DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: So I (f) have had an on-off relationship with my ex (m) for the past 2 years. Recently, he’s shown that he’s growing to be a better person, and I’ve been putting serious thought into getting back together with him.

Before I do so, I need to tell all of my close friends. One of these friends (m) has a huge crush on me. Back when my ex and I were on a break, this friend tried to talk me into dating him instead. I said no, because I wanted to heal from my past breakup. What’s the best way I can go about breaking the news to him without losing the friendship?

He is very important to me, but the fact that he has feelings makes the situation really tricky. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Thanks!

Friends In Need

DEAR FRIENDS IN NEED: Before I even get to your question, I’m gonna be honest: I’m not entirely sure why you need to give a press conference to your friends before you get back with your ex, FIN. Unless this was a break up so dramatic that it caused fissures in your social circle or he was so awful that dating him was harming you or your friends… it’s not really something that people need a heads up over. Your relationship is your business, and while your friends can have opinions on the matter, they don’t get a veto. So the need to tell everyone beforehand rather than it being fait accompli is somewhat lost on me.

But that’s a separate issue from your bud who’s got feelings for you. Not to sound callous, FIN, but frankly this is a him problem, not a you problem. Having been the dude-as-what-had-an-unrequited-crush on folks, I’m sympathetic to how he feels. But honestly, it’s on him to manage his feelings and act like a grown-ass adult about it, not on you.

Now, I do think it’s a good idea to not callously rub his face in the fact that you’re dating someone else — whether your ex or anyone in the future — or take advantage of his affection for you. It’s a kindness to not cause unnecessary pain, especially in someone who you care for as a friend. Maybe a “look, I wanted to let you know that I’m getting back together with Ex” would help soften things instead of suddenly finding out by seeing the two of you canoodling at a party… or maybe that’ll be like tapping a glass statue with a hammer and chisel. Either way, though, it’s not your responsibility to manage his feelings for him, nor can you control how he takes the news. There isn’t some magic way of phrasing things that will take away the sting of “I’m dating someone else.”

At the same time, however, if he decides he needs to step away from your friendship so he can heal and get over you… well, that’s ultimately what he needs to do for himself. If sticking around while you’re dating someone else is going to be like sandpaper on his soul, then it’s not kind to him to try to get him to stay. Just as his desire to date you doesn’t mean he’s got dibs, your wanting to keep him as a friend doesn’t preclude his doing what he needs to in order to take care of himself. If he can’t be around you until he’s gotten over his feelings for you, then it’ll suck, but you really don’t have any choice but to let go of his friendship for now and hope that he comes back when he’s ready.

At the end of the day, while it’s important to be considerate, you’re both ultimately responsible for your own feelings. He’s going to have to be able to handle your seeing someone else, and you’re going to have to be willing to accept it if he decides he can’t be friends for a while.

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: First time writing. I like the way you think, so I’d like your take on a really annoying problem.

To make a long story short, I met this guy online about 11-12 years ago in a chatroom. I was in the middle of a relationship with someone else at the time, it wasn’t going well, and I guess I was looking for a way out. This guy (I’ll call him Mitten) and I lived very far away from each other (he was at the top of the country, I was at the bottom) but we fell very predictably for each other in a way that only two over-emotional assholes can. My feelings grew for this person to the point where I actually got the balls to break up with my boyfriend and settle into a LDR with Mitten, who had been trying to move down to my state for awhile, even before we had met. It was a ‘relationship’ of high highs and low lows, and I was living back with my parents at the time. He was so flaky with his feelings — one minute he was blowing up my IM and the next he wouldn’t talk to me for days. Well, he finally came down, and we met. It was awesome — I’ve never felt as comfortable with someone as I did with him. Here’s the kicker though: we only met once. He couldn’t find a job and had to go back home. Once there, we decided that there was really no point in trying to go any further, but our feelings kept us close. The same old pattern took shape. I was insane over this guy. The quality of my entire day hung on the possibility of his IM or phone call. He started ‘dating’ other people. This broke my 22 year old heart because he would tell me about it. This behavior went on for about a year and a half, maybe more, until we got into a massive fight over something I don’t even remember. He didn’t talk to me for months, but he would stalk my myspace blog every day.

(That’s how long ago this was…)

Finally, he started talking to me again, but only so that he could rub his dates in my face. I said, Bye Felicia.

Eleven years passes.

At this point I’m in a relationship with another guy (LEO), and have been with him for almost that long. We were having severe intimacy issues and though I loved him, I felt rejected and alone. Guess who bursts back into the scene, divorced and ready to cause some trouble? Mitten.

And cause trouble, he did. Just like my previous relationship, I began to rely on Mitten for all the validation and affection that I wasn’t getting from LEO, who knew I was having some sort of an emotional affair with Mitten, but didn’t say boo because he was having one of his own. I should have known better, because Mitten was repeating the same exact behaviors from ten years before: yanking me back and forth and up and down, telling me about his conquests, ghosting me for days and then popping right back up, flirting with my best friend. I was sick. It was like a sickness. Couldn’t get him out of my head, everything I saw reminded me of him.

As time wore on, I began to realize that we had nothing in common except the fact that we wanted each other (in varying degrees) and couldn’t have each other. He sucked at conversation, was immature as hell, and didn’t get me the way LEO did, but my heart wasn’t with LEO anymore. Unfortunately, I still wanted Mitten, but I hated myself for wanting him. A guy friend of mine who I’ve known since childhood (who had feelings for me) let me lean on him during this hard time. He would tell me I was worth more than this back and forth bulls--t and urge me to cut ties with Mitten forever. I balked. It was one thing for me to be emotionally jerked around, it was quite another to let Mitten go and have to face the end of my relationship with LEO. My priorities were so backwards.

Sooner or later, it all came to a head. I finally had the balls to just delete Mitten. I never even told him I was doing it, but at that time his head was up some other girl’s ass and hadn’t talked to me for weeks. It felt like someone had socked me in the heart, but I didn’t falter.

Now it’s two years later, LEO and I have broken up (still friends) and Mitten and I haven’t spoken. He’s had a kid since then, which is a relief to me because if anything is a dealbreaker for me, it’s kids (I don’t hate them, they’re just not for me) but no matter what I do, and no matter what I tell myself about him, I can’t get him off of my mind. It’s ridiculous. I’ve met the guy once twelve years ago, we’re not good for each other. My conscious brain knows this. Apart from learning he has a kid, I don’t visit his profile. I don’t have pictures of him and I have given myself every talk in the book, but I know he doesn’t look me up (I can’t be 100% sure, but I was always the one who cared more out of the two of us) and that hurts me on the dumbest level ever. I don’t know why my brain insists on feeling this attachment to him and I hate him living rent free in my head. I am at a loss as to what to do. I know you might say to just give it time, but it feels like I’ve given it twelve or so years, and that’s freaking enough. What is going to make my silly brain realize that I need to let this guy go?

Just When I Thought I was Out

DEAR JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT: This one is actually shockingly simple, JWITIWO, and something that a lot of people with toxic exes are familiar with. Mitten’s been f--king with your head in a very particular way. Whether he’s doing this consciously or he’s stumbled onto something that just happened to work for him, Mitten’s been exploiting a quirk of human psychology that creates a sort of emotional dependency on certain people.

If you look back on the relationship you had with Mitten, you’ll probably notice that those intense highs and intense lows were pretty even at first, possibly even erring a little to the “incredible high” side of the equation. Then, as the relationship progressed, those lows were becoming a lot more frequent, while the highs seemed to be rarer and rarer… often to the point where you could never be entirely sure when they would come again or how to make them happen. If we were a species of pure logic and reason, it wouldn’t take much to see that this is a s--tty situation, the bad times outnumber the good, and the good certainly isn’t good enough to outweigh all the bad, and we’d bounce right out of there like a 2nd tier Legion of Superheroes character. But we’re not; we’re a species that thinks that it’s all about logic and rational thinking but is ruled way the hell more by our emotions.

This process is what’s known as “intermittent reinforcement”, where neglect, poor or even abusive treatment is occasionally leavened with affection and approval at unpredictably random intervals. Those occasional moments of affection after a long stretch of neglect or mistreatment hit so strongly that it’s like a dump truck’s worth of serotonin was poured into your head. But at the same time, because those moments come so randomly, it’s literally impossible to predict when they will happen or what causes them, and as a result, there’s a part of you that keeps trying to figure out what the magic formula is to bring back those good feelings. You’re never entirely sure when they’ll come again, but you feel like it has to be just around the corner, right?

This is the exact same dynamic that casinos use to get people hooked on slot machines and developers like King Games use in apps like Candy Crush Saga. You get a couple easy wins right at the start, and then those wins get spaced further and further apart and give less and less each time. But you become determined to stick to this because you feel to your goddamn bones that the payout is coming any minute now.

This psychological quirk is one major reason why so many people stick around in awful relationships with people who are demonstrably s--tty. Not even the covert s--ttiness of a Crouching Nice Guy, Hidden Asshole, but the sort of s--ttiness that can be seen from space. The sort of s--ttiness that makes your friends all say “wait, why the hell are you still with them, there is absolutely no goddamn way that they’re so good at head that you’re willing to put up with this.” And, hell, you were in a long-distance relationship where you never actually saw Mitten, so you didn’t even get that excuse.

It’s intense, it’s dramatic and it is really, really hard to break out of… and there’s frequently a part of you that feels like maybe those s--tty times were just a weird little quirk and things would be better now.

Which, unfortunately, is exactly what happened.  You were in a low place in your relationship, Mitten popped right back up, dangled his affections for you like yarn in front of a kitten before rubbing your face in all the strange ass he was getting and trying to get with your friends. And to be clear: you didn’t fall back into this dynamic because you were weak or foolish. You fell back into this dynamic because he’s a manipulator who — through chance or through deliberate practice — knows exactly how to push your buttons and he caught you at an emotional ebb when you would be most vulnerable.

Those rare highs mixed with the more frequent lows are why, even now, even knowing what a s--theel he is, you still think about him. You are, in a very real way, in withdrawal. One of the reasons why break-ups can hurt so much is, in part, because you’ve been cut off from your main source of oxytocin and dopamine. With Mitten, those hits were so rare that it was like rain to a desert plant, and your brain wants those feelings again, even though rationally you know this is a “let’s spend the night in the abandoned hospital with the shady past” level bad idea. Much like someone trying to break his addiction to Diet Dr. Pepper (ahem), you’re being hit with cravings because your brain doesn’t want to give up those sensations, even though the source is bad for you.

But here’s the thing: that will pass in time. Our brains may be lazy and will fight change with everything they have, they will give up and adjust to the new normal. Hedonic adaptation is one of the weirdest and greatest gifts of being human; we can get used to anything, including “not going back to my s--tty ex, ever.” One of the ways you can make this easier on yourself is to take the Nuclear Option and cut off every access point he has to your life. That means blocking him on every social network you have an account on, setting filters to send his emails straight to the garbage, making sure that his number never shows up on your phone and that he can’t so much as see your pics on Instagram. Not only does this mean that he can’t show up like a zit before a big date, but you will have to overcome multiple hurdles to ever get in contact with him. Every extra step you have to take to be in contact with him makes it that much easier to resist the urge. And while there can be a moment where the desire to see him or hear from him again may feel overwhelming… that will pass. That last, incredibly powerful surge is known as the Extinction Burst, and it’s your brain’s last gasp attempt to get that source of happy chemicals back. But if you can white-knuckle your way through… that’s when the desire will finally fade for good.

Oh, and one more thing that will help you get over the urge to see him again? Find a new source of oxytocin. Having someone else in your life — someone who hits all the happy buttons without playing f--ked up head-games — will ease that emotional and chemical withdrawal, and make you much, much happier than Mitten ever did or could.

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 hope you are doing well and staying safe during these difficult times.

I am an extremely socially awkward person with OCD. I have recently started going to therapy and taking medication for it, which has helped a lot. I am looking to get into a serious relationship. But I’m not sure where to start. I keep falling for girls who turn out to already have boyfriends, and it’s been a bit demoralizing.

Any advice?

Thanks,

Faulty Radar

DEAR FAULTY RADAR: I wish you’d included a little more information, FR, such as how you’re meeting these women and discovering that they have partners. But, absent specifics, I can at least provide a little informed conjecture that may help.

Most of the time, when people tell me that they keep falling for people who already have partners, it’s because they’ve been developing crushes on people they meet socially, rather than trying to meet people specifically to date. More often than not, this comes about because they meet someone at a shared activity like work, class or church, or who they see regularly but don’t know well.

Now to be fair1, I do suggest meeting women through social activities; it’s one of the best ways to find people who’re compatible with you and who share your interests. However, it requires being willing to take the initiative early on… and some folks, especially people who are more on the socially awkward or inexperienced side of things don’t.

Rather than starting from a position of gauging mutual interest and asking them out on a date, they end up in The Friend Zone2 because, well, they act like a friend instead of a potential lover. And because they don’t act on their interest early on or, in many cases, avoid relationship talk entirely, they end up with a one-sided infatuation that ultimately ends up foundering on the shoals of “oh, she’s already seeing someone”. If they had acted earlier and just proposed a date, then they would’ve found out earlier. This way, rather than having invested time and emotional energy in an unavailable partner, they would’ve freed themselves to go pursue a relationship with someone who is available and let this relationship be whatever it will become.

This is one of the reasons why I’m a firm advocate of making your move early, before you’ve overly invested in someone. Rather than let things linger for weeks or months, asking someone on a date — not “to hang out some time” or “get together” but a proper and unmistakable date — is fast and efficient; you learn early on if they’re available and interested and it’s much easier to move on if they aren’t.

That having been said, you’ve only recently started dealing with your OCD and any awkwardness and anxiety that comes from it. That can make it a little harder to find the courage to step up to the plate early on and leave you more prone to those one-sided infatuations. What I would suggest in your case is to focus on meeting people in places where folks are specifically and explicitly single and looking for dates or relationships. That means that you should start by getting on dating apps like Hinge and Bumble; taking a little time out of each day to go through match with people will help ensure that you’re encountering people who are actively looking for people to date. I would also suggest looking for MeetUps, networking events and other in-person get-togethers that are specifically for singles to meet. Many cities have events that are unambiguously arranged for single people in particular careers (engineers, lawyers, “young  professionals”) or with particular interests to mix and mingle and possibly spark up a romance. Because these events are earmarked specifically for singles, you know that everyone who’s there is actively looking for a partner; you don’t run the risk of coming off like the guy who tries to use MeetUps as a date ATM.

By combining these two approaches, you’ll maximize your chances of meeting someone awesome and single, while minimizing the likelihood of falling for someone who’s just not available.

However, I wouldn’t write off those women who already have boyfriends… or the ones who like you but aren’t into you romantically, for that matter. I would actually recommend staying friends with them — a genuine friend, rather than hoping that they break up with their partner or change their mind. Those friends have the potential to be your best and most valuable resource and ally. First and foremost, while they may have partners, they almost certainly have friends who don’t… and would love to meet an awesome guy like you. You have to be willing to ask for their help — tell them directly “hey, I’m currently single and looking, do you know anyone who I might want to meet”, rather than hoping they’ll bring it up unprompted — but they can be instrumental to helping you meet someone who will end up being your perfect partner. Similarly, going out with them as friends can make it easier to meet single women — in fact, female friends often make the best wings when you’re out and about.

In both cases, they are providing what’s known as “social proof” — that is, they’re vouching for you as a great guy who’s worth getting to know. When introducing you to her friends, she’s letting them know that you’re a catch; she’s vouching for you directly and indirectly, through her words and through your friendship.  Similarly, when you’re out having fun, her presence is a mark in your favor. After all, they wouldn’t be hanging out with you and having a good time if you weren’t awesome and trustworthy. That makes it much easier to strike up conversations and get the proverbial ball rolling. Even if these new women aren’t necessarily your future girlfriend, they too help provide social proof and demonstrate that you’re worth getting to know. At the very least, becoming friends with them means that you become part of their social circle as well. And just as with the women you met who already have boyfriends,  just because they aren’t the love of your life, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be the one who would introduce you to her.

The last thing I would suggest though, is to see what the women you’ve been meeting have in common. Sometimes the reason why guys tend to keep falling for women with partners is specifically because they’re unavailable. Men who have issues with believing that they’re worthy or deserving of love or who are afraid of success will often sabotage themselves subconsciously by going for people they know they have no chance with. The fact that they know on some level that a relationship isn’t possible is what draws them in. It feels like they’re trying to make a connection when, in reality, their subconscious is “protecting” them by ensuring that this relationship can’t go anywhere.

If that’s the case for you, then that’s something I would suggest bringing up with your therapist. They’re in the best position to help you unpack that issue and find practical and actionable ways to work through it.

Good luck.

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