Doctor’s Note: Today’s letter discusses sexual violence and contains descriptions of sexual assault

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I had been with my partner for almost 10 years. Some significant things happened in my life and I hit a really low depression. Our relationship took a toll for it. Insert a mutual somewhat friend of ours. I liked him, he was funny, interesting to talk too, and charismatic. During our friendship he made a lot of advances. Sometimes I flirted back, but overall never let on that I was interested in having sex. My relationship with my partner was getting worse and worse. He was jealous of my relationship with this other person. He asked me to end it and I wish I had. But I stayed stubborn and ignored his request.

At some point my friend got too… suggestive. I told him I was more than just a sexual body. We stopped talking for a good while. This all took place over a year or so. During this time, I had plenty of opportunities to cheat but I did not want to. It was just nice in the beginning having someone find me attractive and more than just a mom of 3 that cleaned and did school projects all the time.

Well, my friend and I were a part of a group that ran a spring event in the woods. We saw each other during the meetings, I kept things platonic. The night before the spring event kicks off, we always have a staff night. Drinking, dancing, good food, just a nice stress reliever from all the planning. My partner didn’t come with me to the event that year. I was really sad, depressed, somewhat suicidal and I drink. A lot. I’m not a huge drinker and I was chugging this stuff back. At one point, I’m just dancing and joking around. But the night gets fuzzier and fuzzier. I remember at some point, 2 other people from my group dragging me along the pathway to the cabins. Then next moment, one of them is kissing me and taking my clothes off. I remember stumbling back. Then the next memory is one of them pushing my face into their partners genitals (unclothed). I remember gagging and throwing up a bit, swallowing it down. I got up and ran. I didn’t have a shirt or bra on. It was dark and I ran into my friend, asked him for help. I didn’t have a flashlight, didn’t know where my clothes were. I don’t know if I walked or he half carried me, but I ended up at my cabin. And next thing, we’re having sex. I didn’t say no. I went with it. Afterwards, I just laid there. Completely numb.

And then I made this dumb choice, after getting home, I messaged him about the event. Like, that I enjoyed it and when we’re going to do it again. But deep down, I felt grossed out and just dead inside. My partner found out, via reading the message. We separated and it’s been hell since. I never told him the fullness of that night. I was afraid because of what it mean to our group (the event group), that my partner wouldn’t believe me, that given all the events that lead up to it, it definitely looks like I cheated. And I feel like I did. But through therapy, I guess I’ve come to conclude it’s more complicated than that. How do I talk to my ex about this situation? I love him and want him home. I want to heal and move on from this.

What Did I Do?

DEAR WHAT DID I DO: I am so, SO sorry that you’ve gone through all of this, WDID. You’ve been hurt so very deeply and you deserve NONE of it.

Here’s how you talk to your ex about this: you tell him that you were assaulted and raped.

Because that’s exactly what happened.

Here’s the thing WDID: what happened to you was rape. It doesn’t matter that you had depression. It doesn’t matter that you had a flirty relationship with your buddy. Nor does it matter that you were flattered by the attention and got a charge from being seen as desirable by someone. Or that you had been drinking at the spring event. Literally none of that matters.

What matters is that two people apparently tried to assault you while you were inebriated. And when you got away from them and went to your friend for help… he also took advantage and assaulted you. You were in no shape to know what was going on, nor to give consent, and what happened to you was not your fault. End of story. No ifs, no buts, no quibbling.

The only people who are at fault here are the people who assaulted you; your “friend” and the two other people who also attacked you.

Here’s the other thing to recognize: your behavior — during the act and after — is entirely normal. People talk about “the fight or flight” response, but it’s really “fight, flight, freeze or fawn“. The freeze and fawn responses are very common responses to crisis situations; in both cases, it’s a way people — especially women and femme-bodied people — protect themselves and survive. Freezing is often caused by a reaction to adrenaline; your body functionally locks up because you aren’t used to dealing with the sudden surge. Similarly, fawning — behaving in an ingratiating manner — is an unconscious attempt to de-escalate and defuse the situation and prevent things from getting worse.

“Letting” the assault happen (and to be clear: you didn’t let anything happen; you were non-responsive, which is very different) is very much the freeze response. Texting afterwards is, likewise, a fawn response. It’s equal parts trying to avoid angering or antagonizing the person who assaulted you and a way of your brain trying to protect you from the idea that you were assaulted. It’s not an abdication of responsibility or an admission of guilt but a way of trying to protect yourself emotionally and physically and it is incredibly common. This is a very common response from people who haven’t had a chance to process what happened, deal with their understandably complex and complicated feelings and who have legitimate reason to worry that bringing things up would make things worse.

Does it seem illogical? Absolutely. Does it make a lick of damn sense? Nope. But our brains aren’t logical. They don’t give a f--k about sense. Our brains don’t care about our happiness, our brains care about safety and getting you out of a dangerous situation is a much higher priority to them than worrying that our method of doing so may f--k up relationships or make legal issues harder.

So that’s why the very first thing you need to do is forgive yourself and quit repeating this narrative that you cheated or that you “went along” with it. You were assaulted. People tried to take advantage of your being drunk to ignore your wishes or your consent and use you for their own desires. That isn’t cheating, that’s rape.

The second thing I would strongly suggest is to talk to a counselor or therapist, especially someone who specializes or is experienced in dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault. If you don’t have a therapist already or know where to turn, then the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists has an excellent referral directory to help you find an understanding, sex-positive counselor or therapist in your area. I would also recommend calling the National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-4673 and talking to some of the trained staff. The Rape, Assault and Incest National Network can help you find support and assistance in your community, as well as help you determine next steps and provide you with some much-needed resources.

I would highly recommend talking to them — and possibly a therapist — before taking further steps, because the best thing you can do is focus on yourself and your mental and emotional health first. Coming to terms, dealing with what happened, realizing that this was not your fault, that this was done to you and you are not responsible for their actions is vital. Talking to them will help you process your reactions, understand that these are known responses and not indicators of consent and help you realize that you are not at fault here. There are a lot of s--tty people out there who will try to weaponize your responses or circumstances against you and use them to shift the blame. Armoring yourself against that now will be important, if only for your own mental well being.

Talking with the staff at RAINN and/or your own counselor will also help you figure out how best to talk to your ex, give you the vocabulary to explain things and — importantly — help get you ready to face the difficulty of talking about these events.

Now, there is the obvious question of what steps do you take with the folks who assaulted you. This, unfortunately, is where things start to range outside of my pay grade and will depend entirely on what you feel safe and capable of doing. My personal feeling is that you should absolutely bring up your assault with the organizers of the spring event. It’s a safety issue for you and for others at these events; if the two who pulled you away are regulars in the organization, alerting folks to the missing stair is important.

However: this can also be incredibly difficult and traumatic and you may well not be in a place to face this. If — and it’s a pretty damn big if — you feel like you’re able to do this and that it won’t cause you more trauma and damage, then please be sure to proceed with caution.

As for your ex-friend who raped you… well, honestly, it still comes back to your own sense of safety and emotional and mental health. Confronting him with what he did — that you weren’t consenting, that you texted afterwards out of a sense of self-protection, that he assaulted you — can be important, but it can also be incredibly difficult for you. If you don’t feel like you can confront him, even at a remove, then that’s entirely understandable. I would, however, say that you can and should utterly excise him from your life and cut off all access he may have to you. That means blocking him on all social media you use, blocking his number, filtering his texts and emails into the trash, etc. Your safety and well-being is a priority.

Again: RAINN and a trained counselor will be able to work with you and help you decide what the best course of actions are for you and how to execute them.

But more than anything else, here’s what I want you to take away from this: THIS WAS NOT YOUR FAULT. YOU WERE RAPED. This was something that was DONE TO YOU, and nothing that came before — not the flirting, the drinking, even the feeling flattered by his attraction — excuses what he did or means that you were to blame. Because, again: THIS WAS NOT YOUR FAULT.

I also want you to recognize this very important truth: you are much stronger than you know. You have come through this horrific experience and survived. You have wounds and scars, but you survived. You will heal and things will feel better. There are hardships now and likely others in your future. However, there are better days to come, and that is in no small part because of how incredibly brave and strong you are.

And I want to emphasize this one more time: THIS WAS NOT YOUR FAULT.

You’ve been through the fires of hell and you’ve got the ashes to prove it. But you’ve come through. Now it’s time to start the healing process and to take care of yourself.

You are very strong. You will heal.

Write back and let us know how you’re doing.

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: 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