I'm a 26 year old virgin, and right now, it completely dominates my thoughts.

End of last year I realised I've never actuvely tried to get with any girls, and even rejected quite a few attractive ones who tried with me during the past years.

The problem is, after an initially good start (got my first makeout the second time I went out), I started to read, and read, and read - on here, in books ("Models" for example), everywhere throughout the internet. That lead to realising just who much I'm behind everyone else, how incapable I'm of doing something that is considered nothig special by most, how much everyone else is getting laid.

Right now, I'm pretty depressed about it - I just feel like a pathetic little boy. It makes me view the whole process of interacting with women as a painful drudgery resulting in constant degradation as I watch actual men sweep them off their feet and have to fumble and stumble around myself.

A major thing was hitting my 26th birthday - I just feel too old to make any mistakes, like I need to get laid right now, immediately and not a second later if I want to have any chance of catching up and sleeping with lots of girls before I'm too old. Like the best I can hope for if I wait too long is sleeping with a tiny handful of girls and then being locked away in a commited relationship, so what's the point of even starting? I'll always be nothing compared to the guys who got an early start anyways.

I realise on an objective level that these are just tremendously stupid rationalisations that keep me from taking action, and even negatively affect other areas of my life. I become unable to have fun, my originally fairly well developed social skills are suffering and worst of all, I try to enforce an outcome when talking to girls which makes me horribly awkward around them which in turn worsens my anxieties and even creates some I didn't have or successfully eliminated before. It also erodes my discipline with working out and not watching porn.

How do I get out of this? Please help me - I'm already seeing a psychiatrist, and it has helped, but maybe you guys can further shed some light on it? Also, if some people are here who where my age or older and managed to become truly successful with girls, I'd really like to hear your stories.

The worst thing is, I think that if I just kept my initial optimism and having fun, I'd have gotten laid by now with the amount of at least initially interested girls I met the past months. And if not, I'd at least have learned some stuff and had fun. But feeling like this - will not only lead me nowhere, but probably even throw me into a deeper hole to boot.