DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Not sure how to start, but in short, I’m a straight guy nearing my thirties, and put simply, I’ve given up on love. So I’m not looking for dating advice, but rather advice on how to manage being single. I’ve read the related columns, but I didn’t feel they were enough
For some background, I always knew I was in some ways deficient and just connecting with other people would be a struggle. I wasn’t really hopeless at that point, thinking that maybe I didn’t find the right people, but with time I understood better that this keeps happening regardless of what environment I‘m in, so there is no reason to expect change. One aspect of this was romance, which I’ve been dreaming of from a very young age, but have never been even close to experiencing in my entire life. Not only do I no longer expect to find a woman that could be into me, I see no reason to believe that such a person even exists.
Eventually I realized that this desire in particular causes me a lot of pain (sometimes literal chest pain), while offering nothing in return. So I realized that the best I can do is just leave it behind as much as I can, and try to focus on other things in life. I mean, there are happy singles, people who feel no need to look for a relationship which aren’t aro or ace, so why couldn’t it be me as well? I remember reading advice about imagining what I would like my life to look like if I knew for a fact I’d be single forever, and it applied perfectly to my situation, so that’s what I’ve been doing for a few years now.
I think I managed to achieve a lot in that time. I’ve found hobbies to fill my time with, ones which are more satisfying that playing games to be clear. I managed to graduate from a challenging major with good results. My career prospects are looking good and I have still plans I keep looking forward to, so my life has a direction. I’ve been attending therapy and got to a better place mentally than before. I also put myself in social situations, like volunteering, D&D groups, and some other events, and by some miracle I managed to find friends, including ones I feel I can emotionally trust. Admittedly except on the topic of relationships, as they are always trying to convince me how much of a great guy I would be to date and other such consolations, so I don’t bring up the topic anymore.
So I feel I did pretty much everything a happy single is supposed to. And yet I still feel the mythical girlfriend-shaped hole is still in there, and no matter how much stuff I keep throwing at it, it is no closer to getting filled. And it still affects my life negatively, even on a practical level. Seeing cute couples on the street, having a friendly chat with women and remembering that’s as good as it gets, even songs can put me in a sad state, in which I waste my time sulking, as I feel like just lying in bed and crying. Which in turn makes me angry at myself, since rather than being happy for someone I let myself get jaded. And you’ll probably agree that’s not a sustainable way to live.
So in the end I don’t see what else I can do. I’ve looked into biology, philosophy, even spiritual practices and I still have no more ideas. Hence I was hoping you could take a look and suggest how I can attain this elusive acceptance, and finally start living my life without these obstacles. If there’s nothing I can do I’d also like to know this.
Sincerely
Wannabe Monk
DEAR WANNABE MONK: Alright WM, you say you’re not looking for dating advice, just advice on how to be more content with being single. I’m not going to push to say that you need to get back out there, but I do want to talk about some things that I think are making things harder for you – both at being happy while being single, but also what brought you here in the first place.
Let’s start with something obvious: you mention the lack of a relationship causing you so much emotional pain that it ends up triggering actual pain. That, in and of itself is something of a warning sign that maybe you should be talking to a professional. I don’t mean that your pain isn’t real – far from it, emotional pain and feeling rejected can and often does hurt physically – but the fact that your feelings were so intense that it lead to physical symptoms means that they’ve gone beyond what’s normal or reasonable and straight into “this is what therapy is for”.
I suspect this intensity is part of why you struggled and why you continue to struggle. You say it yourself: this is something you’ve been dreaming about since you were a young child – you more or less fell in love with the idea of someone falling in love with you. It sounds to me like you’ve created a scenario for yourself that is almost literally impossible to achieve. I strongly suspect that what you’re imagining and have held onto for so long has crossed the line from what you might reasonably expect from a relationship, especially a brand new one into something that can’t be fulfilled.
It’s a little like the people who have an idealized image of what romance in high-school was like (informed, in no small part by pop-culture), and feel as though they missed on some critical experience. What they often don’t realize is that the reality is far less mythic and more banal – a pair of kids fumbling around in the dark, completely confused and unsure of what they’re doing or how to balance the onslaught of hormones with the inherent chaos of being a teenager.
Once you have elevated the thing that you feel you’re lacking into an almost religious experience, reality can’t match up because reality is inherently imperfect. But at the same time, once you’ve made the desire for this transcendence a central part of your identity, it bleeds into everything you do. It becomes a sort of neediness, and part of why neediness is so unattractive is the intensity of the need making your behavior that much more unnerving.
But the flip side of this is that the impossibility of it also means that you’ve defined yourself by a negative – rather than an identity based around who you are, what drives you and what you’re passionate about, you’ve made “Being Unlovable” your identity. Your self-concept is, quite literally, a desire that cannot and will never be fulfilled; this emptiness has become definitional to who you are as a person.
As a general rule, while folks who are comfortable with being single or who have made their peace with not having a partner (whether for now or for good) haven’t exactly eliminated the desire entirely, they usually have reached a point where it’s not an open wound. It’s often more like making peace with a regret for something that didn’t happen than never feeling a desire for romantic love and intimacy. They aren’t being sent into depressive spirals by the existence of happy couples or sappy songs. Those are not the behaviors of someone who’s at peace or found a Buddha-like calm by recognizing that desire is at the root of suffering. These are the behaviors of someone who has made suffering what they do.
Small wonder, then, that you’re still in pain. You’re struggling because you’ve created a scenario where acceptance is simply not an option. You can’t be comfortable with being single because the issue isn’t that you struggle with meeting people – like many people do – or that you’re dead-bang in the middle of the loneliness epidemic. Instead, you’ve given yourself a wound that will never heal, because you’ve decided that it’s impossible for it to do so. It is both a need that you have decided cannot and will never be met, but also a marker of your supposed deficiency as a human being.
This is part of why nothing is working for you. It’s not that you’re finding fulfilment and satisfaction in other aspects of life, getting your emotional needs met in non-romantic fashion and finding other venues for the intimacy you crave. What you’re doing is trying to find something to numb yourself with… but nothing will, and certainly not for very long, because it can’t. Not without forcing you to confront this part of yourself.
And no, I don’t think you have. I’m going to be blunt here: you’ve basically thrown yourself a never-ending pity party. This wasn’t a “OK, I am accepting a harsh truth about myself”, this was just changing the way you punch yourself in the nuts while trying to pretend that you’re not getting punched.
And to be perfectly frank, part of the reason for this is because you’ve made this “girlfriend-shaped hole” an integral part of who you are. It’s a pain that you’ve chosen to carry for so long that you can’t bring yourself to put it down because you’ve been carrying it for so long. It’s the sunk-cost fallacy writ large; you have to continue holding onto this pain because if you weren’t feeling this perpetual stone in your shoe, reminding you that you’re supposedly a lesser person, then who would you be?
Well, for starters, you’d be a hell of a lot happier and you wouldn’t be having big sads every time you listened to the radio or had to go have a sulk for hours and then beat yourself up for it. Which, of course, adds to the ways that you’re a supposed failure as a person – exactly the way you say you do in your letter.
Now to be clear, this isn’t to say that the answer is “alright, enough with this ‘giving up’ nonsense, get back out there and date, you morose motherf--ker”, it’s “maybe it’s time to actually address the pain”.
The first step of this is – you guessed it – talking to an actual doctor, not a loudmouth with an advice column. You say that you’re attending therapy, but have you or your therapist ever talked about the possibility that you’re dealing with depression or emotional dysregulation? The level to which you spiral when you so much as see a happy couple is not normal or healthy, nor are the ways you beat yourself up for it. A reaction that over the top and unreasonable is a pretty good indicator that maybe you need to do more than just talk things through. I’d suggest that maybe it would be a good time to add a psychiatrist to the mix and look into the possibility that an antidepressant might help lift some of the clouds from around you.
Another possibility is that this form of therapy isn’t helping in a lot of the areas that need to be addressed. I wonder if something like cognitive behavioral therapy might be useful for you. The core of CBT is about changing patterns and habitual ways of thinking; by directly addressing and challenging these thoughts and feelings, digging into triggers and figuring out alternate ways of seeing things could be life-changing for you.
At the same time, however, I think part of what you need is to start working on how you see yourself. It’s pretty clear that the pain and rejection are coming from inside the house – that is, that it’s not “I can’t find someone”, but “nobody could possibly care for me”.
One of the things that we don’t talk about often is that sometimes people struggle with meeting potential partners for reasons that have nothing to do with them as people. It’s entirely possible to be in a place where demographics work against you, where the number of compatible potential partners is so low as to be functionally non-existent. It’s also entirely possible to just have bad luck – even for years. As the wise man once said: it’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That’s not weakness. That’s life.
But that goes out the window when you’ve defined yourself as so inherently flawed, deficient or broken that other people couldn’t love you or find you to be an acceptable partner. And that’s what you’re doing. You’re coming to this from a place of deficiency, where you have some inherent flaw or fault that makes you uniquely unlovable, rather than someone who’s dealing with s--tty luck and difficult circumstances.
So the next step is to address that feeling. And please notice very carefully that I say this is a feeling, not a fact. It’s far more about how you feel about yourself and how those feelings affect your behavior than something about you as a person that makes you undesirable that needs to be fixed. Part of why I talk about Ru Paul’s famous quote so often is because it’s very hard to accept or recognize love from other people when you don’t believe yourself worthy of love.
It’s time to start looking inward – to ask just what makes you feel this way, what triggered it and what you get from holding onto it. It’s time to challenge the beliefs that it’s impossible for you to be loved and instead recognize that you can be an incredible individual who would be a great partner for someone but who is single. Recognizing that you are loveable but currently aren’t in a relationship is very different from someone who thinks he has to “give up” on dating. This makes it a choice, rather than an inevitability. While the result is functionally the same, by recognizing this as a choice reminds you that you have agency. You’re saying that you’ve weighed the pros and cons and decided on this path, rather than “there is no hope for me, my lot in life is suffering”. And that’s a pretty significant difference, just in terms of being able to enjoy your life without having everything thrown into shambles every time you step outside or open Spotify.
This is part of what I mean when I say that sometimes the love of your life is the love of your life. It’s loving yourself as well as the life that you lead – looking around and saying “ok, there’re things I would like to be different, but overall I’m content with how things are. The joy in my life as it is now is equal to or greater than the loss I feel about what I don’t have.” It doesn’t mean that you stop wanting the things you (supposedly) can’t have or that you won’t miss the things you don’t. It just means that while those things are great, they aren’t so great that nothing else can compare and so their lack dooms you to misery.
Yes, that includes romance. Because let me tell you: the idea that a romance is the only thing that could make you happy and nothing else in your life can compare without it creates a standard that’s so high that no other person could ever meet it. And that in turn means that nothing else in your life could make you happy… and so the cycle will just perpetuate.
You can break the cycle. It won’t be quick. It sure as hell won’t be easy. It’s going to require doing some deep work and looking at parts of yourself that you don’t like looking at closely. It will require that you actively question not just choices that you’ve made but beliefs that you’ve held onto for most of your life. But coming through to the other side will yield such massive benefits for you and your life that you’ll wonder why you waited so long to try.
Believe me, I empathize. I understand those feelings well. But I’m here to tell you that while pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. You have far more control and agency in your life than you realize. You have the strength and the will to confront those feelings and to push back against these beliefs and self-images that you’ve let define you. Once you do, I think you’ll be shocked at just how much your life will change.
It’ll be ok. You will be ok. I promise.
All will be well.
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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