Long story short, I was abused and neglected as a kid, I was bullied as a kid in school often, I grew up in a town with a population hovering around 500 and there wasn't very many people I could relate to growing up nor hardly any positive role models, being social never came easy for me, so I have been desperately lonely my entire life. This has made me extremely clingy/needy....at least I've been told this in the past, but to me, it seems normal in my own mind to want to be around and be touched by someone you really like all the time, like it hurts for me being away from people I'm in a relationship with or people I feel really close to.

For a long time, I couldn't be alone, like I was serial dating and jumping into relationships for the sake of not being alone for years, I didn't realize what I was doing at the time because I was naive and young/inexperienced at life. Now I'm at a point where I feel like I can be alone, like I don't NEED to be in a relationship constantly and I am actually happy with just myself, so much so that I took a 7 year hiatus from dating altogether so I could figure my own shit out. The problem still remains though, even when in a relationship (I broke my hiatus 2 months ago), i still feel like 1 person could never be enough for me. I am a black hole of affection, like my sex drive is always higher than anyone I date, I always touch and cuddle my partners more than they ever do me, I always want to spend time with my partners more than they want to spend with me, even if it's doing nothing together, I just want to be around them 24/7. And like that whole NRE thing? that never wears off for me, never in my entire dating history has NRE ever worn off for me, I'll be hyped up 10 years later in a relationship if everything is going well as I was at the beginning....possibly even more so because the longer I'm in a relationship, the closer I feel to a partner. It just feels like I could never attempt monogamy again because I'd be miserable because nobody can match my relationship energy, it's like having a luscious cake right in front of you and you can only eat a sprinkle sized bite of it at a time even though you are starving...and part of me thinks that I've just never met the right person yet to be monogamous with, and part of me thinks that this is how people actually are in relationships and I'm the weird one for wanting to exchange so much affection. It seems unfair to place this much expectation on a single partner, and so non-monogamy it is because I can't get my needs met otherwise.

I just want to know I'm not alone in this is all, like am I actually clingy? Or has this been other people's experience too?