I'm 56 and I don't think I've ever really felt wanted
I was lying in bed tonight, and it occurred to me that at 56 years old, I don't think I've ever really felt wanted.
Not needed. Not useful. Not appreciated.
Wanted.
I was bullied in school. Bullied by my older brother.
Just as we were starting to get to know each other as adults, he killed himself at 20.
After that, my parents divorced. Even before then, though, I never felt like I belonged in that family. My brother was reckless, angry, and abusive. He seemed to consume all the oxygen in the room and all the energy in the house. The rest of us just reacted to whatever storm he brought with him.
I disappeared into school. Into studying. Into achievement.
Recognition was easier to understand than affection.
Dating never came easily. Few people seemed interested, and if they were, I was usually too insecure or oblivious to see it. I was never the person someone couldn't wait to choose. Never the obvious choice. Never the first choice.
I met my first girlfriend at university and fell hard.
She left a few years later after mostly long distance pain. Looking back, intimacy with her always felt difficult. I don't know if she was ever truly that into me. She wanted to stay friends, and I agreed. I stayed friends with her for many years finally cutting it off abruptly as she used me as a sounding board for her troubles with the one she left me for. ffs i’m an idiot for that - that wasn't good for me.
After my second university degree, I met someone else and we got married. She had been married before.
Things were difficult early on. I caught her talking to other men online. It broke something in me.
Intimacy mostly disappeared after that. It returned from time to time, just enough for us to have children, but never in a way that felt close or connected.
Over the years we've talked about it endlessly. At least, that's how it felt from my side. She would snap shut like an oyster, sealing whatever was underneath from view. Eventually I stopped believing there was a conversation to be had. Nothing ever really changed.
I know I have a role in all of this. I don't think life simply singled me out for special punishment.
Maybe it's my introversion. Maybe it's insecurity. Maybe it's a lack of social confidence. Maybe I've never quite understood other people, or known how to make myself understood.
I honestly don't know.
What I do know is that when I look back across the decades, there is a pattern that is impossible for me not to see.
I have spent most of my life feeling adjacent to love rather than inside it.
Close enough to touch it.
Close enough to glimpse it.
But never quite the person someone looked at with deep affection and thought, that's the one. That's who I choose.
And that's the part that hurts.
Not that life was hard. Most lives are hard in one way or another.
It's realizing that after all these years, after all the effort, after all the trying, there is a quiet possibility that this is simply not a thing I will ever experience.
If you've never stood in this place, this probably sounds pathetic.
Maybe it is.
But there is a particular loneliness in feeling unseen for so long that eventually you stop expecting anyone to look.
A particular sadness in wondering whether the common thread through every chapter of your life is simply you.
And tonight, lying in bed at 56, that thought landed a little heavier than usual.