DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: My girlfriend’s autistic brother is ruining everything. He makes her cry, and tries to break us up. He’s an a--hole to everybody including his parents. I called him fat once and he held a grudge for a couple months and it’s affecting me and my gfs relationship. She’s telling me to either be nice to him or leave and I don’t understand why she can’t take my side for once.

Squeaky Third Wheel

DEAR SQUEAKY THIRD WHEEL: Well aren’t you just the little charmer.

So, uh, it ain’t her brother ruining everything, super chief. That’d be you. The reason why she isn’t taking your side is because you’re acting like an a--hole. In particular, you’re acting like an a--hole to someone your girlfriend loves.

Yeah, he may be hard to live with. He and his sister may butt heads and he may make her upset. But they’re still family. Family may be awkward, family members can fight and feud and god knows it may be hard to like them sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, fiercely. Family members may squabble like cats and dogs, but one of the surest ways to get them to close ranks and square up is for an outsider to come in and start s--t with one of them.

Is he trying to break y’all up, or is he responding to the fact that his sister’s boyfriend is acting like a prolapsed anus? Seeing as you’re surprised he got angry at you for insulting him, I’m gonna go with the latter. Especially since it sure as hell sounds like you’re throwing “autistic” around like it should justify why people shouldn’t like him and why it’s unreasonable to treat him like a person. That’s not going to win you points – either with me or with your girlfriend.

Your girlfriend’s given you a choice here. Either you can make nice – even if you’re doing it through gritted teeth – or you can leave. Now you get to decide whether your relationship with your girlfriend is more important than your grudge against her brother.

If you want to stay in this relationship then you can do what men have done for generations when their sweetie has had an obnoxious sibling: do your best to ignore them or avoid them and be polite when you can’t.

But if you’re asking someone to choose between her family and someone who acts like a dick to them, you’re not going to like how it turns out.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Recently I was working out , losing fat and just enjoying myself, talking to everyone and making friends, but I don’t understand something about a feeling I feel.

Let me explain. I make a lot of friends at my local gym! I mean, I know everyone and I enjoy talking to them and well, just enjoying myself. Recently, a girl who is fit – like, really fit –  from my gym add me to her Instagram. I was like, “cool she adds me because I talk to her, makes sense”, but… she responds to my IG stories with fires and such. She is flirting with me and let me tell you, I’m VERY far from a gym bro. I’m kinda chubby, I don’t have a six pack and I don’t even look good on the photos that I post. I mean c’mon, this is weird. Is she doing this because she is trying to joke with me? I don’t understand. I mean yes, I’m friendly and such, but I don’t flirt with anyone at the gym so this is like, I don’t know, I just simply can’t imagine why a girl like her would be attracted to me. I feel weird and I feel like maybe someone is f--king with me. This week I did not even go to the gym because of that feeling.

What do I do?

Gym Ratatouille

DEAR GYM RATATOUILLE: What’s going on here? Well, there’re two strong possibilities.

The first is that she’s being friendly and supportive in the way that women often can be with their friends. A lot of women will hype their friends up, especially online. With female or queer male friends (or straight male friends who they trust not to take things the wrong way or make things weird), they’ll tell them that they look hot or that they’re awesome. It’s encouragement and positive engagement, cheering them on and celebrating them. So it’s possible that this is what’s going on; you’re a friend and she’s being a cheer squad for you.

The second is that she’s into you and flirting in a low-key way in the hopes that you’ll notice and make a move already.

Yeah, she’s super fit and you’re not. So? Just because someone’s got a six pack or 10% body fat doesn’t mean that they’re only into other people who are in the same shape as them. Not every gym bro or sis is looking for a fellow hardbody, and a lot of folks understand that fit comes in many shapes and sizes. Being chubby doesn’t mean that you’re not fit or active, it just means the amount of adipose tissue you have and the size of your clothes. She may appreciate that you put the work in to be healthy without being a fantatic. Hopefully you can appreciate wanting to work out and enjoying being in motion or getting stronger without being fatphobic in the process.

There’s also the fact that you’re a friendly social guy who clearly isn’t at the gym just to hit on people. People enjoy talking to you and like it when you’re around. That’s pretty damn appealing. When folks feel gratified and pleased by someone’s presence, they tend to prioritize that relationship; it’s known as the Reward Theory of Attraction.

Is it possible that this is a prank and she’s playing some weird game? Sure… in an infinite universe, almost anything is possible. But the vast, vast majority of people out there have too much going on in their own lives to put in the level of effort to punk someone like this. That’s the sort of behavior that folks tend to leave behind in high-school and even then it’s not something that can be maintained for terribly long.

So how do you figure out what the likely scenario is? Well that one’s easy: if you like her and you two seem compatible, then ask her on a date. Find a time when you two are talking and then say “hey, there’s $FUN_THING going on this weekend; if you’re interested, I’d love to take you.” If she’s into it… hey, you’ve got your answer. If she’s not… you’ve got your answer. And if it’s the case that she’s cheering you on and being supportive and not flirting, then the best thing to do is just keep being your fun social self. Part of not making it weird is to not be weird about it. If you demonstrate that you’re willing to push through the momentary awkward of “oh, I misread that” and show that you’re going to be cool about things now that you know, she’ll behave accordingly.

But assuming that she couldn’t possibly like you because you’re not Men’s Health cover-model jacked? Those are just self-limiting beliefs, my guy. She can be into you because you’re an awesome dude who looks like how hugs feel just as other people can be into folks so buff that feel like you’re hugging a statue.

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’m an 18-year-old sexually inexperienced male who has been pondering some questions about the nature of sexual and romantic attraction; and whether it’s purely superficial.

The reason being that I’ve been encountering a lot of “looks maxing” content online, which has sparked some insecurities within me. I’m beginning to notice aspects of my appearance that I hadn’t paid much attention to before, and it’s making me self-conscious.

I have learned about obscure stuff relating to facial aesthetics. Examples include “positive canthal tilt,” facial width-to-height ratio, the so-called golden ratio, and how if you are under 6’2″, you better make up for it with your face, or accept that you’ll never be romantically involved with a woman.

Given that I don’t compare anywhere to this so called “Chads” with their chiseled jaws, broad shoulders, and model-esque faces, I have grown pessimistic, cynical and defeatist.

What’s worse is this cynicism isn’t just related to my value in the dating marketplace, but it’s changed the way I look at the world, the human race and it’s social dynamics altogether, and it isn’t pretty.

Hoping to hear from you soon, with your insights.

Warm regards,

Blackpilled Normie

DEAR BLACKPILLED NORMIE: Ah, I see it’s time to reset the clock.

I get letters like this so frequently that they’ve become their own category tag. If I got paid a nickel for every average-but-needs-a-haircut-at-worst guy who insisted that he was too ugly to find love, I would retire to spend my days swimming around in my money bin like Scrooge McDuck.

Now, this question is easy, BPN. Anyone who unironically talks about  the need for, or promotion of, “looksmaxxing” – a term that incels invented to talk about “trying to improve one’s physical appearance” but for people who are terminally online – is not a serious person and everything they say can safely be discarded. Anyone who is selling or promoting products related to “looksmaxxing” is at best a dupe and at worst someone who’s actively scamming you by preying on the insecurities that every teenager experiences.

The videos are nonsense and influencers themselves are clout-chasing scam artists who lack the ability to draw, sing, dance or otherwise actually do anything of interest and instead seek out fame by trying to trigger people’s anxieties, spurred on by an algorithm that considers anger and controversy to be the same as meaningful engagement. It’s clickbait of the lowest order, perpetuated by people who think you’re stupid enough to fall for it and would pull the wallet-inspector scam on you if they thought they could get it to work over Venmo.

Hell, half the time, they’ll brag to your face that they’re cheating you. Andrew Tate cheerfully talks about the scams and cons he runs on people and how they work to the people he’s charging money for the privilege of being conned.

Let me be blunt here: you didn’t really “learn” any sort of secret or occult knowledge, my guy. You spent a lot of time being fed 19th century phrenology – literally – that got nuked in the microwave until it came out a steaming grey and green-lined (no seriously, the f--k is it with these people and green lines on pictures) pile of slop. It is, to use the technical term, a massive pile of horses--t. The supposed rules and ratios of being “Chad-like” were compiled over time by a bunch of men who – by their own admission – are incapable of actually talking to a woman and are based around at times screamingly racist ideas about so-called “ideal” looks.

None of it is new, secret or even effective. “Mewing” – that is, putting your tongue to the roof of your mouth to tighten the ligaments around your neck and pull up the flesh on the underside of your chin – is one of the posing tricks that the contestants on America’s Top Model are taught to do in the first week. Those jaw exercises and “face tightening” techniques are stolen from “facercize” videos from the 90s that were aimed at middle-aged women.

Even the so-called success stories are fake. It’s very easy to achieve the same before/after results you’ll see in a lot of videos. All you need is to change the lighting, adjust how you’re angling your face, shift the focal length of the lens and pray that none of your marks I mean friends ever google “how to contour” and realize that the new cheekbones and “canthal tilt” you developed are the result of make-up tutorials and late-night infomercials with a side of dehydration.

It is, quite literally, all smokey-eye-and-mirrors, a hoax and a fraud being perpetuated on people who haven’t fully accepted that 80% of the pictures they’re seeing on Instagram have been FaceTuned to within an inch of their lives.

It also, I might point out, has nothing to do with what women find attractive. You may have noticed, as the YouTube and TikTok algorithms were opening up the firehose of self-hate, how all the “Looksmaxxers” rating and comparing celebrities and telling you which are the “ideal” are all men – not women. This would be because, contrary to what they insist, the looks that they’re advocating are entirely about what they find appealing, not what women do. It all has to do with another man’s idea of what makes men attractive, not what women actually desire and wouldn’t you know it, it all has to do with ideas of power, dominance and violence. This is why “GigaChad” – who is definitely a person and not a combo of CG and abuse of Photoshop’s liquify tool – looks like a page from Burne Hogarths’ “Dynamic Anatomy”; it’s a power fantasy for men, not a sexual fantasy for women.  

Hell, when you point out the some of the guys that women actually swoon over – Pete Davidson in his Waffle-House-line-cook-that-also-deals-in-meth finest, Serge Gainsbourg and his Innsmouth Look, Matt Berry, Daniel Radcliffe, Peter Dinklage, K. Trevor Johnson, Jesse Plemmons, the number of women who want to lick frosting off Paul Hollywood or, hell, even someone like Jensen Ackles – and it’s like asking an AI to divide by zero. And if you point out, say, Don Cheadle, Winston Duke or Donald Glover, you might watch catch on fire. Cheadle, Duke and Glover are objectively good looking, don’t get me wrong… but they defy all of the “metrics” that supposedly rule attraction. And also, y’know. They’re not white.

Honestly, it’s very easy to debunk these claims. All you really need to do is just go outside and look at people. Real people, average people get laid on a daily basis.

You might be shocked to see that people of all shapes and sizes, who have neither robust “lower thirds”, perfect cheekbones, “hunters eyes” or ideal brow-to-jaw ratios have, in fact, coupled up, gotten married and had kids. I work with clients who are short, fat, balding, , painfully skinny, baby-faced and otherwise “failing” at every metric the “looksmaxxers” insist are vital, but who’ve ended up having more sex in the last year than you’ve had hot meals.

Nor is it even the “looksmatching” that some incels will claim; “hot woman/mid-to-ugly boyfriend” pairing is a cliché for a reason. Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts, Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich, Matthew Arend and Christina Hendricks, 1/3rd of the population of France… I could go on and on.  

Meanwhile many incels have dropped new car levels of money on plastic surgery and took the bandages off to discover that their love problems hadn’t been solved at all. Because, shock of shocks, the problem wasn’t their looks. The call was coming from inside their heads.

Now, there’re a lot of things that one can do to improve one’s looks. But rather than necessitating chewing extra hard gum or pulling the skin around one’s eyes – which, incidentally, will just give you baggier eyes, not change your canthal tilt – most of it is very simple. Boring, even. You want to wash your face daily with a gentle cleanser and exfoliate once every other week or so. Wash and condition your hair, including your facial hair if you have any. Use a daily moisturizer and make sure to wear sunscreen. Drink plenty of water (not coffee, not soda, not energy drinks, water) and do your best to get plenty of sleep. Get regular exercise every week, even if it’s just long walks. Wear clothes that actually fit and cultivate a sense of style that goes beyond “anything that smells acceptable that day”.

But the thing is: sexual and romantic attraction isn’t about looks. It’s not even mostly about looks. There is a wide difference between “good looks” and “being attractive”. Being attractive is about how you make people feel. Every woman alive can point out hot guys that they wouldn’t bang with a borrowed vagina and Idris Elba to do the pushing because their personalities are the anti-sex equation. Meanwhile they can also tell you about the guy who’s a little odd looking or unconventional but who made them laugh so hard that oops their panties disappeared, or who knew how to make them feel like the most fascinating person in the world.

S--t, the loverboy text scammers that have been getting women to fall in love with them to the point of being able to soak them for hundreds of thousands of dollars have done so by… asking women questions and listening to their answers.

Now fortunately for everyone, the cure for the cynicism you’re feeling is very easy: you get off TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, incel looksmaxxing boards and the rest. To speed up the process, you want to go outside, touch grass and interact with people in person. Worry less about getting the perfect jawline ratio and work on going out and just talking to women like they’re people.

If you want to know the real secret to romantic and sexual attraction, it’s this: the most-sex-getting-est men I know all look wildly different from one another. Some are fat, some are skinny. Some are tall, many are short. Some have hair, some couldn’t grow hair if you dunked them in a vat of minoxidil and Super Soldier Serum and zapped them with vita-rays. What they have all had in common is that they genuinely liked people. They liked talking to folks, they liked getting to know people and could make people feel great… because people had fun when they were around. Work on your personal warmth and charisma and you’ll have far more success than spending stupid amounts of money to chew on a mouthguard for two weeks.

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 met a man at a cafe whom I noticed since I go to this cafe each weekend and so does he. I observed him and I assumed he would not like me and I stayed away and looked at magazines. But he found a way to be near the door when I was walking out and we talked and he asked if I knew his ex-wife. I do not know him or his ex-wife or anyone he mentioned to me really.

But he asked if he could buy me a coffee so I said yes.

I felt confused but excited that this man might like me! But then I was worried he might not. I felt like I stepped back into “having a man” with him but I haven’t in 10 years and maybe never but for some reason it was nice to feel like I was with him and he was buying me a coffee.

But I decided I wanted to date him but when I decided I needed to leave the cafe, I asked for his phone number so we could meet again and he said no.

Since then, I have been back to the cafe and I saw him there again and he invited me to sit down. I did sit down and he seemed to say the same things in a way. He keeps mentioning his ex-wife. But I thought…ok maybe he needs a friend, someone to chat with at the cafe. So, I sat and tried to talk but I don’t know enough to offer him advice. I am sad that he is sad over his ex-wife and I wish he was ready to move on and date me but maybe he is not that interested in me. I said that to him…that if he met someone that helped him forget his ex then maybe it’d be better that obviously I am not helping him forget and move forward. He said it has been 10 years …geesh.

I am thinking now that I need to avoid him since I want a relationship. Not necessarily with him but since this is my chance getting out of my house to meet a guy, hopefully who wants to be together a lot (relationship) maybe I should not talk to him. I hardly get out anywhere. At first I thought wow seems perfect when we sat and talked the first time so I was very sad / disappointed when he said no, that he does not want to exchange phone numbers.

What do I do?

Moving Forward Using All My Breath

DEAR MOVING FORWARD USING ALL MY BREATH OK, there’re a couple things here that are worth unpacking. First and foremost is that, yeah, it kinda sucks that this guy isn’t really interested in dating and seems to be hung up on his ex-wife. But let’s be honest here: the main reason you are hung up on him is that he’s apparently one of the first men you’ve really talked to in a long while. It’s understandable to be flattered by the attention and excited about the possibilities, but this is just a man. A man that you barely know anything about. While I’m sure he’s a nice enough guy – if not in great emotional shape right now – he’s not your soul mate or the last single man in America. Getting hung up on him is more about what he represents (a cure to your feeling lonely) than who he is. I can guarantee you that there are other guys out there, guys who are attractive and single and, importantly, not so hung up on their exes that they’re asking strangers if they know them.

You’re really over-investing in a guy you hardly know… and a guy who, let’s be real, isn’t exactly demonstrating that he’s worth your investment in the first place. I understand the excitement, believe me. I understand the feeling that this is the first opportunity you’ve had in a long time and you need to snatch it up like a duck on a junebug. But getting that hung up on a stranger is just an invitation to a broken heart, inviting unnecessary but inevitable pain into your life for no reason other than he was there.

The question of whether this guy is interested or not or why he’s still hung up on his wife or how he could move on are ultimately irrelevant. What’s important are two things: 1) he’s not in great shape, emotionally and 2) he’s not interested. That’s all you really need to know, here. And more to the point, the fact that he’s not in great shape should be the sign for you to not make him the focus of your interest. His problems are not something for you to fix. He’s not a project and the last thing you want in a relationship is a fixer-upper – especially when you’re still needing to do some work on yourself.

Do I think you need to avoid him? Not unless you honestly can’t bring yourself to talk to anyone else because you’re holding out hope that he’s going to change his mind. IF that’s the case… yeah, you need to put some distance between you and him so that you’re not wasting your time watering a dead plant.

What you should do is take that feeling of excitement you felt upon meeting him and let that motivate you to get out of the house more and put yourself into fortune’s path. Yeah, this guy isn’t in any shape to date, nor is he into you that way… but that thrill you felt should motivate you to be on the look out for the people who are. As great as it felt meeting this guy and the hint of possibility, meeting someone who’s ready, willing and able to date will feel even better. If you want to find them, you have to go to where they are. And since they’re not in your house, then that means going out into the world and meeting them there.

Let this encounter be the thing that spurs you on. He may not be the love of your life, but he could be the thing that motivates you to go to the place where you ultimately meet the man who is.

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