Ask Dr. Nerdlove

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: You’ve said in several posts that bars aren’t the best place to meet women and that they’re more for going out with your friends and that one shouldn’t explicitly go to a bar with the intent of meeting women.

We also have the idea that it’s important to learn how to flirt.

We have the idea that social skills (like flirting) need to be built up with deliberate practice.

Finally, you’ve also said that the best way realistically to find a partner is to go to a social hangout or recreational coed sports and wait until chemistry develops with another person and go from there.

This realistically doesn’t work.

Given that socializing requires deliberate practice, this means that if I want to get better at flirting, then I need to flirt. This is not something to be done at my preferred social hangout though. If you ask a girl out or hit on a girl and you’ve misread the situation and she doesn’t like you back, the most likely response is that she ghosts you, she now feels uncomfortable around you and she avoids you. You can be as respectful as you can and read all the signals as best you can and not cross any boundaries. It does not matter, it will still create a tension that won’t go away.

(Let’s assume for a second that this doesn’t happen, either way if you want to meet a woman through social hangouts as suggested, you have to find a new hobby or social group, start over, rebuild the social proof, etc. and hope that you correctly identify chemistry this time. If you ask out a second girl at said group then you will definitely be earmarked as a predator who is only there to meet women.)

So where do you go to get better at flirting?

Bars. Because now if you screw up, you never see the other person again, and you don’t have to rebuild your social life

And are you going there with the primary intention of meeting women? Yes.

The problem is this creates a contradiction with your other advice.

So how are you actually supposed to develop and practice things like “game”, flirting, correctly reading signals and social calibration if you’re bad at it? Especially when the very act of socializing without calibration makes people uncomfortable. Can’t get better if you can’t practice.

Social Calibration Subroutines

DEAR SOCIAL CALIBRATION SUBROUTINES: I see your problem, SCS: you’ve misread, misunderstood or misremembered a bunch of different columns and pounded them into a mash of incorrectness. Let’s start by teasing things back apart, and then we’ll talk about the other areas where you’re making things harder for yourself.

First: bars and clubs aren’t great places to meet potential partners for dating because those generally aren’t where most people go to find dates. More likely to find a potential hook-up, sure, but dates less so.  Most people tend to meet their partners through shared activities, mutual friends and dating apps. The number of people who start relationships from strictly cold approaches are relatively low.

The issue with trying to meet women at bars is, primarily, that it’s inefficient, as well as being a high-pressure environment. You are trying to convince a stranger to be interested in starting a sexual or romantic relationship with you in the span of anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, in an venue where it’s frequently hard to talk, harder to be heard and that isn’t really conducive to getting to know someone at more than a very surface level. And unless you (and your potential snugglebunny) are both regulars, you also don’t have the advantage of propinquity and exposure, where folks get to know you over time and grow closer to you because of that.

They are, however, a place where the social contract says that talking to many different people in the span of a short period of time is not only common but accepted (depending on the bar), and that it’s understood that this is a place where people come to socialize. So yes, it can be a good place to practice making approaches, which can often involve flirting.

But on the other, other hand: singles bars and nightclubs are venues cater to folks who like singles bars and night clubs. Your success and/or enjoyment of practicing there can be very dependent on whether that’s your kind of hangout, too. So unless you’re already someone who is a bar and club kind of guy, you may not be meeting people you’re into and you may be trying to meet them in an environment that you may not be comfortable in.

Now the part about not going explicitly to meet women? That’s not about bars or clubs; that’s about social events like classes or meetups, places where people aren’t going expressly to flirt and meet people. The issue there is that if you’re the dude going to a hot yoga class to hit on women and doing lust laps like a horny shark, you’re making the experience worse for people who just want to do yoga. Please notice that’s different from, say, going to the class, saying hi to the people you already know or the folks next to you, taking the class as intended, then possibly talking to people afterwards… you know, like people do when they’re milling about, rolling up their mats, etc. If you happen to be talking with someone and the two of you are getting along well and you say “hey, I’d like to keep talking with you about X; do you have time to grab some juice after?”, that’s not going to raise an eyebrow.

Well, I guess unless you meet someone who’s grandfather was tragically crushed under an avalanche of oranges, but what are the odds of that?

Similarly, one doesn’t necessarily wait until chemistry “develops” ex nihilo. One of the points of flirting is to test for interest and start developing that chemistry if mutual interest there. Part of the point of flirting is that flirting is fun, and having fun with someone increases the odds that they’re going to want to spend time with you. This is the Reward Theory of Attraction: we prioritize the relationships we have with people who make us feel good when we’re around them.

Now, those are some pretty significant misunderstandings, but hey, maybe I could be clearer at times. However, here’s where you’re really shooting yourself in the foot: you’ve convinced yourself that talking to people is a skill based challenge with a DC of 18 and you’re rolling with disadvantage, regardless of circumstance.

You’ve created a hypothetical, one that doesn’t seem to have actually happened, but that you’re reacting to regardless, where you were The Perfect Gentleman and yet you were ostracized anyway because F--K YOU PENIS, THAT’S WHY. Which, I hate to tell you, isn’t a thing that happens – certainly not out of the clear blue sky with no previous warning or issue.

If you’re talking with someone, generally being polite and considerate, ask them out and they turn you down and if you take that rejection with good grace, then the vast majority of time, what ends up happening is… nothing. Things continue on as normal. Maybe you meet someone who’s a little sensitive because of their own experiences and they pull back, but that’s usually a them issue, not a you issue. Similarly, if you meet someone who seems to react out of proportion to having just asked them out on a date… well, either there’s something going on with them, or you were behaving a lot more egregiously than you realized.

So if that’s an issue that you have been having over and over again… well, it’s probably a good idea to stop and talk to a friend whose judgement you can trust about how you’re behaving.

Similarly, you’re not going to be “marked as a predator” if what you’re doing is talking with people and only asking out folks if it seems like there’s some chemistry and they’re showing interest. That’s just socializing, and how we tend to meet our partners.

The people who make folks uncomfortable are the ones who don’t read the room, who bounce from woman to woman (making it clear that what they’re looking for is a warm body, not because they’re interested in that particular person) or who generally doesn’t give a s--t about the activity that brought everyone together.

(Now, there are people who are perpetual flirts and the folks around them know that they’re flirts and that they flirt with everyone and without intent, because flirting is fun and that’s who they are. They’re also usually very socially well-calibrated. But that’s a very different situation than what you’re positing, and if that were who you authentically were, you wouldn’t be asking this question in the first place.)

Again, if you’re being drummed out of every social gathering you go to because you’ve been flirting with people… well, either you really need to pay attention to what groups you hang out with, or you need to do some long investigating into your behavior and making corrections.

But as I said: you’re positing hypotheticals as though they’ve happened and reacting to those – you are, essentially, just hurting your own feelings.

Now here’s the other thing about practicing flirting: you don’t dive in, guns blazing, telling women “Damn, are you OSHA compliant? Because I want to make sure you’re properly railed.” Part of flirting and learning how to flirt is pinging for interest and meeting people’s level. Flirting tends to start off mildly and seeing how the person responds. If they respond positively, you continue. If they respond neutrally or show they aren’t interested, you dial it back or stop, depending.

The key, is to pay attention and respond based on how the person you flirt with behaves. If they reciprocate, all is well, you can keep flirting. If not, the odds are good they’re not interested and you dial it back and just chat, or move on if the conversation is over. There’re clips of Don Draper flirting with Joan Holloway, where she signals clearly that she’s not into him and he rolls with it with good grace. That’s not behavior that’s going to piss people off, that’s someone reading the room and responding appropriately.

Now, part of practice is understanding that sometimes you’re going to do it wrong or make mistakes… but then again, part of the point of practice is to learn what mistakes you’re likely to make, when you’re likely to make them, how to avoid them, and how to recover from them. Comedians, for example, will bomb on occasion while on stage. Knowing how to pull out of the spiral is a skill, and one that requires practice. Johnny Carson famously used to deliberately bomb in order to work on winning the audience back. So failing at flirting or not flirting well is also part of the learning process. As is knowing how to handle when you mess up.

Now, if bars are a place where you’re comfortable and the people you meet at them are generally the people you’re compatible with, then by all means, go there. But flirting is really just conversation with a point, and that point is to have fun with someone while letting them know that you’re interested in them as more than just a friend or acquaintance. If you’re not talking to people in general, connecting to them and making friends, you’re going to have a hard time flirting.  

As I said, however: you do best to practice in places where people are expecting to talk and flirt and meet people. If you’re at a place where folks aren’t going explicitly to flirt and meet potential dates, then hopping around the room like an oversexed Daffy Duck runs the risk of making people uncomfortable. Talking with them like a normal person, however, doesn’t.

But do yourself a favor: focus on what’s actually happened, rather than creating increasingly improbably worst-case scenarios based on s--tty TikTok ragebait accounts and dodgy subreddit threads.

Good luck.

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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 had been with my ex for 8 years before we split. I wasn’t happy in the summer, I told her and it all blew up and we called it quits. I got back in contact 2 months later, saying I missed her and that I wanted to give it a go. She agreed to meet and we agreed to work on it together. I went away for 6 weeks with work, during which point everything was ok, spoke all the time. Got back and for 2 days it was great. Then after a weekend with our separate families, she came back saying she didn’t think she loved me anymore and that she didn’t think it could work, which I believe is from what her family said after she told them everything bad I ever did after the breakup.

This turned into another argument and ended in me getting angry and her leaving the house and claiming that I had scared her.

A month later, I reached out, as I still love her and want this to work. She is saying that she can’t forgive me getting angry and that she is scared of me. I’ve been to therapy to learn how to cope with my feelings and how to be a better person, but she’s scared I will be the same and is holding herself back from wanting to see me. Do you have any advice?

Many thanks

Hulk Smashed?

DEAR HULK SMASHED: Hoo boy. 

So this is what we in the dating advice biz call ‘a rich text’. What we have here, HS, is a lot of little nuggets that, when put together, paints the full picture as to why your ex isn’t feeling it anymore.

As regular readers know, I have a series of questions for people who are hoping to get back with an ex, questions that need to be answered before they make the attempt. They are:

Question #1: Why did you break up in the first place?

Question #2: Has the reason why you broke up changed?

Question #3: Why Now?

Question #4: Do you miss THEM, or do you miss what they represent?

Question #5: Are they right for you, NOW?

The reason why I have people ask themselves these questions is because things often haven’t changed. As a result, you end up going through the 12” dance remix of your first break up – it’s the same song, just faster and with a more intense beat.

And oh look at what happened with you: you basically had the same break up as before, but now with the extra twist of having gotten angry enough with your ex that she’s afraid of you.

Part of the problem is that you’re not accepting that maybe your ex ultimately decided that she didn’t want to date you all on her own. Blaming this on the supposed Killgrave-esque manipulation of her family neatly ignores the possibility that with a little distance and talking things out with people whose judgement she trusts, she came to the conclusion that this wasn’t going to work out. That’s a disappointing outcome, to be sure… but it’s still ultimately her decision.

The fact that you blew up at her over this ultimately confirmed to her that she was correct to not want to continue a relationship with you. Whether you were arguing over her conclusion, her agency (whether she was manipulated by people for malicious reasons) or whatever else, you were ultimately telling her that she didn’t have the right to feel or think the way she did about things. And while it’s understandable that you were hurt by this decision, trying to overrule or argue her into changing her mind is not going to work. Whether her family did or didn’t tell her about “all the bad things you did” is irrelevant. At the end of the day, it’s still her decision. You can disagree with it or think that how she arrived at that decision was faulty… but it’s still her choice to make.

To be honest, I’m not entirely surprised she still doesn’t want to see you, even after having gone through therapy. I’ll tell you what I am not seeing in your letter: recognizing what you did and why it was wrong. Nor, for that matter, am I seeing you take ownership of your mistakes and understanding why these might affect someone’s interest in a relationship with you.

Those “bad things” you did? However bad they were or weren’t, they clearly were enough to at least give her pause and make her reconsider things. You have to accept that; not recognizing or acknowledging how they made her feel about a future relationship with you is going to tell her that things likely haven’t changed.

The same goes for not accepting that you scared her enough that she doesn’t want to see you. You frame it as “holding herself back” – as though she wants this but isn’t being permitted.  Again, you’re not acknowledging that this is how she feels and instead attributing it to something restricting her own agency. Your framing of the situation is minimizing your actions and making it seem as though you feel entitled to have her back as a partner but it’s being thwarted by outside actors, rather than she made the decision on her own and doesn’t want to have more to do with you.

So, cards on the table: I don’t think there’s any hope of getting back with her – certainly not now, and likely not at all. If you want even the molecule of hope that things will be different, then it’s a matter of deeds, not words. If you have actually changed and become a better person, you’re going to have to show it through your actions. And the first step to that is going to be respecting her decision and moving on. The longer you insist on trying to get her back, the more you’re going to push her away, because it’s telling her that the things that broke you up have not changed.

The next step is going to be living your life with authenticity and integrity. That means living as the person you say you’ve become… which is also going to include taking ownership of your faults, flaws and mistakes. Until you do, you’re just confirming for her that nothing has changed and getting back with you will be a repeat of the last time she gave you a chance.

However, as I said: you’re still going to have to do this honestly, without the goal of getting her back. You have to be doing this because you want to be a better person over all. Otherwise all you’re doing is putting on a performance for an audience of one… and she’ll know that as soon as the curtain comes down, the performance is going to end. That means accepting that you’re likely not going to get her back and not trying to get her back. If she’s going to decide to try again, it’ll have to be her decision, made without your involvement.

But, I hear you cry, how is she supposed to know you’ve changed if you’re not there to tell her or show her? Well, that’s going to be up to fate. Maybe she’ll hear through the grapevine how things have changed and you’re like a different person. Or maybe she won’t. Or she may learn that you’re doing much better but still decide that some wounds run too deep to be overcome. That’s a legitimate choice for her and one that you’re just going to have to accept.

There is no path forward here for you that still involves her. You’re going to have to go and be a better person for the sake of being a better person and let the dice fall how they may. If the stars align and she reaches out to you, then you have the opportunity to start a new and different relationship, rather than continuing the one that you very definitively ended.

But if they don’t… that’s how it goes, and it’s on you to accept it and move on.

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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’ve been trying to get out of my rut by doing things that make me happy like going to my gym more, playing piano (learning Chopin) as well as staying focused with college, which I admit didn’t think was for me until I decided to get back on the horse after 8 years and now I’m getting good grades.

However, there are times when I get anxious/overwhelmed in public and the fear of rejection still scares me. And certain sayings like “you’ll find someone when you stop looking for them” have conditioned my brain to just keep to myself most of the time and be passive, even when someone catches my eye but my mind tells me to avoid eye contact. It seems like an oxymoron why we find things when we’re not looking for them. And the more I avoid it and try to escape with my earbuds or watch Netflix, the thoughts just keep coming back.

But overall, rejection still scares me. There was one time when I met a Venezuelan girl during a Halloween party couple years hosted by a mutual friend of mine. Had I not the courage to ask her to hang we wouldn’t have been a thing. So in this case, I wasn’t looking. I continue to do what I have to do in order to break the monotony but anxiety will still linger.

Analysis Paralysis

DEAR ANALYSIS PARALYSIS: I want to introduce you to the concept of “take it seriously, not literally”. What you’re doing right now is using the idea of “it’ll happen when you’re not looking” as a means of avoiding the risk of rejection by not just taking it literally, but taking it to absurd lengths. And let’s be honest, if you already know what it means to find something when you’re not looking, and you have a concrete example of how it worked, then you know that your current approach is not the same thing.

Here’s the thing about rejection: you will never escape it. That’s not a judgement about you, your social skills, your looks or your value as a person; it’s just a matter of fact. Not everybody is going to like you, especially not in the way that you would prefer to be liked, and that’s ok. That doesn’t mean you’re inherently deficient. It just means that this particular person either didn’t see what they hoped to see in you (or that you hoped that they would see) or that you just weren’t right for them in that time and place. The transphobic wizard lady famously had her manuscript rejected a dozen times by publishers before going on to become one of the most successful writers in history. Those rejections weren’t about the quality of the book or the writer, just about the publishers’ opinions.

(We will not be discussing the relative merits or lack thereof of the books themselves, thanks.) 

The fact that you aren’t immediately appealing to everyone at all times is, in fact, a good thing. Being a few peoples’ shot of whiskey is inherently better than being everyone’s cup of tea. Broad appeal is shallow appeal – people may like it well enough, but it’s not necessarily what they’re craving or will go out of their way to seek out or something that will stay with them for the long term. You can browse the best-seller lists of books for any particular decade or century you like and you’ll see that the books that sold the best weren’t always the ones that became classics. Shakespeare was famously less successful and accomplished a playwright than Christopher Marlowe, but it’s Shakespeare whose work has echoed through the ages.

Or to put it another way: only 10,000 people bought the Velvet Underground’s first album, but everyone who did went on to start a band.

You can’t be everyone’s favorite flavor and you shouldn’t want to be, if only from an efficiency and time management standpoint. The effort it takes to try to persuade someone who’s basically neutral or mildly interested into being actively or strongly interested in you is not and will not be commensurate with the reward. That’s time and effort you could be putting towards finding someone who is into you, as well as cultivating the aspects of yourself that make you a more desirable partner.

This is why rejection isn’t something to be feared, just accepted. It’s understandable that rejection is scary; it feels like a judgement on you as a person. But really, all rejection is just one person deciding that you’re not right for them – either in that moment or in general. You make those same decisions all the time, too. After all, you’re not falling in love with every person you see and you’re not pursuing every single woman you encounter with the ardor and obliviousness of a cartoon skunk or horny Japanese high-school student with an alien roommate. You’re tacitly rejecting – or if you prefer, not choosing – people all the time, not because they’re awful people but simply because they’re not your particular type or flavor. If you can accept that someone can be a perfectly lovely individual but that you’re not remotely attracted to them, then why would that same logic not apply to you?

But here’s the important thing: by trying to avoid the fear of rejection, what you’re ultimately doing is reinforcing that fear. Avoidance just makes the thing you’re afraid of that much larger and more present. Because you avoid the discomfort that comes from rejection, you become afraid of the possibility of rejection – that is, the likelihood of feeling the fear of rejection rather than rejection itself. Continuing avoidance – that is, avoiding feeling the fear of rejection – becomes avoiding times when you might encounter the fear and thus you end up making the world you occupy smaller and smaller.

Which leads us to the way you’re misusing “it’ll happen when you’re not looking”. The idea of “it’ll happen when you’re not looking” doesn’t mean that you simply wait in your apartment until God decides to chuck a woman through your window or a horny single woman kicks your door down, it means that sometimes you get so caught up in the pursuit of the goal that you end up tripping yourself up.

You’ve undoubtedly encountered this before in other areas of your life. Video games are a prime example. If you’re stuck on a boss fight in a Souls-like game and you keep dying and getting sent back to a previous save point, you get frustrated. You want to get back to the boss arena ASAP and take on that fight again… but now you’re frustrated. It’s making you sloppy as you try to rush through to get back where you were, which means you end up making more mistakes and getting bodied by random enemies, which sets you back further. Now you’re even more frustrated and angry because you can’t even make it past the trash mobs and have to get through those, which makes you sloppier and more careless and wash, rinse repeat until you start doing experiments in how deep you can embed your controller into drywall.  

However, when you take a break, step away from the console and come back to it a day or two later, you find that things flow much more easily and you ultimately hand the boss his own ass and move on to the next stage of the game like it was nothing.

This is how it is with dating. When you are laser-focused on trying to find Mr., Ms., or Mx. Right to the exclusion of all else, you get frustrated. You get sloppy. You make mistakes. But if you step away and just live your life, you’re relaxed and in your element. You’re doing things you enjoy, with people you like spending time with and wouldn’t you know it, that means you’re in a much better mood, you’re much more comfortable and you’re better positioned to connect with people and show them your best, most attractive, most authentic self… precisely because you’re not trying.

So not looking doesn’t mean that you refuse to make eye contact and just stand in the corner waiting for someone to take pity on you. That’s just attempting to avoid the fear of rejection by displacing it onto someone else and hoping that other people will be motivated enough to do the work for you. Not looking means you go out and live your life – ideally in ways that bring you in contact with other people. The saying that luck is when preparation meets opportunity is apt here; by doing things you enjoy out in public, you’re putting yourself in position to meet other people who enjoy the same things. That increases the odds that you’ll meet someone who’s actually compatible with you while also making it easier to connect with them; after all, you already know you have these things in common and can start off the conversation by talking about your shared interest.

But this still requires being willing to confront the possibility of rejection… and it’s only through confronting it that you realize that while rejection is unpleasant, it’s not damaging. It affects you exactly as much as you allow it to. And until you actually face it head on without flinching and let you feel what it actually feels like instead of hyping it up in your mind, you won’t see the difference between the rejection going on in your head and what’s actually happening in the real world.

If the idea of going out and actively seeking a person to date is too intimidating or is getting frustrating, that’s fine. But going out and living your life in a way that puts you in fortune’s path does make it much easier to meet folks… and in ways that make it more likely that you’ll meet someone who’s right for you, instead of rolling the dice based on very limited information.

Again: the point isn’t that rejection doesn’t sting; it absolutely does. But it means what you allow it to mean, not an objective judgement that everyone agrees with. Avoiding that sting just makes it worse and ultimately just makes you more afraid of rejection and everything surrounding it. The only way out is through.

But again: you want to take things seriously, not literally. Especially when taking it literally is just an avoidance mechanism.

Good luck.

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