Ask Dr. Nerdlove

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I could really use some smart advice right now! For most of my life, I’ve only been with one man. He’s good-looking, has a great job, my friends and parents like him, and most importantly, he genuinely loves and cares for me. I never questioned being together but quite randomly after many years, I started wondering if there was more to life. I started getting antsy and wondering what dating other men would be like, and I also really wanted to explore kinkier sex like BDSM and toys (to which he is strongly disinclined). So I left… in search of meeting new people who are more sexually open-minded and simultaneously getting some brand new dating experiences under my belt. So far, I’m meeting many nice gentlemen and enjoying the tension flirting a lot, along with exploring this sort of caged sexual energy (this I’m really enjoying). 

However, the issue is, it’s difficult not to draw a comparison back to my ex each time. Either I feel lukewarm about these guys, or if I really start to like someone I feel like they would never love me back the way my ex did. I’m scared I made a huge mistake, and that I shouldn’t have tossed years of love and loyalty over monotony and vanilla sex. I think about how we could build a very steady, loving, PG-13 life together which might be better for me than going out in search of adventure and wilding out.

Do you have any advice for me? I’m really not sure what’s the right thing to do.

Pterrified Pterodactyl

DEAR PTERRIFIED PTERODACTYL: Sexual satisfaction and sexual compatibility are incredibly important to a relationship’s success, PP, and from the sounds of things you weren’t enjoying either. As much as someone may be perfect in every which way but one, that one can very easily be the thing that sinks a relationship. And when that one thing is sex, you can expect a lot of cultural push-back. We live in a culture that teaches us that sex is unimportant until it suddenly is… like when someone who is in a relationship is realizing that his or her sexual needs aren’t being met and wants to break up because of it.

You’re kinky and wanted to explore that side of you, and your ex didn’t. If you weren’t able to come up with some sort of compromise, then your relationship was going to explode on it’s own at some point. Either you would’ve had an affair – which, let’s be honest, would be the emotional equivalent of slamming your hand down on the Relationship Self-Destruct Button – or you would’ve broken up anyway. I hate to dip into Don Henly songs, but sometimes love just ain’t enough.

(As a total aside: I have a pet-peeve of calling non-kinky sex vanilla. The connotation that standard sex is boring and lesser than kink, which is pretty insulting to people who aren’t kinky. Calling kinksters deviant or freaks isn’t cool; neither is inherently insulting non-kinksters. I’d love to see a new term that isn’t inherently divisive or insulting.)

Now I think you have two problems here. The first is that you’ve bought into the sex-negative narrative that sex is less important than just about every other aspect of a relationship. As a result, you’re beating yourself up for having ended a relationship for sex – as though this is some minor thing, that your need for sexual fulfillment is unimportant and you’re selfish for wanting it. As though you’re a bad person for being kinky and you’re doing something damaging to yourself As though your sexuality isn’t an important part of your life and identity, but something you can just, I dunno, wish into the damn cornfield where you’ll never have to deal with it again and enjoy basic missionary sex for the rest of your life like a good little wife.

Bulls

t.

That’s not how sexuality works. If you weren’t able to find some sort of compromise with your partner… well, yeah, you were basically going to be in a relationship with a loving supporting guy where you were absolutely miserable. How, exactly, is this better for you?

The other problem is that you’ve given yourself a false dichotomy, where you can have either a steady, loving relationship or crazy kinky sex. Being in a loving relationship doesn’t mean that it’s strictly boring, PG-13 sex no does having crazy sexy adventures and experimentation means forgoing a significant other. There’s nothing stopping you from being super-kinky adventuress within a monogamous relationship. You can be in a steady and loving relationship that has a compromise allowing you to get your needs met elsewhere – taking part in the BDSM community, for example – if your partner isn’t up for it. You can be in a loving and supportive open relationship, a polyamorous one… honestly, the sky is the limit. You and your partner (or partners) are allowed to make the rules for how your relationship works.

Here’s what’s going on: you’re becoming your authentic self. You’ve found a side to yourself that you never knew was there but had been there all that time. You now know who you are and what you need far better and more intimately than you did before. Let go of the guilt that’s telling you you’re a bad person for wanting the sex you want; that’s just the voice of your jerk-brain messing with you, the sound of a culture that insists that non-standard sex is bad and women aren’t allowed to own their own sexuality. Find yourself a partner (or partners) who is loving and wonderful but is also sexually compatible with you whether he’s indulging your kinks or lets you fulfill the ones he can’t meet elsewhere.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  My best friend who is having problems with his relationship. I’ve been trying to give him advice the best I could but I’m lost here so I thought you could help.

Some back story: my friend, let’s call him, Bruno, has been seeing this one woman for a while now. Based on what he’s told me the relationship been going okay. That is until now. The relationship has been causing a strain on him. The girlfriend hasn’t been respecting his feeling about certain things, she’s been sending nearly nude, teasing pictures of herself to her ex-boyfriend ,and even admitted to my friend Bruno that she loves both him and her ex.

Basically, she’s been exhibiting behavior that has caused my friend not to trust her and fear that she may be cheating on him with her ex (she assures him she’s not). This has caused Bruno to feel, anxious, stressed, and he could not sleep for a while because of this.

What’s your take on the situation? What should he do? He knows he has to break up with her but he loves her too much. If you happen to read this thank you and keep on helping make nerds sexy.

Friend In Need

DEAR FRIEND IN NEED: I’m not entirely sure why you’re writing to me about this. The answer is glaringly obvious: your friend Bruno needs to dump his girlfriend so hard that her great grandparents feel it.

There’s really no question; everything about the way he describes her behavior is telling him that she doesn’t care about him, doesn’t respect him and doesn’t care about the damage she’s doing to somebody she supposedly loves. Even if she’s not actually sleeping with her ex, she’s still causing Bruno some serious distress by continuing to flirt and send sexy pictures to him; I might not call this cheating per se, but I would call it supremely awful behavior.

The thing is though: Bruno seems unwilling to actually do something about it. He knows she’s acting like this, but either he’s not said anything to her – which just means it’s going to continue – or he HAS confronted her and absolutely nothing has changed, which means that she doesn’t care. 

Either way, Bruno’s showing that he isn’t willing to enforce his boundaries; as a result, he’s stuck in a relationship with an incredibly toxic person who is just riding roughshod over his heart. And one major part of enforcing boundaries is being unwilling to put up with that treatment. If she’s not going to change her behavior – and it sounds like she isn’t going to – then the best thing he can do is refuse to be part of it and take off like all of Hell and half of Hoboken is after him.

OK, so he says he loves her. Fine. Then Bruno has to ask himself why he loves someone who is treating him like garbage. To quote a wise man: “I may love you, yeah, but I love me more.”

It’s past time for your buddy to get out and learn to establish some firm boundaries or he’s going to find himself right back in the same situation with somebody else.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I would like to get some advice on the following topic: pornography in a relationship.

I’ve been in a 1 year relationship, I told him I have seen porn plenty of times before, but I don’t agree with the use of porn in a monogamous relationship. I live with him and I’m always available to take care of his sexual needs. I never say no to sex or any fantasies he might want to try. I told him about my view on porn in a relationship and he said he would stop. I later found it he hadn’t.

Of course, he’d lied and I freaked out. He said he did not realize it was that big of a deal and then assured me he actually wouldn’t watch it again. As a result, I have a hard time believing him. I still think he’ll do it once in a while if I’m not around. I’m not sure where to go from here, if I can let go of this issue, if there is a guy out there who would actually stop watching porn, or if I have to give up my ideals because of the way this society is set.

No Porn Please

DEAR NO PORN PLEASE: I feel that in the spirit of honesty, I need to preface this with the fact that I’m very unabashedly pro-porn. So with that in mind:

It wasn’t cool of him to lie about quitting watching porn. And you’re right, NPP: he’s probably going to watch porn when you’re not around. He’ll just be better at covering his tracks next time and making sure you’re not in the house when he does. 

But here’s the question I have for you: are you willing to pretend to believe him when he pretends that he doesn’t watch porn? Because quite frankly, he’s not going to stop any time soon, if at all. And, to be perfectly blunt, you’re going to have a hard time finding someone who DOESN’T watch porn.

Porn consumption is almost universal amongst men; it’s not completely accurate to say that there are two types of men – those who watch porn and liars — but it’s pretty damn close.

(The number of men who don’t is so small that they’re statistically insignificant.)

And porn has always been with us – as soon as we developed abstract reasoning and could interpret lines as humans, somebody was drawing people banging. Those nudes in art museums weren’t just artistic appreciations of the human form; most of them were scandalous at the time. Some, such as Manet’s Olympia caused major uproars within the public.

Now everyone has their right to have their opinions and feelings about porn. You’re well within your rights to dislike it and prefer to date men who (allegedly) don’t watch porn. I’m curious, however, as to what your objections are. The way you phrase your objections – that you don’t agree with it’s use in a monogamous relationship – makes me wonder if that you see it as being tantamount to infidelity or somehow affecting his attraction to you.

Here’s the cold hard truth about men and porn: while there’re some dudes who’re compulsive about porn and have issues with human intimacy, for most men porn is fantasy fodder. It’s something that gets as aroused and helps us get off. Most of the time, we stop thinking about it the minute we orgasm; it’s wham, bam, thank-you-glans and we’re back to business as usual.

The fact that you’re available to him at will doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s not going to want to just masturbate to something on PornHub. Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a comment about you or how he feels about you and everything to do with men’s relationship with getting off. Masturbation isn’t (always) a barely-sufficient substitute for sex. Most of the time, we just want a no-fuss, no-muss orgasm, as quickly as possible without any preamble or post-petite-mort shenanigans. Porn helps make it quicker; we very, very rarely watch porn for the plot after all.

(Axel Braun’s parodies are the exception… dude puts a shocking amount of effort into them.)

The other thing is that people – men and women alike – like variety and novelty when it comes to sex and sexual partners; the Coolidge effect is a real thing, after all. For a lot of people, porn is a quick and easy to get that thrill of the new – the fantasy of sleeping with somebody else without actually going out and actually committing adultery. And if the idea that your boyfriend is attracted to other people is what bothers you… well, unfortunately your only two choices are to get over it or pretend to not know. Being in a monogamous relationship means that you’re choosing to not have sex with other people; it doesn’t mean that you don’t WANT to. That attraction doesn’t have anything to do with the strength of your relationship or how much you care for one another, it’s just how humans are wired. The fact that you both choose to not ACT on that attraction is the critical part. Otherwise you may as well be angry that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

I’ll be the first to admit: porn can be insanely problematic. It can be incredibly exploitive and objectifying of women, it reinforces awful gender stereotypes, and the less said about the treatment of people of color the better. It also gives many younger men completely absurd and unrealistic ideas about sex in general. But that doesn’t mean that your boyfriend’s porn-viewing is necessarily a problem. Unless he’s prioritizing porn and masturbation over you and neglecting you for Gianna Michaels, then he’s one of the 99.999% of men who just like to get off watching other people screw on occasion.

So what do you do about all of this? Well, it all depends. How much is the likelihood that your boyfriend is almost certainly lying about not watching porn going to bother you? Are you willing to turn a blind eye, to be willfully ignorant about his porn habit as long as he’s discreet and it doesn’t affect his sexual life with you? Because this is going to be the price of entry to the relationship with him. If it’s not a price you’re willing to pay then fair do’s… but you have to realize that your next boyfriend and the ones after him will likely also be watching porn and lying about it. They’ll just be better at hiding it.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  First, just want to say I’ve been a fan for years, and I’ve applied some of your lessons with great success in my social life. You’re awesome and your success is an inspiration to all of us nerdlings.

Here’s my problem. My one of my best friends, A, has moved back to town. We were really close in high school, even went to senior prom together but at that point there were no romantic feelings, just friendship.

We drifted apart in college a bit but every time we ran into each other we still had lots of personal chemistry. As you can probably guess where this is going, I fell for her during our time apart. Doesn’t exactly help that she’s gorgeous, does it? I eventually started to resent her some, thinking I’d somehow been replaced by her new friends. I complained about how selfish she was to all my new friends (cough hypocrisy cough) and built a narrative in my head about what a rotten person she was.

Strangely, every time that we reconnected, the cycle was knocked back to square one: best of friends, not talk for a while, longing, bitterness, gradual apathy. I was proud of myself because last year I thought I had really gotten past my dumb feelings and for the most part I still think I have. She’s bi and in a pretty strong relationship with a good girl.

Here’s something you’re probably not used to hearing in these letters: I’ll never be with this girl, I accept that and I want to go back to being the friends we were. My life is worse for not talking to her and since she’s been back we’ve had lots of fun the times we’ve hung out. But apparently, no one told my emotions about this newfound maturity. I crave her attention. I need her to text me back and I want to hang out every day. Oddly, there’s not a sexual/romantic component to these needs, just an urge to spend time with her. I don’t want the cycle to repeat itself, but I also want to stay in contact with her.

Hate to ask this of you, but how can I have it both ways?

Thanks for your help.

Oneitis In Recovery

DEAR ONEITIS IN RECOVERY: Things are never going to be the way they used to be, OIR, romantic feelings or no. You’ve both grown and changed. You’re not the same people that you were in high-school. You’ve had these shared experiences that were part of your life together while you were in high-school and then your lives diverged in college. You’ve both had all of these different experiences and lived different lives, made different choices and found different priorities in life. As a result, you’ve drifted apart. That tends to happen after high-school; it’s very rare that you stay tight with the exact same group of friends all of your life.

(Of course, I say that while still having a fairly close relationship with people I knew in kindergarten…)

Now, some people can pick up a friendship after years apart like no time has passed; some people can’t. This is one of those latter times. The problem that you’re having is that you’re still attached to this old, nostalgic version of A in your head, and the real A is stubbornly refusing to conform to that fantasy.

It’s understandable that you’re envious of A’s new friends; you miss her and want her back in your life again, like the good old days. But therein lies the conflict: you’re expecting things to be exactly the way they were in high-school with the two of you being close as Dipper and Mabel but that can’t happen. She’s not the same person she was; she has a new life, new interests and new friends. The more you try to force your relationship into that mold, the more that you’re both going to be unhappy with one another. You’re expecting her to follow the same script that you had in high-school but you’ve both left high-school behind.

You have to quit expecting your friendship to be exactly the same as it was back in the day. You’re a new OIR, she’s a new A and if you want this friendship to have a chance you have to start getting to know this new A.

Will treating A as the new person she is instead of your old friend mean that you’ll eventually go back to the same level of closeness that you had before? Well… I’d be lying if I said yes. There’s no guarantee that you’ll have that same level of intimacy that you had. People drift apart as they grow up; that’s just part of life unfortunately. But you won’t be able to have any kind of friendship with her if you don’t let go of the past and meet her on new terms and see where life takes you both. Accept that things are different and your friendship is going to be on new terms and you’ll be much happier than you are now.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I was hoping that you could possibly help me with a very difficult situation I’m in.

The girl I’ve been interested in for the past month, who is also quite a good friend of mine, has a boyfriend who is by no means a decent human being. The other day I discovered that he’s cheated on her a few times and I’ve decided that as a friend it’s my responsibility to tell her. I’m not sure if that’s the right decision, though, and I’m not sure HOW to tell her at all. If you could please weigh in on this, I’d seriously appreciate it! Thank you so much.

Waiting In The Wings

DEAR WAITING IN THE WINGS: Well, you asked, but I don’t think you’re going to like my answer.

Here’s what you do, WitW: you back the hell off.

First of all, let’s be honest here. Just between you, me and everyone reading this: you’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart. You didn’t decide that it’s your responsibility to tell her because you are that good of a friend, you’re hoping that when you tell her she’s going to dump her cheating scumbag of a boyfriend and fly into your arms as the one who helped her see the truth. Which, to be perfectly frank, is a pretty sh

ty reason to deliberately insert yourself into the middle of somebody else’s relationship drama.

But for the sake of argument, let’s game this out a little. Let’s assume that either I give you my blessing to telling your crush about her supposedly philandering beau or you decided to go and tell her regardless. How, exactly, do you think she’s going to react? Here’s a hint: she’s going to take it badly. Under the best of circumstances, she’s going to be pissed off like nobody’s business. The only question is who she’s going to direct that anger at.

And the smart money says it’s going to be you. You may have noticed that people don’t appreciate bad news. In fact, we tend to get irrationally angry at the person who brings us the bad news, whether it’s their fault or not; there’s a reason why “don’t shoot the messenger” is a common phrase, after all. So you’re already starting off with your would-be hunny-bunny ticked off that you’re telling her that something’s rotten in Denmark.

But then there’s the next step: why should she believe you? Do you have proof? Do you have unquestionable proof that you can actually show her? Proof that couldn’t possibly be explained away? Because if you don’t, then it’s going to be your word against her boyfriend’s. And sure, her boyfriend may be an assbag, but he’s still her boyfriend. This gives him more credibility in her eyes than you have… especially if either of them know that you’ve got a crush on her. And believe me, if she doesn’t, he almost certainly does. This is going to be leveraged against you – you’re going to look like you’re lying up in order to break them up.

(And let’s be honest: that’s what you’re hoping for here.)

Now let’s add another wrinkle into the mix: what makes you so sure she doesn’t know already? Right now you’re working from limited information – you know he’s cheated on her. You don’t say you know when it happened, whether she found out before, whether he confessed or she confronted him and whether they’ve worked through it or not. For that matter, for all you may know, they may have an arrangement of one sort or another. So you’re going forward and telling her with the distinct possibility of re-opening old wounds, dredging up past problems or stumbling onto the fact that they were only socially monogamous. None of which is going to work out for you the way you’re hoping.

Let’s throw a third wrinkle: how’d you find out? Did you catch him in the act? Did you prowl through his phone or emails? Or did you hear it from the grapevine? Because she’s going to want to know… and she’s going to want to know why, exactly you were prying into her business. All of this is going to make a difference, because it’s going to be demonstrating your agenda rather strongly. And if you two aren’t honest-to-god BFFs – which, from the sounds of things, you’re not – it’s going to look like you went digging for dirt, even if we grant that your motivations were as pure as the driven snow. And that is going to bring you right back to that credibility problem.

But hey: let’s say that you manage to thread all those needles and she dumps her no good, scummy boyfriend. Assuming she doesn’t lash out at you for causing her break-up, she’s still not going to swoon into your arms. She’s going to be ticked off at men in general and in no mood for your trying to be the next in line… in fact, she’s probably going to resent it.

Women don’t appreciate it when guys suddenly assume the window of opportunity is open because they’ve literally just broken up with somebody. She’s going to need some time to recover and your hanging around in order to help her through this ordeal is going to start verging rather seriously into Nice Guy territory.

In short: you’ve got yourself your basic no-win scenario. And you’re not going to Kobayashi Maru your way through this.

This isn’t your business. Your getting involved is only going to add another layer of drama to somebody else’s relationship. And even under the best of circumstances, it’s going to end badly for you.

Leave it alone.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  Got a question for you, Doc. I’m a lady who recently took the initiative and found I had some chemistry with a guy and asked him out. We’re in the same fandom world, and finding nice and normal people among us is very rare. Being totally generic for the purposes of protecting identities, we became friends by mutually respecting what we’ve contributed to our fandom.

I started to reach out to him on email a few months ago. We had a few conversations, in which he threw in some comments seemed like bad attempts at flirting. Not everyone has game, right? But after initiating a few conversations, I decided to let him reach out to me, and he didn’t. OK. Fair enough. Moving on….

Then I reconnected him at a recent event, and he started reaching out to me with gusto – emails, pictures (clothed!), etc. He even admitted to basically stalking me on social media, though he doesn’t really have a social media presence himself.

So after a few weeks of email flirting, I decided to be a grown-ass woman and ask him out. I was bold and direct (and funny). What I got back was a long, rambling email where he admits to being in relationship with someone else, but he doesn’t want to lose what “we have.” I’ve never seen evidence of him having a significant other, and I’d be really pissed off if a boyfriend of mine was having this kind of relationship with another woman.

There have been a few short email exchanges since my rejection. He’s done all the reaching out – I suspect either to take my temperature to see if I’d still talk to him or checking in to make sure I haven’t sunk into a vast depression (trust me, I haven’t).

What is up with men and their hidden relationships? Maybe his rambling was a nice way to hide that he just wasn’t into me like that? Since I’ll run into this guy at upcoming fandom events, what do I do? Honestly, I feel totally embarrassed and humiliated. I kind of want to tell him to go to hell, but I don’t want to be the bitter jerk who hates him because he turned me down. I also want to avoid him, but that gets exhausting, too. Trust me, if I had any idea he had a long-term GF or would turn me down, there’s no way in hell I would have asked him out in the first place. What was he doing starting this kind of relationship with me in the first place? Do I bother to continue a friendship which he seems to want even though I know it will never be enough for me?

Thanks,

Thoroughly Confused

DEAR THOROUGHLY CONFUSED: There are a lot of possibilities here TC. It’s possible he was stringing you along because he liked the flirty attention you were giving him. He might have had a crush on you and was enjoying the thrill of new relationship energy and the frisson of a mutual attraction from somebody besides his girlfriend. Or it’s entirely possible that after you reconnected, he decided you were cool and wanted to be friends.

I can’t say for sure one way or another – after all, I wasn’t there, and without interviewing you both and reading the transcripts, it’s kind of hard to say whether he was flirting or not. And if he was indeed flirting then there is a question of how much of it was just flirting because flirting is fun and how much of it was flirting with intent.

All that being said: I don’t think he was leading you on, and I don’t think he was deliberately hiding the fact that he had a girlfriend. Considering that you’re running in similar circles – fandom tends to be a small world, after all – it’s entirely possible that he assumed you knew he was seeing someone. Why didn’t he bring her up when you were talking? Well, again: I haven’t seen the transcripts, but it’s possible that the topic just didn’t come up. I’ve had many, many conversations with my friends – men and women both – where we don’t talk about our significant others simply because there’s no call to. It’s possible – even advisable – to have a life outside your relationship after all.

I also am willing to bet that he had no idea you were into him. When you straight-up asked him out, he suddenly realized that you two weren’t on the same page and suddenly things got awkward. Or maybe he had a clue that you liked him but was willing to ignore it in hopes that you’d end up romantically interested in someone else and you wouldn’t have this nascent infatuation between the two of you.

Either way: sh*t done got weird. So now what?

Before I get into what to do about this, I want to address your question about what was he doing starting a relationship with you at all. Something to keep in mind is that guys tend to have more emotionally intimate friendships with women than they do with other men. It’s a lot easier for guys to open up to women than it is for other guys; no matter how much people may talk about bromances, being open and emotionally intimate with another dude is still seen as being unmanly. Even the term “bromance” carries the “ha ha, it’s kind of like you’re dating” pointed nudging and and not-quite joking, and guys can be uncomfortable with this. So, we often seek out intimacy from our female friends, who tend to be less judgmental and more accepting of emotional openness. If you look at it from one angle, yeah, it can kind of look like a romantic connection… but it’s more about fulfilling an emotional need than trying to start an amorous relationship or conduct an affair.

But all that aside, the immediate question is: what do you do now that this is all out there, flopping around on the table like an Awkward Turtle? Right now, you’re feeling humiliated and probably a little angry. And I don’t blame you: you put yourself out there, you got rejected and that sucks. Getting rejected LITERALLY hurts. 

Take some time to let the sting fade and the anger cool off. Once you’ve gotten past the immediate pain, you’re going to see that it’s not as bad as it seems. Liking a dude who doesn’t like you back the same way isn’t embarrassing. Getting turned down, while painful, isn’t something to be ashamed of. All that happened is that you found out that the two of you weren’t compatible. In the end, there’s really no harm, no foul. It’s hard to see it now, but with time and perspective, this will end up being one of the things you look back on with amusement as one of the wackadoo parts of the dating game.

So where do you go from here? He clearly hopes to continue your friendship. As I’m always telling men, one of the issues with being in the Friend Zone is that you’re choosing to stay there. You say that being friends isn’t going to be enough for you – fair enough, that’s a valid choice. Just don’t treat his wanting to be friends as though he’s offering you the booby-prize, or that being friends is a poor substitute for romance.

If you don’t want to be friends with him and you don’t want to spend the rest of your time avoiding him whenever you might be at the same event, then I suggest you be straight with him. Tell him that he’s a cool guy and you like him, but you were hoping for something more. Let him know that trying to be friends with him would to be painful for you and it’s not fair to either of you to try and continue things when you’re longing for something he isn’t able to offer you. And then you just let things drift apart. If you happen to run into each other at events, then be polite, say hi and just keep going. If things get awkward, then just acknowledge the awkwardness. It doesn’t have to be a teeth-grindingly uncomfortable situation unless you let it be.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com)