For example, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable diving head-first into some difficult situations I’ve chosen if there weren’t others like me who were also struggling. I didn’t even need to know their real name or how they looked or how they spoke, but I felt a kinship with them from reading their words, regardless that they would never know me, and I never contacted them, either.

Feeling one-way “socializing” like that was a “connected disconnectedness” that was very sad and hopeful at the same time for me. “Social” probably isn’t even using the right word for this situation… but it was still a connection of some sort between two human beings, just not necessarily reciprocal.

To get all extreme, there are in this world actually people who (for any number of reasons, all of them no one else’s business) consider virginity to be a desirable state (not one to be rid of ASAP) and do their best to remain in it, but I Would Not For One Second presume that such people don’t have social lives.

Social lives do not equal love lives which in and of themselves do not equal sex lives. In point of fact, I went through my childhood with no idea that dates were “expected” to end in sex because almost nothing on TV during those years remotely suggested (to a naif like myself, anyway) that this was the case; even when characters woke up in bed together, I had no context for understanding the circumstances, and as a child, when characters on TV shows said or did something that I didn’t understand, I simply patiently waited for something that I *did* understand to happen; again, that was childhood, when I believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny; I’ve come quite a way since then and realized that the existence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are mere THEORIES, not facts. :-)

The world today is strange.

It’s telling the world that things like intimacy are not necessary that’s absurd and intrusive and needs to be pointed out.

And if you didn’t need people to agree with you, and be intimate in your shared loneliness, you wouldn’t be so strident about it here. You’re not aware of your own self-contradiction. And that needs to be pointed out too, because you don’t see it and don’t realize you’re being absurd and funny. You really don’t.

I didn’t actually say I was in ISOLATION. I said that I don’t have a LOVE LIFE. If you see no distinction between the two, well, that’s your deal.

And I stated that I don’t have a love life to demonstrate WHY I don’t think a love life is NECESSARY because I’m living proof that it ISN’T. It’s desirable, yes, but if one doesn’t feel like making the necessary effort to establish one and all its inherent insecurities and doubts and jealousies and so on (in addition to those that are already inherent in the human condition), that’s fine. There are any number of things that I don’t have because I don’t feel like making the necessary effort to acquire them. And that’s fine.

At present, I don’t feel like the positives of a love life outweigh the negatives of a love life (and no, I’m not going to list what I consider to be either). I’m sure I’ll feel differently at some future juncture and make the necessary efforts. And that also is fine.

My basic point is: I genuinely do not believe that sex is a human necessity like food or sleep. Many people, including, evidently, yourself, believe that it is. And that’s fine, too.

I don’t feel the need to tell you that you are in desperate need of change. And I’m not going to ask why you apparently feel the need to tell *me* that I am in desperate need of change. Because why you felt that need is none of my business. Also, I don’t actually care why you felt it.. And even that is fine.

You can deny the essence of human nature standing off alone like that and pretending you are whole — instead of, say, just a hand cut off at the wrist — but people are not fully people in isolation. At best, they’re zoo animals. You’d like it to be more than that, ronald, but let me ask you something.

If you didn’t care about what other people thought about your aloneness, why’d you post here with an audience?

I, uh, I honestly am not sure what this remark is meant to mean.

BTW, your Twain quotation seems to be founded solely upon procreation, which plays little if any role in the love lives of a great many people. If I presently had a love life, I assure you, every available measure would be taken to prevent procreation from becoming a factor therein.

Furthermore, had it been a female commentator who made my initial remark (with you perhaps not knowing that), she would surely NOT have appreciated Twain’s implicit categorization of women as apart from “we” (implicitly, humanity), as a “factor” which exists to improve the lives of MEN, just another manifestation of the mindset that produced the phrase “wine, women, and song” including women on what is considered a list of “vices” that plague HUMANITY (again, as if humanity and women are separate groupings).

So, you know, there’s that, anyway.

I presently have no love life and I’m mistaken for a productive member of society on a regular basis. :-)