My Truth About Womanizing

I'm sitting on the couch with my girl and a friend of hers.
Her friend is dating a guy with a checkered past.
I've already double avoided the "What's your number" question from my girl and she has accepted my unwillingness to answer in specifics.

We're discussing womanizing and I speak THE ONE truth when I say that "womanizers are hopelessly lonely", like with most overt displays, they are attempts to mask or hide the opposite feeling/reverse psychology as it were.

Earlier in my life, I would maintain something like 2-4 relationships.
What kind of emotional vampire needs 2-4 women to feel whole?
A black hole of a person, is the kind of person who needs to do that.
A person so vapid, empty, shallow, and lonely and self-loathing they need to gather a pack or harem in order to combine enough women into this Transformer like construction to block them from seeing their poor self-image and low self-value....but ultimately....it always returns. The mask always slips. The truth can never be completely ignored nor erased save only for a time.
There is not enough alcohol, porn, pussy, sex, money in the world to fix a broken self-image.

Rather than look at my own core beliefs and values and perspective and utter lack of self-worth, I did the opposite and collected women in an attempt to feel wanted and validated and valued.

There is nothing wrong with wanting sex with various women and this blog is no place for value judgment as long time readers will know.
But there must always be an attempt or rather search for authenticity with oneself: why do I do the things I do? Why do I value the things I do? How to I honestly and frankly see myself?

How is this working for me? Am I moving toward contentment or just chasing the next rush/high/thrill?

Maybe I got desensitized. Maybe I burned it at both ends too long. Maybe I finally hit the threshold of how much pussy variety I want or need.
Maybe it's called growing up, though part of me hopes not really.

These are powerfully deep and penetrating things to consider and it is much easier to exhaust ourselves or numb ourselves with people, hobbies, drugs, alcohol, porn, whatever rather than face unpleasant realities about deep-seated self-image issues which have predominated us since a very, very, very young, perhaps subconscious age.

Ultimately, the need for validation physically, emotionally, intellectually run rampant is a path to ruin and unhappiness. At least, this was and is my truth.

I found my way to the other side through the path of excess but it was not easy, and not everyone makes it through.
Sobriety was a monumental shift for me in challenging my entire life and old ways of thinking, being, acting, and existing and especially thusly interacting with others.

I say this not as a warning or an admonition to not womanize, I say it save only as my personal experience and that only through coming to know myself have I been involved in marginally healthy and ultimately far more rewarding interactions and relationships with women.
My old way lacked true intimacy and comfort and trust.
My old way was based primarily in fear and selfishness and thus, the interactions were always left wanting, half full....never enough.
I was not actualized in the Maslow sense or by any stretch of the meaning of the term.

I was not whole. I was cracked, fractured and broken.
I was disparate and the world was colossal and jagged.
My old life did not work nor was I happy.
It was that simple.

Desperation drove me to seek a different path....and that has made all the difference.