DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Last year, my girlfriend of six years and I broke up. That’s not why I’m writing though. She had to move across the country to take care of her aging family, I can’t move because I have too many obligations here and neither of us can do long distance and so we decided to end it while we still loved each other. It was as healthy and friendly a break up as you could want but it still hurt and it took me some time to recover. Now I find myself in a really odd place, emotionally. While I can say I’m well and truly over the break up, I think I’m afraid to actually date again.
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It’s not that I don’t think I’m attractive or that I couldn’t find someone. I know for a fact that I can attract someone in the short term. It’s that I’m afraid that I won’t be able to find someone who could put up with me and all my weird little habits and lifestyle needs. To give an example, I’ve got a sensitive stomach and lots of things will send me running to the bathroom with very little warning. Who’s going to want to date someone long-term who’s going to have to poop six or seven times a day at random intervals? Or there’s my sleep routine: melatonin gummy, mouth tape, specific memory foam pillow, white noise generator, fan on and air conditioning going, otherwise I will be up all night and miserable the next day. Or any of a number of other weird little things that just seem like they’d be too much for anyone who might want a serious relationship with me.
I don’t want to live the rest of my life like a priest or a monk, but the idea of someone learning about all my weirdness and deciding that they can’t make a life with me after all literally makes me wake up at night in a cold sweat.
Any ideas about what I should do? Do I need to start forcing myself to rawdog sleep and a rigorous eating schedule to avoid embarrassing myself with trying to find a men’s room at the last minute?
Freak Like Me
DEAR FREAK LIKE ME: Let’s leave aside things like “have you been to the doctor about your gastric problems” and instead, FLM, let me tell you a story.
In the Before Times, the Long Long Ago, I was out on a first date with a woman – someone I had a crush on for quite some time – and I was very invested in making this work. Which of course, meant that I might as well have directly invoked Loki, Coyote, Anansi, Eris and Sun Wukong all at the same time and told them that they were s--t at their job.
The date as planned was pretty prosaic – literally dinner and a movie, with a brief interlude between for a sappily romantic ride on a carousel. Well, five seconds after having sat down on the carousel horse, dinner decided to come back to haunt me. A couple very loud warning gurgles later and I immediately have to hop off and make my way – gingerly but at speed – to the nearest men’s room. It was, to put it mildly, a very near thing. And naturally because the universe works by fairy tale logic, I would leave the bathroom, head back to the carousel and then a VERY loud gurgle would announce that no, dinner was not in fact done with me two more times. So my date would see me emerge from the men’s room, be half-way back to the carousel, before I would immediately turn around and race back to the bathroom.
Twice.
And then the faucet on the sink burst and sprayed water down my front.
Things could not have possibly gone worse and the level of cringe set off seismic detectors in Beijing.
The movie wasn’t great, either.
My date and I were together for four years after that.
I bring that up because, by all rights, this should’ve ended the date right then and there. This wasn’t even a “ok, we’ve been dating for a year and now I’m comfortable enough for you to see this side of me”, it was the first time she and I had ever been out in a romantic context after nearly a year of my pining for her. This wasn’t my worst first date but it was pretty damn close.
But it still worked out.
As it turns out, when someone likes you, it’s pretty hard to turn them off, especially if you don’t treat those things like a world-ending disaster.
Here’s the thing: you’re putting the cart way before the horse. The horse isn’t even in the same county as you right now. You are worried about things that aren’t going to be an issue for quite some time. You’re not – or at least I hope you’re not – going to leap from being single to shacking up with someone with no in-between. You’re going to have a pretty standard courtship period, and a lot of these issues simply aren’t going to be A Thing for a while. By the time any of it is actually going to be an issue, you’ll have had a decent amount of time together and you’ll be in the grip of New Relationship Energy. Let me tell you, the golden haze of NRE obscures many, many sins and makes all sorts of things little quirks and cute little idiosyncrasies. By the time the NRE fades, those oddities are going to just be Part Of Who You Are, and not nearly as much of a problem as you think.
But what about before you reach that point? Well, like I said: if someone likes you, they’re willing to roll with a lot of stuff. I’ve dated quite a few people with all sorts of quirks of their own, things that could be seen as being anywhere on the spectrum from cute and eccentric to legitimately limiting – from lifestyle choices to chronic conditions to “I have a very short list of foods that won’t kill me” – and none of them have been so egregious that I didn’t want to date them. The same goes the other way, too; I’ve got my own picadillos and oddities that can make living with me frustrating at times and it was never the deal breaker that I feared it would be.
(We had entirely different issues that would end the relationships, but that’s neither here nor there.)
And honestly, it doesn’t matter how supposedly “perfect” your partner is, there will absolutely be stuff about them that will make you grind your teeth with frustration at times. And they’ll feel the same about you. But you know what? While those things may make you roll your eyes to the heavens or grumble under your breath (and vice versa), they’re very rarely something that makes you say “Nope, deal breaker, I’m out” or “nope, can’t handle that”. Most of the time, you’ll just sigh and deal with it because as weird/outré/frustrating/inconvenient/genuine hard limits as it might be? They’re still them. They’re still the person you fell in love with and you’re still the person they fell in love with and those weird little things that make up your life are what make both of you uniquely yourselves.
Sure, there’ll be people who can’t roll with it. But that’s always going to be true… just as there’ll be people who won’t want to date you for other, entirely random reasons. There’ll be people who won’t want to date you because of the way you cut your hair or the smell of the product you use, just as there’ll be people who you will ultimately not want to date because of the way they pronounce aluminum or how they whistle through their teeth. But all any of that means is that someone who wasn’t right for you took themselves out of your dating pool, leaving you free to look for someone who is.
Those issues you mention may be a deal breaker for some. But for someone who’s right for you – and there are many who will be – they’re simply not going to be the problem you’re afraid they are.
We’re all f--king weird, we’ve all got quirks we think only a tiny, select few could tolerate and we’re all wrong about how big of a deal they actually are. Don’t worry about future problems that don’t exist. Just focus on meeting people who are right for you and you’ll be fine.
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