Ask Dr. Nerdlove

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I am a newcomer, and I really appreciate all the work you put in for so many people!

I’ve been In a 10 month relationship, and this is my second official relationship.��A bit of a background check, my first relationship only lasted a month. I tend to get anxious with relationships and, it was getting too hard to carry, so, I broke it.

Now for my current relationship, I met her for the first time in my neighborhood as she was a friend of my cousin. We got into contact, and, we used to talk constantly, until I realized I had feelings for her. I asked her out, and she said she needed time. I asked her out a month later again and she accepted. So, we got in a long distance relationship.

I got anxious about the relationship after just one month and I kept fighting it until I overcame it within 2 months. The primary reason for my anxiety was because she and I didn’t share a lot of common interests, so I always feared that she will realize that we are different and the relationship will fall apart. But, in the end, I convinced myself she won’t break up with me for this reason, and we carried our relationship further and over time gained multiple common interests.

Throughout the relationship, my main goal was always to keep her happy. I always awaited her texts, and I kept planning ways I could make her life better. I always have lots of task up my sleeves, but even after all those, whenever I heard her notification ringtone, I always got excited and got ready to talk to her regardless of what I was doing.��I always just wanted to see her happy, I always felt bad for how crappy her life was and I just wanted to improve her life, spend my life with her, and live happily together..

Some months ago, anxiety struck again.. I kinda screwed up, and I was treating my passion projects as a necessary task and forcing myself to work, which lead to loads of stress and I got so scared of doing anything that I eventually got really anxious about everything.

She was always by my side throughout this, helping me at any moment. And now, after 2 months, I no longer feel too much anxious about things and am doing better. But, here comes the problem…

When I was going through anxiety, I was so overwhelmed with things that I couldn’t feel my love for my partner. Or for anyone for that matter. I always thought that I’ll feel It back again when I won’t be anxious about everything.��But, now that I am not overwhelmed, I still don’t feel the love. I still feel mildly anxious every now and then for no particular reason, but I guess that’s only natural. And, I don’t know If that’s what making me feel this way.

The thought of making her happy, no longer excites me the same way. I dread whenever she texts me, I am always afraid that in some way, talking to her may bring back the anxiety. Even though she only loves me more than ever. When I talk to her, everything is great, I love her more than ever, but I do feel scared at times.

I am too afraid of having to go through that again. The feeling of being overwhelmed, stressed out by everything. And, this fear makes me afraid to be with her at times. And, not thinking of ways to make her happier anymore, makes me feel like I’m not being a good boyfriend…

She even suggested herself that, we should break up if the relationship is causing more harm than good, and even my friends suggest the same. But, I know that, we can change our mind and not our partner to fix things many a times. And this Is certainly one of those times. But, I just don’t know how.. I really do love her, I know that, but, not in the same way I used to, and, I don’t want to be someone who wants to gain happiness from a relationship without returning it.

Sorry if this was confusing, thank you for spending your time reading this.

Anxiety Ruins Everything

DEAR ANXIETY RUINS EVERYTHING: Right, so there’re two things going on here, ARE. Let’s start with the surface level: how your anxiety has made you feel about this relationship.

What you’re experiencing is actually pretty common. One of the reasons why fears, phobias and anxieties can be so tenacious is that they often have unintentional knock-on effects. Much of this is due to the ultimate reason why we have fears and phobias: they’re a form of self-preservation. We experience trauma or have a negative exposure to something and the pain, discomfort or other unpleasant experiences carves a groove in our brain, and that groove says “I don’t want to go through that again.” As a result, we have a visceral, negative emotional response to what we perceive as the cause of that experience.

If you – just to pick a random example that has absolutely no relationship to anything at all, I swear – climb a tree as a child and get stuck near the top and can’t get back down again safely, you might develop a fear of heights. As a result, being in places where you’re high up in the air, you start having all the physical effects of fear – the racing heartbeat, the adrenaline dump into your system, the way your body tenses for the fight/flight/flee response and so on.

But here’s the weird thing: our brains are very bad at understanding why we feel a certain way. They take the sensations we feel and create a reason for it afterwards based on the evidence at hand. And because a lot of fears are born out of negative experiences – including extreme discomfort – you can often end up with an aversion to not just the thing that you’re afraid of, but the physical and emotional sensations of that fear as well. You’re literally afraid of being afraid because those feelings were so deeply unpleasant and intense and you don’t want to experience them again. So as a result: you associate other things, things that aren’t necessarily directly connected to that fear trigger, with that fear.

That’s almost certainly part of what happened. Because your anxiety spiked while you were busy and you associated that anxiety spike with being in contact with your girlfriend, there’s a secondary connection between your girlfriend and your anxiety – one that’s reinforced by your previous anxiety about the relationship. So now your brain has made the association between your girlfriend and that anxiety and it’s in self-protection mode. It doesn’t want to experience those intense negative feelings again and so it’s pushing the associations away.

There are ways of undoing this, mostly by reinforcing the positive aspects of being with your girlfriend and all. But if I’m being honest here? I don’t think that’s actually a good idea. Which is what brings us to the second issue – your first anxiety spike and your relationship itself.

Now I want to be clear: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your girlfriend or that she’s a bad person, nor am I saying there’s anything wrong with you. However, I don’t know if this relationship is actually one that you want, or that it’s going to be good for you in general.

I fully understand that this is your second relationship ever, and so you don’t have a lot of experience under your belt. I suspect that you’re also dealing with a certain amount of self-esteem and self-worth issues. But the way you describe, not just your relationship but how you act in it, sends up some flags for me.

Let’s start with an obvious question: what do you like about your girlfriend that isn’t either her looks or the fact that she likes you? What does (or did) this relationship bring into your life that isn’t just “I have a girlfriend”? What do you all share that makes this relationship worth it for you?

Give those some serious thought before you answer, because… well, I’m not entirely sure there’s much there. The fact that you and she don’t have a lot in common is something I see crop up when people round physical or sexual attraction up to “love” or try to build a relationship out of a purely physical connection. You can be attracted to someone, even have intense physical chemistry with them – so much so that you have to fight to come up for air in between banging out on every sturdy surface in the house – but not have enough to make a relationship work. Physical chemistry and sexual connection is important in a long-term relationship, yes, but it’s not the only thing you need to make a relationship work. Especially since that New Relationship Energy will always fade; it’s just part of how we’re wired.

I’d also like to know how you feel about yourself. There’re a few things in your letter that scream to me that you may not see or believe in your own value and worth. When you’re barely a month into the relationship and you’re already feeling like the Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head, that’s usually a sign that something’s wrong. Either you know on a subconscious level that there’s something off here, or you don’t believe that someone could care for you because of who you are.

That carries over to the way you behave with her and your attitude towards your relationship. The attitude of “I have to make sure I’m always making her life better”, to the point that you’re neglecting your own interests, isn’t healthy. It’s the sort of thing that suggests that you feel as though you have to be constantly doing things for her, with an unspoken “or else” lingering in the background like a smell after a fart. It’s easy to frame it as “trying to be a good boyfriend” or “I love her so much so I sacrifice everything for her”, but quite frankly, that’s not a healthy attitude. Every relationship requires balance. Yeah, you need to do things for the relationship and for your partner, but you also need to do things for your relationship with yourself. Losing yourself in your relationship and feeling responsible for their feelings and actions is the literal definition of codependence.

Overbalancing towards having to making someone’s happiness the exclusive goal in your life isn’t healthy – not for you, not for them and not for the relationship. It suggests a level of insecurity and fearfulness with relationships and the belief that you can only be loved or appreciated for what you do for people, not for who you are. That’s not a great place to be in general, and it’s especially not a good place for making a relationship work. Even if you’re with a good partner who doesn’t take advantage of this – or who doesn’t exhibit codependence of their own – it’s the sort of thing that can result in the exact sort of burnout and anxiety you’re already experiencing.

So while I don’t think there’s anything wrong or bad with your girlfriend… I don’t think this relationship is a good or healthy one for you. I think your girlfriend and your friends are right: you should probably let this relationship go for your own good. You don’t want to be setting yourself on fire just to keep other people warm, even if they weren’t demanding it of you. All that happens is that you hurt yourself and make your own life that much more difficult and traumatic.

I know it’s not what you want to hear, but I think what you need to do right now is back out of this relationship and focus more on the relationship with yourself. If I’m right and either you have an insecure style of attachment or self-esteem issues, you’d be better off working with a counselor and getting yourself into a better place, mentally and emotionally.

And here’s the thing: if you and your girlfriend do have enough in common to make things work, that doesn’t mean that breaking up for now is the end. If you go and work on yourself and get yourself into better emotional shape, there’s nothing stopping the two of you from circling back around to this relationship and giving it another try. If she’s right for you, she’ll still be the right for you when you’re healthier and in a place where you can be a good boyfriend without tying yourself into knots about it. But right now, you’re not in a position to be good for her or yourself, and you need to prioritize you for a while. There comes a point where you have to be willing to say – to paraphrase the sage – “I may love you, but I love me more”.

If you love her, then love yourself enough to take care of yourself for a while. If this is meant to be, it’ll still be meant to be when you’re in a better place.

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: I am a 67 year old woman, my friend is a man and 70. From the first meeting it was great and I thought things were wonderful. We saw each other a couple times a week. He has classic cars so some of our dates were like 10-12 hours going to car shows. We had lots in common. I am widowed, he was divorced years ago, maybe 20 years. Only had one long term relationship since. Don’t know all the details but he did say her Dad asked him what took him so long to figure her craziness out. LOL

He has dated since but nothing serious. My husband died almost 5 years ago and I’ve been trying to date the last couple. Nothing serious or even more than a few dates.

Anyway, I was blindsided when he texted me between Christmas and New Years that he thought we wanted different things. (After giving me a very expensive necklace. Surprised by that, I just got him a tee shirt of a band he likes.)

This was my last contact from him, despite me texting, emailing and sending actual letters to him. I was surprised because we had never discussed what we each might want.��We weren’t intimate, much to my dismay, I’m still a very sexual person. We did discuss it and though he hadn’t had sex in forever, he said things still worked. Even though, I do want to have sex I was getting to the point that if it was off the table, I could live with it. Yes, liked him that much.��My problem is that he didn’t talk to me about anything and won’t talk to me about it. It has made me a bit insane. If I knew the reasons I could move on but I can’t seem to without knowing.�He’s a very well-mannered man and had a pet peeve about people not saying Thank You. Well, I already had his Valentine’s items ordered and couldn’t be cancelled when he dumped me so he got those. NO thank you. His birthday was this week, sent him gifts, just because. NO thank you. Which is very irritating. If it wasn’t for tracking numbers I wouldn’t know for sure he got them. (It was only recently thought I found out by accident how much the Christmas necklace cost so I sent him a watch.)

In the past, I’ve always been able to walk away, usually said F* you, your loss and never talked to them again, no matter how I felt. But I haven’t been able to do that with him. I think it’s because I don’t know the why and don’t understand why he is ghosting me.��Any thoughts? I’m not desperate for a man so that’s not it.�Sorry this is all over the place and hope you can make some sense of it.��Thanks in advance.

Lost In The Mail

DEAR LOST IN THE MAIL: Honestly, LITM? I think this is a lot simpler than you realize. He decided he wasn’t interested and gave you a fairly standardized, polite rejection that theoretically doesn’t blame anyone. “We want different things, best of luck” is basically a variation of “it’s not you, it’s me”. And as with “It’s not you, it’s me”, it comes with an unspoken coda. With “It’s not you, it’s me”, it’s “I’m just not into you like that.” With “We want different things”, it’s frequently “you want me, I want someone else”.

Now these, in theory, are letting people down easy. It’s a way of either saying nobody’s to blame or that oh woe, for the universe has aligned against us ah well. But a lot of people don’t take it that way. A lot of folks, like you, want to know more. They want closure, which is frequently a fancy way of saying “I want justification for your decisions”.

But honestly? Most people don’t want that and wouldn’t appreciate it if they got it. Nobody wants to hear a detailed breakdown of why someone’s not attracted to them. Even if they genuinely think want to know so they can work on themselves for next time… they really don’t want to hear it. The vast majority of the human race can’t compartmentalize so well that they can take someone’s “here’s why I don’t like you” and not take it personally. What they’re hoping for is something they can argue against and say “well you’re wrong, let’s try again”. But what they often get, if and when they get it, is frequently “and now I shall hit every single one of your insecurities in alphabetical order and give you some new ones besides”.

And that’s assuming that the person can even articulate a reason. A lot of times, the reasons why we don’t like someone or aren’t into them aren’t always readily apparent to us, the person feeling it (or not, as it were). What we think is the reason may be rationalization, it may be what we assume the reason is, or we may not even know the whys and wherefores; we just know we’re not feeling it and so we fall back onto a polite “nobody’s at fault here”.

This is why closure is ultimately a thing you have to give yourself. You have to decide that you’ve gotten it, make your peace with either not knowing or give yourself a reason for it and resolve to move on.

Now that having been said… you’re letting this get to you and you’re acting in a way that’s not really covering you in glory, here. It’s fairly clear you’re not accepting his break up, and you’re trying to engineer a confrontation about this.

Sending him stuff post-break up is a pretty transparent bid for contact. You didn’t need to send on his Valentine’s day gift; you could have returned it, sold it or gifted it to someone else. There wasn’t anything that required that it be delivered to him.

Similarly, you absolutely didn’t need to send him a birthday gift, “Just because”. He’d dumped you three months previous and you hadn’t had any contact with him since. That’s pretty definitive.

You say that you didn’t get a response, not even a “thank you”, but that’s not correct. He has given you a response, because no response is a response. He’s telling you, in no uncertain terms, that he’s not interested in talking, and I can tell you with a great deal of confidence that continuing to push for contact isn’t going to work.

The best thing you can do under these circumstances is ultimately just shrug your shoulders, assume that it’s his loss and move on. He’s not into you. Instead of wondering why, you’re better off to go look for someone who is.

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 are women so anti men nowadays?

I’ve heard women complain and chide any form of male attention as harassment, and they perceive the very notion of men having a sex drive as unsettling.

Oh he said hi to me, I’m not here to talk to other people.

Oh he tried to flirt with me, doesn’t he know I’m not here for that.

I should just wait for a woman to take initiative. Wait no women don’t take initiative in a culture where men make the first move.

I should wait for women to send me some faint signals to make the first move. No, she doesn’t go anywhere without 8 other friends, and so she’s not going to notice me.

She already has options so she’s not going to put in the effort to talk to someone new.

I should just force my way into a conversation. No that’s not respectful of boundaries and her time.

I should just be empathetic and understand that women don’t want male attention and not approach her.

Wow I’ve been single for a while. How do I get out of this?

You should get to know her first as a friend and then ask her out. Oops, now she’s creeped out because I was supposed to hit on her right away, and now she thinks I’ve been disingenuous about being her friend.

But if I’m upfront right away, I’m just one of a dozen other guys that harassed her today. Nobody wants a single guy lurking about because he might ask somebody out, and that’s not an okay thing to do, because I didn’t get her consent to be attracted to her.

Even if I do make a move, there’s a 40% chance she’ll get offended and then tell everyone and now I have a bad reputation.

The outcome is “you guessed correctly that I like you and now we can go on a date”, or the more likely “I’m not comfortable talking to you anymore”. There’s no option for a simple rejection.

Why is dating or meeting women as a man just a catch 22?

I’m either single or a predator.

–Catch-22

DEAR CATCH–22: Well it’s been a while since I’ve gotten one of these. I figured most of the usual sources had moved on to complaining that guys had to be built like Marvel heroes instead.

But hey since it’s been a while, I’m going to do you a favor and actually take your question seriously instead of just snarking on it for a thousand words. Hope everyone’s brought a lunch, because this is going to be a long one.

There’s an easy answer to your question, C22, and the answer is: you’re not even wrong, you have a list of assumptions that’re based off other dudes’ assumptions and the transitive property of this means that they don’t even manage to fit into to an actual state of wrongness. That would require operating in what we know as “reality” and not the fever-swamps of various sub-Reddits and wackadoo YouTube channels.

The issue isn’t that women are “anti-men”, it’s that women’ve gotten fed up with assholes and dudes who can’t be bothered to act like women are people. And, I dunno if you’ve looked around recently but that attitude is very much a top-down sort of situation. When you’ve got state legislatures restricting basic health care for women and trying to legislate what women are allowed to wear, while also coming after no-fault divorce because prominent YouTubers complain that women are allowed to divorce their husbands “without his permission”… it’s hard to fault ‘em for it.

(And that’s before we even get into the folks trying to use cottagecore and hilariously misguided ideas about subsistence farming as backdoors into fascism and taking away women’s rights.)

But I digress. Let’s talk about some of the examples you mentioned.

I’m not gonna dig into every single one of them because a) many are redundant and b) this is gonna be long enough as it is, but we can at least poke some holes into the highlights.

We’ll start with “I’ve heard women complain and chide any form of male attention as harassment, and they perceive the very notion of men having a sex drive as unsettling.”

Cool story bro, cite me some actual sources that say those exact things. But since we’re in the world of r/thathappened, how about the fact that a whole lot of guys treat women happening to exist in physical proximity as an indication that they’re an object to be consumed and not a person with automony and agency and their own interests and goals. What they’re complaining about, if you actually listen, are guys who ignore their obvious disinterest or take their “no, thank you” as “please try harder”.

Women who complain about guys approaching them in public spaces don’t mean someone being polite or who takes “no thanks” with good grace, they are talking about trying to go through the world with the sexual equivalent of walking down a street lined with carnival barkers, clipboard holders asking for donations and signatures and dudes trying to get you to take their mixtape. Except all of them are hawking d--k. And not even high-quality d--k marketed to an interested audience in the market for it. Literally “you look like an appropriately shaped hole, let me tell you the good news about my d--k.”

Now, one of the things that gets tricky about trying to get guys to understand what this would feel like frequently means relying on either homophobia, transphobia or otherwise spreading s--tty ideas about age, size, ethnicity or what-not. Other metaphors rarely convey the same dynamic or otherwise don’t break through to the sense of empathy that’s really needed to understand why this is an unpleasant and alienating experience. Dudes frequently think that it’s awesome having strangers hitting on you when you’re not into it – and I can tell you from personal experience that no, not it is not. So all I can say is “imagine folks who you don’t find appealing demanding that you let them see your d--k.” Constantly. Everywhere you go. Going for coffee? “eeeeeey, lemme see your d--k”. Trying to get to class? “Come on sweetness, whip that sucker out I got my ruler right here”. Out having dinner with the family? “Come on baby, I can suck it better than them!”

Now imagine that’s your daily existence. Next!

“Oh he said hi to me, I’m not here to talk to other people. Oh he tried to flirt with me, doesn’t he know I’m not here for that.”

First: if you can take “no” with grace, then this isn’t your problem.

Second: if you’re running into this, perhaps the issue is that you’re trying to hit on people in places where it’s not generally expected or appropriate to hit on folks.

Third: odds are also good that you’re not just choosing people who aren’t showing interest in you, but also you’re doing it badly. Work on your social calibration and learn how to read the room or else stick to places where it’s generally accepted that people are looking to talk to strangers and possibly get dates. NEXT!

“I should just wait for a woman to take initiative. Wait no women don’t take initiative in a culture where men make the first move.”

Or women are just as shy and worried about talking to men they find attractive as men can be. OR – and stick with me here – because we have a culture that still insists men are supposed to make the first move, guys tend to react badly when women make the first move and either assume far more interest than she actually has or that this is some sort of trick and either she’s setting him up or a sex-worker looking for a client.

And hey wanna know who established and enforce the “men initiate, women receive” social order? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t women. NEXT!

“I should wait for women to send me some faint signals to make the first move. No, she doesn’t go anywhere without 8 other friends, and so she’s not going to notice me.”

My dude, being noticed is easy. Show up in a fuzzy top hat and a mesh shirt; everyone will notice you then. Wait, is that not the attention you were hoping for and you’re not a professional magician who tried to model his look on Criss Angel? Probably should work on being more noticeable in a positive fashion then. Because it turns out that women do notice guys they’re into, even when they’re with their friends.

If you’re able to see an attractive woman while you’re out with the boys, then it stands to reason that women are capable of doing the same. NEXT!

“She already has options so she’s not going to put in the effort to talk to someone new.”

Ah, we’ve reached the “making all sorts of unwarranted assumptions based on what a couple of Braincel subreddit regulars, who’ve never actually talked to a woman that didn’t involve placing an order at Arby’s, said on a podcast” portion of the rant.

This is an IMAX problem, because it’s just straight projection. It’s not real, it’s what a bunch of guys think is real because they have a lot of really weird ideas about how women think and operate that has no basis in reality. It’s the sort of thing you come up with when your only concept of how attractive women behave came from watching High-School Musical at too formative an age when you didn’t realize that Sharpay is a caricature and not an actual person.

(Insert whatever fictional Mean Girl is appropriate to your generation here, cultural osmosis will only carry me so far.)

NEXT!

“You should get to know her first as a friend and then ask her out. Oops, now she’s creeped out because I was supposed to hit on her right away, and now she thinks I’ve been disingenuous about being her friend.”

You might have a point if it weren’t for the sheer number of dudes who talk about being a Nice Guy and a woman’s friend but then throw an tantrum because she didn’t reward his friendship with sex.

Now I’ve written fairly extensively about how to ask out a friend, but here’s what you can expect if you ask out a friend who isn’t interested when you’ve not only genuinely been her friend, but also didn’t act like a d--khead in the process: a little bit of awkwardness that you both eventually power through because you’re friends who understand each other and are also grown-ass adults who can see that just because someone wants to date you or doesn’t want to date you doesn’t mean that the friendship never existed.

OK this next one needs to be split up into two parts. First:

“Nobody wants a single guy lurking about because he might ask somebody out, and that’s not an okay thing to do,”

If the way you behave can be accurately described as “lurking”, then that would imply that you’re not actually part of that group and also behaving in ways that would already make people uncomfortable.

Now a more charitable read on this would be “guy who’s quiet/ on the fringes of the conversation or social gathering/ relatively new and doesn’t know many people yet.” At which point this falls apart because a) nobody would know if he were single unless he actively told them and b) his presence is rarely a problem unless he’s acting in a weird way that would make reasonable people uncomfortable. And just “listening to the conversation without actively participating because he doesn’t have anything to say” isn’t the sort of thing that makes people uncomfortable, especially in social situations where the context is groups of folks stand around talking – like a party. If you’re lingering around a private conversation or hovering around a group of friends at a bar, then yeah your behavior’s weird and off-putting. Because that’s not how folks join conversations with strangers at bars. There’re ways of doing this successfully but it requires understanding the social context and a willingness to talk to the group and not just focus your entire attention on a single person because you think they’re hot.

And once again: check my archives, check my YouTube channel and read my books. I have given extensive amounts of information about how to handle those situations.

But this next part here? This part’s a tell.

“…because I didn’t get her consent to be attracted to her.”

Ah, the disingenuous misunderstanding of consent. There are two possibilities here – either you literally believe that this is something that people think, in which case you need to get off Reddit, YouTube and whatever weird Manfluencer podcasts you’re listening to until the brain-poison drains away, or you’re mocking the idea of consent which is going to be why women don’t want to talk to you in the first place. Either way: THERE’S YOUR PROBLEM.

See, this sort of attitude tends to radiate out of folks like a cleanup crew at a particularly passive-aggressive nuclear spill. These are the sort of jokey-jokes that turn out to not actually be jokes; its’ the sort of “said in frustration but meant with sincerity” kind of situation that tells the people around you a lot that you may not have intended. It’s a sign that, at best, you’re the sort of person who says “but don’t you think #metoo/political correctness has gone too far?”, especially in conversations about how Andrew Tate was arrested for human trafficking or Harvey Weinstein getting sentenced.

But for education’s sake, let’s say that you actually believe this is true, without malice. Here’s the thing: nobody – and certainly nobody serious – cares about what’s going on in the privacy of your ears. If you run into somebody who actually, literally and sincerely believes that you need their consent to be attracted to them, then you have run into a deeply unserious person and I would love to know how they move through this world without constantly throwing fits at the unwary.

But the fact of the matter is that you can be attracted to somebody all you want and nobody is going to give a s--t. The time anyone is going to care and be bothered by it is when you make it their problem. And no, “asked them out on a date, once” isn’t “making it their problem”. More often than not, what you’re likely to find is that it wasn’t “once”, it certainly wasn’t polite or respectful and usually also includes doing something that would make reasonable people say “um, what the f--k, Charlie?”

Now it’s certainly possible that you may run into some Mean Girl who reacts to your asking them out (politely!) with “ew”; it’s an infinite universe and that means it’s certainly possible to encounter someone who acts like they came out of a bad 80s teen boner jam. But that’s where you’re right back to “this is a deeply unserious person,” and you’re better off asking yourself why you’d want to date someone who acts like that in the first place.

But in the real world, the time you’re most likely to run into someone who has a problem with your being attracted to them, it’s almost always because you made your interest in them an issue that they can’t ignore or avoid. There’re a lot of folks who would consider themselves to be “supreme gentlemen” who act like entitled asshats and do end-runs around things like ”didn’t actually give you her contact information” and show up in her DMs or texts anyway. Which is not just presumptive as f--k but creepy as hell, because it indicates that he does think that her desire to not be bothered is less important than his desire to try to get into her pants.

“Even if I do make a move, there’s a 40% chance she’ll get offended and then tell everyone and now I have a bad reputation.”

A word of advice, Super Chief: if you’re trying to make a point, you should probably not frame it as having a 60% chance of working out. Those are some pretty good odds. But also I dunno if you noticed, but we recently saw a spousal abuser – someone who was found in court to have abused his wife – have his incredibly-well-documented behavior read out repeatedly, with the whole world watching, and the response of a distressingly large amount of the population was “I told you that bitch was lying!” Meanwhile he goes on to continue to work and get paid handsomely. People celebrated Bill Cosby getting out of jail, where he had been convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault, on a technicality. S--t, people still line up to work with Roman Polanski, who not only had the most open-and-shut rape case you can possibly find but who fled the country in order to avoid jail.

Those are men who committed literal, documented acts of violence against women and who many still see as the bee’s knees and the badger’s nadgers.

Asking someone out and being shot down isn’t going to destroy your reputation unless you’re in junior high. And that’s junior high. Just liking the wrong TV show or being bad at Fortnite will do that to you.

But now that we’ve demolished these bulls--t ideas, how about some actual, practical advice that you can start implementing today?

First, get the hell off the Internet. Seriously, I can tell where you’ve been hanging out and who you’ve been listening to, and it’s given you brain worms. You don’t just need to go outside and touch grass, you desperately need to go and interact with people in person, without a keyboard or filtering your thoughts through social media. I’m not being snarky here: you legitimately need to go talk to people with your mouth and actually connect with people in person, especially women. On that note:

Second, make friends with women. Not “hang around women you’re hoping to date”, but make actual friends. Talk to them, get to know them and get some insight into what their lives are actually like instead of taking the word of a bunch of guys who hire sex workers to hang around them to try to trick social media into thinking that they’re successful with women. Getting to know women as people instead of acting like they’re your opponents will fix at least 50% of your problems here.

Third, have a life. Go out and do cool s--t that you enjoy, in ways that bring you in contact with other people who enjoy that same s--t. Make friends with them, build a social circle and celebrate a human connection of the sort you can only have in the flesh with other people. Some of them may even be attractive women! But wait, isn’t that a problem? No, not really because here’s the thing: if you get to know someone as a person and generally act like a decent human being who didn’t get all his talking points from the redpillteen subreddit, the more time you spend with someone, the more they like you. Part of the reason why most folks meet their partners through either mutual friends or shared interests and activities is because propinquity is one of the strongest and yet most under-appreciated forces in attraction and dating.

But also, fun thing: your female friends may not want to date you and that’s fine. But they have friends. And if women like you and think you’re a genuinely good guy, they’ll talk you up to those friends. But first you have to be their friend.

Fourth: focus way the hell less on trying to cold-approach women. It’s a nice skill to have, but not only is it varsity level difficult, but it’s inefficient as hell. Even the folks who are very good at cold approaches have to shotgun it to get results, which means that they’re still dealing with a success-to-rejection ratio that’s heavily tilted in the rejection side.

But it’s also a big part of why women get tense about guys coming up to talk to them while they’re out on about.

Once we account for overdeveloped senses of entitlement and a culture that taught men that women are just things to be consumed, the single biggest reason why guys make asses of themselves and drive women to complain about getting hit on are the dudes who are focused on cold approaches.

Too many guys think that the ultimate goal is to get a complete stranger to decide she wants to start a romantic or sexual relationship with him, never realizing that this is not how most people date. If those dudes did nothing else but slow their roll from a 10 to a 2, they’d have far better results.

They’d do even better than that if they took it at a 2 and didn’t make it clear through their behavior that what they’re looking for is a woman-shaped figure that just happens to have a hole for their d--k. The dude hitting on women at the bus stop is making it clear that he’s not into her because she’s a specific person but because he’s trying to get laid and she’s the most immediate acceptable option. If it weren’t her, it’d be someone else, and let me tell you: even if you’re someone who is open to sex with someone you just met, you still aren’t going to just go with anyone who asks and especially someone who makes it clear that “you’ll do”. Nobody likes being treated like an ambulatory Real Doll. And the folks who do, like it with people they’ve already know and have a connection with.

And if your immediate response to this is to gripe about The Friend Zone, simps, cucks or betas… I refer you to step one. Because you’re still dealing with brain worms and you will never, ever find someone to willingly and consensually touch your penis until you get rid of them.

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