This is the story of one man’s unremitting loneliness. Source: News Limited

“It’s like waking up to the same nightmare every single day,” said the man from Paradise, California.

He puts his celibacy down to a combination of crippling shyness and an abusive childhood.

In a no-holds-barred interview with New York Magazine, he explained what it was like to go through life without intimacy.

“I gave a girl a kiss on the lips when I was a kid, but it wasn’t a make-out or anything,” he said. “That was before adolescence.”

He says he’s tried to stop thinking about sex, because it’s too painful. Source: ThinkStock

When he was younger, he would fantasise about having sex or just holding someone attractive.

Now he tries to block out those thoughts, and doesn’t even masturbate, because it only causes him “misery and suffering”.

His one recollection of seeing a fully naked woman is from his 20s, when he chanced upon some skinny-dippers at a lake.

“I didn’t talk to them because I didn’t think they’d be interested in me,” he said.

He first learned about sex when he found his father’s Playboy magazines under his bed. He looked at some things on the internet too, but said he was put off because it can get “pretty weird”. He has never watched a pornographic film.

Sex used to be on his mind all the time, he admitted, but his sex drive has diminished, and he has made an effort to stop thinking about sex.

“When I was younger, I’d lay there hour after hour burning with passion. It was like your hormones dictated your thoughts and they were stronger than I was.”

The 58-year-old was severely abused by his father as a child. Source: Supplied

He recounted a handful of occasions when he had tried and failed to make it work with someone.

His first and only date, to a Mexican restaurant called La Comida, was a failure. “I could tell she was bored with me,” he said. “I think she only agreed to be nice.”

Another time, he moved to a new town to be nearer a woman he thought was interested in him.

“I might have come on too strong,” he acknowledged. “Women either think I’m going too slow or too fast and I can’t seem to find an in-between.”

When he tries to speak to women, he said, he draws a blank.

He has thought about going to a prostitute, but believes it would just make him feel worse, like trying a fine steak and then consuming only beans and water for the rest of your life.

In childhood, he was regularly woken at 3am by his grinning father, for a beating with a belt. He was confined to his room with nothing to do but read encyclopedias over and over.

Once he was told to take his baby brother out in the rain for crying.

His sense of worthlessness has made him consider suicide. Source: ThinkStock

He dreads repeating his father’s abusive behaviour towards a partner and children.

When he got a little older, he moved in his grandmother, where he stayed until he was 30, struggling to find a job, he thinks because he has the wrong kind of face, or “terminal ugliness”, as he puts it.

He has a problem with one eye, after smashing it on a bedpost when he fell asleep sitting up. He was scared to sleep when his father was around.

A college graduate, he worked briefly as a telemarker and in construction before studying computer science.

Life as a 32-year-old virgin student was hell, he said. He felt invisible, and like a freak.

Scared of rejection or failing to perform, and feeling painfully shy and unattractive, he believed there was little hope.

He would dream of going to sleep and not waking up.

Now things are better. He has friends, but not close ones. He lives in a trailer and is always short of money, but he doesn’t think about ending it.

The hardest part of his life remains, however. And that’s remembering he’s alone.

To read the full story visit New York Magazine.