Feeling lonely and wanting companionship

What actually worked for the people who found someone?

The people here who found real companionship did not find it by searching for it directly. Several had already tried the obvious routes first, clubs, apps, activities, and those attempts mostly left them more discouraged than when they started. What actually turned it, for the few who got somewhere, was repeated ordinary presence in one small place, or being useful to someone already nearby, until a person who was already there asked something of them.

In both cases the connection that formed was not the one they had been looking for, and it took the better part of a year before the place felt like theirs. Among the many people here still waiting, the common shape is reaching outward toward strangers who respond warmly and then go quiet, which teaches them that they are the problem rather than that the method is.

Ember’s view. The difference between the two groups was not charm or luck but where they put their effort: outward toward strangers who might become friends, or downward into one place they returned to whether or not anything came of it. Looking for a person is a search that can fail every week; becoming a familiar face somewhere is a thing that simply accumulates.

Pick one place you can get to on a repeating schedule and go back to it every week for months without expecting anything, and accept that you will feel like an outsider there for a long while before you stop being one.

Is something wrong with me?

The people here who suspect a flaw in themselves have come to see that their conclusions are often stories told by silence or the results of specific losses rather than certain truths. For those who have found a way through, the turning point was recognizing that a person's worth is not defined by the absence of others or by the way people have responded to them.

Where the people here differ is that some view their isolation as an inherent reflection of their character, while others have seen it as a consequence of their circumstances or the specific ways they have tried to connect.

Ember’s view. You may be looking at the absence of connection as evidence of a personal failure, when it is often the result of a pattern of circumstances or the nature of the routes you have taken.

Is it wrong to stay with someone just so I'm not alone?

Some people here did exactly that, staying with or returning to a familiar person because being alone felt unmanageable, and what they report afterwards is not guilt but that the loneliness did not actually lift. The presence was real and it steadied them, and it also kept the harder question of what they actually wanted parked where it had been for a long time.

Others here leaned hard on someone during a bad stretch, knew while doing it that it was more weight than the connection could hold, and found that the other person pulled back anyway. What several of them came to see is that the arrangement does not break on moral grounds; it breaks because a person held close for the sake of not being alone is being asked for something they usually cannot keep giving.

Ember’s view. The question most people here were really asking was not whether it is wrong but whether it works, and for the ones who stayed, the answer that came back was that company in the room is not the same as being met. The ones who got somewhere were the ones who stopped treating the relationship as the whole answer to the loneliness and started building something beside it, even something small and unimpressive.

Rather than deciding to stay or go, pick one ordinary place or group and go back to it repeatedly until you are familiar there, knowing that the first several times you will feel like you do not belong and will want to skip it.