DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I have had a few friends since high school. We remained friends even after we graduated, went to different colleges, lived over an hour apart, after I moved out of state, but now I’m back, and one of my friends moved less than 10 minutes from me for the first time.

We’ve been on the same Discord server and are all online more than once a week. However, I’ve been feeling distant from them much more, because they got into live-streaming. Now in theory, this shouldn’t change anything, but in practice, everything is so much worse. They almost always are playing a game I REALLY don’t like, to the point that it makes me feel much more bored and down when I play it. So I don’t. The problem is, it’s a game that they are always communicating during it, and any time I try to say anything, I just get ignored or a “I can’t talk now, I’m busy with this.” And then they play it for hours on end.

Even when they don’t play that, stuff still isn’t the same. Like, I can’t talk about anything remotely political with them, I can’t talk about anything personal, and even though it’s not their profession and they’re not particularly famous, they do get a small amount of viewers, so I have to always watch what I say and I can’t be myself when they’re streaming. At least one of them is streaming almost every day of the week, and it’s always while I have free time. It’s just exhausting to have to constantly be watching what I say, even around my closest friends, especially after a day of work. I’ve also been going through other things emotionally, and I can’t even talk about it, because I can’t say it on a livestream, because it would be taking attention from the streamer and it’s something any audience member wouldn’t want to hear.

I don’t want to make them stop, because they seem to enjoy it and I don’t want to be a funwrecker, but I just want my social and friend life back with them, especially after a long day of work. I also don’t want to keep this bottled up, before I do or say something I regret and can never take back. But I also just want my social life with them back… What do I do about this?

Video Game Widower

DEAR VIDEO GAME WIDOWER: This is one of the times when you should be talking to your friends, not to a loudmouth with an advice column, VGW.

The core conflict here is fairly simple: your friends have a new hobby that they’re currently wrapped up in and it’s not one that you dig. It’s taking up a lot of their time and attention and the very nature of it precludes hanging out with them while they do it. The problem is that you’ve presented yourself with a false dichotomy; it’s not a case of “make them stop” vs. lose your friends, it’s telling them “hey guys, I haven’t hung out with you all in forever, and I’d like to do something other than stream games.”

(We’ll pause to appreciate the irony of my writing this after having just finished watching the Mighty Nein vs. Vox Machina stream…)

Honestly, that’s the first step: let them know you want to hang out in person, and not during a stream or making your hangout part of their stream session. You can even start with proposing doing something specific — go play mini-golf, go for beers and watch the UFC match at a bar somewhere, go bowling… something that isn’t just “hang out on cam, playing a game for the livestream”. Having a specific event at a specific date and time means that spending time with them won’t just turn into another livestream session; you’re going to be out and about and — ideally — not broadcasting it with GoPros or smartphones.

Now, this may end up requiring some compromises. If they’re streaming on the regular, they may have set times when they’re live; you may have to work around their streaming schedule. Or it may be that you have to plan to get together a few days (or even weeks) in advance as you try to find a time that it works for everyone. That may not be what you want, especially if you’re used to hanging with your friends at a moment’s notice. Unfortunately, the need to plan seeing friends days or weeks ahead of time is something that happens more and more often as we all get older and have increased responsibilities with work, relationships, family and so on.

However, you may also end up dealing with the fact that your friends are prioritizing streaming over hanging out. If that’s the case, then yeah, you’re going to have to use your words. But again, that doesn’t  mean that you’re left with “tell them to quit streaming or else.” Laying down an ultimatum like that isn’t going to work out well. You don’t have the leverage to make them do anything. The only leverage you have is your presence in their lives… and that’s what you’re going to have to use.

What you need to do is make it clear that this is about you wanting to see your friends, not subsume your friendship into being part of their Twitch stream. Let them know that this is the first time in years when you all have been close enough to see each other regularly, that you’re not into streaming and that you don’t feel comfortable hanging out with them and a live studio audience. You don’t feel like you can actually spend quality time with them while they’re focused on being “on”, nor do you feel that you can be your authentic and unguarded self while they’re on stream. You would rather spend time with them when the point is for you all to spend time together as friends, not as part of what’s ultimately a show for other people and you don’t like the idea of mixing friendship and monetizing their hobby.

If they decide that streaming is more important to them right now than hanging out with one of their old friends… well, then they’ve made their choice. We all grow and change as people, and our interests and priorities change with us. And that, unfortunately, means that sometimes those changes include friendships coming to an end. It’s not because you or they didn’t put enough effort into making it work, it’s just because as everyone has changed, they have changed in ways that mean you and they aren’t compatible the way you were before. As a result, it may well be that you and they have outgrown your old friendship. If that’s the case, unfortunately, there’s not really anything else you can do besides mourn the end of that friendship and move on.

However, regardless, of whether you find a compromise and hang out away from the cameras and capture rigs or your friendship with them gets downgraded, I think it would be a good idea to put some effort into making new friends. Having diverse — and separate — social circles can be a good thing; you can have friendships based around different interests or activities, rather than having a small group of people who are supposed to be all things to you and vice versa. And it would also mean that your friendships aren’t going to be contingent on somebody else’s Twitch schedule.

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 need help understanding how to navigate my boyfriend’s friends. They are all gamers or part of his D&D group or both, and I don’t really have any experience of either of those things. The problem isn’t that so much as the facts that they seem to have a completely different set of social expectations than what I’m used to.

My boyfriend’s best friend lives pretty far away, I’ll call him J. He and his girlfriend (H) were coming to visit. My boyfriend kept talking up H and how much we had in common. To the point where I was getting worried we’d be separated by gender once they got here. The fact that he never used her name, only ever called her J’s girlfriend, also made me uncomfortable. I’ve heard him talk about me the same way, I think most of his friends probably don’t know my name even now after two + years together and 6 months of living together. It was fine once they got here, we did spend time together as a group mostly but it still felt strange to me. And that’s the only time they were both here. This weekend J was here alone and they’ve been gaming non stop for two days, from morning to far into the night and I only see them while eating dinner. I work weekends and this morning J woke up when my boyfriend was still sleeping but after realizing I was the only one up, he hid away at the computer until I left for work.

He had some other close friends over once for beer. The first time I met them too. None of them spoke to me at all besides from saying hello. I just sat there the whole night watching them talk, trying and failing to join the conversation whenever the topic was something other than the games they were playing. I felt like a chair or a lamp or something, it was awful. I told him how it had felt after and he was shocked, he hadn’t noticed and didn’t understand why I hadn’t just left. That the girlfriends usually join to eat and then leaves. That it shouldn’t matter if his friends like me or not.

For me the normal thing would be to want to get to know the partner of someone who’s important to you. If I visit a friends house I’ll talk to their partner as well. When my best friend or my siblings have been here we’ve all made sure to include him in conversation and to all hang out together. Maybe not the whole visit, but they want to get to know him. Since he’s part of my life they want to get to know him. And I want him to know them. This has confused him too, at times.

He has one friend who he does invite for me to hang out with as well. We’re both vegan and that’s really the only thing we have in common. He also mostly doesn’t talk to me though, when I ask him low stakes small talk things he gets uncomfortable, and I don’t know what else to do. At least it’s better than the others.

I’m not naturally social, it’s hard for me, I get very anxious and default to being quiet but I try very hard. I don’t know how to get it right with his group though. If it stays like this I think next time any of his friends come to visit I’ll just make sure not to be home at all, because if we don’t get to know each other at least to the point of acquaintances, it’ll just be painfully awkward forever.

Fifth Wheel

DEAR FIFTH WHEEL: It sounds to me like you’re dealing with a classic dilemma: when two socially awkward samurai of equal power meet… who makes the first move?

Ok, let me back up a bit.

The issue at hand is that you’re dealing with nerds, and from the sound of it, painfully socially awkward ones at that. Part of the issue with this particular brand of awkwardness is the classic Geek Social Fallacy: that friendship is transitive. A lot of well-meaning nerds tend to believe that, because they’re friends with X, Y and Z, it only makes sense that X, Y and Z should be able to be friends with each other as well. In a lot of cases, there’s even the underlying belief that this friendship should basically already exist; everyone will just click like old friends who’ve only just met and it’ll be effortless and simple.

In reality… this doesn’t happen very often. While there are times when friends from disparate groups will mesh up perfectly, there’re just as many times when there’s a lot of stilted awkwardness. This is especially true when you’re dealing with folks who may be a little anxious, a little awkward or just socially inexperienced. Thus you end up with scenarios where a new person — in this case, you — is introduced to the group — his friends — and there’s that weird moment of awkward tension that just hangs in the air. Who makes the first move? How expressive or effusive should you be? What do you say? How do you join in the conversation without feeling like you’re intruding, or how do you make them feel included when you and your friends have years of inside jokes and shared experiences that they don’t have?

This can be exacerbated when — as it seems to be in your case — that your boyfriend and his friends aren’t in the habit of including the significant others in their reindeer games. This, in and of itself, isn’t inherently a bad thing; it’s good for couples to have separate interests and do things with separate groups of friends. However, that does often mean that they don’t have quite the same level of ease or familiarity with their respective partners, and that can make folks uncomfortable. It’s this odd feeling of “I should say something, what should I say, I don’t know what to do here, s--t, I’ve been quiet for too long now it’s A Thing…” That discomfort of not knowing what to do and the fear of The Awkward can end up being incredibly uncomfortable; if you’re socially awkward or inexperienced, it feels easier to just try to avoid things than to just confront it head on.

Hell, the feeling of “I’m awake before anyone else at a friend’s house and the only other person who’s up is my friend’s partner who I don’t know” is painfully familiar to a lot of nerds.

Now part of the problem is… well, again, your boyfriend’s friends are nerds. While this doesn’t automatically translate to “poor social skills”, the closed-circle-hyperfocus-on-our-favorite-topics-excluding-everyone-else trope among nerds and geeks is a very common one, and it seems like this is the routine with his friends. The partners are there for dinner, then go and do their own thing; very 1920s “the men will adjourn to the library for brandy and cigars” in its way.

Though in fairness, I suspect this is less misogyny or a lack of respect and more of benign ignorance. They’re so used to this routine — and their partners go along with it — that it never occurs to them that this can feel awkward or alienating to someone coming into it for the first time. That doesn’t make it better, mind you, but the rudeness and exclusion is a side-effect, not intent. And again: the fact that things get awkwardly uncomfortable provides a distressing incentive to just hope it goes away.

Which, unfortunately, it doesn’t. Especially not for someone like you, who’s making a good faith effort to connect with your boyfriend’s friends.

So… what do  you do?

Well, if I’m being honest, it sounds like you’re doing everything you can. It sounds like you’re trying to draw them out, find commonalities or things to talk about. You may get some success by asking them about the things they’re interested in — maybe ask for a beginner’s explanation of their favorite game — but this seems like a case of some folks who are just really uncomfortable socializing outside of their circle of friends.

This may change over time, the more that they see of you and the more you see of them. Continuing to be friendly and strike up conversations may help them get comfortable enough to not just Homer-Simpson-Into-The-Bushes… but it may not, too. It may help to ask your boyfriend about how to best connect with them, but at the end of the day, you can’t pull blood from a stone and you can’t pull conversation out of someone who feels too uncomfortable to talk to someone they don’t know.

It may just be that these are dudes who just aren’t ready or able to talk to the partner of their buddy. That’s on them, not on you.

That having been said: at the very least, your boyfriend can try to help make it so that you don’t feel like you have to leave whenever he as his friends over for a game night. It’s your home too, after all.

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’ve been a big fan and avid reader since 2016. So where to start, I don’t have great social skills that I can act on with gusto, usually I get told I’m a great flirt and wonderful person but I tend to flirt without doing much thought. It’s weird but due to the advice I read on your various blogs I was able to meet someone amazing back in 2017 and ended up dating that person.

For background: I was a 23 year old male chef who honestly gave up on dating after an abusive relationship I had the strength to cut off and decided to be single to focus on work. Well plans change, and I met a 37 year old woman at my job who I got along with right away and ended up falling in love with right before we started dating. We worked close everyday and called all the time and got close fast, to the point where we confessed our love a night before Christmas and met up and had our first kiss together.

Now a problem I have always had was my lack of meaningful relationship experience, as my longest relationship before this was about a year two years before and it ended badly. Before that well, they lasted about four months or less I’m sad to say. With this relationship I understood most of the do’s and don’ts of past failures, so in truth I was finally comfortable. A big shout-out to you on that one, Thank You!!

I ended up being with this woman, we will call S, for over two and a half years. We were together from December 2017 to July 2020 and in that time, we grew madly in love and understood that we wanted to be married. So, why aren’t we together? Well I was unfaithful; not physically cheating but emotional cheating to the point where it was understandable if people thought I was cheating. I didn’t love anyone else, it was an attention factor. I have major depression and it came back strong, and I was too proud to get help or even talk to S for reassurance and, well, I had trust issues. We had fought about this issue a lot of times since June 2019 and she finally ended things in July 2020. She’d had enough because she couldn’t trust me anymore. I had issues stemming from my lack of high school dating and social circle (or lack thereof). I started working on giving up my vices. I was an alcoholic until August 2017,  I even deleted my social media when we were trying to fix it because that was my enabler to flirt with others. This helped for a while — to the point we were planning a wedding and even wanting kids. Unfortunately I ended up lying about school work and she had it, I understand now was no excuse and she was right for leaving me. Knowing this didn’t make it easier to cope with.

We still communicated a lot after this, to the point where it felt like we were still dating and so it created this continuous hurt for her and me. She told me she moved on in December 2020 and did not want to text since she had entered a relationship. I was crushed completely and chose to focus on my studies. I started college in June 2018 for a bachelor’s degree in Digital Cinematography; I’d ended up messing my grades up when we first fought a year after starting so I was a year behind in grades with F’s across the board. I have since fixed my studies, I am about to graduate in December of this year and I have A’s across the board.

I’m now 26, my studies are better, my professors love my work and are encouraging to be a TA, and around March, S contacted me on the phone and she told me that she can’t get over me because she still loved me and still wants to be with me, but she’s incredibly scared. We talked for over two hours, just laughing and crying and… well, it felt like that night we confessed our love. It was great because we got everything out, and she understood I changed for the better. S was happy with the grades, and the fact that I had I let go of stupid issues about my dad (forgave him for leaving), high school (understood that’s not who I am), and low self-esteem (I started exercising, reading more, and talking to more people (even if it’s 6-feet and neighbors)). She thanks you for all that by the way.  S even told me she was not over me and understood I wasn’t over her. At the time, she had said that she doesn’t know if she wanted to be with me again because I had hurt her to the point she couldn’t believe me at all. Now she does trust me again, I am being 100% truthful to her as well and only talking to her as I decided to focus on school and platonic relationships. In the limited correspondence so far, we’ve been taking things slow, in case the hurt becomes too much for us. She has sent various texts and songs that show she still has incredible feelings for our relationship. She has said she still loves me and still has dreams of us being married. I still love her and I would still marry her tomorrow.

Now my question Doc, should I hope that we could be together again even after the hurt I did? I mean I have changed, in a positive manner, and gotten my teen-douche-f--k boy out. Should I do everything to help her see I changed and show that I am that guy she fell in love with back then? I have talked to her but she wanted time to think, that was the beginning of May. Or should I start to protect myself and hold back my feelings? I’m sorry this is a long, long message, I’m trying to cover almost 4 years, any advice you have Doc would be greatly appreciated.

Worth Loving

DEAR WORTH LOVING: WL… honestly, you’re asking the wrong question. I’m not entirely sure why you’re asking if you could get back with your ex, because it sounds to me like S wants you back as much as you want her. Everything you’ve written makes it sound like this is a “for f--k’s sake, take ‘yes’ for an answer already” situation.

But as I said, the question you should be asking isn’t “can you get back with her?”, it’s “should you?”

When people ask me whether they should try to get back with your ex, most of the time, the answer is “no”. A lot of times, people want to get back with their ex out of a fear of being alone, the allure of nostalgia and the golden times of the start of the relationship, sometimes even just because they want the thing that they can’t have. But more often than not, the biggest issue is that now that their ex is out of their lives, they’re thinking about the early days when everything was new and fresh and exciting. What they don’t think about is why they broke up. Sure, they may remember the fights and and the conflicts… but nostalgia puts a soft blur on everything that dulls the sharp edges and takes the venom out of the arguments. It’s very easy to get lost in the haze of memory and convince yourself that things weren’t that bad, right?

And yes. Usually they were. As a general rule, your ex is an ex for a reason, and those reasons don’t change just because you’re aching for the highlight reel of what your relationship had been. Assuming that it had actually even been that good in the first place.

So when people come to me to ask whether they should try to get back with their ex, I have a series of questions that they need to answer before I’ll give them my answer.

Question #1: Why did you break up in the first place?

Question #2: Has the reason why you broke up changed?

Question #3: Why Now?

Question #4: Do you miss THEM, or do you miss what they represent?

Question #5: Are they right for you, NOW?

It’s important to answer these questions honestly and completely, because otherwise all you’re doing is signing up for heartbreak… and that’s assuming that your ex would even be open to coming back. If you haven’t addressed the issues that get drawn out by these questions, then all you’re doing is signing up for the 12″ dance remix of your previous break up… the same old song, just faster and with a more intense beat.

Most of the time, people haven’t thought things through. They’re so caught up in just the emotional pain of missing their ex — or, more often, missing what they remember — that they don’t realize that nothing has changed. Either the fundamental conflicts or incompatibilities are still there, or they’re reacting to being lonely, or they’re trying to recapture the feeling of dating them and not the reality. Sometimes, it’s not even about their ex, it’s really about them; they don’t like being the one who was dumped or who got left behind.

But if they can answer these questions in such a way that, yes, it seems clear that it’s possible to make things work now… then it becomes a question of whether it’s even worth trying. Knowing whether you have changed or circumstances have changed is only half the battle. There’s also, y’know, their ex. And a lot of times, it doesn’t matter how much growing or changing they’ve done, their ex isn’t interested in trying again. The hurt may have been too deep. Their ex may have changed too and isn’t the person they were when they were dating. Or their ex has simply moved on, and it would be a better use of everyone’s time and energy if they would too.

Now if we look at your situation, it seems like you’ve pretty handily answered most of the questions. You clearly understand why you two broke up, and it seems pretty clear that you have put in a lot of effort to address the issues that lead to your breaking up. You did the wise thing: you took a long, hard look at yourself and decided to make some very necessary changes. That’s really admirable; it shows a level of maturity, self-awareness and emotional intelligence that a lot of folks lack. It also says a lot that you were doing this for yourself, and not just in the name of getting S back.

Question number 3 is also an easy answer. Why now? Because S reached out to you, first. Question number 4, likewise, seems to be answered; you pretty clearly understand what you had with S and what you gave up because you were busy being an insecure bag of slop who was looking for validation in places that didn’t serve your needs.

Now question number 5 is the tricky one. It’s been a while, you’ve grown and changed… but so has S. While you two may still have feelings for each other, as the poets say: “sometimes love just ain’t enough”. Part of what’s going to be important for the two of you moving forward is that you don’t rush things. Just as the early, intoxicating days of New Relationship Energy can make you overlook problems and incompatibilities, the dopamine and oxytocin rush of getting back together can be just as blinding. It can be very easy to get lost in the chemical and emotional rush of starting the relationship again and not realize that neither of you is who you were before. And while that means that the previous problems are no longer in effect, that doesn’t guarantee that you’re still  compatible. People grow and change, and sometimes those changes mean that you’ve grown apart.

So it’s a good thing that you and S are taking things slowly. In fact, I would advise that you two continue to do so. I know you feel as though you could marry her tomorrow, but you need to put the brakes on that. It’s going to be a while before you and S are going to have the clarity and perspective to see whether you can work together now. This is going to be especially true on your end. Yes, she trusts you now, but the pain of the previous relationship is still there. You’re going to have to show that you’re trustworthy and live your life as a man of integrity. It’s a lot easier to do this at the start, when everything is exciting. It gets a lot harder when the twitterpated stage has faded and you don’t have that NRE to help with the emotional lifting.

My advice in your case is to proceed with caution. That’s not to say that there isn’t reason to hope; from everything you’ve laid out in your letter, things look very promising and hopeful. It certainly sounds like there’s every reason to believe that you two could make this work. But it’s all too easy to get caught up in the excitement and dive in head first, only to realize that things were shallower and rockier than you knew. So I would say to continue to take things slowly. Think of this as an extended courtship; talk, date, and continue to test the waters. Just don’t lose your head and commit to anything more than next week. You need to treat this like a new relationship, not like you were picking up where you left off. Otherwise, the two of you run the risk of breaking your hearts a second time… and that’s going to hurt even worse than the first time you went 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