Lots of people have relationships where they never live together, and see each other a few times a week. They go along like this for years, decades even. I knew one pair that didn't even live in the same country. What I think you want is a relationship but not a live-in partner. Just make sure you are dating people who want the same kind of relationship as you do, basically a permanent long distance relationship.

You might want to see a therapist, this sounds too complicated to ask a message board.

Have you tried dating yourself? Straight up.. when you're in a relationship and you do all these things for other people and your emotionally available and youre whatever blah blah blah.. when you're single do you do those things for yourself? You take yourself out? Do you buy yourself nice things? Do you treat yourself well? Are you interested in things and pursue things as a hobby? Like is there anything you do for yourself?

Sounds like you do want to be with someone; you just have a habit of getting with people who aren't a good match for you.

I've had partners that made me feel like how you describe being with someone. My current partner does not make me feel like that.

Gotta find someone with whom you can be alone with.

Meaning you can be alone with this person. And that you can be alone with yourself in their presence as well. Someone who can respect your alone time, basically.

Otherwise, when single, you gotta learn to take care of yourself as if yourself was someone else. That's how I coped when I was single. Treating myself all the time to little gifts, taking care of myself, even going out with myself by myself like a date night.

"6:30, dinner with myself. I can't cancel that again!" -The Grinch

I've come to the conclusion that I'll rather be in a relationship yearning more more me-time and solitude than be a single feeling alone and lonely. Both come with its pros and cons but to me the the scale tips towards a relationship though in my case the relationship I'm in is quite low maintenance so it's easy to manage.

It sounds to me that you need to learn to love yourself first, so you feel comfortable being single until you find the right person.

They say you have to be able to love yourself before you can love someone else

It sounds like you are a sociable introvert who other-thinks things. I know because I am one.

I've thought about it quite a bit (obviously) and I think the issue arises from the tension between enjoying company but also needing your own space to unwind. That's all compounded by the over-thinking as you chew over what people might think or what is expected of you.

For the last few years I've been free of responsibilities and realised that if I wasn't entertaining myself, no-one else would. For example, I'd avoided going to the cinema on my own (I thought people would judge me for not having company) but all that meant was I wasn't getting to see the films I wanted to watch.

The solution is a form of mindfulness (or running out of fucks to give - however you want to pitch it to yourself to make it work). You worry less about what people think, because, largely, they don't care (the exception might be going to animated children's films on your own - you definitely get some odd looks then). I now have a few WhatsApp groups were I let friends know what I am doing and if they want to tag along that's great. This has the bonus of events getting bogged down in negotiations and actually seems to result in note group events - for my birthday I just booked a bunch of tickets to a stand-up comedy tour and let everyone know. I had takers for them all within a day.

Relationships are trickier but if you can find someone who also likes company and their own space that would be ideal. It is a tricky balance to strike.

I'm a person who needs a lot of alone time. It took me a while to learn how to set boundaries with partners. That balance wasn't easy for me to find. Do you feel like it would benefit you if you got more alone time in your existing relationships?

like I need a relationship to feel complete,

That is normal.

I repeat: that is the normal thing.
Humans are like that. Humans need other humans.

and I fucking hate that.

Please don't hate it. And please don't hate yourself.

I feel like a failure,

Same: Please don't. Don'thate yourself. You are a perfectly normal human being.

So I end up in another relationship, and after two years I can't stand it anymore, and the cycle repeats.

I suspect some mistakes somewhere in that cycle. Humans make mistakes. All humans do. Maybe forgiving helps.

How can you be alone and not feel lonely?

This seems like the key question. Relationships or not might not actually matter here.

What does it mean to you to feel lonely? What kind of lonely is that?

You need someone who is low maintenance like yourself. Someone who doesn't need constant validation from you to feel complete. Or a friend with benefits. Both exist but can be tricky to find.

Sounds like you could benefit from therapy

Look into "avoidant attachment styles". (And, really, attachment styles in general.)

Perhaps even look into avoidant personality disorder and/or schizoid personality disorder. (I'm not diagnosing you or anything, but what you're talking about is something I've heard frequently in relation to schizoid personality disorder. I'm not quite as familiar with avoidant personality disorder, but it's sometimes described as "a lesser kind of schizoid personality disorder." Also, don't confuse "schizoid" and "schizophrenia." They're very different things.)

This isn't the answer you asked for, but perhaps a relationship with someone who likes their personal space as much as you do would work out. It might not be the most "traditional" sort of relationship you could find, but it might work out well.

But more to your question, the best answer that I can come up with is therapy.

Relationships are about giving. It's a cliche, but the more you put into a relationship, the more you're going to get out of it. And I don't mean this in the transactional sense. I don't mean you do something nice for your partner then they do something nice for you in return. It's more like: the more you value the person, the more you will feel fulfilled when you do loving things for them. It's easier to understand when you're doing it. This didn't mean you sacrifice all of your own wants and needs for the other person. However, a "me first" mindset is looking at a loving relationship backwards. You should want to make the other person happy, they should be a big priority in your life. A person is not a product that we buy and then hope we like owning it.

I learned these things the hard way. 35 years later and I still have deep regrets.

I know several people like this, it's normal IMO to need social connection, I don't think you are broken or anything, modern life is hard in a way and if you are a man, it can be even harder because in general men don't have as many other ways to connect with people so rely more on their romantic partners to provide it. It's not natural , historically speaking, to be alone as much as we can today. But yes kind of shitty to use people because you can't be alone so I understand wanting to change it.

If I was being snarky, I'd say have kids because oh my God does that teach you to value solitude. We moved to a new house once and I was alone in the house one day and realized I'd not been alone in that house before, ever, and it had been over a year. The only time alone I'd had for a year was in the car or on a walk.

Therapy is probably the best answer but mindfulness, meditation might help. Sit with your thoughts until you figure out what is happening. When it gets uncomfortable and boring, abide. Listen to the world, focus on your breath, let the thoughts come.

And don't discount the value of weak social connections, talking to people at work, going to the same place to get coffee or a drink every day, go physically to the library for books, go shopping at little places with real cashiers. All that casual interaction is really good for you, not just deep friendships and lovers but regular shallow contacts too. Oh, and you'll never have no responsibility, I think you know that, but people do vary in how high maintenance they are, a good match should make you feel you have less responsibility because there are two of you to handle it.

ETA: the "two years" thing made me laugh. That was my husband after he divorced and before we met - he had a string of two years relationships. I think that's when infatuation fades and you see what is underneath it. So I told him no to living together until we'd been together two years, then he wanted to get married I told him two years before he could ask me that too.

Make a list of all the things about relationships that annoy you. Put the list somewhere you can find it. Whenever you feel alone read the list.

If this doesn't work you actually value relationships enough if its probably worth pursuing one.

Can you explain a bit more about why you feel it is easier to learn how to enjoy being alone than learn to enjoy being in a relationship?

I defintely struggled with giving up my independence, and still find it hard to be responsible for/to another person. But I finally ended up in a relationship with someone who was also independent and we were in a very casual relationship for five years before we started to admit that we were a couple and another few years before we realised how much we now loved each other. I guess all I'm saying is relationships don't need to be one way. I have a friend who only dates people who live in other cities / countries, because that way they only see each other occasionally and at pre-arranged times, and that works for them.

But if you really feel you are happier on your own and it's just internalised social pressure that makes you want a relationship then you could try developing "singleton pride". Part of the reason gay people historically got into "gay pride" was to help the overcome their own internalised homophobia, because even if you don't agree with something you still absorb it in your upbringing and it can be hard to get past it.

So, you could try directly telling people that you're single for life and that your happy with that choice. If you're worried that society will think you're a failure for not having a relationship then confront that fear immediately and get it out the way. You'll realise that most people don't care, some people will actually be on your side, and the people who do actually think worse of you are wrong so you don't need to care about their opinions. But if you're not confident enough in your decision to proudly stand behind it, then of course doubts will sink in and you'll repeat the loop again.

That's your unconscious-mind playing games with your life, same as mine does with mine.

It's essentially a variant of "addiction", aka Kahneman1 mind ( imprint-reaction mind ) trying to make your life obey its imprint-reaction programming.

Read both Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow", in order to understand the pseudo-reasoning that Kahneman1 mind ( he calls it System-1, but that presumes his work's context, which normal-discussions don't presume ), and how its mission is undermining correct-reasoning ( Kahneman2 mind ).

AND read Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change", about our unconscious-mind's mechanism that fights off growing-up, & how to intelligently counter its sabotaging of our lives.

It's essentially a kind of "demagnitization" that you need to do, of your unconscious, but if you don't systematically use real leverage, you're not going to win.

Every time I see an image of a cute, intelligent, driven, wonderfully diffierent-from-me woman, I'm wanting to be wrapping our lives together, but..

.. relationship depends on having common core-identity.

Some people have such alien/different core-identity, due to life-experience, that that potential got broken.

You can't make an intact window out of random shards of broken glass, right?

They're separate, and they don't become unitary, the way molten glass does, just because you put them adjacent to each-other, right?

Some people have been too changed by experience, to be able to value what normal-identity values.

My life-mission is to remove my Soul/Continuum/CellOfGod/ChildOfAllgod/ParticleOfBrahmanFieldOfOriginalAwareness from Universe-containment/entrapment, so that no more of this reincarnation abuse/bullshit contains future-lives that it has.

Aversion-therapy was successful, in other words..

How could any woman want what I want?

That's nonsensical.

You can't have the savage intensity of aversion to "remaining in world, living in relationships, gently earning human meaning" that I have, & somehow be "in" relationship with woman who is wired into needing that kind of meaning..

Not only is it idiocy, it's abuse ( it would be abuse for me to be in-relationship with anyone, given my ripping-Soul-from-endless-stream-of-Universes NEED in me, that my core is ).

So, while your reason is different from mine, we're both fighting-against the "magnetization" of our unconscious-minds & our Kahneman1 programmed imprint-reaction/instinct minds.

1. understanding { the books, one's own unconscious, experience-induced-understanding of studying one's unconscious, as it sabotages one's life, in order to protect its dominion over our Eternity, through hobbling our strategy/intent }

2. finding the deliberate & strategic means of communicating with our unconscious, using techniques given in those books

3. keep earning the demagnitizing of our unconscious-minds, our Kahneman1 minds, until each of us wins ( any addiction, it's the same rules, whether addiction-to-relationship, or addiction-to-dysfunction, or addiction-to-chemical, or addiction-to-class-status, or addiction-to-money, ANY addiction is using these mechanisms, so the method for dismantling them is, strategically, the same )

4. endure the life-scale process ( no point in pretending that one's unconscious-mind can be force-rewired in mere-months: it took decades for our unconscious to form, and it absorbed many-decades of culturally-accumulated inertia in the early years, it's going to be a slog, and only enduring-persisting can work, and the life-accomplishing can be worth it, whatever it is that one is working on earning ).

and that's it.

No "magic bullet", no "magic pill", just competenly-demagnitizing one's unconscious-ignorance from one's life, and making one's life hold to a non-default "river" path.

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