Love and affection. As someone who’s parents have a bunch of psychological problems, paired with growing up poor as an immigrant. I never in my life have experienced either love or any sort affection for either family nor strangers. For context my mother is a prefect example of a sociopath and I’m 80% sure my dad is autistic. Neither of those conditions exactly scream empathy. I never heard the words ‘I love you’ spoken with the eyes, or any sort of meaning behind them. Listening to daily (and I’m not exaggerating here) screaming matches for 30 years has given me the impression that those words don’t really mean anything to them anyway. Never having had a safe place to develop those feelings and given that I’m not exactly easy on the eyes means that I have somehow managed to become full grown, mentally stable adult with empathy, and a yearning for affection and acceptance without a single fibre of love in my body. Never have I had an interaction other than quid pro quos, “I want something from you, you want something from me.” never “I want you, you want me.” I literally can’t imagine what it’s like waking up next to somebody, feeling emotionally safe or having somebody genuinely wanting to spend time with you. I know that there are currently literally billions of people for whom this the most normal thing in the world but for me that is borderline incomprehensible. I would want to wish that kind of lonelines on my worst enemy.

I’m a dude BTW.