I’m A Veteran And The Reality That I’m Better At Killing People Than Interacting With Women Is Slowly Killing Me

I don’t even know why I’m writing this, but here it goes. I am the most awkward person in the world with women. What the Dos Equis guy is too beer, I am to not getting laid. I have absolutely no idea why I am this way, or how to get better—not just so I can get laid, but so I can improve my social interactions with women in general.

I’m 26, and I have only been in two relationships in my entire life. The longest lasted five months, and it ended when my girlfriend told me she’d been cheating on me since the beginning anyway. For me, approaching a woman I like in a social setting is the absolute most stressful thing I can do—more stressful than killing someone. And even if I somehow do mange to get a girl to start a relationship with me, I act weird, clingy, jealous, and overly nice. I’m a total pushover.

In the Marines, I literally killed people for a living, and I was very good at it. I enjoyed the simplicity and ruthlessness of combat. I was not at all what you would consider a “nice guy.” Mentally, I had no problem being a killing machine. But when I try talking to a woman, I freeze, panic, blush, shake, and stutter. Girls usually laugh at me, and I go home feeling like I’m going to cry for a week straight. Then I don’t go out again for a month at least. Each time, it seems to get worse, not better. I have no confidence. Getting shot down again and again is so painful.

To give you some context about my history with women, I lost my virginity to a prostitute one and a half weeks before I went on my first deployment to Iraq. I was 18. I was 22 when I dated for the first time. My father died when I was 10, and my mother drank the rest of her life away. She put me in an all male Catholic “reformatory,” where I stayed until 17, when I joined the marines. I saw almost no females throughout my enlistment. I was in the infantry, where females are not allowed. So at 21 I got out of the Marines and tried going to college. Keep in mind that from the time I was 10 until 21, I had about zero contact with women.

So from 21 years until now, at 26, I have been adrift, chasing horrible women who treat me like shit. For the last three years, I pursued a girl who gave me herpes, sent me to jail, and said that I should get a lobotomy. I thought we were in love, so I put up with a lot. And then one night she got drunk and told me the truth about how she felt. She said that I was too nice—that it’s sexy to be bossed around by a man and since I never did that, I was lame. She also said that I was bad in bed because I was too gentle. She left me after telling me she’d been unfaithful the whole time and that she deserved better. When she left, it shattered everything I thought I knew about being a man and treating a woman right. Mind you, I learned most of what I know about women from watching Disney movies. I thought I was supposed to be nice, never hit a girl, open doors, pay for everything, consider her first always, be faithful, loyal, and loving. If I was all of those things, I thought I could get the girl of my dreams.

I could blame my horrible, abusive, isolating childhood, or my combat experience in Iraq, but in all honesty I have no fucking idea why I am the way I am with women. It’s been this way as long as I can remember, and as I get older, my weirdness and awkwardness seem to grow compared to my peers.

Am I just doomed to be alone? To be treated like a punching bag? How, if possible, can a man like me gain self-confidence with women? I don’t even know why I wrote this, but it’s Saturday night and I’m alone in my apartment.