My life becomes unbearable

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I have too many difficulties like social anxiety and depression. Most probably i have aspergers syndrome too. Im getting older and nothing is getting better. Problems are even worsening. I have around 21000 days before death and dont know how i will cope with loneliness when i get older. Imagine you are 70 years old and never had a girlfriend or anything. Its my future.

Try having a relationship with God instead of a woman.singleness can be seen as a gift in a certain light

Not wishing to be disrespectful of anyone's religious beliefs, but as a 21-year-old male I would infinitely have preferred a relationship with a woman to a relationship with any deity yet heard of.

I recall feeling just about exactly as the OP describes above at that age (except I didn't get as far as counting how many days I had left). From the age of 12 or 13 onward, I dreaded ending up as an old man, unmarried and still a virgin and all alone. I tried to kill myself on more than one occasion for that exact reason.

All I can really say is, that is not necessarily your future, although I respect the fact that whenever anyone tried telling me that at the time, I didn't believe them.

However, despite poor social functioning and other problems associated with Asperger's, plus not being physically attractive, I did somehow have some girlfriends, and with the second of those I did lose my virginity, and at least two of the women there have been in my life wanted to be with me indefinitely, so while I am currently single and a bit lonely, you could say I am so by choice, because I chose to dump those particular women as I did not feel either one of them was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

By the time you get to 30, as a male, your sex drive will have declined to a point where being single is less bothersome, but I appreciate you would obviously prefer to have at least had some kind of a sex life by then, preferably a sex life that could also truly be called a "love life". It could happen!

You are not cursed, nor doomed, nor predestined to have a lousy life. However, going around thinking you are is arguably just about the most unattractive feature any man could possibly have, from the female perspective. On that front, I found cannabis and psychotherapy helped. It is possible a relationship with a deity might help, I guess. But try to find some source of help that works for you, maybe?

I read people who are truly alone are more prone to dying an early death if that is of any consolation.

It will get a bit more tolerable in the next few years. At your age I cried everyday at least once. Now i never cry. If you're alone for long you can look back on the things you had to endure alone and from that feel reassured that you can also handle the rest of your life alone if you have to.
I'm sure you will find a girlfriend but it won't cure your social anxiety or depression. And you will break up sooner or later so when you're 70 you will have other things on your mind than her. Lots of old people are widowed and lonely. Or they have for decades put up with a marriage (for comfort, mutual dependence, fear, social norm) just to divorce and maybe be alone anyway at age 70... There are no guarantees. You shouldn't worry now what will be with you at that age. The 70 old you doesn't need the 21 year old you to worry about him.

This is a very significant point. A.S.D. does not necessarily condemn you to a sexless loveless life but finding a girlfriend is not, repeat NOT, the cure-all that I certainly naïvely used to assume it would be. Even after two girlfriends, experiencing love and sex and yadda yadda yadda, I attempted suicide several more times, and needed a lot more therapy and a lot more experience and a lot more maturity before I finally learned how to live in my own head and in my own skin, and stand on my own two feet, and stop despising myself.

And after that, why, surprise surprise! I suddenly seemed to be seen as more attractive and more likeable than when I was younger and so full of self-pity and self-hatred. From feedback received, my best feature in my 20s was my buttocks. By the time I was past 30, my buttocks were migrating rapidly down the backs of my thighs, yet since passing 30 (feedback suggests), I apparently have other better & more important positive attributes, which have led some people to like me and some women to fancy me.

So who needs buttocks anyway?

At time of posting, I am single and a bit lonely. If my 30-years-ago self could have seen my present-day self, he might have added this to his list of reasons for suicide, but if so, he wouldn't have been appreciating how much fun and how much love and how much sex and how much fulfilment and how much healing I've enjoyed during those intervening 30 years. At 46, I also know what I did not yet know at 16 or even 26: solitude does not necessarily mean loneliness. If you're comfortable with who and what you are, being alone needn't be a problem.

If I even reach 70, I probably will be single, but that's actually fine by me.

Finding a girlfriend is not the remedy. Getting the right help and learning to be reasonably satisfied with who and what you are is the remedy, and after that your chances of finding a girlfriend actually increase by a very long way...

If I could now look in the future and see that at age 30 I will be alone, that's OK, but if I see I am working min wage in a factory again, that is definitely a reason for suicide.

Good luck with your employment situation, then!

The trouble with being depressed when you're in your teens and your early 20s is, perhaps, you don't yet realize that you can actually combat it, or you haven't yet learned how to. Every time you feel yourself sliding into another depression you fear this could be it, this is the way things are going to be forever, you're never going to feel any happiness ever again and nothing can possibly ever improve. It isn't easy to know what to say to a young person in that state, because at that age when I was depressed I simply refused to believe any positive thing that anyone tried to say, and I convinced myself I was doomed. Hence suicide seemed like an obvious short cut to avoid a lifetime of hell.

I'm not a big fan of getting old, but one advantage is by now (in my 40s) I know I can actually exercise some control over my own mood and prevent myself from sliding into too deep a depression, and also I know my depressions are to some extent cyclical, so even though (for example) I've been pretty depressed in recent days I do at least know I won't feel this way forever: I just need to ride out the storm. I don't think my 21-year-old self would have believed me, though.

Whenever I do an internet questionnaire it tells me I am urgently in need of help and must immediately tell my family how I'm feeling and make an appointment to see my doctor. But the internet doesn't know how much more depressed I used to get! I really think coping gets easier with experience, but to judge from the OP he may not be in a place where he's even prepared to believe that.

You are only 21. Perhaps that is a little too soon to give up.
I am 71 years old. After the age of 21, I had girlfriends, lived great adventures, got married/still married, worked for 4 decades and retired. I am surrounded by my family, my wife, children and their children. I don't suffer from loneliness.

I think life is what you make of it.

I am an extreme introvert but I do not suffer social anxiety. I am a non-conformist. As a matter of fact I don't mind being alone. There are always a million things to do. Depression is normally a sign of unvented stress energy. If you can learn to vent stress properly and efficiently, depression will dissolve away.

When people say that to me (and I am someone who has had that said to me many many many times in the past, invariably by some smug person in a luckier situation than mine), it doesn't tend to cheer me up. It tends to make me hate myself and my situation even more than I already was when my distress or discontent prompted the person to say it. It certainly would have poured paraffin on the flames of my depression when I was 21 and on the brink of suicide.

It is true you can improve your chances considerably by changing your outlook, but you do also need good luck. To tell a depressed person "Life is what you make of it" is to imply he or she has wrought his or her own present distress and deserves it, which is not necessarily so (least of all when you're young and it's possibly not least your parents or family circumstances that have ****ed you up).


Nor do I, now, but it hurt like hell at 21, in my case if not in yours. It was torture. It felt like being imprisoned without trial for an offence I was not even aware of having committed.


I find it hard to believe it is that simple in this young man's case. Depression often goes with the A.S.D. territory and that kind of accumulated, historical depression can take some untangling.


On behalf of my own 21-year-old self I confess I am a bit disturbed by the blithe oversimplification of this young person's plight.