DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: This may be a simple answer or maybe it’s a bigger bag of cats than I give it credit for, but a thought occurred to me and I wanted to run it by your expertise.
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I’m in the slow process of getting over a long-term infatuation with someone I’ve known for about six years but became highly infatuated with over the past two years to the point where it became a full on crush that has really lived up to the name.
And, as the crush has finally started to break under the weight of the reality that “she’s just not that into you”, I started to wonder… does the reason I get these long term fixations have to do with how limited a social circle I maintain?
I am a cyclic habitual offender of getting a crush on someone I know, finding out they’re not into me and taking YEARS to recover to the point where I am open to being interested in someone else, only to start the whole process over again. And today, the thought occurred that maybe I just don’t have the social net that would support NOT suddenly becoming hyperfocused on someone I know the moment I’m finally over the last person I knew who I happened to like.
While my social media network of friends feels extraordinarily vast to the point where I have to cut myself off from doing follow backs because I just don’t have the bandwidth to keep up anymore, my in-person friends are few and far between…and the people I find myself attracted to in that group are even fewer, which I think probably contributes to that hyperfixation when I find someone who does hit the right buttons for me.
…but it just never works out. One way or another, I always find myself falling for someone who’s either unavailable or just not interested in me that way.
I know that finding someone is at least partly a numbers game — barring the daunting prospect of internet dating, if you never leave your house, you’re hardly likely to find a partner. They don’t DoorDash soulmates (to my knowledge; have they added that to the menu?) While being introverted and reclusive by nature makes it hard to contemplate — much less put into practice — it seems like the only effective way to mitigate these long-term infatuations that eat up years of my life is to expand my social contact by a BROAD margin so that I’m not just inflicting my romantic focus on friends who never see it coming and are just not interested.
Not sure how cohesive this was. I am prone to ranting. Thanks for listening, Doc.
I wish you, as always, a…
Good Journey
DEAR GOOD JOURNEY: When we talk about why we fall for the people we do, we tend to focus a lot on factors like physical attraction. It’s part of why, for example, so many dudes get hung up on the idea of “leagues”, or folks become convinced that only 20% of men get laid or can find casual partners. What we don’t do is pay attention to the other factors that are involved.
One of those factors is propinquity. It’s very easy to forget just how powerful familiarity and exposure is. The more often that we’re exposed to a particular stimulus — a song, for example — the greater the odds are that we are going to start to like it. This is why, for example, you’ll catch yourself humming that pop single by the singer or band you can’t stand and have to grudgingly admit that it actually slaps; you’ve heard it so many times, you’ve started to like it. This effect has been documented in a host of areas: in music, in art… even in people. The more time you spend with folks, the greater the odds of forming a friendship or becoming attracted to them. This is one of the reasons why, for example, we tend to develop crushes on classmates and coworkers; we spend a lot of time with them, often in close physical or psychological proximity to one another. It’s also why, for example, folks in the service industry develop fondness for their regulars, why we tend to make friends so easily in high-school and college and so on.
But it goes beyond just being exposed to a person over and over again; it’s also about the quality of the interactions we have with them. If we consistently have positive interactions with somebody that we see often or are regularly in close proximity to, then we have more opportunities to interact with them. And if they’re people we’re on good terms with — friends, coworkers, classmates, etc. — then those interactions are much more likely to be positive experiences. The more of those positive experiences we have with a person, the greater the likelihood that we’re going to develop positive feelings for them. It’s The Reward Theory of Attraction in action: their presence makes us feel good and so we unconsciously prioritize our relationship with them. By being someone often (propinquity), getting to know them (familiarity) and having positive experiences with them, we start to build attraction.
This, incidentally, is why personality tends to win out over looks in the long-run. Looks help when we first meet somebody, but personality is why people stick around and want to spend time with us. We very rarely start relationships with folks we’ve just met; we tend to start them with people we’ve gotten to know.
So yes, it’s understandable that you develop crushes on your friends; they’re folks you spend the most time with, and so you’re more likely to develop feelings, platonic, romantic and sexual.
However, another factor that we often don’t take into consideration is avoidance — that is, we fall for people because we’re avoiding the possibility of a relationship. This sounds like a contradiction in terms at first, but there’s actual logic (of sorts) behind it.
A lot of times, when we fall for people that we know, on some level, aren’t interested in us, it has far less to do with being a hopeless romantic or that person being The One and everything to do with fear. The most common expression of this is the fear of success — again, something that seems inherently contradictory. However, what’s going on here is the difference between fantasy and reality. An impossible relationship is safe, because it can’t happen; it means that this is forever a fantasy, not reality. Because it’s only ever a relationship in potentia, it can be exactly what you want it to be. You are free to imagine it to progress in whatever direction you want because it’s ultimately never going to happen. It’s never going to be more than a fantasy. As a result, it’s safe; you know it will always be perfect, it will always be romantic, it will always go exactly how you want it to.
However, if your feelings were returned and you were to actually date that person? Well, now s--t gets real… with everything that entails. If a relationship is real, then that means it can fail. A real relationship with someone means that you now run the risk of ruining it. You can break someone’s heart or get your heart broken. Your partner can cheat on you, leave you or die. The relationship can fail and your love can wither into bitterness and resentment. Or you might do something wrong and cause it to fall apart. At least when you’re dealing with an unrequited crush, you know that the pain can only so bad. Yeah it sucks, but it’s not as bad as the pain of having what you wanted and losing it.
And so, falling for someone you know is unavailable or uninterested represents safety. It’s a way of protecting yourself against the greater pain of a real relationship and all the slings and arrows that come with it. This is one reason why a lot of guys get “stuck” in the Friend Zone or act like Nice Guys; they know that their crush will never like them back the way they want, which is why they never actually try to move the relationship forward. To do so would end the fantasy and collapse the quantum waveform where she both does and doesn’t reject them into the reality where… well, where they get shot down in flames. But by that same token, they don’t move on because doing so would mean running the risk of actually dating someone, with all the risks thereto. And so they choose the comforting fantasy and the lesser “pain” of being in limerence with someone who doesn’t like them back.
At the same time, another reason why people get hopeless crushes is about self-esteem. Specifically, folks will get unrequited crushes or fall for people who are unavailable or uninterested because they don’t believe they deserve to date somebody. They don’t believe in their own worth or value, they don’t feel like they have the right to be happy or to be loved and so they choose to take steps to avoid it. They will fall for people precisely because they know on a deep level that this is an impossible relationship; that person will never love them back, and so they are protected from the risk of dating while being unworthy.
Now, as I’m often saying: you’re the common denominator in every relationship you have. If you’re consistently crushing on folks who aren’t into you, especially if it’s almost always exclusively people in your social circle… well, that’s a sign that it’s time to start digging into just why. And in your case, GJ, that’s pretty easy: you’re stuck in a repeating pattern. You aren’t going out and meeting people; you’re relying on people to come to you and that’s not a good way to find partners. Not if you’re not proactive about it and certainly not if you never leave your apartment. Even online dating requires having a life — both to make a more attractive profile but also because the first question folks ask about potential matches is “what would my life be like if I were dating them?”
The problem here is that you’re in a stalemate. If the only significant change is which of your friends you have a crush on, then that’s an indication that you’re stagnating. You run into the same situation constantly because you’re doing the same things and… well, how’s that working out for you?
If you want different results, you have to do things differently, otherwise nothing will change. And nobody can start that process except for you.
(Quite frankly, I’m about yay close to getting a stamp made that says “sgniht tnereffid od ot evah uoy ,tnereffid eb ot sgniht tnaw uoy fI”, so I can stamp it on people’s foreheads and they can read it in the mirror every morning.)
And while I realize the joke is “how do introverts make friends? They wait for an extrovert to adopt them…”, blaming a lack of socialization on introversion is unhelpful at best. Being an introvert doesn’t mean someone’s incapable of socializing or too delicate to be out in the wild world or whatever, it just means that they gain energy by being on their own and expend energy out in public. That doesn’t mean going out and socializing is impossible, it just means working with and around your energy levels. I know plenty of introverts who are extremely social; they just Batman out earlier than others when their social batteries get low. I also know folks who have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, but who have active social lives; they take that into account and shape their plans so that they can go and be social and then have time to recharge. That may mean husbanding their energy so they can go to a friend’s party or making sure that they’ve cleared the deck afterwards so they can have some recovery time the next day or two. But they still make it happen.
So my recommendation for you is to start doing a deep dive into yourself. Figure out exactly what’s going on here; how much of these hopeless or unrequited crushes are because of the limited number of folks you interact with in person, or if there’s a deeper psychological issue going on. If it’s the former, then you’re going to have to make a point of meeting more people and building your social circle. If it’s the latter, then you need to start addressing the underlying issues; otherwise, all you’re doing is putting a bandage on a paper-cut while ignoring the internal bleeding.
But either way: things can’t change until you start making changes. So if you want things to be different… you’re going to have to decide how you’re going to do things differently.
Good luck.
Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com