DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: There is this guy that I’ve liked for 3-4 years almost, and well he’s pretty confusing. First things first, he’s an introvert, he does not talk a lot, and secondly it depends on who he opens up to. He and I met in the first year of high school and we barely talked. We started talking a bit, because of our mutual friends, then there came to a point where I think he thought I liked him (I didn’t, yet) and he became rude to me without an explanation. I started disliking him completely. 

But the year after, our 2nd year, I don’t remember how, but we just started talking more and more till we got close. I shared some of my personal things with him, and he kind of did too, he tried telling me to go where he went, but I didn’t because I had no ride, then he would recommend good movies to me, (which i watched) and he was surprisingly nice. We had late night conversations, but all of a sudden he just became rude which made me want to back away, because I thought that it might be because we’re always together. But he would do that so suddenly.

I will say, that year he, his friend, and I went to eat for my birthday; I’d asked him the day before, but he kept thinking too much about it, but finally decided to a yes. Well after that school year ended we did not talk over the summer, we took a long pause (you could say that) when we went back to the third year we barely talked. That whole year we barely had any contact; he stopped texting me, I stopped texting him, then we got to see each other a week before schools closed because of the pandemic. Within those 5 months, we did not have any type of communication — none at all. I was still having a hard time because I wanted to text but, I didn’t want to be the first.

Well our last year started and we didn’t get to see each other at all, there came to a point where I literally started forgetting about him, I started working and I met another guy, who is now a very good friend. We started getting along and I felt comfortable with him. I joined soccer and, well, only the friends I stayed in contact with knew. 

Well all of a sudden, after school had completely started, I got a phone call; I wasn’t sure who it was, but it was my old friend. I’d deleted him from my contacts. He called me, saying he didn’t know I got a job and that I joined the team, and said that he hadn’t known I got a boyfriend. Thing is, everything except the boyfriend part was true. I asked him how did he know, and told me his friend told him. Now I was upset with myself because I knew my feelings were going to come back, and they did, after I tried not talking to him anymore but I still did. I even asked him to give me rides, which he surprisingly did.

Now here’s the funny part, I feel like he wants to act rude again, and well I don’t want to deal with that anymore. I was planning on confessing my feelings to him on graduation day, but all my friends suggested for it to be soon and well I did. I just sent a text and he didn’t look at it. I called him but it was late. He responded in the morning through normal messages instead from where I messaged him, so I have a feeling he did see the text. I’m honestly confused and I just wanted to let it all out.

What’s your opinion on this matter? 

-Confused Girl

DEAR CONFUSED GIRL: My opinion is that this is why dating in high-school is a chaotic mess and shouldn’t be taken all that seriously.

OK, so that’s not terribly helpful. Let’s back up and try this again.

The way you and he relate to each other sounds like half the time you and he don’t know whether you’re coming or going. Half the time you like each other, half the time you’re painfully irritated by each other and can’t stand to talk to one another. Half the time you’re friends, half the time, one or the other is grumpy, annoyed and rude to the other. While this is very much “life as a teenager”, it’s a bad basis for a relationship. While blowing hot and cold is sometimes treated as a sign of passion — generally people can’t get under your skin unless you and they are particularly close or into one another — it also means that the relationship itself is a turbulent mess. That sort of on-again-off-again vibe makes for great teen dramas on Netflix or the CW, but it’s a massive pain in the ass to go through in real life. Especially when there’s little time left and graduation is looming like Banquo’s ghost at the feast.

But the bigger issue here is… well, the fact that neither of you can seem to spit out what you’re thinking or feeling. And yeah, I get that you two are teenagers (holy borsht you all are so painfully young) but being able to actually, y’know, talk about the shit that’s bothering you is a vital relationship skill. If both of you respond to conflict with the silent treatment and cutting each other off, then it means you’re going to be spending more time not talking and not seeing each other in the weeks and months you have left. Similarly, it seems like he responds to his frustration with you — what sure as hell seems like a “I like her but I can’t say anything and that’s getting on my nerves” situation — with rudeness, sullenness and silence. That’s not cool in general but it’s also counterproductive for things like a healthy and stable relationship.

Once again, the whole tsundere “I like you/I’m angry/I’m angry that I like you” thing works in manga, less so in reality.

(Actually, if I’m being honest, it’s a trope I roll my eyes at in manga and it leads towards long rants about how much the relationships dynamics annoy the piss out of me.

I’m really fun at parties.)

So TL;DR: no, I don’t think this is a relationship that’s going to work. Not as you all are now, at least. Leaving aside how statistically few relationships in high-school last past graduation, neither of you are actually using your words here. If you — or he — want to make a relationship out of this or even help this friendship survive, you both are going to have to work on saying what’s on your mind in a clear and concise manner… and ideally without getting so frustrated with each other that you go back to no-contact and deleting each other from your phones again. That includes being able to admit how you feel, not just letting irritation at things bubble into resentful silence from either or both of you and actually talking things out without it turning into a weird passive-aggressive left-on-read fest.

Now to be fair: this isn’t exactly a skill that high-schoolers excel in because, well, ya’ll are high-schoolers.  That’s not a dig at high-schoolers, it’s just a factor of age and circumstance. Between the volatility of emotions at that age, the medium-security-gen-pop atmosphere of most high-school social scenes and an overall lack of experience and perspective, it’s goddamn hard to express yourself clearly. Half the time, you aren’t sure how you’re feeling, never mind knowing how to put those chaotic feelings into words that make sense to anyone who isn’t actually in your head. It’s the sort of skill that’s perfected over time, as you gain maturity and experience and things start to settle down enough that you don’t feel like you’re about to explode every five seconds.

But it’s also perfected with practice… so I’d recommend starting that practice now. I don’t think you and your buddy are in any position as you are right now to make things work. But if you — and he — work on your communication skills and stay in touch after graduation? Well… you two might find yourselves in a place where it can. It doesn’t sound like the two of you are in a place where you’re right for each other. But with time, experience and practice… you could get there in the end.

Good luck.

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

Doctor’s Note: Today’s letter deals with discussions of self-harm.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I don’t know how to explain this, so I’ll give some background. I’m a 25 guy who never kissed a girl or held hands and so on. I’ve been rejected all my life and in many mean ways, always being told I was too ugly, hideous, disgusting, etc. Of course that hurt me a lot back then and destroyed what left of my confidence and hope that maybe someday someone would like and love me. Now I can imagine myself trying to approach someone again, because I’m scared to death that they will say something like that again and I don’t want to bother them if I’m just not good enough.

That’s normal I guess and I would be somewhat ‘fine’ if I just never tried again talking to girls in a romantic way. However, for some reason I keep repeating myself those words and phrases and keep hurting myself emotionally. I tell myself ‘you’re hideous, no one will ever love you’ or ‘you’ll never get a girlfriend and you’ll die alone’ or ‘why you’re so ugly? kill yourself’ and so on. Or, for instance, at night I listen to romantic or some songs that remind me about girlfriends, love and relationships and I search ‘cute couples’ on google images and I spend hours crying and feeling awful and depriving myself of a good sleep (and the next morning, when I’m sleepy at work, I feel even worse for wasting time on that). Sometimes I go as far as texting myself awful things, just to make me cry.

I don’t know how or when I got this habit, but it’s something I deal on a daily basis. I’m going crazy? I’m just broken? This is a side-effect of my loneliness and being unlovable? I don’t know what to do. I can accept and being ok with people being mean to me, maybe I deserve it, but why on earth I hurt myself?

Bad To Me

DEAR BAD TO ME: Hoo boy. This is one of those times where I need to remind folks that Dr. NerdLove is not a real doctor, and when you’re dealing with forms of trauma and self-harm — even emotional self-harm — you’re better off talking to a mental health professional.

But look: you’re here, you’re asking me and you’re clearly in pain. So hopefully this will help you get some clarity and get you to a place where you actually go to a therapist.

What you’re doing here is a form of emotional self-harm. It’s like psychic cutting, in a way. A lot of folks who engage in physical self-harm will tell you that doing so gives them a sort of release or euphoria immediately afterwards. Some do so because they’re emotionally numb and they’re trying to feel anything, or they’re trying to release emotional tension. Some will tell you that their harming themselves is because it’s a way of communicating or expressing themselves, usually because they are feeling incredibly strong or intense emotions that they don’t feel that they can express in any other way. Still others do it as a form of control; they feel powerless in their lives, but they’re able to affect their world in this small way… even though it is literally hurting them.

And some do it to punish themselves. They don’t feel like they’re good enough, that they’re “worthy”, or because they’ve committed some egregious “sin” or made some mistake that they don’t feel they can undo, fix or atone for.

I strongly suspect you’re the latter.

You’ve said that you were rejected in cruel ways by people, possibly bullied by them as well. At the risk of making it sound like I’m over-inflating things, that sounds like it was traumatic for you — especially if it’s still affecting you to this degree. Now what you don’t say is when this happened — what age you were, whether this was middle school, high-school, college, etc. Considering that you’re 25, you say this was “all your life” and that it was especially cruel… well, I’m guessing this was likely high-school. And considering how high-school can be, especially in the age of weaponized social media and mass communication… yeah, that s--t can be really goddamn intense.

For all that would-be tough guys like to mask their own emotional wounds with bravado and toxic bulls--t, bullying can be traumatic. It can leave scars — physical and emotional — that can stay with us for a long, long goddamn time. And teenagers are, in a lot of ways, the most vicious because being a teenager is one of the most f--ked-up times in our lives. Everyone’s confused and feeling off-kilter all the time because their bodies are in flux, they’re in a state of trying to figure out who the f--k they are, how societies and relationships work, trying to figure out their place in the world and make decisions that they’re told, over and over again, will affect the course of the rest of their lives. The adults in their lives are often of no use, especially if you’re someone who stands out from the norm — particularly if you’re LGBTQ or neuroatypical — because their own bulls--t and prejudices mean that they either don’t know how to help or won’t.

And unlike when I was a high-schooler, lo more years ago than I care to think, at least s--t at school would stay at school. It’s capacity to follow you home was next to nothing. Now the folks who torment you are able to reach you wherever you are, at any time.

Oh, and it’s also supposed to be the best time of their lives.

Now the tricky thing is that part of growing up and maturing means learning to let go of the past. Not pretending that the past didn’t affect you, but learning how to not let the folks who hurt you keep occupying space in your head, rent-free. In an ideal world, we recognize that the folks who most abused us were s--tbirds and that life is too damn short to give any remaining brain cycles to what assholes think.

(OK in an ideal world this wouldn’t be necessary, but you take my point.)

You learn to make peace with your past self, recognize that your scars mean that you’re a survivor and realize that living well and never giving them another moment of your time is the best revenge. You clean up, you heal and you remember that they don’t get to define you. But the problem a lot of people have is that learning how to reject their reality and substitute your own means that first you have to reject it. And that can be really goddamn hard.

It gets a lot harder if you’ve internalized it and — worse — validated their beliefs by adopting them yourself.

And I think that’s what you’ve done, BTM. I think you’ve taken on their bullying — not rejection, bullying — and internalized it. You, at some point and some level, decided that they must be right. Rather than saying “f--k you, f--k your friends and f--k your thoughts with a big s--tty stick,” you took those beliefs and made them your own. That’s, unfortunately, not uncommon. A lot of victims of bullying or abuse will internalize what their abusers say and blame themselves for the abuse. It’s f--ked up, but it’s a perverse way that people will try to protect themselves. They don’t want to believe that they’re someone who would be abused, or that people could hurt them like this and so they take the responsibility into themselves.

I strongly suspect this is what happened to you, BTM and why you continue to hurt yourself emotionally. It may be about punishing yourself for being abused by them and not standing up for yourself, or it may be that part of you took their bulls--t on, but either way: you’re continuing the abuse by hurting yourself. You’re punishing yourself for the sins of others, sins that were inflicted on you.

And unfortunately, just knowing this doesn’t fix it. Emotional and psychic injuries are harder to heal and take longer, especially when they’re part of a negative pattern in your life that you keep reinforcing. But as I’m often saying: harder isn’t the same as impossible. And while healing isn’t always quick, the sooner you start the process, the sooner you start to get relief.

The first thing you should do is address the symptom; it’s hard enough to heal when you keep reopening the wounds. Dealing with the intrusive thoughts and behaviors is likely going to be the first step. As the old joke goes, if it hurts when you go like this, then stop doing that. Cognitive behavioral therapy is especially useful for dealing with frightening, painful or obsessive intrusive thoughts. Self-directed exercises, like ones available at Mood Gym can go a long way towards helping get those thoughts under control.

However, it’s important to note that while this is a start, it’s not a substitute for therapy. And let’s be clear: this is the sort of thing that you should be talking to a real doctor about. Finding a therapist, especially someone who’s good with intrusive thoughts and self-harm is going to be vital for unpacking and unwarping the s--t that your bullies did to you. You’ve got some wounds that’ve never fully healed, and it seems like there’s debris and infection to boot. To let those wounds finally close, you’re gonna have to debride the wounds and clear the infected tissue. That’s not fun, and it can be a process. But it’s also a necessary one.

But one of the most powerful and important things you can do is to take away your bullies’ power to hurt you. And to do that… you need to forgive yourself. You’re continuing to punish yourself for things that were done to you. They weren’t done because you deserved them, nor were you bullied because you somehow brought it upon yourself. You weren’t targeted because you were lesser or repulsive or what-have-you. You were bullied and abused because people can be cruel and because people will lash out at others in order to secure their own status in a chaotic and turbulent world. They weren’t right, they weren’t justified, and they weren’t telling the truth. They were hurting you for the sake of hurting someone.

It’s time for you to stop carrying their bulls--t for them. And to do that, you forgive yourself. You forgive yourself for giving them validity. You forgive yourself for the things that you think you could have done but didn’t; that wasn’t your fault, but it’s something you’ve clearly taken upon yourself anyway. So you forgive yourself for what you didn’t do; you made the best choices you could at the time, even if you wish you’d done things differently now. You forgive yourself for taking their bulls--t onboard, so that you finally have permission to toss it all aside. And you forgive yourself for the ways you’ve been hurting yourself since. You were hurting and you directed that hurt inward and caused more harm… but you can stop now. You can let it all go. You just have to forgive yourself so that you can give them all the double middle-finger as you walk backwards into a better life.

A life where you don’t punish yourself for the misdeeds of others. A life where you allow yourself to love yourself the way you deserve to be loved. And a world where you throw aside the words and jibes of assholes, because life is too goddamn short to give even a second’s consideration to the opinion of assholes.

And then, as you’re cleaning off your mental slate… hie thyself to the therapist’s office.

It’s time to cleanse the wound and let the healing begin.

You’ve got this, BTM.

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: Long-time reader, first-time writer. I have the privilege of teaching improv comedy for a living. My students are all adults. Sometimes I get a vibe that a student might be interested in me, and sometimes I find a student attractive. I’ve always been wary of pursuing anything with a student as I’m aware there’s a power-dynamic, even though we’re all adults and the subject matter requires playful teaching. Also, I don’t want to complicate a happy client relationship.

However, these classes also tend to be an intense bonding experience, and with being a parent it’s not like I have tons of time for other activities where I can meet people.

So my question is this: at what point would it be alright to express personal interest in a student, and how? After the class is over?

Thanks,

Making It Up As I Go Along

DEAR MAKING IT UP AS I GO ALONG: Alright, MIUIGA, this one’s tricky.

The idea of power dynamics and power differentials is one that gets thorny very quickly, in part because… well, the definitions and ideas about how they change and influence relationships gets twisted up very quickly. One of the biggest reasons why power dynamics can cause problems is when they can be used to manipulate or pressure people into doing things they don’t want to do. A teacher, for example, often has direct influence over their student’s future; they could use the promise of better grades (or the threat of poor ones) as a way of pushing a student into a sexual relationship. Even if it’s not overt, the dynamic is still there; the student could feel the need to do things they might not otherwise consent to because they feel like refusing might negatively affect their grades, even if their teacher didn’t say anything.

Similarly, part of the reason why we have age of consent laws is to prevent unscrupulous people from trading on the inexperience or immaturity of minors. Even when the relationship is seemingly consensual or based on mutual attraction, a lot of people in their teens don’t have the maturity to be an equal partner or have the experience to be able to judge whether a particular relationship is good or bad for them. Nor, for that matter, are they as likely to be able to advocate for themselves, maintain necessary boundaries in the face of pressure from their partner or other be able to extricate themselves from the relationship. The case of Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau is a great example of how this can play out. For all that people make it out to be that Fualaau was “lucky” and how they were “in love” this is a story of a woman who continually pushed herself into a 13 year old boy’s life, who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and who would ignore restraining orders and demand that he let her see him. That’s the sort of pressure that a 13 year old is very susceptible to, and unlikely to be able to push back against.

Now in the case of a teacher and student in an improv class… well, that’s a little different. To start with, as you said: everyone’s an adult and presumably fully capable of standing up for themselves and agreeing to do things even though it might be a bad idea. On top of that, most improv classes aren’t exactly a graded experience. One rarely “fails” an improv class, nor does one need a passing grade to advance or further their academic career.

However, a lot of improv classes are part of a series; you have to take level 1 to take level 2 and so on. Plus, many are often tied to specific troupes; classes with The Groundlings or the Upright Citizens Brigade, for example, are often taken with an eye towards hopefully graduating to becoming a member of the troupe. This is especially true for groups like UCB, which are often a launching pad to a career in comedy and show business. So in those cases, there is a distinct level of power or influence that comes into play; the teachers there do have a direct influence on what may or may not happen in the student’s future.

(And while yes, relationships happen and people in the scene will use sex or the offer of sex in hopes of influencing others — teachers and students alike — the potential for squickiness is high.)

But power dynamics aren’t the only consideration here. You may not teaching classes that’re seen as being the first step in getting cast on Saturday Night Live, there’s the simple issue of comfort. Even if these are classes that a person is taking on a lark or because they want to sharpen their social skills, the teacher flirting with them or hitting on them has the potential to make things feel awkward and uncomfortable. They didn’t sign up to find a partner or to get laid, they signed up because they want to learn improv. And there’s also the matter of the improv scene being relatively small and insular; if word gets around that one of the teachers was hitting on the students, that can negatively affect the classes and the program, even if it’s otherwise on the up and up.

There are other complicating factors as well. As you said, the fact that it can be an intense experience, which means feelings might feel stronger or deeper than they actually are. That can make a minor crush or passing attraction feel much more than it is… only to have it deflate when the experience is over. So while that’s not necessarily an ethical complication, it is something to keep in mind. Part of the reason why so many actors and celebrities hook up while working together and break up soon after the project is done is because of that amplification effect. And that effect can also make it a little trickier to judge mutual interest; it runs the risk of being dickful thinking on steroids.

So with all of this in mind, my general opinion is that this runs a little too close to functionally sticking your junk in a beehive. Whatever rewards you’re likely to find are drastically counterbalanced by, y’know, getting the s--t stung out of your junk. If this were something that you were to actually pursue, I think your best option would be to let your student make the first move after the class is over and you’re no longer their teacher. While this may well mean that a student who’s interested won’t make a move for fear of being turned down, at the very least it keeps the current status quo and doesn’t negatively affect the class, your reputation or any client relationships.

Good luck.

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