Clearly it doesn't depend. You just proved my point.

Back in the day (still, but we women are becoming more immune to the propaganda) nearly every woman obsessed over and hated her body. Because she believed she wasn't beautiful unless she looked like the girls/women on the covers of magazines. She was bombardes with these images from a very young age. It warped her peeception of herself.

It never mattered how many men told her she was beautiful. How sincere or not, how compassionate or not, whatever. She never saw the proof or the "evidence" because she so deeply believed the propaganda. That belief was a plague on her life that surfaced time and time and time again.

It wasn't true. But she believes it to be true and so she hung her self worth on needing constant hits of validation and attention from men in order to feel she had earned her place in society.

But she always felt empty because it didn't fix her real problem, the one about her believing a lie. It validation and attention never worked, because even when she got affirmations she believes those to be the lie.

Gareth, you and many men are now where women of my mother's generation were then.

You believe a lie. That your value and worth as a man is solely predicated upon your ability to partner with a woman. It doesn't matter what happens that disprives this notion (there have been several now over the course of me following you the past few years). You keep coming back to the lie time and time and time again. You won't leave it in the dust where it belongs. You've made it the cornerstone of your foundational beliefs. It's your touchstone, your perceptual center.

Nobody can destroy that and rebuild for you. And even if you got married and had a family, you would still return to this idea because you won't give it up, even as it's blowing up your chances for hapliness.

Let it go Gareth. Leave it behind. You don't need it. It's holding you back; it's drowning you.