DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I have an issue of, I guess, becoming less of a nerd. Let me explain: I (31f) have been married to my partner (35m) a few years now. When we started dating 7 years ago, we shared a lot of traits. Our best year together was when we lived abroad, worked in the same company so that our ”together-time” was during the lunch break, so then after work both of us played games for the rest of the day, separately or together.

Something changed after we bought an apartment though. Because it was ”my own nest”, I wanted to become more organized. I started pursuing more hobbies and dreamed of travel. You can see where this is going. I feel we have grown apart and there is nothing to talk about anymore. I guess my question is… how do I know when to break up? Or am I just being selfish?

There are a few things that make it difficult. On the one hand, he is the type to always be loyal and not let me go. I tried breaking up once and he just scoffed it off. Our day-to-day life together is good to ok. But I’ve started to feel better when I’m alone or with friends. He is also bad at communicating or being vulnerable; in important discussions he will become anxious and mix words up, and take multiple minutes to form words. He’s not very self-reflective either. I feel stuck. If I knew he’d get better at communicating it would be different. I’ve also thought of having a family in the future, but with him? I don’t know.

NerdLess 

DEAR NERDLESS: On occasion, I’ll hear from folks whose relationship early on was founded on loving a lot of the same things. Of course, over time, people grow, people change and their interests change… but when their tastes in pop culture or hobbies or games start to diverge, they begin worry that this says something bad about their relationship.

But while shared interests and commonalities are part of what bring us together, they’re not what keep us together. Or at least, not exclusively. In fact, relationships can often be strengthened by partners having different interests, different social circles, even separate vacations. Part of what sparks that passion and desire for togetherness in the beginning of a relationship is novelty and mystery… things that are difficult to keep in a long-term relationship, particularly when you both live together. Having separate lives, where you both are able to do your own thing on occasion, can have a huge benefit to your relationship. Not only does it keep the spark alive by helping maintain that feeling of “can’t see enough of you, there’s always something new to discover,” it also means that you have less pressure to love all the same things… or to worry about what it means if and when you start to have interests your partner doesn’t share and vice versa.

However, I don’t think becoming less of a nerd is your issue here, NL. The problem seems to be about communication and feeling connected to one another. If you’re always together, then it’s very easy to start feeling smothered or to want time to yourself. Having space of your own can be vitally important in a relationship, especially during the COVID pandemic. Being able to feel like you have a life that isn’t defined by what your husband wants or enjoys is important, just as it is for him. There’s no reason, for example, that you couldn’t travel with friends, even if your husband would rather stay and keep the home fires burning.

Similarly, there’s the lack of communication and vulnerability. I have to wonder if whether the issue is that he isn’t bad at communicating and more that his way of communicating is frustrating you. Sometimes there can be a disconnect when our partners don’t necessarily have the same communication style that we do. Some people get heated and vehement, even when they aren’t actually upset or angry. Others get flustered and tongue-tied when they’re dealing with strong emotions and react badly when they feel like their partner’s being overly aggressive. That doesn’t mean that either of them are bad communicators, just that their style of communication is in conflict.

You say that he starts to get anxious, mix up words and needs to take time to collect his thoughts. That leads to an obvious question: have you been giving him that time? If you’re having important discussions, especially about things that are vital to you or to him, then it can be important to factor his communication style into the discussion. If someone, for example, tears up when they feel strong emotions, that doesn’t mean that their partner can’t get upset at them or have those tough conversations. It just means that both parties have to take that into consideration as part of the discussion.

All of this is part of why when I tell people to have an Awkward Conversation, that they should carve out time specifically for it and to take turns while the other listens without interrupting. Amongst other things, this gives everybody the opportunity to focus their thoughts without feeling like they need to reply right away. Knowing you won’t be interrupted takes a little of the anxiety out of trying to express yourself and makes it easier to be clear and ensure that you’re understood. And, of course, easing that anxiety means that people who get flustered are better able to keep their cool and not rush into a response.

There are a couple things that strike me as a little odd; you say that he scoffed off your breaking up with him. What exactly does that mean? Did he just not accept the break up and you went along with it? Or was it that because he didn’t immediately end things, you had time to think about things and realized that maybe you didn’t want to break up? The way you phrase it as a complication is confusing; it’s a little hard to tell whether you mean that this is a good thing, or you’re worried that he’ll be able to somehow veto your decision to divorce him.

Now it does need to be said that it sounds like you’ve already decided that you’re ready to end things and you’re just looking for the reason to pull the trigger. If that’s the case… well, again, there’s not really anything else to be said. All 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws, which means that you don’t really need a casus belli; you just need to decide that you’re ready to not be married any more. And honestly, if you’re just asking for permission to do what you already want to do, then hey, permission granted. It doesn’t really sound like it’s warranted yet from what you say, but I’m also not the marriage police. If you want out, then the kindest thing to do would be to end things, as quickly and cleanly as possible. It’s better for the both of you; you don’t feel trapped in a marriage you want out of and he’s no longer married to someone who doesn’t want to be with him any more. Ending it quickly means that he doesn’t have to wonder what happened as your dissatisfaction curdles to into contempt, which will end up hurting even more than a speedy end to the marriage.

But if you aren’t standing there with your hand hovering over the relationship eject button… consider talking to a couple’s counselor. Having a third party help mediate some of your issues can make it easier for you both to hear and understand each other, as well as bridge the communication gap the two of you seem to have. And if it does turn out that no, you really are ready to leave, a counselor can also help you negotiate the end of your relationship and make it as painless as possible.

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’m a 24 year old woman. My boyfriend and I have been together for over a month, and he’s the first guy I really fell in love with. Everything seems to be fine except for one thing: I’m afraid to tell him I’m a virgin. We have already done some foreplay but we haven’t had the opportunity to be alone and go further yet, and even if I want to have sex with him, a part of me is happy to postpone the “speech” out of fear of his reaction.

I trust him, but the more I think about it the more I don’t know how to start. What if he leaves me? After all, we’re only at the beginning and we made no promises. What if he’s ashamed of me, if he thinks I’m not enough for him, and to his eyes I’m no longer attractive? Or maybe he doesn’t like the fact that, since I’m inexperienced, he will have to teach me how to please him? What if he tells his friends, or he thinks i don’t measure up to his exes? I even thought I could make up the story of how I lost my virginity years ago with a friend, but I’d feel terrible to lie to him; I could say nothing and just wait until he figures it out, but it would be too embarrassing, and I prefer to preempt the humiliation and tell him the truth myself.

Plus, even if I have no intention to wait, I still have a bit of anxiety about this new experience, especially when I think that it probably won’t all come natural to me and it’ll take time for me to learn, and I don’t see how he can enjoy waiting for me to get to his “level”. I wouldn’t want to ruin our relationship just because I don’t have the courage to open up, and therefore miss this opportunity with a guy I like very much and who likes me back. I want to be able to finally loosen up and enjoy this experience that I have been waiting for so long just like other girls, and make him understand how much I want him.

I’ve tried to report all my insecurities and everything that’s been going on in my head these days. I am probably exaggerating it, so other points of view might be helpful. Maybe I just need reassurance and a little more confidence. Any advice or opinion you have will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Queen Of Overthinking

DEAR QUEEN OF OVERTHINKING: I think you hit the nail on the head with your signature, QOO; you’re letting your anxieties take over and creating a cascading number of worst-case scenarios, each worse than the last.

This, to be perfectly honest, isn’t terribly surprising. Even in the year of our lord 2021, society is still really goddamn weird about virginity, especially for women. There’re an absurd number of conflicting (and inaccurate!) messages about sex, sexuality and virginity in general, and those get dialed up to 11 when the discourse turns to women. Kids are having too much sex — blowjobs in middle-school! porn on their phones teaching them that anal is ok! — but they’re also not having ENOUGH sex and there’s a sex recession going on! Guys should have as much sex as they can but also avoid masturbating because it’s bad for you and/or not masturbating gives you super powers! Women don’t like casual sex, except when they do. Third wave feminism has been empowering because it encourages women to take ownership of their sexuality, except "it’s bad because now women are expected to have a series of kinks or else they’re just ‘too vanilla’”…

And of course, as always, women are caught in the trap of be sexy but not sexual, be virginal but also experienced and the classic idea that while men are valued for the sex they have, women are valued for the sex they haven’t had. It is, needless to say, a goddamn mess.

So I’m not terribly surprised that you’re carrying all this anxiety and that it’s put such a whammy on your head. But I do have good news for you: I don’t think you have anything to worry about.

So, assuming that we’re defining “virginity” as “having not had penetrative sex” (which is a flimsy definition under the best of circumstances), let’s start with the glaringly obvious: there’s nothing wrong with your being a virgin at your age. While you may be a little older than the national average (around 17 years old, as of 2015), it’s not unusual at all. Being a virgin doesn’t say anything about you as a person, any more than having lost your virginity would say anything about you. Virginity is a social construct; all it means is that you have or haven’t had a particular experience yet, that’s all. It doesn’t say anything about your worth as a person. It doesn’t mean that you are more or less virtuous. nor, for that matter, does it mean that you can’t or won’t be able to please your boyfriend.

Here’s the thing: virgins can have mind-blowing, bed-rocking sex just as easily as folks who’ve had partners numbering into the quadruple digits can be goddamn awful lays. Good sex isn’t about numbers or whether you know how to do the swirly-go-round, the Transylvania Twist or the Rusty Venture, it’s about connecting and communicating with your partner.  And not to put too fine a point on it: while I can understand being worried about “your boyfriend having to teach you how to please him”, there’s also the issue of, y’know, you having to teach him how to please you. Just because somebody hasn’t had penis-in-vagina sex, that doesn’t mean that they don’t know about orgasms or what makes them feel good. Having a sexual relationship isn’t just going to be about getting him off, nor does his having experience mean that he’s going to know exactly how to hit all of your buttons.

Part of every relationship entails a learning period as you and your partner get to know each other and each other’s bodies — what makes you tick,  what makes you scream like a banshee and what makes your skin crawl. There really aren’t any universal sex techniques that work on everyone; what makes one person sing to the heavens can be a hard no to another.

The other thing you should keep in mind is that your virginity is just one aspect of who you are; how he reacts to your being a virgin, on the other hand, will tell you everything you need to know about him. If you tell him that you’re a virgin and he decides he’s ashamed of you, laughs at you, or decides he doesn’t want you any more and you break up… that’s a good thing. That isn’t a tragedy, that is a f--king bullet dodged. That sort of negative reaction is all you need to know, because he will have shown that he is not somebody you should want to have sex with, regardless of whether he’s your first partner or your fiftieth. That’s not the sign of a caring and giving lover who’s considerate of their partner’s comfort and pleasure, that’s someone who’s revealed themselves to be a Crouching Nice Guy, Hidden Douchebag and you should kick him to the curb with the rest of the trash.

But I don’t think you need to worry about that.

While obviously there are no guarantees in life, I think you’ve already gotten clues about what to expect… and that’s that he seems to be a good guy. Y’all have been fooling around for a month or so and — even allowing for the lack of opportunity — you don’t mention that he’s been impatient or pushing for more. That’s a good sign; a partner who’s willing to go at the speed of the other person’s comfort is someone who’s going to care about their partner’s desires. It sounds like this desire/anxiety combo is coming from you, rather than his trying to move things faster than you’re comfortable with. That’s completely understandable, and it’s ok. But the easiest and most reliable way to resolve this anxiousness is to take a breath, clench your fists and just tell him.

Don’t frame it like something you’re ashamed of or like you’re rolling out some deep dark secret — because it’s not. What you’re doing is telling him exactly what you just told me: you really like him, you want to relax and be open with him and enjoy this experience you’ve been looking forward to.

If he’s as good of a guy as it sounds, then hey, you have absolutely nothing to worry about besides feeling a little nervous and awkward trying to spit it out, and that will fade so fast, you’ll wonder what you were worried about. On the other hand, if he reacts badly? Then while it sucks and will undoubtedly hurt, it’s a good thing for you. You’ll have kicked a dude who was absolutely wrong for you out of your dating pool, and you’ll be free to find someone who’s right for you and worth sleeping with.

But like I said: I don’t think you need to worry. I think this is just anxiety f--king with you.

Good luck. And write back to let us know how it all goes.

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’ve been struggling with confidence, not being needy or anxious. I asked an author how can I achieve ‘inner calm’ and he sent me a response, but I don’t know what he meant by it and I was hoping if you can help me get a clear picture of it.

He said “when you learn to step back, see the bigger picture and learn to develop quiet inner confidence by not getting anxious about so much, or care too much what others think (not in an arrogant way), that can lead to inner calm that builds over time”.

Can you tell me what he meant by that like stepping back and such?

Bundle of Nerves

DEAR BUNDLE OF NERVES: I can see why you’re confused, BON. When he’s telling you to learn to step back, what he’s telling you is to try to step away from the immediacy of the moment and to work at getting perspective.

One of the reasons why anxiety is so pernicious is because it’s so very immediate. We feel like it’s an emergency that needs to be resolved right then and there, even when it’s over an event that happened in the past or a thing you’re worried about in the future. It also ends up feeling so much larger and more momentous because we’re right in the middle of it. But many times that’s a trick, an illusion, a sort of mirage brought on by perspective and how close we are to it. But if we can find a way to take a breath, slow our heart rate and calm ourselves down in the moment, we often realize how much smaller and less important it really is.

It helps to think of it like looking at a very large painting in a museum. If you stand close to it, you’ll see the brush strokes, the texture of the paint and canvas, the tiny details of the piece. But if you step back, you are able to take in the painting as a whole… and realize how much those seemingly massive and significant details vanish. So it is with anxiety and panic; when you’re able to take a second to metaphorically step back or zoom out and look at the bigger picture, you gain perspective. You see how much that the thing making you anxious is actually smaller than it seems — often to the point of being insignificant or invisible.

This may seem impossible — how can people not zoom in on that humiliating or embarrassing thing?  But in reality, people very care to the extent that you do… or even notice. It’s easy for you to get hung up on it because you have a 24/7 unedited stream of your thoughts and actions; everyone else, however, doesn’t have access to that same stream. They’re seeing far, far less than you, if they’re seeing it at all.

One of the reason why people suffer from social anxiety, for example, is because we’re convinced that we’re the center of everybody’s universe. We feel like we have a bright spotlight shining down on us, drawing everybody’s attention to whatever we just did that we’re embarrassed about. The truth, however, is that everyone is so caught up in their own bulls--t that they barely have time to notice other people’s, never mind give a damn about it. We’re all focused on our own issues and that means we’re far less likely to pay attention to the things other people think are unmissable. A great example of this is the infamous “gorilla basketball test”, where students were asked to watch a video of people throwing a ball back and forth and pay attention to how often people in white shirts passed the ball. In the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla costume wanders through the frame. They’re absolutely unmissable… but when asked, students didn’t even realize that the gorilla was even there. They were so focused on counting people throwing the basketball that they never registered the gorilla in the midst.

Once you realize this, it makes things far less distressing. You may think that your brief moment of awkwardness is indelibly branded on people’s minds… but the truth is that once you leave their eye-line, they’ll not only not think about it, but completely forget that it happened.

It’s the “you too” factor writ large. You think that saying “You too” at the wrong time is the sort of thing that people remember…. but consider how often someone said it to you and you never noticed or wrote it off as a random flub everyone makes. To paraphrase David Foster Wallace: you quit worrying about what other people think of you when you realize how rarely they think of you at all. When you realize how little the things that make you anxious register to the outside world, you stop worrying about it as much. When you are able to interrupt that moment of panic and look at the bigger picture, you’re able to see just how little it matters. And once you do that, you’re able to act with more confidence, realizing that you don’t need to be “perfect”. You can make mistakes and still succeed. Hell, you can make big mistakes and still recover, as long as you keep your head. If you don’t panic, even obvious, unmissable mistakes can go from being soul-crushing defeats to a quirky anecdote you all laugh about later on.

I’ve quite literally choked — as in, I aspirated on my own saliva — while introducing myself to a couple of very attractive women. Instead of freaking out, once I could breathe again, I said “hold on, I think I can do better, let’s do another take,” stepped back (literally), walked up and introduced myself again. I ended up talking with them for twenty minutes and got a phone number before I went back to my friends.

So instead of striving for perfection,  work on realizing that anxiety lies to you. But if you can stay cool, interrupt that panic response  and get a little perspective, you can tamp that anxiety down and transform it into calm, genuine confidence.

Fear + survival = confidence.  Once you can embrace that, your confidence will grow over time.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I recently learned from my girlfriend that she has been feeling especially lonely recently. She does not feel that I have been very interested in her life. While I do greet her every day when she gets home from work and ask about her day, she has told me it only feels like I am asking superficial questions and then I start talking about my day.

I do know that I am the kind of person who waits to talk more than he just listens.

What can I do to make sure I’m not just having a shallow conversation or trying to pivot the conversation to things in my day?

One Sided Conversation

DEAR ONE SIDED CONVERSATION: The answer here’s kinda obvious, OSC. You say that you’re the sort of person who waits to talk, rather than listen… so start listening. Part of what makes somebody a great conversationalist is to pay attention to the other person, instead of just waiting for the chance to talk about your stuff. The easiest way to accomplish this is to be an active listener and focus on what she has to say. Rather than taking the surface answer and assuming that was that, make a point of involving yourself in the conversation.

First: acknowledge and respond to what she’s saying. If she’s telling you something her coworker did, don’t just say “huh”, say “wow, that’s crazy/cool/unusual (or whatever would be appropriate)…” something to indicate that you’re actually paying attention, rather than just waiting for the tone of her voice to say that she was done.

Next, you want to find a way to go deeper. Maybe you had a similar experience; at that point you can say “I’ve had a co-worker that did X too; in fact, they were kind of famous for it.” By doing this, you’re showing that you understand what she was saying instead of latching onto keywords; you’re essentially restating in ways that allow you to commiserate or relate to her experience.

But rather than use this as your pivot to talk about your day, take this opportunity to go deeper. You might ask “what lead up to that?” or “So what happened next?” or “What did you do about it?” Or there might be something you don’t understand or context that you’re missing; this is the point to ask questions to get a broader picture about what happened. Or you might ask for her for more details about a specific thing that she did that day. Or what she thought about X coworker or Y meeting. Or some other aspect of her day, her interests or her goals. There are almost always things that you can use as a springboard to more questions about her, if you just pay attention.

And to be perfectly honest, OSC, showing interest in what your girlfriend gets up to or does is kind of an important part of a relationship. Relationships are supposed to be partnerships, not just the One-Sided Conversation show, with your girlfriend as the live studio audience. She’s got a lot going on; it’s worth investing some of your time and attention to learn more about it, rather than expecting her to only be focused on whatever you’ve done that day.

But hey, once you start paying active attention, you may find that there’s more going on that you’d want to know more about. Learning more about your partner is always a good thing. But if you’re stuck on treating conversations like an opera singer warming up (“me me me me”), you’re going to find yourself single again… and sooner than you’d like.

Good luck.

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