DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m a late-20s male who feels like he’s being left behind by his peers. I had always hoped to marry early and have a big family but it seems like that isn’t going to happen for me at this point, and all my friends are now pairing off and having kids.
Advertisement
Ever since I was younger I figured that I must be doing wrong to not be finding a partner when it seems so effortless for everyone else. To that end I focused hard on self-improvement. On paper it would seem that I’m in a great place to succeed:
– I have a 6-figure salary, good career prospects, and own my own house
– I have multiple friend circles and a fairly active social life
– I have multiple engaging hobbies which I find fulfilling and others find interesting
– I’m average looking, but dress well and exercise daily so am in decent shape
Nevertheless, I have no success at all on dating apps (maybe half a dozen dates in 10 years of use) and don’t seem to have any opportunities to naturally meet women through channels such as work. Nor do any of my friends apparently have anyone to whom I could be introduced.
Now that my friends have started to marry and have children, I fear that I’ll spend even less time with others and that they are achieving my dreams while I languish away alone. People say it’s not about comparing oneself to others, but it was always my dream to find someone and have children, so I feel like a failure even against my own standards.
It seems to me that I have tried everything and come so far, but that it has made no difference. I’m no closer to achieving my goals than I was when I started, except all of that time was wasted.
At this point I’m out of ideas. I’m not really interested in picking up more hobbies since I don’t have time or the interest, I dislike the career risk involved with trying to date colleagues, and my social connections to women have been exhausted. It feels like there must be something wrong or broken about me since I just can’t do what everyone else gets for free by virtue of just being around.
How can there be any hope left for me? What fields are left for me to till? Has all the work I have put in been for nothing?
Signed,
Ozymandias
DEAR OZYMANDIAS: Alright my guy, I’m going to give it to you straight: your biggest issue here is that you’re making this hard on yourself for no real reason. A lot of what you’re dealing with is in your head and artificially restricting yourself for unnecessary reasons.
Part of the problem is that you’re basing goals on things that require other people’s active participation, which means that you’ve added a layer of difficulty. Wanting to get married early, for example, requires meeting people who also want to get married early. Same with having a big family; that’s a takes-two-to-tango situation, which means you’re now having to filter for people who are also have the same goals. So first you have to find the people who have those same ambitions and then sort for things like mutual attraction, compatibility, etc. Those extra steps are going to slow things down, especially if you’re going to be firm on the ultimate goal of marrying young.
Demographically, you’re working at a disadvantage. More and more people are waiting to marry until later in life. In 1980, 66% of young adults were married by the age of 25, with approximately 33% having gotten married by 21. By 2020, less than 7% of people were married by 21 and 22% were married by 25. Now the average age for getting married for the first time is 30 for men and 28 for women, when they’re getting married at all.
Now that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who aren’t interested in marrying young and having larger families… but you’re not going to find many of them on dating apps. The people who are most likely to fit the life path you have/had in mind are more likely to be conservative and religious, so you’d do better to be going to church than spending Sundays on Hinge and Bumble. And to be quite frank, even then you’re going to be dealing with a smaller pool. I know folks in those communities who have a hard time finding women in their early 20s who want to settle down and kick out a bunch of kids. Almost all of them had to adjust their expectations and look to marrying women who were in their later 20s.
Now, personally, I think it might be worth examining precisely why marrying early is important to you. What is it that makes this so important to you that would make marrying in a little later in life less desirable? I’m not saying it’s wrong or a bad idea (though to be honest, it’s not a choice I would make), don’t get me wrong. However, if you’re going to set yourself a time limit like that, you’re going to have to make concessions somewhere in that mix to get there. Nobody gets 100% of what they want in a relationship because no one person can be our 100% match. You have to decide what parts are vital and what you can live without as the cost of entry to the rest.
The next thing I would point out is that your friends getting into relationships or getting married has nothing to do with you. Their success doesn’t take anything away from you, nor does it signal anything about you. The only way their success would be in any way comparable would be if you were living their exact same lives, doing the exact same things they were at the exact same time and not getting the same results. But you’re not. You’re you and they’re them. They have different experiences, different advantages and disadvantages. They spend their days doing different things than you. That’s going to give different results.
Their romantic journey is entirely separate from yours and, quite frankly, you’re only privy to some of their experiences. You see a very limited slice of what they’ve done, what they’ve gone through and how hard they’ve worked. A lot of what seems effortless to the outsider is almost always the sum of a s--tload of work that the outsider never saw and was unaware of. It’s a lot like bands that come out of nowhere to become overnight sensations; what you didn’t see were the years and decades of practice, toil and effort that it took to get there. They’re not getting anything “for free” by virtue of “just being around”. Unless you’re going to tell me that they quite literally just sit there doing absolutely nothing ever and a girlfriend fell into their laps that required no action on their part (up to and including introducing themselves), there is a lot of activity that you’re not seeing. It just looks like that to you because you’re not getting the 24/7 continuous feed of their lives and the inside of their heads.
Comparing yourself to them is a rube’s game; all you’re doing is looking at your unedited footage and wondering why it doesn’t look as amazing as their highlight reels. All this does is make you feel bad about yourself. It’s distracting at best and demoralizing at worst, just another way to punch yourself in the dick for not achieving a goal that wasn’t going to be easy to achieve in the first place.
I would also point out that some of what you list as proof that you’re set up for success aren’t as helpful as you’d think. It’s great that you have a high-paying job and own your own house, especially in this economy, don’t get me wrong… but how are your prospective dates supposed to know that and why should they care? It’s not as though you’re walking around with your bank account and credit score hovering over your head after all. It’s a little like guys who make a big deal about having six-pack abs; unless you’re constantly wearing uber-tight shirts at all times or showing them off at the drop of a hat, most people aren’t going to know that you have them, and it’s not going to be the major deciding factor for the people who do know.
Having lots of money is nice, but it’s not inherently attractive, except to people who are attracted to money. Financial security is more desirable because life is chaos and we’re all just two bad weeks away from disaster… but most women aren’t looking for Uncle Moneybags or sugar daddies. They’re just looking for folks who’ve got their s--t together and who aren’t going to drag them under or leech off them like the stereotypical dirtbag boyfriend who’s always borrowing money and has no ambition. Most women would prefer to be able to pay their share, rather than be taken care of.
(There’s also the fact that a lot of high-paying jobs come with demanding hours, high levels of stress and little time to actually enjoy life, so it’s not always the draw dudes think it is. Especially once kids are in the mix.)
It also sounds like the two ways you’ve been trying to meet women are ones that require minimal effort on your part, which is likely part of the problem. Being successful on dating apps isn’t really a measure of one’s attractiveness or desirability, it’s just a measure of how good you are at making dating profiles. Likewise, I could rant for hours (and I have) about how dating apps have changed and how monetization gets in the way of the stated goals of the apps, but that’s not necessarily going to help here. The important part is that it’s not working for you right now, which means it’s time to do things differently. And in this case, doing things differently means that you’re going to have to invest time and effort in ways that you haven’t been before.
Now part of the problem is that you’ve already written things off and refuse to consider them. Well… it’s time to reconsider. If you want things to be different, you have to do things differently. What you’re doing right now isn’t working, so either you can keep trying harder and hope for a miracle, or you can shift gears and make some changes. That means that you’re going to have to decide where you can be more flexible – either in terms of what you’re looking for or where you’re looking for it. You might not be interested in more hobbies or more activities, but which is a higher priority for you right now: meeting someone and potentially finding a partner, or maintaining your current status quo. The same goes for time; everything in life has an opportunity cost and that cost is time. If you want to add something to your life, it’s going to come at the expense of something else. You have to decide what’s going to be more important and what you’ll give up in order to pay that opportunity cost. Sorry, but that’s just life in linear time. Unless you’ve got a flux capacitor or a big blue box, you’re pretty much stuck in the same boat as everyone else, living in a linear progression of cause and effect.
I’m not going to go into your reasoning for some of it because I’m not here to tell you that you’re wrong about the supposed risks of dating at work or whatever. I will say, however, that one of the most underestimated factors in finding a relationship is propinquity – the tendency to start relationships with the people we spend the most time with. This is why a lot of relationships (romantic and platonic) start at work, at church, at school or other places where you’re around the same people over and over again.
So if your current hobbies aren’t bringing you in contact with people you don’t already know, then it may be time to decide that some of those can be put on the back burner while you prioritize meeting people. The best options would be to find places where you’re going to see a lot of the same folks over and over again – recurring events, regularly scheduled meet-ups or organized activities, ideally ones that match up with things you already enjoy. Then you’re going to have to go and just interact with people. Have conversations, get to know folks, find out what makes them tick and – if you find them attractive – whether you and they have enough in common that they might make a good potential partner.
If you meet someone a few times at, say, a local open-mic, and you catch a vibe when you’re talking to them, it’s the most natural thing in the world to ask them out on a date. And if they say no… well, the thing is to recognize that not everyone is going to like you the way you wish. That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you, any more than there’s anything wrong with the people who you don’t want to date. It just means that the necessary components on both sides aren’t there.
All of this is to say that you have choices to make, and while the specifics will be different, they all come down to the same core question: what are you willing to change? What areas are you willing to bend and what are you going to stand firm on? There are no right or wrong answers here, because it’s all down to what’s important to you. You have to decide what gets prioritized over what, and the difference in priorities means different results and different consequences. If you’re going to be firm in wanting to marry soon and have a large family, then you’re going to need to be willing to accept that this is going to cut down your pool of potential partners significantly. If you aren’t willing to adjust how much time you’re spending and on what, then you’re going to have fewer opportunities to meet people.
What you have going on right now isn’t working out the way you hoped. So it’s time to decide what needs to change and to what degree. And that’s something that only you can decide.
Good luck.
Bottom of Form
Bottom of Form
Bottom of Form
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com