 

Then what is your alternative: to spend the rest of your life without a partner, while being overwhelmed by lamentation for the things that went wrong? That's one of the saddest ways to go out.

Are you truly so depressed that you can't imagine a happier life than the one you've got?

So you're saying that there are more important things in your life than making your life better???

You sure are a hard case. This is the kind of faux-introspection that I expect from teenagers--and not the majority of them.

I sure hope there aren't any kids close to you who regard you as a role model.

 

So if you found yourself in charge of a group of children (perhaps one of your close relatives dies and his/her children come to live with you because they have no one else to turn to), you would be proud to be their role model: an adult who chooses not to have a mate??? (For reasons that you still have not made clear.)

 

Indeed. Mammals and birds--in fact almost all chordates--are programmed with the instinct to mate. It's one of the mechanisms by which the species survives. Many mammals do not form permanent mating bonds, but Homo sapiens happens to be one of the few that do. Our young have the longest maturation cycle of any mammal--roughly fifteen years, compared to five for elephants and only two for whales. This requires both parents to participate in raising the young for quite a long time, and the mate-bonding instinct is key to that.

Our species has several unique or nearly unique attributes that aid in the survival of our young. One unusual one (which we share with dolphins as well as our closest relatives, the chimpanzees) is that human females are capable of copulation when not in estrus. This is a tremendous aid in keeping fathers at home.

Most, if not all, of the children which you (either hypothetically or in reality--your prose is rather vague on the subject) are raising are going to have the standard set of instincts, which means that they will gravitate toward pair-bonding. They're going to need those fifteen years of parenting so that when they approach adulthood they'll be prepared for all of its aspects, including mating and parenting.

Being raised by a single parent is already a bit of a handicap; a single parent who has no desire to bring a mate into the home, even a succession of temporary mates, presents an even stronger handicap. One who does not even believe that having a mate is important, or actually believes that it's a bad idea, is going to be quite a challenge to the kids' maturation.

Obviously there are children who are raised this way, and many of them overcome the handicap and mature successfully. But many don't.

You keep making vague references to a strong reason for not choosing a mate. That's your business. But I do believe that the odds are very high that you would, indeed, not be a very good role model.

I'm not a good role model for children because I never wanted to have any. But I was careful to never actually have any, so it's not a problem for me or any hypothetical children.

You seem to think that you could raise children even though you don't even want a mother-figure in your life. Maybe you could. But why take the risk?

 

Some people are much more adept at communication than others, not to mention much better at reading people by their body language, the things they like and don't like, etc. This makes it not quite so difficult to find a soul mate.

Not to mention, making any relationship work, whether it's husband-wife or artist-patron or buyer-seller, requires compromise. The inability to compromise is the biggest handicap in marriage or anything else.