ita, I think there is no comparing you and me. You're devastatingly beautiful, and clever, and sexy as all get out. Plus all the stuff in the book, and things I didn't write.

You have a horrible disability that left you unable to be the other half of someone due to horrible, mind-bending pain eating at your life.

My loneliness is no about choice, it's about me, being difficult to look at, and more often than not, worthless. There's no comparative analysis to be had.

it's about me, being difficult to look at, and more often than not, worthless.

The crux of this issue is that this is how YOU feel about you. Not how others perceive you. I know you're working through this and it's difficult. I've gone through the same thing--the introspection was the most painful thing in my life. I have a twin sister who is petite (seriously, 110 lbs), blonde, a successful corporate lawyer and married and STILL isn't 100% happy. Her image of herself is totally skewed and I do my best to help reinforce her positive traits on a nearly daily basis. In the end, she's going to have to find it within herself because no amount of me telling her is going to change how she sees herself.

You have a horrible disability that left you unable to be the other half of someone due to horrible, mind-bending pain eating at your life.

I may have a horrible disability now. The other twenty years of my adult life? Why do I have three months of relationship in all of that? What can you blame that on, that you can't blame your singleness on too?

Take it from someone who's had to "endure" looking at you. You know what's much more difficult? Listening to you talk about how ugly and worthless you are.

Allyson, you're overweight by the standards of Western shallowness. But you are not ugly. They are not the same thing.

I'll stop talking about it.

I really think there is some gene that makes people like us single. Like some kind of weird pheromone that gets generated, thats like boy/girl repellent.

This is why I advocate meeting people in chat rooms dedicated to one's favorite tv shows. It overcomes the weirdness.

And Brenda, I'm looking forward to meeting you, too. Sure hope we don't end up doing that too-shy-to-talk-to-anyone thing.

I don't want you to stop talking about it. I want to shake you until you start crying and understand what I'm trying to say.

Besides, fuckit. Worthless people get into relationships too. It's nothing to do with who deserves what. It just is. Serial killers find love. Adolf Hitler could find women who wanted to get into his pants. That doesn't make us worse than him. Or uglier than Carrot Top, or whoever.

It just makes life nothing like fair.

Honestly--what do you think I've done to deserve being single all this time. You can be honest with me here in public. I don't mind.

It just hurts to hear you say you're worthless, Allyson. Because you're most definitely not that. Self-deprecating, I can take. Self-loathing, not so much.

I am sarameg re: singlehood.

I am brenda re: meeting WindSparrow and Daniel.

I am P-C re: VictorC choosing yes to goatee.

I just finished re-watching the finale of DS9 and can I just say that when Kira and Odo say goodbye, it makes me cry every damn time. One of the best relationships in tv history, IMO.

Allyson, your description of yourself is breathtakingly not the way other people see you. I know I can't convince you. After all, my response to you bright, funny, attractive and articulate people believing that you are essentially unlovable and worthless is to think, "Boy, they think they're unattractive. I am hundreds of times more unattractive than they are."

Oh Allyson, I so wish you could see yourself as the rest of us do. It always amazes me that someone can be so striking and lovely and not know it. I've said it many times so I won't go on here, instead I want to reinforce this:

Besides, fuckit. Worthless people get into relationships too. It's nothing to do with who deserves what. It just is.

It's too friggin' true. There's no rhyme or reason to who is in a relationship and who is single. Don't ever take it as a judgment on yourself. ita's right, it just is.