Hi, I've got my 21st birthday coming up soon. I've never had a girlfriend. I'm straight, I like girls very much they are very beautiful. I'm starting to think it will never happen for me or there must be something wrong with me.

What can I say? At school I started to get close to one girl, she basically told me she didn't fancy me but in a very skillful way so I didn't get hurt and we stayed friends. Another friend I wish I said how I felt about her but didn't find the courage. Left school at 16, at college I was quiet and not that sociable. Amazed at how quickly and easily I lost contact with my school friends. At 18 started university. Felt very alone. 1st day everyone was in groups of friends and I was by myself. I was living at home still, driving into uni to try and save money on rent so I was at a slight disadvantage at making friends there as every one else all live together. I did make friends there but never spoke to them outside of uni. So no social life at all. Dropped out of uni after the 2nd year because I was failing, I thought the uni wasn't very good, the course wasn't quite what I was expecting and I didn't like it there.

Got a lot of other stuff going wrong in my life that I can't really go into details about. Some quite serious really. Just want to say that it's related to being alone / no girlfriend. End of 2007 I was getting depressed and thinking of killing myself. As I am now, I have absolutely no self esteem left and don't really leave the house. I just retreat to my room and sit by myself. I have never felt like giving up so much before. I don't know what to do I can't carry on like this.

Finding happiness through another person will never be able to sustain itself over time. If you cannot find a way to be happy with you, you will never be happy with another.

You sound like you have a lot of things going on in your life right now and as hard as it is to hear me say this, I think the last thing you need right now is the one thing you say you need. You sound very fragile right now, what if you met a girl and she broke up with you, what happens then? I can tell you that as low as yourself esteem is right now, it might be the thing that sets you over the edge.

I really do think the best thing you can do is to find you, somewhere in the middle of all that pain, loss and suffering and despair is a wonderful bright 21 year old guy who is just starting in life.

I suggest going to get help, talking through the real issue you have inside. Being alone is nothing more than an effect not a cause. Find the root of the problem, fix that and watch how things fall in place. You mentioned sevral times how easily you give up. School being one example.

Failure happens to each and everyone of us. It hurts like hell and it sucks when you feel the weight of the world on your back as you try to pick yourself back up. However, taking your own life is a cruel and cowards way out of finding and discovering who you were meant to be. You are so young. If you only knew the stupid things I did at 21 they would make you laugh. Now looking back I couldn't have known how wonderful my life would be.

I need you to really listen to me for a minute, and hear what I am about to say, with an open mind. Sometimes it's hard to put our past behind us. It's hard to put our mistakes, shortcomings and failures away and let go and move on from them. But it's the past and you cannot do anything to change it. But your future is a whole different matter. You have the right to be happy, and you have the power to start shaping your life into anything you want it to be. You have to be strong for you. You deserve that for you.

You have to trust me when I tell you life gets a hell of a lot better. You are the only one who can defeat you. It's time for you to take a stand and find that fighter you have within you. You need to gather the weapons that can lead you to a life of victory. I'm not talking about weapons of mass destruction (because we know they don't exist) The weapons I'm talking about are weapons of the heart and soul. Like confidence, wit, audacity. Like standing your ground and speaking your mind. Standing up for what you believe and believing that's good enough. These weapons are unbeatable and no one can spar with your confidence. Know one person can ever take those from you.

I know how hard it is to imagine that you can really be happy, but I promise you that you can. You just have to find that strength and courage within yourself first. After that life begins to unfold just the way it was meant to.

PS: One day your future wife will be grateful you didn't have a girlfriend and that you waited. Waited for that meant-to-be-moment, to meet and fall in love with her. Your time is yet to come. In the meantime, look inside you gather up those weapons I mentioned and open up your fears and hurts with a professional who can help you get through that part of your soul that needs some minor repairs.

PSS: You're are future and us older ones need you to hang in there because one day you might be who leads us, or heals us, or protects us. So we need you around and strong to help keep our future looking bright.

I feel you man but, killing yourself is way out of the question. Don't worry about girls, they come and go just make yourself a better person first then you can worry about them. It no fun if you have a girl and your life is a mess. Get your piority straight work on making yourself feel better. IF you feel better then everything else your doing will feel better.

Thank you that helped a lot. I think you are right.



I don't think I know how to move on from the past. I have come to realize recently that my main defence mechanism has been to ignore feelings and to repress memories of bad things that have happened all my life. I think I need to deal with feelings in the future. How does someone put the past behind them without just trying to forget that they ever happened?


I have lived all my life in my head, trying to look at everything with cold logic. No heart or soul or even feeling sometimes. I need to find myself. I will have lots to think about.

Good evening DMA...
I am so glad to hear that you are considering other options for your life which includes your future. What we all are doing is simply living life. Doing the best we can with the hand dealt to each one of us. Some of us get great hands and others well, if we weren't talking about life and just cards, let's just say we would fold.

DMA, when I was a little girl and throughout my childhood, I put all my fears and all the unknows into faith. As a little girl you don't need to understand faith so much just that it's what makes the future look brighter, than the hear and now.

I told myself at a very young age that I can't control all the craziness around me. I couldn't control the pain my brother, sister and I had to endure. But even with that faith that bad times were still bad. The pain and fear grew but so did my faith in something bigger, something protecting us kids. When I got to my early teens I told myself no matter what when I turned 18, I would leave this life behind and make my own future. I never thought it would be easy and it wasn't.

I joined the military at a young age, married young, had two children divorced and became a single mother, grew a career made a few more mistakes but had many highs. All through that, the feeling that never left me was that this was my life that I was living. These were my mistakes and my highs. Nobody could hurt me without me allowing them to. DMA, that's a great feeling.

This is your time and your life. It's not easy for any of us. Even the ones we look at and we envy their lives. They struggle just as we do, they feel pain and loss and heartache, like we do.

So you stop looking at the past as a book of endless mistakes and failures but as an instruction book. Your Golden Ticket, if you will. A book of what didn't work and why. A book full of life lessons. The way I see it your young, and look, you already have the start of a best seller on your hands.

So it's up to you now DMA, how will your story be told and how will it end? I can't wait to read it.

Go start your story, with no regrets...

Dating is a matter of odds often, if you want to date, ask 10 or 12 or ever how many girls it takes to get one to go out.