DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve always had issues expressing romantic interest or talking to women outside of work or family, but it’s gotten significantly worse over the last year. I don’t make eye contact with women, walk in the same direction or look at them in public. I can only talk to women in situations where the conversation has as least one other guy.

There’s a few reasons for this. My father committed awful actions against others and I feared I would follow suit. From there, my younger sister experienced behavior I realized I was doing. She avoids going to the gym because men would look at her, which made her feel uncomfortable. She wasn’t catcalled or inappropriately talked to, she just felt a lot of eyes on her and it caused her to stop going. Lots of people were mad about the TikTok gym situation, but having heard from her how uncomfortable being looked at made her feel and how she avoided going at all, I realized how often I looked at women and how I likely contributed to that uncomfortable experience. I feel gross looking at women knowing I might be the reason they feel too scared to go to the gym or a park.

From what I read online, many other women experience the same issues. Some state they can’t go into a public place without awkwardly getting asked out, or they enjoy a class only to stop going when men try to flirt with them. It makes them uncomfortable, annoyed, or creeped out. I don’t want to do that to others. So I actively began avoiding eye contact, looking, walking too close or appearing to follow, getting too close or making advances.

I figured I would just use dating apps to try and find relationships. However, I experience radio silence on them. It could be that my initial conversations starters are sterile and sanitized, or my pictures or something in my control. But eventually the fears I have in public reach online apps. After getting nervous I’m too forward or awkward, I eventually just get flustered and give up.

I’ve talked to a few therapists on this issue. What is often brought up is that the actions I perform to avoid being creepy may be more creepy. By doing things like avoiding eye contact or turning my head, I could be signaling that I am attempting to hide something or avoid suspicion. This would make women feel more creeped out in public because I’m not signaling my actual intentions.

I understand how my body language will cause this issue. However, I get flustered because I fear there’s no solution. If I look at women, I make them uncomfortable. If I don’t look at women, I make them uncomfortable. This results in me avoiding social situations altogether, as I’d rather be miserable and uncomfortable than make someone else miserable and uncomfortable.

When talking about this with others, I get responses like ‘just treat them like people’ or ‘get out of your comfort zone’ or ‘you’re going to be awkward, it takes practice.’ I don’t care to waste people’s time or make them cringe by saying something stupid. I get so nervous about showing the slightest bit of romantic interest when it’s not warranted or misinterpreting romantic intent for just being friendly. They are people, they deserve to not feel awkward.

I’m not sure what to do.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Terminally Creepy

DEAR TERMINALLY CREEPY: OK TC, I’m gonna start from the bottom, because there’s an important thing you’re missing. You say “They are people, they deserve to not feel awkward”.

Well, you’re people, too. You deserve to not feel awkward. And you also deserve to not feel like you have to slide through the world as frictionless as possible for fear of ever inconveniencing anyone, ever.

Now to be clear, your intent is noble. You don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable or awkward. That’s great. There’s only one problem though: you’re assuming a level of control you don’t actually have. You can’t control how other people feel. There is no collection of actions you can take or not take that will guarantee that everybody will only feel what you want them to feel or that they won’t feel what you’d prefer they didn’t. That has nothing to do with your succeeding or failing at trying to keep people comfortable and has everything to do with the fact that people are irrational, chaotic and our actions and choices and feelings may not make a lick of goddamn sense to anyone who doesn’t have the full 24/7 feed of what’s going on in our brains.

Individuals might decide to feel some way about you that you literally can’t control for or anticipate. Someone may think your hair color is too much. The way you dress may be close to some negative experience they’ve had. They may even just have a bad case of bitch-eating-crackers, where you could be minding your own business and eating crackers and they get upset because look at you, sitting there eating crackers like you think you’re special.

You don’t have control over what other people think or feel. And if we’re being honest, the person whose feelings you’re ultimately trying to control… are yours.

What you’re experiencing is a form of anxiety, and as I’ve said before: anxiety is a maladaptive form of self-protection. It’s your brain trying to keep you safe from the things you’re afraid of. The fact that it makes you miserable in the process is irrelevant. Our brains are programmed to keep us safe; our happiness doesn’t matter.

As I said, this is coming from a noble place. Your father did horrible things and you don’t want to be like him. Your sister experienced deeply uncomfortable things and you don’t want to contribute to that. That’s all very good. Some of this is under your control; you aren’t destined to be like your father. You can choose to not be, to be better than him and resolve to break any sort of generational curse. He may have been horrible, as his father before him. You can decide that you won’t follow in their footsteps, that you will be the one who breaks that curse and becomes better than they ever were.

But that doesn’t mean living in fear or making yourself increasingly small.

Just as I’ve said elsewhere about anxiety and self-protection, part of the problem with anxiety is that it never stays static. If you don’t actively confront it and avoid it instead, it just grows. The things that make you anxious multiply as you avoid even the things that might trigger you’re anxiety and so the world you allow yourself to live in becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. You can see this happening now, as you overthink things and see your trying to avoid creeping people out as being creepy.

So what do you do about this? Well, to start with you give up the illusion of control. You can’t control what others think, assume or feel; you can only control what you do. Someone can feel the way that they feel about you and your actions; you can’t control that. You can only control what you do. You can examine your behavior and do your best to make sure you’re not doing anything egregious, but you also can’t ensure that everyone’s going to feel the exact same way about everything. The most you can do is to do your best to live with integrity and in alignment with your values. If you mess up, you do your best to make things right and to not make that mistake again.

But first you have to actually have made a mistake.

You also have to recognize when people aren’t talking about you, especially when they’re talking in generalities. Part of that means some functional media literacy – understanding that what people are talking about isn’t what you are doing, and also to read beyond your knee-jerk assumptions. When women are complaining about guys hitting on them when they go out, they don’t mean people having normal conversations and going about their day. Nor do they mean classmates who want to be friends or who are interested in getting to know them better.

What they mean are guys who know nothing about them coming up, running the same spiel they give to everyone and generally treating them like an object rather than an individual. The guys who hear “no” as “try harder” and “I’m not interested” as “I’m testing you, keep at it.” They are talking about guys who go to classes just to try to get laid and shotgun their interest in hopes that if they throw enough lead in the air they’ll hit something, eventually.

The same thing involves guys who stare and make women uncomfortable. The key word there? Stare. I don’t know you’re your sister experienced, but I have a lot of friends who’ve had similar experiences with guys ogling them. One of the things that all those stories had in common was that none of my friends were describing normal, average behavior. Those guys weren’t noticing a woman out of the corner of their eyes or looking over, appreciating someone’s aesthetic appeal and then going back to whatever they were doing. They’re the ones who are looking at a woman like a starving man looking at a ribeye, the ones who are leering like a cartoon wolf or who seem to be trying to measure how many lampshades they could make out of her skin.

They weren’t looking at her like a person, they were looking at her like an object to be consumed.

Are you doing any of that? No? Cool… then the women you see talking on social media aren’t talking about you.

By that same token, some things they say may make little sense to you or that the reaction is out of proportion to the offense. Ok, so then try a little empathy and nuance. Do your best to try to look at it – honestly, without your negative bias coloring in the lines – from their perspective. Try to put yourself into their shoes and understand where they’re coming from. Again, however, you have to do this without leaping to the conclusion that you’re automatically guilty by existing, rather than recognizing that 9 times out of 10 they’re not talking about everyday behavior.

Part of media literacy also means recognizing the perverse incentives of social media as well. People seem to keep forgetting that almost every social media service is run on algorithms that prioritize engagement over everything else, and nothing boosts engagement like outrage and anger. This means that there are perverse incentives to be a little louder, a little more outraged, a little more extreme than the previous person, because it gets you more attention. S--theads like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro say outrageous s--t in part because it gets people’s eyeballs and people react to it. West End Caleb became a thing in part because people kept piling on and on and trying to outdo one another; the same with the Couch “Cheater” and others.

So the things you’re seeing aren’t indicative of the thoughts of Every Woman Alive, Ever, they’re what rise to the top of your feed because those are posts designed to goose engagement. And if you are engaging with them – reading them, commenting, even just watching those videos without clicking away – then you’re telling the algorithm to send you more because you are engaging with them. This then creates the illusion that it’s all omnipresent. Key word here: illusion.

Now I think there’re a few things you need right now. One of them is to talk to your therapist about anxiety and how to manage it. This may mean medication, it may mean different forms of therapy, it may even mean just learning to pause and pay attention to what you thought and how much of that was what you really think or what you’re anxiety is saying.

Case in point: your fear of saying something stupid or cringe. How often have you heard someone else flub what they were saying, say the wrong thing or accidentally shove their foot in their mouth. Out of all those times, how often did you come away thinking “ugh, how dare that person even show their face in public?”

If we’re being honest? Probably never. Hell, most of the time you probably forgot it even happened until I asked you to remember it, specifically.

Well guess what? The same is true of you. When you’ve said stupid things or did something cringe – as everyone has – the people around you likely didn’t notice. If they noticed, they almost certainly didn’t care, and definitely not for longer than span of time it would take them to have a sip of their drink. The grace you’re giving to others about their dumb or cringe moments is the same grace you should be giving yourself.

This is why part of what you need is to recognize that what you’re doing isn’t helping anyone; it’s only hurting you. You aren’t even setting yourself on fire to make other people warm. You’re setting yourself on fire on the off chance that someone else, somewhere, might be cold… and most of the people around you aren’t even chilly.

All you’re doing is diminishing yourself and reinforcing the idea that you are inherently unwelcome and unwanted based on nothing more than your own fears. Learning to love and celebrate yourself, to recognize your own worth and that you are deserving to be comfortable, just as other people are.

And on that note, it’s also important to realize you’re setting yourself up for failure. You have created a standard for yourself that is literally impossible to meet. You are expecting yourself to perform certain acts – like recognizing romantic interest or asking someone on a date – perfectly, the first time you ever even attempt to do so. And that’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works.

Part of learning how to recognize romantic interest over friendship, or to show romantic interest successfully or even just to not be too forward or less awkward is practice. You are only ever going to get better at meeting people, reading the room and so on through practice. That means you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to misread things. You’re going to say stupid things. You’re going to ask people on dates and they’re going to turn you down. And all of that is ok. You are wildly overestimating the level of impact that you’re going to have on people when you’re being sincere and acting in good faith. Trust me: the vast majority of folks are going to understand the difference between a guy who’s only “crime” is hoping someone liked him more than they do and the guy who thinks “no, go away” is what happens to other people. There’s a vast gulf between “I’m going to this museum exhibit on Saturday, I’d love to take you if you’re interested” and “Hey baby don’t be like that, you should give me a chance, get to know me, come on at least give me a smile” and very, very few people will confuse the two when they’re on the receiving end of it.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: things aren’t nearly as dire as it seems in your head. Take a breath. It’ll be ok. You’re not the monster you’re afraid of being. Work on your anxiety, stop trying to control the world and give yourself the grace you’re giving to others. It’ll be alright. I promise.

All will be well.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: This doesn’t have to do with dating, but it does deal with an interpersonal relationship.

My roommate is my best friend. Like all friends, we clash sometimes, and it’s always about cleaning. She is pathologically clean. She spends over half of her non-working awake time cleaning. Whenever she gets on my case, I can never argue with her because her response is, “Do you want to live in filth?” I’d say she was OCD, but we both know that cleanliness, even to excess, is not OCD.

The problem is, I have severe ADHD, which means two medications and frequent counseling, just to be as good as the laziest neurotypical person. In the past, I made messes and left them there. I’d spill coffee on the floor and just step over it. A few times, I’ve caused problems at work by losing an email or task, even from earlier in the day. And this is with treatment.

My roommate went away for almost a year, and I visited her. We had a great time, but there was a bad fight, and during, she hinted that my poor cleaning prowess might lead her to find a single when our lease was up.

When I got home, I worked hard to get better so she wouldn’t move out, and also because maybe it’s time I put in the extra effort. What’s frustrating about it is that something that takes every ounce of concentration I have — that I have to remind myself to do every time — is just below the lowest bar for being a decent adult, so no one is impressed, least of all my roommate. A lot of readers won’t be impressed, but this is what I can do now after exhausting training:

I clean up after myself when I’m cooking, including the floor.�If I drop something, I pick it up.�If I spill something, I wipe it up.�If I see cat puke or hear it, I clean it up.�I don’t forget to give my cat his medication.�I wish I could say I was better about my medication.�I do chores without being asked.�I wash my hands when I’m cooking.�I wash my hands after the bathroom.�I shower regularly.�At work, I answer emails as soon as I get them, or when I’m finished with the task at hand.�I pay bills as soon as I get them.�I don’t procrastinate.

These are all things that took years of conditioning to accomplish, and I have over a dozen alarms on my phone to remind myself to take medication, do tasks at work, clean the litter box, shower, et cetera. These things are second nature to a neurotypical person, and many of them don’t believe how hard I have to work. I’m like a kid who studies day and night and can only get Cs on his tests. All I want to do is carry blissfully on like I used to, leaving whatever mess in my wake. But now I’m doing things like turning back around and returning to the bathroom to wash my hands when I forget to.

And the only thing my roommate ever says about it is when I miss something. She seems skeptical of ADHD being the cause of my less-than-sparkling approach to cleaning, and even when she does acknowledge it, she says that my doctors aren’t trying hard enough.

Everything else, literally everything else is blissful. She stuck with me after my ex-wife purged my friends, and she gave me a place to stay when I was kicked out of my home. We make each other laugh, and we eat dinner together every night. When she made dinner for my father, who is sensitive to any spice more than salt, she fixed him a separate plate from the spicy food the rest of us had. Even my ex-wife wasn’t that thoughtful.

And yet, I am constantly on edge, worried about the next mess I’ve left behind, when I put all of my focus into keeping that from happening. If she finds a stray handful of beard hair following my last trim, she drags me into the bathroom to show me. I don’t know if I can live like this, and I’m considering moving out too.

Is there any way I can ask her to chill out on me? ADHD is a huge part of my life. Unlike the bipolar disorder, which I can treat and forget, ADHD is always on my mind because it actively keeps me from functioning like a normal person. I can’t turn it off. It’s like trying to walk uphill on ice with a strong headwind. How am I supposed to live with someone who won’t try to understand that about me? What do I have to do to get a little recognition here?

Sincerely,�Sisyphus

DEAR SISYPHUS: OK, so as with many situations like yours, there are a few issues at play here and all of them are connected to one another. Some of them are inherent to having ADHD, some of them come from living with someone who doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept what ADHD is, and some of it comes from, well… trying to act like you’re neurotypical instead of neurodivergent.

First and foremost, I’m going to push back on some of the language here, because I don’t think it’s helping you or to explain things more effectively to your roommate. You’re treating not being neurotypical like some sort of mark of shame, something you need to strive for and to regard yourself as a failure for not accomplishing it. This is incredibly clear in the language you use and the way you describe your actions – “just to be as good as the laziest neurotypical person” is a prime example of this. So is “ carry blissfully on like I used to, leaving whatever mess in my wake.”

Be honest with me: are you actually blissful when you leave messes? Is that something that’s actually bringing you joy? Or is it that right now, the effort it takes to not do this is very high and very frustrating compared to the path of least resistance? Because if it’s the latter, not the former? Then describing yourself as “blissful” sets some really unfortunate and unhealthy expectations – like you’re happier wallowing in filth.

(If it’s the former, then your roommate is right and that’s not an ADHD thing…)

In fact, let’s take this as an opportunity to segue into the issues with cleaning and keeping your place hygienic. I’m going to be honest – and I say this as someone with ADHD and who’s lived with someone who is very focused on cleanliness for over a decade now – cleaning up and trying to keep things to a reasonable level of sanitary is really important. You don’t need to keep things to the point where you could perform surgery at a moment’s notice, but there’s a difference between “operating room” and “the cockroaches left to find a better place to live”.

I have sympathy here for you – I know what it feels like to live with someone who’s views on cleaning are much more extreme than your own – but I also understand and can relate to where your roommate is coming from. And frankly, I side with her on keeping things cleaner, because this isn’t just a case of her being the Felix Unger to your Oscar Madison. There’re legitimate health issues involved here.

It’s one thing if you’ve got a level of clutter that’s contained to your room, but when it involves spilled food, cat vomit or other organic substances, you’re inviting pests because yes that’s how you get ants. And also roaches, rats, mold and fungus. Beyond being nasty, those can become legitimate health hazards for everybody involved.

And that’s before we get into issues like washing your hands. That goes well beyond just being gross and well into “hand washing, especially before and after handling food or using the bathroom, materially affects human life expectancy”. Not washing your hands when you’re cooking or after going to the bathroom is how you end up spreading a whole host of toxins and bacteria, from staphylococcus to e.coli to salmonella. If you’re lucky, that’s how you end up with pink-eye. If you’re not lucky, people end up s--tting themselves to death – and that’s not an exaggeration. Hell, even not paying attention to, say, making sure that any drippings from raw chicken get cleaned up or that the cutting and food preparation surfaces don’t get cleaned properly can cause all sorts of health issues that range from the merely unpleasant to the legitimately life threatening.

So, like I said: I agree with her. To a point.

At the same time, I think it’s uncool that she doesn’t acknowledge just how far you’ve come, how much progress you’ve made and how much effort goes into your trying to keep things under control. Nor do I think it’s cool that she acts like a schoolmarm with a recalcitrant student, dragging you around by the ear to point out all the places where you’ve been deficient.

And I don’t think she quite understands how ADHD works.

Part of the problem – and one of the reasons why I don’t like most of the jokes about this – is that ADHD isn’t just “being easily distracted” like a dog that suddenly saw a squirrel. Most people who don’t live with someone who has ADHD don’t get how ADHD affects short-term and long-term memory. It’s not that we’re careless or don’t bother trying to remember s--t, it’s that information doesn’t write to disc. Short term memory’s like RAM; information is loaded to it for temporary storage while the app runs, then relevant info is offloaded to long-term memory and the RAM cache is cleared to make space for the next app. With ADHD, that transfer often doesn’t happen at all. It’s not that you couldn’t be bothered to remember, it’s that those things never got sent to memory in the first place, or if it did, it did so with an indexing issue that makes it impossible to call up that information in a logical manner.

This includes issues like “object permanence”. People with ADHD often have issues losing things or forgetting that things are there, even when it’s right in front of us. Almost everyone who has this condition knows how objects will quite literally fade into the background and we no longer see it because it’s been incorporated into our mental image of the scene. It’s very similar to why most car accidents happen within a mile of home – your brain isn’t actually processing the information coming from your eyes; it’s working from what you expect to be there because it’s so familiar to you. When people talk about how that tree/car/person/whatever came out of nowhere, they’re not trying to excuse s--tty driving, it’s that their brain literally put less bandwidth towards “what your eyes are seeing”.

This is why when I say “we don’t see it” I mean that literally – as in “the light may enter the eyes and be translated to signal via the optical nerve, but the brain doesn’t bother translating it back”.

Executive dysfunction is similar. It’s never as convenient as “I can only do the things I want”; it can affect things we enjoy just as much. It’s more like there is a loose wire that occasionally is in contact with the circuit and occasionally isn’t; when it’s not, the circuit won’t close and trigger whatever needs to be done. When you have ADHD, it’s very much like you have the one neuron that needs to fire to accomplish the task and it doesn’t, and thus you often find yourself pushing the “do task” button and nothing happens until certain extreme stimuli break through. This is why, for example, a lot of folks with ADHD seem to procrastinate on topics right up until the deadline – the terror of “oh god this is due TONIGHT” is akin to thumping the box until the loose wire connects long enough to complete the circuit.

So I think part of what your roommate needs to do is to learn a bit more of how ADHD actually works, rather than the popular idea that it’s just excusing laziness and an unwillingness to work. Showing her resources like ADHD Alien or How To ADHD might help her realize just what it is you’re living with.

You should also tell her – straight up – that a lot of what she’s doing is the opposite of helping. Dragging you around to yell at you like a recalcitrant toddler isn’t going to make your brain produce baseline levels of dopamine and serotonin. At best, it’s just going to make you feel bad. At worst… well honestly, at worst, it’s more likely to play into the ways that brains with ADHD will prioritize actions that produce dopamine and deprioritize ones that don’t.

Now here’s a thing you need to consider: you’re not neurotypical. Part of the problem you ­– and to an extent, your roommate – are having is that you’re trying to live as though you were. And you’re going to be a lot happier when you stop trying to do so.

To be absolutely clear: this doesn’t mean that you give up and just go back to living how you did beforehand. This is about trying to be something you’re not. The “laziest neurotypical” isn’t better than you, certainly not because they’re neurotypical and – critically – you’re not lazy. You’re dealing with a brain that functions differently, for reasons well beyond your control, in a world that isn’t accepting of this. Treating the symptoms of having ADHD as some sort of character flaw is like telling someone in a wheelchair that they could get up those stairs if they’d just try a little harder. Or that it’s their fault that they can’t get through the too-narrow doorways or fit into the bathroom stalls.

And honestly, some of the way your roommate talks is getting a lot closer to that outlook than I’d be comfortable with.

Now part of what I think you need to do is to stop trying to force yourself to act like you’re neurotypical and start leaning into the fact that you have ADHD. That doesn’t mean that you can just disregard everything and go back to walking blithely through an apartment that’s increasingly becoming a Superfund site. It means learning to accommodate your handicaps and find ways to work around them.

If you had issues with, say food waste because you’d buy groceries and they’d go bad in the fridge because you forgot they were there, then the answer wouldn’t be “write a list of everything in the fridge” or “meal prep every Sunday” – those aren’t going to work with how ADHD usually manifests. Getting pre-made meals, or only getting the groceries you need for that day would be an accommodation. It’s not as efficient as planning meals for the week and making only one trip to the store, sure, but it would mean less wasted food and less wasted money.

Keep having issues with washing the dishes? If you’re just going making a meal for yourself, you can use paper plates and bowls. Again, it’s not as cost-efficient as reusable dishware, but it makes a significant difference in your quality of life.

It’s like staying on top of paying your bills. Automating as many as possible is part of how I kept my credit score from going to hell or getting tossed out of my apartment because I forgot to pay the rent. Instead of trying every “system” that was supposed to work, I found the one that worked best for my circumstances.

This applies to your living situation as well: stop trying to force your ADHD square into a neurotypical round hole and start making accommodations for what you’re not good at. Some are relatively simple and straightforward. Roommate is yelling about beard hairs in the sink after you’ve trimmed? Layer some paper towels first to catch ‘em, then ball it up and toss it as soon as you’re done. You can even use the outside of the ball to swipe up any strays.

Other solutions and options require a level of investment on your part. The cleaning is an issue? OK… well maybe you should look into hiring a cleaning service to come once a week. Yeah, it’s going to be an additional expense but ask yourself (and your roommate) this: is that additional cost going to make a difference in your overall quality of life? If so, then you may want to start making that a higher priority than other expenses. You and your roommate may decide to pool funds for this or (seeing as she’d benefit from this as well), make an adjustment for how you split the living expenses. Maybe you roll your share of the cable bill into hiring a cleaner.

But if I’m being honest? I’m wondering if you or your roommate moving out would be the worst thing in the world. I suspect that a lot of what you’ve learned to do, and the ways that you’ve improved, would be easier if you weren’t always worried that she was going to blow up at you.

As couples around the world have discovered: the fact that you like each other and get along great and are important to one another doesn’t automatically mean you can live together. That doesn’t mean the relationship is doomed or flawed; it just means that you’re trying to force two incompatible things to mix, with all the success of trying to blend oil and vinegar. Oil and vinegar ain’t gonna mix, no matter how much you agitate it, but also the oil ain’t shaming the vinegar for not doing so.

(Yes, sheath your tweets, I know about emulsification. Congratulations, you’re very smart, now stop actively missing the point of the metaphor.)

It’s great that your roommate’s a wonderful person otherwise, but if she is going to keep shaming you for s--t outside of your control and keep treating you like you’re lesser for having a handicap, then I question how good this relationship is for you.

And yes, it is a handicap.

So maybe you two can be great neighbors as well as friends, instead of trying to make this work as roommates, and living on your own will not only free up some much needed emotional bandwidth, but also make it easier to accommodate your needs as someone with ADHD.

Oh, and one more thing: I’m wondering just how much your medication is helping. I realize that it’s all very much a moving target and God knows that trying to get ADHD meds is a trial under the best of circumstances – and also, Dr. NerdLove is emphatically not a doctor – but it sounds like you may not have hit minimum-effective dosage, or the medication you’re on isn’t working as well as it should be.

I realize that a lot of ADHD drugs are stimulants and can trigger manic episodes in people with bipolar disorder, but I wonder if your current treatment for your bipolar disorder is conflicting with treating your ADHD. This is something you should definitely bring up with your doctor. While I get that for yourself gets tricky when you’re talking about Schedule II medication and you’re very reasonably afraid of the phrase “drug-seeking behavior”, you have every right to advocate for yourself and your quality of life. You have a right to say “I would like to be more than just ‘functional, with Herculean effort’ and I don’t think my current medications are working the way they should. I’d like to try either a different dosage or a different medication.” And if they brush you off, it may well be worth your time talking to a different doctor – particularly someone who’s practice is focused on ADHD and similar conditions.

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 hope you’ve got some support for this situation.

My experiences with dating haven’t been all that great. I had a girlfriend when I was younger, but it was a toxic relationship which never should have happened. After that I went on to have three (thankfully) brief periods of dating emotionally unhealthy women. I recognised the pattern, and took some time out to recover. Now I’m in my thirties, and don’t really have much opportunity.

A few months back I met a girl through a Bachata group, and we ended up hanging out a few times by ourselves. I thought it was all platonic, especially since she spent a fair amount of time criticising her exes, but it also turned out we had things in common and a decent chemistry, so we ended up getting closer. A couple of months ago we went on a road trip for a few days, and it was our first time being intimate. From my perspective, everything was going fine, and she seemed really happy from the communications I had with her. At no point did we have any disagreements, everything was consensual, and I can say with absolutely certainty that I treated her well.

Immediately after that trip she went quiet on me, which I picked up and did ask about. She claimed everything was fine, but a bit later ended things because “she had other things to focus on”. She claimed she genuinely felt a connection with me, was disappointed she couldn’t pursue things further, and she wanted to assure me there was nobody else (I never asked). I accepted this reasoning at the time, although was also mindful it was in fact the end of things. In all other circumstances I would have walked away from the situation easily, however since that road trip and change in behaviour… I’ve been genuinely frightened.

I don’t truly know why, but there’s something really bothering me about the situation. At first we were talking to each other as normal, but a couple of weeks have gone by where things have been radio silent. The classes have been awkward, and I can’t help but feel she’s trying to make me jealous at times with who she speaks to / dances with. Most of all, I think it’s the stories she used to tell me about her exes – all mistreated her in horrible ways, or so she said, and now I can’t help but feel this was all made up for attention, and that I’m next on the list. I don’t want to have to stop going to the classes, but I’m concerned she may spread lies about me.

I don’t know if I’m overthinking this because of past experiences, or I don’t know if my body is trying to tell me something. I can’t tell if this is a genuine case of her wanting to focus on herself, or if I’ve been manipulated in some capacity. I’m concerned about where things are going next.

Any advice?

Look At All These Rumors

DEAR LOOK AT ALL THESE RUMORS: My dude, going from “she’s taken a step back because she’s dealing with stuff” to “She’s been lying to me all this time and now she’s just biding her time to destroy me” is a hell of a leap and I’d love to know why you took it.

I’m doing my best to be fair, here, but you’ve made some wild swings in this letter without anything to back them up. I get that folks occasionally forget to include pertinent information or don’t realize in the moment that there’s additional, relevant material that would make things clearer. But leaping straight to “I feel like she’s trying to make me jealous” and “I think she made up all those stories for attention” with absolutely nothing to bolster them doesn’t incline one to agree with you. If anything it sounds like you’re one or two but not three steps away from musing about women are voids that steal men’s light and talking about how tin foil makes a comfortable and stylish hat.

There’re a lot of reasons why someone might suddenly decide to step back from a burgeoning relationship, even when things are seemingly going well. It could be anything from “this made her realize that maybe she’s not ready to date right now” to “she’s so used to dudes treating her badly that being treated well scares her”, to “other things in her life are affecting her and she needs to withdraw in order to deal with them” to “you thought it was going well but there was something that made her decide you two weren’t really a great match after all”.

If any of those are the case, why wouldn’t she just tell you? Well, to start with, she already did. If it’s all personal stuff, then there’s really nothing more to be said; y’all were barely at the start of a relationship and she doesn’t owe you a deposition about her life. If she doesn’t want to share or doesn’t feel comfortable sharing, that’s her right. You’ve gotten the information you needed; everything else are details. If it’s an issue of something that you did that made her realize she’s not interested in a relationship or that you two may not be compatible after all… well, there’re a lot of reasons why she wouldn’t want to share it. If she’s had a lot of s--tty exes, then she may well have had similar conversations before and had them go off messily and all over the place before. Yeah, you wouldn’t act like that… but she’s likely heard that from dudes before.

But also, maybe part of what she’s trying to work out is that she feels a certain way but doesn’t know why. She could well not be explaining things precisely because she doesn’t have a firm grasp on it and is giving a socially polite reason to you instead of saying “look, I got no goddamn clue why but this isn’t working for me.”

I would, however, want to know why you think she’s trying to make you jealous outside of, y’know, just dancing or talking to people who aren’t you. Leaving aside that it’s entirely possible that you’re reading too much into this, there’re a whole host of reasons why she might just be talking to other folks more than you. One of the bigger ones would be if you’re radiating the same “you’re just manipulating me” energy in person that you are in this letter. If you’re coming off in the flesh the way you come off in this letter… well, I’m not surprised that she’s keeping her distance.

I think saying that you’re overthinking things is a bit of an understatement here. Overthinking would be “Wait, did I offer her the wrong beverage when we stopped for snacks on the road?” or “Did I say or do the wrong thing or misread a tone of voice or choice of clothing”, not “she’s probably spreading lies about me”. Trusting your gut is generally a good idea… but only if your gut is trustworthy. And if your gut is making the leap to “she’s a lying liar who tells lies and is about to lie to people about me” without actual evidence that this is happening? Well, that’s a point where you should be questioning your guts’ trustworthiness.

This is a time when NerdLove’s Razor comes into play: never assume the worst case scenario unless you have actual evidence that it’s happening. Most of the time, it’s just anxiety fucking with you

Right now, I think the best thing you can do is to take what she said at face value. Even if it is the case that something you said or did made her decide it was time to end things, you aren’t going to change things by not accepting what she said. The overall outcome will be the same and you won’t be creating a weird atmosphere by acting like she’s maliciously deceiving you.

So dial things back on your end. Quit assuming that she’s out there lying about you unless and until you actually have evidence – not speculation, not guesswork, not a “gut feeling” but actual evidence. Treat her like you did before you started hooking up: be polite and respectful. If she doesn’t want to talk to you, then let her go about her business with good grace. Continue being a good guy within the group instead of walking around looking like you’re trying to solve an especially complicated calculus problem in your head. If she gets to a place where she feels like she can talk to you about what happened – or wants to, for that matter – then she’ll come to you. Until then? Keep on with life as normal.

Stop borrowing trouble when there isn’t any. Life’s too short as it is.

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