This forum really needs to get over its obsession with sex. Sex is nice and all, but it's not the Holy Grail some people here seem to make out it is. In a very general sense, it's little more than a temporary increase in the dopamine levels in the brain. Smoking crystal meth has a similar effect, but makes you look hideous and causes all your teeth to fall out. (So don't do it.) There's also bad sex, which is just... bad. I've had some, so I know. Actually, I've also been responsible for some, thanks largely to my friend and yours, alcohol. There are more important things in the world than copulating with random strangers. Like eating your vegetables, getting regular exercise and saving the planet from rapacious corporate behemoths who WILL ENSLAVE US ALL!
This has been a public service announcement courtesy of Perfidion -- bringing gratuitously cruel helpings of reality to a public numbed by years of incessant consumerism.
Yes but it's not really the prospect of temporary release that causes this kind of psychological longing and alienation when it comes to sex and relationships. It's a host of other, far more complicated emotional and existential factors.
For instance, the idea of loss, of regret, of knowing that time is passing and that the world is passing by with it. Masturbation will achieve the physical release if that's what one is looking for. Hell, if that's all one wants then masturbation is a lot easier than dealing with another person invading your space, who has different preferences, etc.
But for people who either have not experienced sexual contact, or experience very little of it, the real issue can be a kind of doubt about whether things can ever get better. It's a feeling that regret is just behind one even if it hasn't quite caught up yet. Maybe it never will. Maybe one can go one's whole life without the regret of being different from everyone else. That wouldn't be so bad. But maybe there will be regret. That's the risk of being different from everyone else.
Sometimes it's about power, about competition with other people and our perceived place within the social order... we feel that an active sex-life and a relationship gives someone a stamp of certifiability. In part that may be true. It's about how others perceive us, or how we perceive their perception. We may even want a significant other simply to use against other people... to show them that we "have it all". Knowing that one has made an impression is quite a dose of dopamine in itself.
So much of social life is a subconscious process of making others envious of ourselves... of subtle deprication until one finally succeeds in fending off the attacks from outside.