DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m writing in to get advice about how to conquer my mindset, which I know is both unhealthy and unhelpful. I’m not entirely sure what question I am trying to answer here, so I’m praying you’ll have better insight into this than I do.
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Ultimately, I feel that I have an obsession with the topic of dating.
Every day, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, there are many times throughout where I struggle to shift my thoughts away from the subject. I find myself reading a lot of advice columns, or perusing Reddit to see what people have to share about their experiences, only to find myself thinking back to my own life and ending up stuck in rumination and over-analyzing events, to the point it can consume much of my day. While I partly attribute this to my friends and family always inquiring about my love life and thus reminding me on a regular basis, fundamentally it’s become a habit to “go down the rabbit hole” with this way of thinking.
I’ll give you an example. Today I happened across a thread on Reddit about “missed hints from women”. I’ve never been able to determine if a woman is interested in me, but in hindsight I thought back to moments where this may have been the case. I also started fantasizing about the prospect of a woman showing interest, in some made up scenario or perhaps based on what I had been reading. So I’m sat there with this thread open, getting lost in thought, and…boom…two hours have gone by.
Now, don’t get me wrong – my entire life doesn’t revolve around trying to get laid or finding a relationship, as I know there’s people out there whose every living, breathing moment is centered around trying to get notches on their bedpost or finding true love. I’m not actively dating and haven’t been on one for thirteen years. My lifestyle isn’t adjusted or governed in any way in an attempt to find someone. I’m quite fulfilled and successful, so in theory there’s no reason why I couldn’t be someone’s lover, but I’m not here today looking for advice on how to date.
If I were to try and answer my own question, I’d say it’s me being overwhelmed with the knowledge of having not been able to experience this part of life, and not being able to accept the idea that I could ever do so. FOMO? Whenever I read these discussions online, or listen to friends talk, I can’t relate to these stories of having met a potential partner at a house party, or being in the “talking stage” with someone they met online, or that brief sexual encounter while on holiday. How does one even get to this point? Talk to people? I do that and nothing happens. And there we go, the cycle of over-thinking has now begun. It all feels so alien to me. Perhaps I am the alien. The very concept of these events is just not something I can wrap my head around.
I don’t think it’s having too adverse an effect on my life. Although I do feel lonely at times (naturally), I simply get on with things. My realization today was that I’ve been engaged in this habit since I was 18, and I just don’t want to reach my 80’s with these thoughts stuck in my head all the time.
Broken Record
DEAR BROKEN RECORD: As someone who is professionally obsessed with dating, this isn’t exactly a mystery, BR. In fact, it’s kind of obvious what’s going on.
When we get hung up on a particular topic like this, to the point of near obsession, there’s always a reason. It’s a little like someone with an anxiety condition who doom-scrolls through worst-case scenarios and reads up about disasters. You would think that someone who is always afraid of the worst happening would want to avoid thinking about it, not marinating in the topic… except that’s not why they do it. To them, reading about the worst that could happen is almost a relief, a way of easing that anxiety. It’s almost literal magical thinking – focus on the worst and it won’t happen – but it brings an ease with it.
This behavior is an adaptation to a particular need, the mental equivalent of dealing with a persistent itch. Indulging in it like this is, functionally, scratching the itch. You have a mental itch, and reading subreddits or dating advice columns, indulging in those daydreams and so on make the itch go away.
The problem is that, like actual itches, scratching it doesn’t actually make the itch go away. It just overwhelms the nerves so that you don’t feel it for a little while, before it comes roaring back. What’s also significant is how much the resurgence makes the itch worse, because this behavior doesn’t actually fix the underlying issue. It’s your brain trying to resolve discomfort, but doing so in a way that no longer meets your need.
So the first step is to pay attention to the need that your brain is trying to meet. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think your analysis is right. I don’t think this is about being overwhelmed by anything, nor do I think it’s FOMO. The fact that you’ve been doing this since you were 18 is the key that unlocks this particular mystery. This is straight analysis paralysis and has been for a long, long time.
Were I to hazard a guess, what I suspect happened is very simple: like a lot of 18 year olds, you wanted to date but a combination of anxiety, unfamiliarity and frustration lead you to try to figure out what x-factor was missing or what you needed to learn in order to date. The problem is that if you ask five people questions online about dating, you’re going to get six opinions and there’s a part of you that feared rejection far more than you feared being single. So, again, like a lot of people, especially young people, you decided research was the answer. Research and study would eventually lead you to the magic formula that would lead to perfect success with no risk.
The problem with this, as any author will tell you, is that research is not the same as action. It feels like action, because you’re actively doing something that you tell yourself is going to make the end result better. But what it doesn’t do is actually move you forward. The author who gets stuck doing tons and tons of research isn’t actually putting words down on paper, and the person who is constantly reading and studying about dating and reading subreddits and watching YouTube videos isn’t actually out there trying to date.
(And honestly, I don’t include dating apps as taking actual steps, for a lot of reasons. Like research, it’s the sort of thing that feels like you’re taking steps, but it’s very much the illusion of effort. Especially as the monetization strategies of the dating apps makes them increasingly less useful.)
The problem is that, as I said: dreaming isn’t the same as doing. Research isn’t the same as doing. Collecting the gear you “need” isn’t the same as doing. Neither is making a Pintrest board, visualizing or anything that isn’t actually going out and putting in the effort and – importantly – making a lot of mistakes.
Because here’s the thing: the folks who succeed are the ones who didn’t spend all the time preparing and researching and studying. Preparation, research, study… that’s all good and important, don’t get me wrong. But they’re not the same as actually going out and f--king up. Your favorite artist has hundreds upon hundreds of drawings and paintings and illustrations that went straight into the trash. Your favorite writer has pages upon pages that will never see the light of day, novels that are stored away in a forgotten corner of their hard drive or shoved in a desk drawer. Musicians have s--tty songs, computer developers have oodles of spaghetti code and so on. The people who are successful at dating? They’re folks who’ve gotten rejected a lot, because they put themselves out there a lot.
Because anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Doing things badly, without trying to be perfect or avoid all mistakes is part of how we learn and grow. Trying to avoid errors and look for the critical path that will give us the magic formula or teach us everything we need and let us avoid the Pain Period ultimately leads nowhere. And analysis paralysis is precisely that: trying to avoid the pain period.
The thing is: do this for long enough and the task itself becomes the point. It’s still scratching the metaphorical itch – kind of – but the point of it has changed and mutated and now instead of being something that you’re doing for a supposed purpose, it’s become the thing you’re doing, end of. Find an excuse to put off doing a task for long enough and eventually you start just doing the excuse instead. You’re still scratching the itch, but scratching the itch has become the point.
In your case, that itch is still “wanting to date and to date successfully”. Reading those threads, falling down those rabbit holes and daydreaming about it are all ways of saying to yourself “ok, I could still do this if I wanted. I can still make this happen. I’m closing in on the exact steps I need to make this work”. There’s a part of you that’s still trying to find the magic formula that will make it all make sense, so you can step out of the house and say “3X2(9YZ)4A” and off you go. It may not be your conscious motivation anymore… but it’s still there.
So now that we’ve identified the need going unmet, the question becomes: what would be a better way to deal with this need? If you ask me – and you did – then I’d say the first thing is to start taking actual responsibility and recognize your agency in what you’re doing. You use a lot of passive language in your letter to describe what’s going on and I think that’s part of the problem. You didn’t find that thread through sheer happenstance, nor did it fling itself before your eyeballs while you were unable to resist. It didn’t appear on a billboard in Time’s Square or pop up on your smart TV. You were reading a dating subreddit. The same with reading advice columns or watching videos on the topic, etc. You’re making a series of decisions that lead to your going down these rabbit holes.
The way you describe it makes it sound as though these are less choices and more coming out of a fugue – as though you suddenly woke up and realized that Edward Hyde had been reading Dear Prudy before you shifted back to Dr. Jekyll. And they’re not. You’re the one deciding to chase that particular white rabbit down its hole. Start by acknowledging that you’re the one making these choices and remind yourself that you actually have agency.
Now, if you have truly made peace with never dating, I’d say that the answer is to just go cold turkey. Quit reading the advice columns, block those subreddits in your browsers and so on. Classic “Doc, it hurts when I do this”/”Ok so stop doing that.” But I don’t think you have. I think you’re resigned to it, but clearly you still want it. And my advice would be to echo a different doctor: don’t dream it, be it. Start working on your social skills, start practicing your flirting and start asking people out on dates. You don’t need to do all this research and all this trying to find the Rosetta Stone of dating, you need to go out and make mistakes. You need to go get rejected, brush yourself off and start again.
Because here’s the thing: despite what your anxiety tells you – and you’re not alone here – nobody really cares about how long it took you to get to the party, the point is that you got there. Nobody is dating your romantic history, they’re dating you. The only time the window is well and truly closed is when they’ve closed the box and lowered you into the ground.
Will this require adjustment? Sure. Will you need to upend your life a bit to make room? Well, yeah. That’s how it works. But it seems pretty clear to me that this is something you want, so perhaps it’s time to start actually trying again instead of trying to convince yourself that you don’t want it.
But that’s ultimately up to you. The choice is yours, one way or the other.
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