u/Classic_Caregiver816

Hi everyone. I'm an 18 old male and i have so much to tell about my chronic loneliness and its effects on my life that it feels like it is all i have ever had and will have. But right now the thing bothering me the most is how i have made my only beloved friend extremely uncomfortable by how touch starved i am, and how i'm genuinely just not able to read the room because i just don't see people that often. I don't fucking know i feel like such a fucking creep

We met online. I have never had genuine friends irl that would not abuse me in one way or another. No one has been kind or merciful to me irl. I had a lot of online friends when i was 16-17, but i was never able to keep contact with them due to how depressed i am. I tried to fill my need for connection by endlessly texting online but oh my god how tired i am of this. It pains me so much to just sit in my room once again and just text and text and text and sit in front of my monitor and not actually do anything, because me and the person i call my "online friend" could've had so much if we were actually together. So i lost all of my friends online because of how painful the realisation was. Except for one friend i know for a year already.

In the late spring i could not continue trying living a normal life anymore. Having a job and shit. Going there every day with literally NO ONE to even say "Hi" to me, and then coming back into my shitty-ass moldy-ass room where no one is waiting for me. It felt like i was a fucking slave. The loneliness was genuinely becoming unbearable to live with. So i decided to leave everything behind and leave my country because my only true friend lives in a different one.

I have hung out with him every day for 10 days that i was in his city. It was such a relief to finally feel alive after all those years. I held my tears every time i saw him because of just how happy i was, and then cried bitter tears on the way to my hostel every evening we left each other. It was beautiful. But i'm so touch starved that i just lost my mind when i finally met someone who was not completely repulsed by me. And i finally felt true feelings for somebody. And those feelings of friendship were so strong that i've confused them with romantic ones. Which led me to holding his hands a little bit too long and rubbing my head against his a bit too often and hugging his a bit too strong and then giving obvious hints that i like him a bit too much too. Which after all was so wrong because now i realized that i only like him as a friend, and it's just my loneliness messing with my mind. Now that i have left his city he texted me and said that my actions scared him and he was uncomfortable every time i was doing it. He was just too scared to tell me right in the moment. And he couldn't sleep afterwards because of how creeped out he was. Despite saying that he understands why i did so, i feel he became much more colder to me and i feel like he's disgusted by my actions. Which is reasonable. But oh my god. I feel so bad. I never wanted to make him so uncomfortable. I'm genuinely not okay and i think i never will. I just hope that we will stay good friends he's literally all i have left.