Ask Dr. Nerdlove

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve been getting a lot of s--t from my family, mainly siblings and stepmom, about still being a virgin. I’m a 19 year old male coming from an extremely religious household. I was super self-conscious throughout high school, which combined with religion, negatively affected my ability to make friends/relationships. Since COVID I’ve been living with my dad’s family, who consistently insult my social ineptitude.

I’ve been looking up online the ages people usually lose their virginity, and feel like the clock is ticking till I become the stereotypical 40-year-old virgin. I really don’t care whether or not I ever have sex, as my priorities are on my career, but it feels like there’s a negative stigma towards virgins. I’d rather have a one-night-stand or some hookup now just to get it over with.

Do you have any advice for someone like me that has no experience with dating or hookups, and lacks in ideal qualities like looks or being a great conversationalist?

First Time Writer, Long Time V-Card Holder

DEAR FIRST TIME WRITER, LONG TIME V-CARD HOLDER: I realize that I’m saying this a lot lately, FTWLTVH, but it’s a regularly occurring phenomena: the problem you’re asking about isn’t the problem you’re having.

There’s a saying that I’ve seen in a few places online – attributed to various different people – that I feel is appropriate here: before you diagnose yourself with depression, or low self-esteem, first make sure you’re not surrounded by a--holes. Your issue isn’t that you’re a virgin, it’s that holy s--t you’re surrounded by giant, sulfur-speweing a--holes, gaping fundaments who’re spraying bulls--t at you like they held a frathouse kegger where the only beer was Cholera Lite and Dysentery IPA.

This isn’t to say that there’s not a lot of horses--t out there about virginity, especially male virginity – it’s part and parcel of the Toxic Masculinity package – but your single biggest problem is that you’re living with a bunch of bullies, not whether you’ve had sex or not. And here’s the thing to realize: losing your virginity isn’t gonna change that. Even if Dua Lupa were to suddenly show up at your house, grab you by the shirt collar and drag you into her waiting Shaggin’ Wagon to take you ’round the world while your siblings and stepmom were there to watch the van go a-rockin’, all that would happen is that they would find some other thing to bully you over. Your being a virgin isn’t what’s making them bully you, that’s just the excuse. Get rid of that, they’ll pick something else. You could live your life in such a way that they couldn’t possibly find fault with you or give them any material to pick on you for, and a--holes will just make up something instead.

So honestly: the ultimate answer is “get the f--k away from these people at speed, by whatever means necessary.”

Unfortunately, at 19 that’s not likely to be a viable option for you until or unless you can go live in the dorms at college or move in with friends.

(Neither is “next time they talk s--t, break their nose”, unfortunately)

However, there’s also a secondary issue here; again, it’s not the question you asked about: how you are responding to the stigma of virginity. Sex for you isn’t a priority, which hey, that’s totally valid. Maybe it’s not something you’re interested in now, maybe it’s not something you’ll ever really be all that heated up about. That’s fine. But if that’s the case… why give a s--t about what people think about it? If sex isn’t important to you, then who cares if you’re a virgin at whatever age?

At the same time, you’re also buying into a classic mistake: the idea that there’s some “window” in which folks are expected to lose their virginity or else there’s something wrong with them. This is, to put it mildly, horses--t. First of all, you’re not running out of time. The median age in the United States for a first sexual encounter is 17 (which, incidentally, has been going up), and that’s in the context of a steady relationship, not a casual encounter. At 19, not only are you not on the far end of that particular bell-curve, but you’re not even in a significant minority; less than half of teenaged boys the US have had sex by the time they were 18. So, no, you’re hardly running out of time, nor are you particularly unusual in this respect.

Similarly, there’s the fact that virginity, in and of itself, is a social construct; this is never more obvious than when you try to pin people down on exactly when someone has lost their virginity. If you stick to the strictly heteronormative idea of “when tab A goes into slot B”, then there’re a lot of queer folks who’ve never lost their virginity, despite racking up body counts that would make John Holmes feel inadequate. If it’s only “p-into-the-v”, same story; you get not just LGBTQ folks who don’t have penetrative sex, but also the folks who take advantage of God’s Little Loophole. If someone’s been with… let’s pick a number at random and say 28 people, and they’ve only ever had anal sex, are they still a virgin? What if they’re the master of oral (giving or receiving) with the same numbers, but that’s the only sexual contact they’ve had? Do they count as having lost their virginity? If no, why not?

For that matter, while we’re talking about 40 year old virgins… what if they lost their virginity through force? If someone was sexually assaulted – no matter the gender of the perpetrator or the victim – does that mean that they’re now no longer subject to the stigma that comes with being a virgin? Do they never have to worry about being seen as The 40+ Year Old Virgin if they never have any sexual contact after that?

Once you start actually digging into these questions, it becomes pretty obvious that virginity is just an idea, not an actual state of anything; it’s just buying into someone else’s made-up happy crappy that ultimately has no real meaning or definition.

Similarly, the act of having sexual contact with someone isn’t transformative. You’re not going to suddenly develop The Glow because part of you has been in part of someone else (or vice versa). All being a virgin means is that you haven’t had a particular experience yet. That’s it. Being a virgin is no more definitional than having never played hockey or never participating in the Red Bull Flugtag competition.

If you were to go out and get laid tonight, tomorrow morning you would be the exact same person you are now. Nobody is able to tell The Untouched from the Wanton, by sight, by behavior or any other metric you care to define. S--t, if you were to strip the dude’s name off his tweets, you could be forgiven for thinking that that Elon Musk is just some stereotypical 4-chan-poisoned troll in his parents’ basement, s--tposting on the Internet because nobody’ll touch his peenor.

With all that having been said: if you want to make having sex for the first time a priority, that’s completely valid. I’m a huge fan of sex and I think the people who want it should have plenty of it with other consenting folks who also want it. But right now you’re going to have a harder time accomplishing that, especially in a way that’s not going to make you feel worse. Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with you, but because of the way you’re approaching things.

If you want to lose your virginity right away, with no fuss, no muss and no need to worry about things like “looks” or “more than the minimal level of social skills”, then the easiest answer would be to visit a sex worker. Do some research, find an independent escort in your area, go through her screening procedures, pay her fee, tip well, bingo-bango-bongo, congratulations, you’re no longer a virgin. If you’re worried about the legalities of it all, then get a cheap flight to Reno and make an appointment with one of the legal brothels in Nevada; many of them will send a car service to the airport to pick you up and take you back. Same story there; you pay the fee, y’all make the bedsprings squeak for an indeterminant amount of time and hey, there you go: you’re freshly de-virginized.

This isn’t me being sarcastic, by the way. There’re plenty of folks who decided to go the escort route and found it to be a rewarding experience. In fact, one could argue that a professional would be a better option than, say, a bar hook-up or mutually drunk encounter at a party; you would be with someone who actually cares about your first time and motivated to be kind, gentle and giving instead of someone who said “you’ll do” because you were the closest, least objectionable warm body. Even if you’re just wanting to get it over and done with, it’s still going to be more enjoyable with someone who is going to give a damn about it being a good experience for you.

But honestly, that’s also likely going to be your only option with the way you framed your question. A casual hook-up or one night stand is going to be a lot harder when you’re coming to this with an attitude of “I don’t have the benefit of good looks or being a good conversationalist”. There’s a reason why Eeyore isn’t a sex symbol; very few people are into “it’s ok if you don’t want to f--k me; I wouldn’t f--k me either.” If you decide that you want to lose your virginity and you don’t want to go the sex worker route and you’re going to set these limitations on yourself… well, then you’re probably going to be waiting for a while.

Rather than lamenting “not being good looking” or not having “ideal qualities”, your goal should be to develop those qualities. Being self-conscious and coming from an extremely conservative upbringing may have meant that you haven’t developed your social skills much, but they don’t mean that you can’t. That’s the great thing about social skills: they’re skills. Skills aren’t something that you’re born with, they’re something that you develop through practice. You didn’t come out of the womb able to read, write or speak; you had to learn those skills and put them to use in order to master them.

The same is true about your looks and your social skills. You may not be a great conversationalist now, but you can change that. You can learn how to dress better and work on your grooming and overall presentation. You can put more emphasis on just talking to people and being a more social person. Focusing on learning how to build and cultivate the things you lack instead of treating them as immutable obstacles is going to be a much better use of your time than trying to game out how to lose your virginity as quickly as possible. This is especially true if your focus is going to be on your career; social skills are going to be vital, no matter what your career path or industry ultimately ends up being.

But seriously: get the hell away from the a--holes in your dad’s side of things first. That alone will make your life 1000% better. Everything after that will be gravy.

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: Why do men get so angry on dating sites? When I started using them I’d answer to be polite but learned very quickly not to do that if I’m not interested. So I stopped. But I get yelled at if I don’t respond. 

I get chastised if I don’t answer right away (I was actually called the “c” word. I didn’t answer right away because I was at work).

I canceled a subscription. I thought it would delete my profile but it kept it up and allowed people to message me. I’d get notified that someone left a message but I’d ignore it since I canceled. I went back on about a year later and my inbox was full of men yelling at me for being rude. I never saw those messages!

It’s to the point that I lay off dating sites for a while, but I’ve met some wonderful people on so these sites so I go back on.

I don’t get it, if I message someone and they don’t answer I just go on with my life. Why do they get so hostile?

Signed,

Shaking My Damn Head

DEAR SHAKING MY DAMN HEAD: Short version: some people are a--holes.

Slightly longer version: dating apps moved to a mechanic that encourages rapid responses, people have entitlement issues that can be exacerbated by the mechanics of an app, the algorithms affect who we see or don’t see in ways that create mismatches and also: some people are a--holes.

OK, that’s probably not really satisfying. Let me elaborate a little more.

There was, at one point, a sweet spot for dating apps, where the focus was more on messaging and longer profiles, but also didn’t have bulls—t charges built in. I’m old enough to remember things like Spring Street Personals on every site out there, where you had to buy credits in order to message people. OKCupid coming in and eliminating that was like an earthquake in the online dating space. Then Tinder came along – stealing much of its mechanics and vibe from Grindr – with an emphasis on high-speed, low-drag interactions that were (theoretically) supposed to help you find a hook-up with people who were near you. The swipe mechanic and limited room for information in your profile meant that the emphasis was placed more on photos and instant “yes/no” choices. The immediacy of “IT’S A MATCH” if you and someone else swiped right on each other helped create a sense of urgency and speed. Since Tinder was originally a hook-up up/same-night lay kind of app, there was a certain expectation of things moving at a rapid clip.

It also didn’t help when apps moved from a more email-style form of interaction to direct-messaging… complete with read receipts and notifications that this or that account are currently online. What was supposed to create incentive to talk – hey, you’re both online, here’s an interface that mirrors iMessage or WhatsApp – instead creates an expectation of immediate gratification, on top of the swipe mechanic. The immense popularity of Tinder and the consolidation of dating apps under a few companies – looking at you, Match Group – meant that these mechanics ended up becoming a de-facto standard across the board. This why even apps like Bumble have a similar interface.

So that sort of high-speed interaction became much more of an expected norm… even if that’s not how most users actually took it.

That’s one part. Another part is that a lot of folks on dating apps are assholes who have entitlement issues. Part of it comes from the toxic alpha-male bulls—t that’s convinced them that as long as they have this cargo-cult mentality about masculinity, women should be dropping panties at their feet. When women don’t play along with “the rules” that say “I’m a dominant man with a lower third that could cut steel, you are supposed to give me what I want, when I want it”, they get pissy. They feel like they’re being cheated out of their rightful rewards for following a bunch of retrograde ideas they picked up from dodgy subreddits and online grifters. And since it can’t possibly be that they were sold a bill of goods, it’s clear the problem must be women’s fault for not going along with it and then they throw a temper tantrum in your inbox over it.

Then there’s the fact that many of these same guys don’t quite understand how dating apps actually work, vs. the version they have in their heads. The swipe mechanics in particular tend to push folks towards overestimating the interest from the people they match with and what they’re supposed to expect from their matches. It’s an expectation – based more on their desire to get laid right then and there with minimal effort than actual courtship – that doesn’t match with the reality. Even folks who are interested in a no-strings, casual hook up with a relative stranger that night are going to want to do a little more communicating and vibe checking before doing the deed. After all, just because you matched on an app doesn’t mean that you actually have chemistry; it just means you liked their profile and pics and vice versa.

But this actually leads to the next issue: the folks who get pissed when you don’t respond immediately or say “thanks but no thanks” don’t realize that matching isn’t the end of the process, it’s the start. You see this a lot when folks complain about how “easy” women have it on dating apps or how “well, I used a photo of a model and I had chicks all up in my business”, or dudes who swipe right on everyone in order to maximize potential matches and then message folks after they decide who they’re interested in. They tend to see matching as being the hard part and that after you’ve matched, it’s all done bar the squishy noises. So when their new match doesn’t immediately respond, or doesn’t show “appropriate” levels of interest (that is, they don’t immediately respond with “here’s my address, come take me now you stallion”), they get pissed because they just got smacked upside the head with the hobnailed boot of reality and they don’t like it. And as a result: they throw a tantrum because they’re not getting their way.

And then there’re just folks who are entitled a--holes who think that Galileo was wrong and THEY are, in fact, the center of the universe. Many of them also tend to actively dislike or resent women. A--holes are gonna ass, no matter what mechanics are in place to encourage NOT ass-ing.

The good news is: this is how nature says “do not touch”. Guys who behave like this – who expect you to be  Jill-on-the-spot and are gonna lay down weird rules and get mad when you don’t follow them like you didn’t agree to – are self-selecting the f--k out of your dating pool. The ones who throw those tantrums are showing you that they’re a classic case of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Douche Canoe” and your best move is to go ahead and unmatch them, block them and go along your merry way. So while they make dating apps a misery for everyone – how eager are you to keep swiping after a few of those responses? – they at least make it clear that you dodged a bullet, if only by accident.

So take breaks when you need to, unmatch and block your way to happiness. There’re good people on there; they’re just not as loud as the dickheads.

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: TL;DR: used to be a nerdy loser, recently got my life together because of my fiancé, tempted to use my newfound powers.

I’ve been stuck in this strange situation for some time and I’m trying to figure my way out of it. To cut a long story short, I’m 33. I spent the majority of my life as a frustrated, overweight, overworked, nerd.

At one of the lowest points in my life, I found a girl. At the time, my dad was terminally ill, I’d left my job (I couldn’t cope with the stress of him being sick), and I was really depressed. I was 26 with no job, no family (my mom and I don’t get along). The one thing I had going for me was that I had some really good friends to help me through it.

After he died, this girl was there for me. We dated shortly after his funeral, and truthfully things turned around. She helped me get into therapy, and after a little while I was able to land my dream job.

Fast forward 7 years and since that point, life has panned out great. I’ve been able to afford to buy my own apartment (all from being promoted from that job at the company), dental braces, a new car and let’s just say, life worked out from that real low point. During lockdown, I proposed to my girlfriend and I thought life would be set.

My problem started after lockdown. I’ve started to go out a lot more to hang out with friends, which now also includes clubs and bars with work colleagues. On several occasions I’ve been at bars, and women have made passes at me. Not only that, but I feel like I’ve gotten noticed a lot more in the last year compared to the entirety of my 20s.

I admit I’ve glowed up, I’m happy with my life. But the thoughts keep coming in: “I need to make up for lost time”, “I need to make up for lost experiences”, “I need to take advantage of my glow up”.

No matter how hard I try, the thoughts keep coming in. Do I act on them? And if I don’t, have I missed out on my golden years? After almost 10 years of sadness, wouldn’t it just make sense to test it out?

I never had any success with women growing up. That whole time, I longed to have the superficial things to make me more successful with women. Now I have those things, and I can’t use them.

Help Doc! It’s like the Lord’s Prayer:

Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil.

All Glowed Up

DEAR ALL GLOWED UP: Ok, AGU, you know how I’m always saying “the problem you’re asking about isn’t the problem you have?” This is a classic example of what the end result looks like.

I know, that may not make sense right now. Stick with me for a second.

I want to preface this by saying that I realize this may be a somewhat hot take but… this isn’t about being successful or not being satisfied with what you had or being a selfish jerk. It’s about your mindset.

Specifically, it’s about how you feel about yourself, about the standards you use to measure success, about changing externals without changing the internals and not having quite let go of the what you thought was so important back when you didn’t have access the things you thought you needed to be happy.

This is a thing that a lot of folks go through, especially folks who have the sort of glow-up you describe. Folks who’ve spent years or decades of their lives feeling one particular way about themselves will often put in a lot of work to make important changes and become the person they’ve always wanted to be… or the person they think they’re supposed to want to be. But what usually happens is that they’ve put in the effort to work on their exterior issues – their physique, their grooming, their skin care and presentation, even techniques to be more charismatic and charming. And to be clear: they put in a lot of effort, and that should be acknowledged. It takes hard work and discipline and they should be proud of what they’ve accomplished, just as you should be proud of how you’ve turned your life around.

However, because they put all this effort into their exterior, what they often discover is that their mindset hasn’t changed along with their outside. Yeah they may be more stylish or more conventionally attractive, but in their heads, they’re still very much the lonely or frustrated person they were before. They can’t fully accept just how much things have changed for them and what it all means. What it usually means is: the problems they were having weren’t about their body or their clothes or what-have-you. The problems were how they felt about themselves and the metrics by which they were gauging who they were supposed to be or what standards they were supposed to live up to.

To take a common example, let’s say we’re talking about men who were heavyset or overweight who felt like they had to lose weight to be attractive. Well, they dieted, they exercised, they lost weight and… well, now they may be yoked as hell, but inside they still feel unattractive. Even when they’re getting external forms of validation – being checked out by others, for example – they still feel like it’s not “real” somehow or that it doesn’t “count”.

It’s not that they have “fat boy brain” or whatever (and yes, I’ve seen people call it that), it’s that they didn’t recognize that the problem wasn’t their weight, it was how they saw themselves. They felt unattractive or undesired, decided that the issue was their weight and tried to correct it.

And to be fair, this is something society pushes hard on folks; lose weight, get into X shape and all your problems will be solved, whether physical, mental, spiritual or emotional. When this doesn’t actually work, people get frustrated because they’d been sold a bill of goods and oh look it turns out to have been mostly bulls--t. All that happened was that they discovered that while external validation is nice… it doesn’t actually fill the hole in them.

But let’s turn this to you, AGU. You started off in a place where you felt profoundly unvalued, undesired and unwanted. As you put it, you were “a frustrated, overworked, overweight nerd”, with all the baggage that comes with it. You grew up being told that your value and status was intrinsically tied with externalities – how much money you bring in, how much sex you’re having, how strong or manly you are compared to other men and so on. You got fed a narrative that “these are your golden years” or that you needed to accomplish all these things within this narrow window of time and that time not spent achieving these things will have been wasted.

To put it another way: your inner growth was being stunted because you were told to douse it all in Brawndo because it had electrolytes, when what you needed was water.

And then hey: during a low point in your life you met someone amazing. For what I’m sure felt like the first time in a very long time you were getting things you actually needed: emotional support and intimacy and being  made to feel like a worthwhile person, regardless of those externalities. And wouldn’t you know it: like a plant finally getting water and sunshine, you started to grow and bloom… you thrived, even. She didn’t do these things for you, don’t get me wrong; what she did is help provide support that helped empower you to be better able to make these things happen.

Could you have done this on your own? Yeah, probably… but having folks in your corner who care for you and support you make it a hell of a lot easier when the journey gets tough.

But now you’ve got all these annoying thoughts coming about “making up for lost time” or “missing your ‘golden years'”, and it’s driving you batty. And the reason is because there’s an important lesson you haven’t learned yet, and it’s incredibly frustrating because you’re so close but you’re not quite making the connection. In fact, there’s no better illustration of the disconnect you’re experiencing than this line from your letter: “That whole time, I longed to have the superficial things to make me more successful with women. Now I have those things, and I can’t use them.”

In case you can’t see it, let me be all Wizard of Oz here for you: you never lacked for the things that made you successful with women. The fact that you have an amazing girlfriend – now your fiancée – who you met and dated before your glow up is proof. You didn’t need all the things you have now in order to meet her and start a relationship with her. You had the ability within you all along; you just needed to give yourself permission to unlock it.

In fact, by any reasonable metric, having a loving, caring and amazing partner who’s helped motivate you to achieve all these good things in your life and who’s supported you and validated you and made you feel like a champion is being successful as hell. But there’s still that part of you that is using an entirely different benchmark for success – one that’s quite literally been marketed to you.

That’s what’s tripping you up. There’s a part of you that feels like you did the whole thing backwards – first you get the glow-up, then you get the women. Well, you got the woman first and oh look, that worked out far better for you. While you may have had your glow-up and your life got better, you still have a lifetime of lessons telling you that you should have been chasing tail like a puppy and that you only had ten or fifteen “golden years” to do all the Man Stuff before it was too late. To continue an already stilted metaphor: you may be getting water, but you’ve still got all those Brawndo ads going through your head, telling you that it’s what men crave.

The thing to realize is that this is really common. You’ve passively absorbed these lessons because they’re part of the structure of the culture you grew up in; it’s literal cultural osmosis. When the majority of voices of authority in your life are telling you “you should do X, you need Y, all REAL men are Z” and there’s no counter-narrative or very little of one, it’s hard to not take it all onboard. So it’s entirely understandable that you still have these beliefs. Culturalization is a motherf--ker to uproot, especially when it’s been part of your life for the majority of your existence.

But just because you learned those lessons passively doesn’t mean that you need to stay passive. What you need to do is take an active role in confronting and examining those beliefs and asking yourself whether they’re valid or not and why. Ask yourself: what does “making up for lost time” mean to you? Why is it important? What will doing those things do for you?

Let’s say that making up for lost time will mean “going out and having more sex with more  women”. Ok, wanting more sex or desiring people people is perfectly valid. But why do you want it? Do you want it because you’re naturally a very sexual person and maybe conventional monogamy isn’t right for you? Do you want it because having more sex partners will be an external marker of your value as a man? Or – and be honest with me here – is it because you’re worried you settled and you feel like you could do better? If you honestly feel like you settled, is it that you chose someone you didn’t actually desire but felt like you could have? Or is it, again, the feeling like “ok, but what if I had everything my fiancée gives me and also someone who made my friends/strangers jealous?”

There’s no judgement here; it’s important to be honest with yourself on these. If it’s the former, then that’s something to consider about your relationship. If it’s the latter, that’s something to consider about yourself and the metrics of what you find important.

Similarly, ask yourself: what, precisely, meant that those previous ten years were your “golden years”? What does it mean to have “missed” them, and why is this bad? Why can’t these be your golden years? Like the man said: 30’s the new 20, except in this case you’ve not only got the drive of your 20s, but also external trappings (better job, better car, a great  relationship) and hopefully the maturity and experience to actually appreciate them and realize what’s actually valuable to you.

You want to “test things out”, sure… but what will that do for you, in the short term and the long term? Will it actually make you happy, or is it just a way of your dunking on your past self?

And, importantly: are the things that you think you would gain from this actually worth what it would cost you? You’re engaged to someone who’s brought so much amazing things to your life and who’s been by your side as you’ve achieved those things. Odds are good that to “make up for lost time” or “test things out”, you’d have to give her up… and you can’t expect her to be waiting for you when you’re done. Is that something you’re willing to lose?

Here’s the thing: you can appreciate your progress and your results without casting everything aside. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying feeling like you’re more attractive without actually doing anything about it. Even folks in happy, monogamous relationships get a charge from knowing people think they’re hot. Just because you’re not going to the party doesn’t mean it’s not nice to be invited.

So there’s your assignment, AGU: dig into those beliefs and really interrogate them. Be bluntly honest with yourself in your answers. Examine them and figure out how much of this is just your jerkbrain tossing other people’s values at you.

But if you want my opinion? In this case, I’m going to have to defer to the sage: “There’s a million fine looking girls in the world. But they don’t all bring you lasagna at work.”

Good luck.

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