I haven't told my family how much pain I'm in

They know I'm shy, and haven't ever had a girlfriend, but I haven't told them about this one at work who I like, and get along with, and yet since we finished up that job, we only speak via email.

I don't imagine they'd be much help.

Friends, I've told a few about it. They are not a lot of help either.

Not with me.

Have never told family. They know I'm shy but don't really understand. My mum even found out about this website once and doesn't understand and she now keeps trying to get me to talk to girls. Like there is a girl who we see with her mother round our local area and she says isn't she attractive and tyies to make me talk to her

Have told one friend, who is either Incel or LS himself. He's never mentioned it again since and is pretty useless anyway. He sent me the Wikipedia link to Love-Shyness and copied the paragraph on Gilmarton's suggestions for surrogate girlfriends as a cure and said 'I've found a cure for you.'

whats with all the one word posts from this guy?

My parents are generally supportive, but they are from the 1950s generation and dated in the 1970s and those were completely different times compared to today. Their advice is well meant but unfortunately useless cliché stuff that I've already implemented like "you need to go out more", "you just need to talk to girls, it ain't that hard" or "put some gel in your hair, makes you look very manly".

My brother is crap. He derides me as nerd, loser and sometimes as gay. Some of my friends, not the ones at uni I might add, also deride me. They say "you, a girlfriend? Haha, that's never going to happen. Don't make me laugh."

Don't kid yourself, those people aren't your friends.

A rogue moderator that went berserk, he replaced his essays with one word to sum them up. A true shame....he posted some interesting stuff.

I suppose so. I don't see them very much nowadays anyway since I left my home town to go to college so it doesn't matter.

But in all honesty, many people on this board get ridiculed whenever the topic of DSR comes up even by their friends. Not beiong successful with women is looked down upon since in western culture getting your first girfriend around age 16, losing your virginity in high school before your 19th birthday and being a stud in general in your 20s are all considered rites of passage. Who fails to make these advancements at the appropriate age (like loosing your virginity (without paying for it) before age 20-22) is automatically seen as having some kind of problem. As word spreads you're soon seen as 'giving off creepy vibes' and you receive a social stigma and become the subject of many below the belt jokes whenever sex comes up.

It's us who are abnormal, not them, unfortunately.

My mom knows too. I think she caught me on this site once. She doesn't say much about it though except, 'The right one will come along....never say never, etc.' She doesn't understand the whole inner working of today's dating scene and the plights of the love-shy and the incel.

I was at this Halloween party a couple weeks ago and she kept telling me to ask this one girl to dance. I couldn't get the courage to ask her singly on my own but when they danced in a group I joined them, at my family's prodding of course. But I could not ask her alone. Nothing wrong with the girl but I feared a negative reaction.