Ask Dr. Nerdlove

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m a 33 year old male from the Midwest. Just your average nerdy white guy who works in healthcare. Don’t have a particular interest in travel and have your typical nerdy interests like books, games and the like. I’m making myself sound dull but I present it better on my profile of course.

I have over a hundred matches on OKCupid and I’m not having much luck finding who they are blindly swiping. I didn’t want to spend money but I’ve spent forty bucks on dumber stuff. I said to myself: “Hey, maybe I’ll find someone relatively close among a hundred people!”

The vast majority of my matches were international, predominantly from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. There were very few people from my state among my matches, and they weren’t people I was interested in or attracted to. I think there were maybe six Americans.

I’ve noticed before that I tend to match a lot with people from overseas, particularly the Philippines. It isn’t that I dislike the attention per se, it’s just I find the lack of enthusiasm and interest from people in my home country… disheartening. I’ve met some lovely people from overseas don’t get me wrong, but while I’m open to some distance I’m thinking like maybe a hundred miles not three thousand! But very few people that I’m actually interested in here show me any interest.

Is this an odd problem to have? Should I just…get a passport and roll with it or what? I am really not sure what to make of it.

Unlucky in the States 

DEAR UNLUCKY IN THE STATES: As much as I hate to say it, UITS, most of those aren’t real profiles or real matches. While I’m sure some of these have actual people behind them, very few of them are lonely women overseas looking for love. Some are scammers and grifters, some are folks looking for matches to get them a form of financial security and many are going to be shady “check out my webcam” bait-and-switch profiles.

Plus the occasional genuine person.

First thing you need to do, UITS, is change your profile settings. It sounds like you’ve set things to look for matches in a massive search area, and that means you’re going to be getting matches from bots, fake accounts and overseas profiles. While keeping your search radius to, say, a 25-50 mile region isn’t going to keep bots and scams from matching with you, it will cut down the number immensely. It’ll also mean that you’ll feel much better about nixing the folks who’re overseas; their swiping on you will be an indication that they didn’t actually read your profile. That would imply either someone who doesn’t care what you said, or that it’s not a real match.

The next thing to do is consider whether OKCupid is the right site for you. One of the reasons why folks will often struggle with online dating is that, quite frankly, they’re on the wrong apps. Different apps have different user bases and cater towards different relationship types. OKCupid is very much the “anything goes” app, the 500 lb gorilla that gets by in part on being the app that everyone uses. That massive user base means you’re likely to find folks on there, but it also means it’s going to have the highest per-capita bot/fake account ratio — possibly only exceeded by Tinder. You may find that you get better results off Hinge or Bumble, especially since Bumble mandates that women initiate messaging after matching.

Now, the next thing to do, regardless of whether you stay on OKC or move elsewhere, is to delete your profile and start over. I realize this sounds harsh, but part of what you’re going to be doing is functionally resetting the algorithm and changing who your profile gets placed in front of. By rebooting your account, you get the “new profile” algorithmic boost, which will help put you in front of more potential matches in your (very carefully chosen) area. It’s also a good time to do some polishing on your account and a little A/B testing on photos, questions, etc.

The third thing to do is, paradoxically, use online dating less. While dating apps are very much a boon to meeting folks, they’re still not a replacement for meeting people in person, especially when the ways men and women use swiping apps can work at cross purposes. Dating apps are best used as a supplement to meeting women, not a replacement; something that you do when you have a few minutes of downtime, rather than something you devote hours of each day towards. By deprioritizing the apps, you don’t invest your self-esteem as heavily in the results you do or don’t get; it’s a bonus, not the sum totality of dating. And by de-prioritizing how important the apps are, you won’t find yourself focusing so much on any one match, especially when you don’t know anything about them other than what’s in their profile. The people you meet on OKCupid may awesome… but they’re not the only people in the world.

Just as importantly: consider the power of your social network. Even in 2021, most people meet their partners through friends and shared activities, not dating apps. Telling your friends that you’re single and looking and to let you know if they know someone they think you’d click with can help you meet far more eligible (and compatible) folks, more efficiently than hoping that this random person from Kiev is, in fact, a real woman and not a cam-site honey trap.

And don’t worry if your friends only know married women or folks who are coupled up. Making friends, especially female friends, regardless of their marital or relationship status increases your chances of meeting the singles you’re hoping to find. After all, folks tend to run in packs and the cute women you befriend also have single friends who are as cute as they are. Making new  (genuine)friends means that you up the number of folks who can introduce you to the people who may well end up being the match of your dreams.

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: An almost 28-year old man here with a lot on his mind he’s trying to get sorted out.

I have always been a hopeless romantic with a tendency to fall head-over-heels for women, especially those I feel compatible with and it really feels like it’s something I can’t control. It gets very frustrating thinking like this and then realizing I may never find the right woman for me. It’s a habit I’d really like to break because it’s very painful to want romantic love so bad and realize nobody may ever love you as much as you love them, if they even love you at all.

I am still a virgin who has never been in a mature, adult relationship for a variety of reasons. I never felt like it was the right time after I graduated college and did a series of temp jobs, and I had a serious mental illness that went undiagnosed for over a decade and led to a couple stays in the psychiatric ward before we could get me onto proper medication and treatment that has significantly reduced my symptoms. Even still I had to resign from my last two jobs because my illness interfered with my ability to work as part of a team or meet workplace standards.

As I write this, I am currently unemployed, having just resigned from my last job 5 days prior. I’m taking some time off to try and understand myself better so I’m not in a situation like this again where the symptoms of my illness are aggravated to such a point where I fly off the handle and hurt, scare, or offend my coworkers, even unintentionally. I’m trying to find a therapist to work through a lot of these issues with, but it’s so frustrating because they all seem to have no openings for new clients.

In the meantime, all I can think about is how I’m getting older, how women older than me (who I am open to dating) want someone more mature who is making money and is in a stable place in his life and how women younger than me probably want a man with more experience than I have to offer and may not want to date someone even a couple years older than they are .

I have tried to reframe my situation but I always seem to fall back in the same rut – “no woman I have feelings for will ever have feelings for me”, “I am past my prime/expired goods”, and “if a woman stays in a relationship with me, she will leave at the first sign of trouble/when she realizes how much baggage and trauma I carry”.

When I think about dating someone, thoughts like these fill my mind, and I know that having those thoughts could very well end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy because I might be more likely to date women who do act in those ways, leading to a vicious cycle.

And then, there’s another “issue”. I do not ever want to have children, and I would rather be single for the rest of my life than with a woman who wants kids. But I feel like childfree women are few and far between and likely have a more independent streak and no desire for a relationship. I don’t know very many childfree women, but that’s just the stereotype in my head.

All these things come together to create a lot of mental trouble for me. “You’re too needy”, “Why can’t you quit daydreaming of the perfect woman for you?”, “You’re damaged goods”, “You have too much against you and not enough for you”. And so it goes.

It’s not like I don’t have a good life. I have an amazing and supportive family and close friends. I travel and I am a photographer. I love animals, music (I am an avid vinyl collector and singer), road trips, and sampling as much food & drink as I can get my hands on. I consider myself an intelligent, kind, generous, thoughtful, and relatively mature person who does his best to treat others with dignity, respect, and love.

I have personal and professional goals and ambitions – chief among them to start my Master’s degree next year and eventually get my doctorate and become a college professor and mental health advocate & researcher. Personally, I want to get married, buy a house, build a man cave, and potentially foster and adopt cats and dogs.

It just feels like I’m starting out very late and with the fact I don’t want kids my dating pool is pretty low already, so I am also feeling a lot of pressure to pick the “right one” as quickly as I can.

So, If I had to sum up the main question of my piece that I’d like you to answer, it’s this: How can I reframe my situation and what actions can I take to make things better?

Very Respectfully,

The Virgin Murray

DEAR THE VIRGIN MURRAY: OK TVM, this is going to sound harsh, but this is very much a self-inflicted problem.

There are two things that are contributing to the issues you’re having.

The first is relatively simple: you’re putting far too much importance on what are ultimately transitory crushes on folks and rounding it up to love. What you’re feeling is what’s known as “limerence” — a sort of puppy-love that tends to be incredibly intense and include almost obsessive thoughts and fantasies of starting a relationship and having those feelings returned.

Now this is entirely understandable: you’ve rounded up love and romance to being both of dire importance and to being perpetually out of reach. So now, when you have a momentary infatuation on someone, often someone you know very little about, it becomes symbolic of both your desire and the impossibility of fulfilling it. In a very real way, falling for people you know won’t return your feelings becomes a sort of perverse self-preservation; you don’t feel like you’re worthy of love or that love is possible so you subconsciously choose people who are “safe”. People who won’t return your feelings or who you have minimal contact with.

The problem, of course, is that this sort of “protection” only tends to make the person being “protected” more miserable. But then again, our brains don’t care about our happiness; they only care about safety, predictability and reliability.

The second problem is that you — like so many others — are making assumptions about other folks based on your beliefs, not on reality. You’ve invented women in your head who reject you because you’ve convinced yourself that nobody could want you. And so, rather than actually talking to women or finding out what they want, you’re reacting to what you think they want.

It’s a trap entirely of your own making and one that only serves to reinforce your current status quo. And part of what makes this so difficult to escape is that these beliefs prioritize inaction. You aren’t putting yourself out there, talking to women, making connections and trying to find folks you might be compatible with. You’re creating scenarios — again, entirely in your mind — that are giving you reasons to not make progress. And as I’m so often saying: if you want things to be different, then you have to do things differently.

However, it sounds like part of the issue here is getting yourself in a place where you can date. If you’re currently dealing with symptoms that make it difficult to hold down a job, then treatment and management needs to be your top priority. It doesn’t do you any good to try to date if you’re dealing with severe emotional dysregulation on top of everything else.

You already know that. The difficulty you’re having is that rather than seeing this as “I’m getting myself into emotional shape” or “setting myself up for future success”, you’re framing this as “this is why I don’t deserve to be happy” and “I’m running out of time.” And neither of these are true. All of that is just the voice of anxiety speaking, your jerk-brain dripping lies and poison in your ear.

Because the truth is that no, you’re not running out of time. People fall in love and find relationships — even lose their virginity — late in life all the time. You don’t have a life crystal embedded in your hand that’s going to start flashing when you’re out of time, nor are you going to end up in a place where you’ll be excluded from dating because you didn’t have enough parters by age X. Trying to rush things or force the issue, however will screw you over, because it’ll exacerbate the problems you’re already having.

Instead I want you to think of it this way: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Taking things carefully, getting yourself taken care of and in a good place may feel slow… but slow means that you’re doing things carefully and methodically, which will smooth out your way. And if you smooth out your path, then you’ll have fewer hang-ups, make fewer mistakes and create more opportunities for success, than you would if you try to bulldoze your way through in order to “beat the clock” as it were.

So rather than engaging your confirmation bias by looking up (inaccurate) numbers of women who are child-free or making up people to be rejected by, focus on yourself. You aren’t losing time, you’re making sure that you’re ready and in position to find love and affection. You are clearing away obstacles, setting yourself up for success and making sure you know what you want and what you aren’t willing to accept in a relationship.

Now, I get the frustration of trying to find a therapist and a psychiatrist, especially at a time where not only is the population at large dealing with PTSD and anxiety from COVID, but therapists are also dealing with PTSD and burnout. But frustrating isn’t the same as impossible; it just means that you may have to look a little further afield or think outside the box. You could, for example, find ways of dealing with those obsessive thoughts through some self-directed cognitive behavioral therapy, guided via apps like MoodGym. There are also a number of therapists and counselors who work with clients via Zoom, Skype or other forms of telehealth. Even organizations like Hims have started offering remote talk therapy, which can help give you structure and direction to getting your condition under control.

But again, the important thing to remember is that this isn’t “losing time” or “wasting time”, it’s “getting set up for success”. If you were to find the woman of your dreams today, you wouldn’t be in a good place to pursue things. But by making sure that you’re in mental and emotional shape, you’ll be putting yourself in a place where, when the opportunity arises, you’ll be ready, willing and able to take full advantage.

And trust me: it’s much better to wait to pursue something when you are actually in a position to do so than to try to force something when you aren’t ready. That’s how you end up in relationships that seem ok at first and quickly turn to something far less acceptable down the line.

So taking time to focus on yourself and your mental health is the best thing you can do for yourself. You’re doing the right thing and it’ll work out far better for you in the long run. Take care of yourself; love will be ready and waiting for you when you’re ready. There is, in fact, time enough for love.

You’ll be ok, TVM. I promise.

All will be well.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: So let me preface this with: I think I’m pretty average. I know this and try REALLY hard to make conversations exciting and fun. I don’t get a lot of matches, so I try not to waste it with boring conversation. I have to prove I’m worth spending time with, right?

So I usually start my conversations with something fun and different, like wanting a domesticated raccoon in a support animal vest. Usually these conversations go for hours. Some have even lasted 3 days. I get pumped up, and excited. We talk about music festivals, hobbies and things we do for fun. Sometimes we’re literally messaging each other at the same time. Before we finish typing (you know, those little three dots saying someone’s typing).

Suddenly they’re gone. No more responses. I’ve showed friends my conversations and they all agree I never said anything weird or red flagged. It’s disappointing. And I’m usually bummed for an hour or two and shrug it off and move on.

Recently I messaged my friends that I was disappointed after a really great, highly engaged conversation about music went the way of the dodo. My friends and I messaged back and forth and I realized I was less hurt by being shot down and more hurt that they left me hanging. I can deal better with a flat out no, but leaving me on Read just irks me. 

My friends told me I’m asking too much for a close on a conversation. But I’ve always felt it’s impolite to just leave people waiting for a period on the conversation. We got in an argument. They all teamed up on me and, maybe they didn’t mean to, but it felt like an outright attack. I refuse to talk to them about dating now (they’re all happily in marriages and relationships). \

I feel lost. Like it’s not even worth trying anymore. I feel like a window of opportunity has closed on me since I have basically no more close friends who are single to go out with.

So I guess as a TLDR: 

1) Is there a place I can go where conversations might actually last? Am I asking too much for wishing people would end conversations like normal?

2) Where does one go to meet people when they’re the only single one in their circles? Do people go to bars alone? Is that weird?

Thanks in advance,

Tired of Flying Solo

DEAR TIRED OF FLYING SOLO: So, there’re a couple of things here, TFS.

The first is that if you’re consistently having conversations dry up, then the odds are good that part of the problem is that you’re taking too long to get to the dating part of “dating apps”. The point of talking to someone on a dating app is get the conversation off the app. Conversations and interactions have their own momentum, and NerdLove’s First Law is that emotional momentum fades… unless it’s acted on by an external force. That means that the longer you are chit-chatting on the app and not moving towards meeting in person, the greater the odds that the momentum and interest are going to bleed away. Especially if they’re also talking to other people on the app — folks who do ask them out on dates.

Your matches can’t go out on dates with you that you don’t invite them on TFS, so you have to make your move.

If you and your match are getting along well and having good conversations, then I highly recommend moving things along. Again, the first — and possibly easier — step is to just move the conversation off the app. This, at the very least, moves things up the intimacy ladder; it carries the implication that you’re moving towards actually meeting up in person and possibly going on a date.

The easiest way to make this happen is to say “hey, I’m really enjoying talking to you, but I find messaging on here to be frustrating/annoying/gets lost in the churn. Do you have Kik/WhatsApp/iMessage/whatever?” or “Hey, I’m probably deleting the app soon but I really like talking to you and I’d like to keep this going; I’d love to move this to text. My number is 555-55555…”

Similarly, you can also propose a pre-date date: that is, a brief meet up in person for coffee or ice cream or something. Again, the procedure for this is very simple: “Hey, I really like talking to you and I’d love to see if we’ve got chemistry in person too. I’ve got some free time between appointments/meetings/whatever; would you like to meet up for 15 minutes for coffee at the Starbucks of your choice and see if we get along?” This tends to be a relatively easy lift; in a worst case scenario, if you just don’t vibe or they aren’t who they presented themselves as, you’re out 15 minutes and the price of a grande coffee.

Now, the second thing is that yes, people just leave you hanging. It’s annoying, and it’s a pet-peeve for a lot of folks, but that’s life these days. While you can and should model the behavior you’d like to see or experience to others, ultimately, you have to to just roll with it. There really aren’t other options unfortunately; all you can do is just shake your head at it and roll on.

It’s also not worth taking personally; it happens to everyone, and it’s just part of the culture of online dating. If that’s something that drives you nuts… well, then maybe online dating isn’t for you. And hey, that’s valid!

Now as for your second question: yes, folks go to bars alone all the time. Nobody is going to notice that you’re rolling solo unless you call attention to it; people just aren’t paying that close attention to you or who you’re talking to.

However most people don’t meet their partners at bars or clubs. Most folks meet their partners either through shared activities like classes or hobbies, or through friends. And while your friends may be partnered up or married, that doesn’t mean that they can’t help you out.

First: your friends can still come hit the bars with you, even if they’re not on the hunt themselves. They can provide moral support or wing for you as needed, even if they’re not trying to get some themselves. But again: most folks don’t meet their partners at bars.

That’s why there’s a second, superior option: ask them if they’ve got any single friends that you’d get along with. Tell them that dating apps aren’t proving to be your thing and you’re looking to meet awesome folks, so if they know someone they think you’d vibe with, you’d appreciate an introduction. You can even host events — a barbecue, a house party, a backyard NERF war — that they can bring single friends to, so that it feels more organic and less “set-up-y”.

But again: you have to be willing to take the initiative here. Your friends may know you’re single, but unless you ask for what you need — in this case, help in meeting some sexy singles — they aren’t going to know that this is something you want.

Oh, and one more thing: your friends weren’t ganging up on you. They were just trying to tell you that conversations die on the vine and that’s just how folks roll these days. I get that you find it rude or kind of insulting… but it’s just how things are these days. Railing against it isn’t going to do anything other than get you worked up and more upset; the only thing you can do is accept it and try to be the change you want to see. So lead by example, TFS; maybe you can cause a new trend.

Good luck.

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