Sean Penn has never been 'loved'

Sean Penn tells it like it is.

And he's doing that in a first-person piece for Esquire, on sale Dec. 18, as he talks about moviemaking, his son's scary skateboarding accident and how that led to his involvement in Haiti, and about love.

Penn, who was married to Madonna for four years and to Robin Wright for 13 years now, says he doesn't think he was ever really loved.

"There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved by someone. As I look back over my life in romance, I don't feel I've ever had that. I have been the only one that was unaware of the fraud in a few of these circumstances blindly. When you get divorced, all the truths that come out, you sit there and you go, What the (heck) was I doing? What was I doing believing that this person was invested in this way? Which is a fantastically strong humiliation in the best sense. It can make somebody very bitter and very hard and closed off, but I find it does the opposite to me."

Penn says his divorce from Wright had an effect on their children — daughter Dylan, 21, and son Hopper, 19.

Before Hopper turned 18 he was in a skateboard accident that nearly killed him, says Penn. "When he was recovering, seeing the morphine go into him and give him relief created kind of a love affair for me with morphine and that usage of it. It had already been eight months of divorce and (stuff), and raising a kid that's going through the divorce himself, and then this (effing) thing happens ...it was a tough, tough time."

He adds that Hopper is "100% now."

After the accident, Hopper moved in with Wright, leaving Penn with time on his hands.

"I thought, wow, I can actually go on a date. And so I go out and I strike out four nights in a row, drinking at a bar and ending up home, you know, drunk," he says. "And on the fourth day I said, 'I could just go sit in the middle of the bed and watch TV at four in the afternoon, too. I don't have anything. My daughter's ... doing her thing, my son's with his mother.' So I turned on the TV and there was this earthquake in Haiti."

Soon after, he co-founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization.