DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: What’s up, Doc? I’ll keep this one short and sweet: I’ve got anxiety and I hate it. It doesn’t matter how well things are going, there is a voice in the back of my mind that will tell me how it’s all a big mistake or that I’m at risk of messing everything up or I did something weird and now everyone’s got the ick.

My anxiety means that I’m on high alert all the time like I’ve gone outside the wire in Iraq all the time and I’m always second-guessing every word I say and everything I do. When it’s not doing that, I’m going over everything people have said to me and trying to convince myself that they don’t secretly hate me. 

I hate it and I want it to stop and I don’t know how. Please don’t say therapy, I’ve already got a therapist and they don’t seem to understand. What do I do? 

Nervous Devonshire (W)rex

DEAR DEVONSHIRE (W)REX: I know you said don’t say “therapy”, but if your therapist isn’t helping, it’s probably time to find a new therapist. Therapy is a lot like dating; if you aren’t clicking with your therapist, if you don’t feel like you’re being understood or listened to and if their work isn’t helping after you’ve given it a good-faith try, then you may need to find someone who is a better fit. You might also want to talk to your GP or a psychiatrist about anti-anxiety medication. Even something like a beta-blocker to help control your heart rate might help you get things under control.

Yeah, I know: it can feel like you’re weak or can’t hack it because you need pills to not be a nervous nellie. F--k that noise; as someone who’s dealt with a few different mental health issues, I’m a big believer in better living through chemistry. Our brains are blobs of tapioca with electricity running through them until they hallucinate hard enough to invent calculus; of course changing the chem balances will have an effect. If you’re willing to use the right kind of oil to keep your car’s motor happy, then there’s really nothing significantly different than taking your meds when you need them.

Now with that out of the way, I think what may help here is to change your relationship to your anxiety. The key to understanding anxiety is that it’s not there to hurt you or make your life worse. Anxiety is one your brain’s attempts to keep you safe.  Your brain doing its best to anticipate problems before they can happen so that you can navigate them smoothly and without issue.

Think about it: if you know that you’re entering the savannah and there’re saber-tooth tigers around, having plans and contingencies in case you encounter them makes sense. Being on the lookout for signs that they’re nearby is basic survival.

That’s what anxiety is doing; it’s looking for signs of trouble and trying to help you avoid it if possible and to deal with it when necessary. In this case, instead of helping you avoid predators in the tall grass, it’s being applied to your social life – helping you navigate the complex and frequently confusing morass of being a person in the world.

The problem, however, is that anxiety can be a bit like a working breed dog; if it doesn’t have a job, it can get rambunctious and destructive. When we had to be on the lookout for smilodons and cave bears and s--t, someone with a higher level of anxiety was a feature; they kept their crew alive. In a much safer world, there’re fewer things to be on alert for and so that anxiety kinda goes berserk trying to do its job and starts trying to find threats where there aren’t any. So someone like you ends up becoming hypervigilant in the name of safety, convinced that there’re threats lurking behind every smile, micro-expression or time that someone takes longer to reply to a text than they did before.

So, there’re three things to do here. The first is to give yourself a little breathing room. When you have those moments of being sure that something is wrong, actually look at the evidence and ask yourself what you would tell a friend who came to you with the same fears. Would you look at their concerns and say “oh yeah, you’re f--ked; pack your bags, change your name and get a new face, you gotta get out of here”, or would you say “hey, it’s ok, you’re making a lot out of nothing”? Or you might take a moment and think of times when you’ve been on the other end of the situation: a friend said something weird or you didn’t reply to a DM the instant you got one. Did you start to hate them because they misspoke, or did you intuit what they really meant and just took it in stride? Were you not answering their DM because you don’t like them or because you had other stuff to do?

You can’t logic yourself out of an emotion, but you can dial back the immediacy of the worry. If you can give yourself that space where it doesn’t feel like the world is coming down on you right this instant, then you’re giving yourself a chance for that moment of anxiety to pass. And it will pass, just as every feeling does. Nobody can be sad or happy or scared forever; it just feels that way in the moment.

The second thing you want to do is to pay attention to your feelings – note them when you’re having then and give them a name. When you have an anxiety attack about something, take a moment and observe that you’re having a feeling. Then you name it and describe its purpose “this is my anxiety about asking Sally out on a date”; “this is my anxiety about my connection with my friends, it’s telling me that I’m feeling insecure because I haven’t seen them in a while because I’ve been busy but they’ve all been hanging out and I worry that it means that they don’t have room for me anymore”.

Please note very carefully the way I phrased that: you’re having a feeling, not you are that feeling. You’re not anxious, you’re feeling anxious. Reminding yourself that you’re having a feeling is a reminder that this is a temporary issue, not a permanent, definitional state of being. Similarly, describing the why of it helps you figure out what the underlying issue is; the answer is often found there. If you’re worried about your closeness with your friends and you’ve been distant for a while, then perhaps it’s time to block out time to hang out with them. Maybe it’ll be easier to schedule one-on-one, rather than a big group outing; either way, that time with them will help reaffirm that no, things are fine.

The third is to gently redirect your anxiety away from these phantom problems. Remember what I said about how anxiety is like a working dog without a job? Well, just as with those dogs, sometimes the answer is to give it a job. If you’re getting anxious about something, ask yourself if that’s something that’s actually happening right now? Is it something that is, absolutely, positively going on, or is it theoretical, just the potential of a problem? If the answer is “no, it’s not happening right this instant, it just might”, then you want to gently redirect your attention to something that does need to be taken care of.

Is there a deadline for a project coming up? Maybe now’s a good time to figure out how to make progress on it. Is there a call you’re not looking forward to? This is the best time to start rehearsing what you’re going to say. Finding something else to focus on, something that you can accomplish and know that you’ve avoided a problem, helps settle things down.

Remember: anxiety is just your brain trying to keep you safe, not happy. It’s about smoothing the way forward and avoiding problems. By finding other things to do or problems to solve, you help keep it occupied and – importantly – allow it to do its job. Yeah, I know; it sounds like weird woo-woo s--t. But trust me: it works. The key isn’t to try to make the anxiety go away, it’s to give it a useful focus until the moment fades.

And by being more in tune with your feelings, being more mindful of what you’re feeling and why, you actually reduce the amount of anxiety you experience because you are giving yourself to address the underlying causes in a productive manner, instead of just freaking yourself out for no good reason.

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: So a bit of background: I’m 45 and last year had a my first ever serious relationship of 6 years come to an end. Also to note I live on an island of the northwest of Scotland so it’s a fairly small populations. So for good chunk of this year I felt in a rut, single and in a job that was sapping my soul. I tried for the 5th time in as many years for an internal vacancy I had chased and been turned down for. I got denied again and this spurred me to look to move on. I got the job I was after with another firm, the new place is a happy, calm, relaxed environment and I have passion for work and life again. I’m back at Muay Thai training and re-started my efforts to learn a new lingo (Russian), now a co-director for the local comic con, started a new tabletop meet-up in my small hometown. I feel enthused again

So I decided to go back into the dating world and the results have not been good. Signed up on a few dating apps, crafted a profile, had a lassie I know check it out and said my pic was cute and came across as a sweet guy. I read the profiles suggested to me carefully, and carefully chose who to swipe right on. The results have been practically nonexistent. Currently 3 matches, one did not reply to me, another on Badoo did message and I never got a reply and the third I messaged, got a reply and since then the trail has gone cold. And that’s been my fill so far very little action and so I’ve just given up on the careful and selective approach and now just swiping right on every profile suggested as I would think this will boost the chances of a like or a possible conversation that doesn’t evaporate. So far and nothing, getting the feeling that maybe I’m just not what women are looking for.

I have been working on my IRL dating meetup, was talking to a lassie for 2 weeks recently and felt a good vibe, only to ask her out and her to tell me she just started seeing somebody and was just “going official” but that we could meetup as friends. So not much luck IRL. Just feel like I’m hitting a brick wall and desperate to turn this part of my life around

cheers,

On Tilt Scotsman

DEAR ON TILT SCOTSMAN: I empathize, OTS. It can be hard to be single when you don’t want to be, especially when it feels like everything you do keeps coming up short. The problem is that this frustration can actually make things worse for you and you have to be careful to try to keep your wits about you when you hit these moments.

Here’s the thing: the frustration is natural and understandable. Nobody worth listening to is going to tell you that you shouldn’t be frustrated or that it’s possible to find relationships without occasionally having times when it feels like nothing would go right if you held a gun to its head. This is something that everyone deals with, no exceptions. But you have to be mindful about how you handle it, otherwise you end up with a cascading series of effects that makes it even harder.

When you start feeling like you’re running into a wall – getting matches that don’t lead anywhere, meeting people who later let you know that they don’t feel the same way you do, and so on – there’s an understandable feeling that maybe you need to go bigger, make bigger moves, do more to try to break through. This is a mistake; you’re reacting to the frustration of the moment, rather than thinking clearly. The impulse is based on emotion, doing something to address what you’re feeling right then, rather than making smarter, more measured decisions. You make poor choices because they’re ones that feel “right” in the moment, but they usually have far less thought or care behind them. And because those moves don’t have real thought or mindfulness behind them, they frequently don’t work or don’t produce results that are commensurate with the size of the move and so you get even more frustrated. That, in turn, encourages you to make even bigger moves… and so the cycle continues.

There’s actually a term for this in poker: going “on tilt” or “full tilt”. Someone who’s “on tilt” has had a series of disappointments and upsets – sometimes because of poor play, sometimes because of bad luck and occasionally because they lost and lost badly, and are feeling humiliated or disrespected by it. Because they’re letting their frustration and anger get to them, they tend to abandon strategy and play more aggressively than they should – they’re trying to deal with the unpleasant feelings and make them go away. And once a player is on tilt, if they don’t recognize it and find some way to induce a state break, they tend to get wiped out pretty quickly.

So right now, you’re getting to the point where you’re trying to make the feeling go away, rather than actually do better at dating and that’s a bad place to be when you’re trying to make decisions. Case in point: swiping right on everyone on a dating app is a bad move. For one thing, the app penalizes that behavior specifically; guys who swipe right on everyone to maximize the number of matches end up making other people upset because they matched in good faith. It’s in the apps best interest to disincentivize people from doing this, so someone who starts swiping on every profile gets deprioritized in the algorithm. For another, your behavior on the app in general changes how the algorithm responds. If you’re swiping right on people, the app is going to send more people who are similar to them into your feed. So if you’re swiping on people you’re not into, you’re going to start seeing more people who aren’t your type. And then many apps will also gauge who’s swiping right on you to decide who to show you and who to show you to – if you’re matching with a lot of people who you aren’t into, you’re going to be shown to people like them rather than the ones you’re attracted to.

There’re also apps that decide how high to prioritize people based on how many people swipe right vs. left on them. Maximizing the number of folks who’re saying “no thanks” means that you’re less likely to get matches from people you’d be into.

That frustration also means that you miss out on other opportunities or ways to turn a seeming loss into a win. One of the things with meeting people – on apps or in real life – is that just because someone doesn’t like you the way that you’d hope doesn’t mean that this was a failure or that you’re unloveable, nor does it mean that you shouldn’t ever see or talk to them again.

So the first thing I would suggest is that you need to get off tilt and get a state break. The quickest and easiest way, in my experience, is to give yourself a moment of quiet – to find a way to turn down the noise in your head.

I’m a fan of moving from brain to body – making yourself more aware of yourself physically and saying “shhhhhhhh” to your brain in the process. For some, this would mean exercise and getting lost in the feeling of motion, the burn of tired muscles and the exhaustion that comes with physical effort. Going for a jog or a long walk, doing a heavy work out with weights, punching the heavy bag – all of these can help burn through the mental energy while centering yourself in your body.

For others, removing external distracting stimuli is key – turning off music or podcasts, closing the laptop, turning off the TV and phone – and giving themselves literal quiet, so that they can focus on little things around them: the temperature of the air on their skin, the texture of the carpet beneath their feet, the feeling of their clothes on their skin.

Still others will meditate, in whatever ways make the most sense to them. For some it’s through movement – dance, performing katas, doing tai chi exercises and so on. For others, it’s about counting their breaths and noting and naming their emotions and physical sensations. Other people will meditate by standing under a  hot (or cold, for that matter) shower and just feeling the water on their skin as the heat relaxes their muscles or the cool eases the fire in their hearts.

In every case, though, the important part is to give your brain time to calm down, to unclench and release the tension, rather than twisting things tighter and tighter. Let the tension bleed away and say “shhhh” to your feelings and just breathe until things are calm again.

I also recommend giving yourself permission to take a break for a little while. It might be as short as a week, or it could be a month or however much time you need. The point is to let your brain and your feelings focus on other things, things that you aren’t going to take as personally and that help recharge your emotional batteries and feed your soul. Spending time with friends, reading good books, watching movies you’ve been meaning to see… things that help give you positive feelings are important here. These moments help produce more oxytocin and dopamine, which make you feel better overall.

Then, once you’re feeling ready, you’ll be in a better place to make sound decisions and plan things better.

In your case, one of the things I would suggest is to do a hard reset on your dating profiles. Delete the accounts and start over fresh. You can use the same prompts and bios and pics or you can change them up. Some folks like to start over and try different approaches, seeing as the previous one wasn’t working the way they’d hoped. Either way, you want a fresh account, so that you’re coming in with a clean algorithmic slate.

The next thing I would suggest is to give yourself some guidelines in how you’re going to use the apps, and then stick to them. Having some rules to follow can go a long way to giving yourself a feeling of control, rather than being at the mercy of the fickle finger of fate and the uncaring Algorithm. Recognizing you have more agency than you realize is an important part of combatting that feeling of helplessness. 

The first guideline is that you limit the time you spend on the apps, making sure that the time you do spend on there is deliberate and with purpose. Some people find that they do best keeping to swiping and checking in on matches or messages only once or twice a week, rather than whenever they get bored, lonely or horny.  If you’ll forgive an awkward metaphor, this is a little like going to the grocery store when you’re hungry; you’re going to be a lot more focused on the immediate desires rather than thinking about meal planning for the week. As a result, you make decisions you wouldn’t have made and may well end up bunch of junk food instead of what was on your grocery list. 

… ok so maybe that one got away from me. Anyway. 

The point is that by only using the app on certain days and being mindful of who you’re swiping on and why, you don’t enter a cycle of chasing after potential dopamine hits that just leaves you more addicted to the app. You also ensure that you don’t get caught in the intermittent reinforcement loop that just ups your frustration. If you’re going to use the apps, you want to do so with intent – only swipe on people you would actually want to meet in person.

The second guideline is to worry less about matches and more about messages. The point of apps isn’t to collect matches, it’s to meet people and go on dates. Those connections start not with matching with people but with messaging them. Getting lots of matches isn’t worth a damn, not when they’re people who you don’t want to meet or who don’t want to meet you. Quantity doesn’t have a quality all of its own, and having lots of matches with people you’re not actually interested in just serves to make you more frustrated. This is why your effort should be on connecting with the people you do match with and building things from there.

The third is that you change how you look at dating apps in two very important ways: how you approach the app itself and what you expect from it. For the former, you want to remember that the app isn’t a tool, it’s a venue. It’s a single’s bar you keep in your pocket, and your pictures and profile are what people see when you walk in the door or when they look across the bar at you. When you’re choosing your pictures and writing out your profile, you want to think about the first impression you would like people to have as though they were seeing you for the first time in person. The guy who’s talking about what women SHOULD be in order to match him or who’s grousing about how unfair and choosy women are? He’s coming off as the guy at the end of the bar muttering to himself and glaring at people. Not exactly someone who’s going to collect phone numbers or make panties disappear.

For the latter, you need to see using a dating app less as ordering takeout or calling an Uber, and more about sending out resumes and responding to job listings on LinkedIn. That is: you don’t expect immediate delivery, but instead that you’re sending out pings and waiting to see if you get pings back. Some may come back quickly, some may take a while… but you want to be ready to fire and forget until they do. No amount of vigorously checking your inbox will make it fill up any faster. It will, however, encourage you to obsess, which is more likely to send you on tilt. 

(This is also part of why you want to restrict how often you use the app; it helps keep you from obsessing about whether you’re going to match or get a message back.)

Now for in person… well, I’d point to the woman you met and remind you that she would like to see you as a friend. I’d recommend that you actually take her up on that and befriends. Not because you’re going to win her over or be there if her current relationship blows up but because she’s an attractive woman who does like you and thinks you’re a cool guy. Yes, she may not like you the way that you wish, but recognizing that friendship isn’t the boobie prize is important. And – not to put too fine a point on it – she’s got friends, and those friends are likely to be similar to her. If you find her attractive, the odds are good you’re going to think at least some of her friends are as well. And the fact that she thinks you’re a great guy means that she’s going to be your best reference and testimony to her social circle. Your odds of meeting someone who is right for you, is attractive and attracted, and is also single will be much higher with her in your corner than if you let this rattle you.

But first: take that time to get a state break and get off tilt. Calm your frustration, get centered again and you’ll be in a better place to make decisions and meet people you’ll want to date.

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 work in customer service , not exactly a professional level career, but it’s not flipping burgers. I actually like my job, while not the best, the pay is decent , I get to work from home, and being a government job, the benefits are pretty good, and I have weekends and holidays off as well as good job security.

Unfortunately, my work seems to be an issue with a lot of women. After I tell them what I do, I never hear from them again. Some people have told me to just get another job, but the job market isn’t the best and I’m not exactly qualified for a lot of professional level jobs, plus I’d have to give up working from home, I may make less money etc. Also, there aren’t any single women where I work and if there were I really don’t want to date a co-worker.

Are there any other options?

Career Exception Oriented

DEAR CAREER EXCEPTION ORIENTED: Let’s take the “dating a co-worker” off the table for the moment here, CEO, because it’s not really relevant. Instead, I want to talk about how to fix dating problems you might be having – and, importantly, how to be sure you’re trying to fix the right problem. I’m sure you’ve seen me talk about how “the problem you have isn’t the problem you think you have”; part of how you avoid this is to make sure that you’re actually looking at what’s actually going on, rather than making assumptions. This is why you want to zero in on what the real problem is, rather than what seems to make sense.

So let me walk you through some steps to try to analyze the issue and then I’ll give you my opinion about what I think is happening. 

The first thing to keep in mind when you’re troubleshooting your love life  is that correlation is not the same as causation. It’s the fallacy of “post-hoc ergo propter hoc”: after this, therefore because of this. It’s a trap that people fall for all the time, because it makes a certain logical sense. It’s the linear progression of cause and effect – this thing happened, then this other thing happened soon thereafter, so it stands to reason that the former caused the latter. The problem though is that life – like time – is really more a big bundle of wibbly-wobbly stuff, where things only seem related because of proximity and we’re a species with a pattern-seeking brain that will look for patterns and meaning, even when there isn’t any. The problem is, because we have pattern-seeking brains and a general love of narrative, this fallacy means that we tend to end up believing a lot of wonky or even harmful things, simply because they happened in a particular order. It’s basically working backwards from the conclusion; X happened, Y happened, so if Y happened because of X, we’ll come up with reasons to make the two related, even if they aren’t. 

That doesn’t mean that the two are never related; sometimes it really is as obvious as it seems. But that doesn’t mean that this is a connection or inference that you can rely on. The risk here is that if you get stuck on the post-hoc fallacy, you end up letting your biases do the thinking for you. Troubleshooting your dating life means that you don’t want to leap to a conclusion just because it seems to fit, you want the one that actuallyfits. The most obvious answer isn’t always the correct one because the one that’s most obvious isn’t actually obvious to anyone who isn’t you. It’s not “this is so self-evident that it must be the answer”  so much as “this answer matches my pre-existing anxieties and beliefs”. In this case, people have a lot of beliefs about how important (or not) a person’s job is on the dating scene. If you’re at all sensitive about what you do for work, it’s very easy to assume that this was the trigger. But that doesn’t mean that it’s true; it just happens to be an area where you’re particularly sensitive. 

Of course, being sensitive doesn’t mean that you’re wrong, either. This is why you want to try to be as objective as you can while examining the potential conflicts and causes. Even if you’re correct, you want to be correct for the right reasons, rather than by accident. Having the right answer doesn’t help if you got there by faulty reasoning; you end up focusing on the wrong issues or ineffective solutions. 

This is why you want to do your best to take an objective look at the data and evidence you actually have, while being mindful about what evidence you don’t have. When it comes to dating, what you often don’t have is access to what the other person is thinking or feeling or otherwise has going on in their life. So there are times when the problem isn’t even on your end, just as there can be times where you have the classic situation of “you can make no mistakes and still lose.”

Now, here’s the order of operations I would recommend for you.

The first thing I would suggest is taking a hard look at the exact frequency of how often your job comes up with women going radio silent on you. One of the common flaws of the human brain is recency bias; we tend to focus on experiences that are fresher and more immediate and assume that it’s more significant than it actually was. One of the ways this can manifest would be feeling as though X keeps happening to you with far more regularity than it actually does, simply because X happened to you the last time or the time before. In this case, you should check to see if it really is true that women are ditching you after you talk about your job.

Fortunately, because we’re talking about dating apps, you have the receipts. If you were to go through your conversations with your matches, for as far back as you can, did they all end when the subject of your job came up? If it’s not every time, was it still more often than not?  Or is it just that the most recent matches, plural, end at this point while others ended at other times? While it’s hard to say what a “statistically significant” number would be, let’s say that it follows the Bond Rule of Enemy Action: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a problem.

If it does seem to be a recurring problem, then we want to make sure whether this is correlation or causation. So we want to look a little closer. That’s why, in this case, the next step would be to look at the timing of the connection drying up.

This is another area where we can get tripped up, in no small part because things that feel significant can warp our perspective. This is why it’s easy to mistake correlation for causation; we think something happened much sooner than it did, which then means we tend to not look any further past that point.

So, looking over those previous conversations, pay attention to how long it was before the conversation ended and your match stopped replying. Was it really the case that you would say “I’m in customer service” and they would just stop responding immediately afterwards? Did they say “ah, ok, I’m no longer interested, thanks for your time?” as a direct reply and then unmatch? Or did the conversation continue on for a bit before petering out to silence? If it were the latter, then the odds are that this is correlation; it just happened that the conversation was already winding down by the time you got to that point.

Which actually brings me to the next thing to consider: whether the trigger was your talking about your job, or whether things were already on the downswing and it was a coincidence that this is where it ended. 

For this, you want to look at the overall tone and rhythm of the conversation before you got to the job talk as well as afterwards. Had these women been actively engaged in the conversation, keeping up their end of things or even being enthusiastic as you were talking until someone brought up the topic? Was there a distinct and noticeable vibe shift? Or were things starting to drop off or reach a lull, where their replies were getting less and less involved and you were starting to hurt your back from carrying the entire conversation by yourself? If that was the case, then the odds are that by the time your job came up, then the problem wasn’t your job so much as they were coming to the conclusion that they just weren’t feeling it. What you do for a living wasn’t a deal breaker, or if it was, it wasn’t the sole cause. It’s more likely that this was just the point in the interaction where they decided that they weren’t feeling what they needed to feel to be excited to see you. The fact that it coincides with you talking about what you do for a living was just happenstance. 

If that’s what happened, then you should take a look at the overall tone of the conversations you were having and see where and when the vibe started to shift. It may not have been anything specific – as in, it wasn’t a case of “well if you hadn’t said this particular thing, she’d still be interested” – so much as you weren’t necessarily connecting, didn’t demonstrate that the two of you had enough in common or there was something in there that signaled that maybe you two weren’t a match. Which sucks, but that’s as likely to be an issue of “wrong person” as it is that it’s a problem with you. Online dating means you’re going to face rejection more often and from more people, simply because you’re putting yourself out there more than you would be if you were meeting people in person. And putting yourself out there more often means that you’re going to meet more people who simply aren’t a good fit for you, or you for them, no matter what. 

Now let’s say that yes, it absolutely is the case that the majority of women have dipped out as soon as you mentioned that you work in customer service. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your job is the problem in and of itself. There’re other variables to try to isolate before we assume that the problem is your job.

One of the first is who you’re matching with: are they driven, ambitious professionals in white-collar jobs? Are they entrepreneurs, small business owners or people working in or aspiring to middle class success or higher? Perhaps they’re creatives, who are hoping to make their passion their career but are currently working a day job to make ends meet. Or are they women who are looking to get on the marriage-and-family track right away? If that’s the case, this may well be an incompatibility; they’re looking for someone who’s more or less on the same level as they are or who has ambitions outside of their day job and is demonstrating the drive to achieve those goals. If you’re happy where you are, your needs are more or less met and you don’t feel much of a push to seek something better, then it’s likely that the issue isn’t your job so much as that you don’t match what they’re looking for. And that’s fine; that’s an indicator that you and they were likely not compatible, not in the ways that would be necessary for a long-term match.

Another thing to consider is to look at how talk about your job. Customer service conjures up a wide range of possibilities, from being the person at the big-box retailer processing returns and exchanges to being the voice on the other end of a company’s 800 number, or the chatbot on a company’s webpage. If you’re describing it to your matches the way you did to me, then honestly, you’re painting a very vague picture that doesn’t make it sound terribly appealing and leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

Part of it is that you start off sounding kind of negative about it. You aren’t apologizingfor it, exactly, but you’re treating it as though it were a mark against you, before backtracking to explain why it’s not so bad. By the time you get to “the pay is good, the benefits are gold-plated”, you’ve already set an image in people’s heads and it’s hard to shift that. So I’d start with giving either your job title or a more precise description – “I do X for the Y department of the government” rather than just “customer service”. Talk about what you do, specifically – “I help people with questions about their tax returns” or “I assist people getting access to government programs that they’re entitled to” or whatever the actual description is. You can follow it up with “It’s not the most exciting gig, but the pay is good, the hours are flexible, I can work from home and I get a government benefits package, which is pretty huge.” 

This gives a better idea of what you do without the negative associations that come with “customer service”. While it doesn’t come off like anybody’s dream job, it certainly doesn’t seem like a bad one. But if you’re describing it to your matches the way you describe it to me, then you sound like you’re saying “I work a dead end job,” and all the good parts are going to fade to background noise. As a result, you leave people with the impression that either you’re stuck there and have no prospects or you have no ambition to move on to something better.

Which brings me to my analysis. I don’t think it’s your job, per se; I think it’s about how you’re coming across to other people. While the job itself may be a turn-off for some – more on that in a second, I think that the bigger problem is that you give the impression that you’ve either settled for this and given up, or else you  don’t have the drive to do better. And while I fully get not wanting to give up your benefits – trust me, I’ve seen what state employees get, never mind federal employees – the fact that you’re giving reasons why you’re not looking for another job kind of stands out to me. There’s a difference between “I’m trying to find something better, but the job market sucks” and “I don’t see the point, so I’m not going to bother.” The former indicates that you’ve got initiative and drive but you’re hindered by outside forces. The latter suggests to people that you’re kind of a slacker. Needless to say, one is relatable and the other is… less attractive.

Obviously not everyone needs to be a captain of industry or determined to make it to the C-Suite, and f--k knows that a job with good insurance is worth a lot of frustration. But the issue I think you’re running into is that the way you’re coming across sounds like you’ve given up before you’ve even started and in a manner that’s pretty defensive. To be fair, you’re relating this to me, not to your Hinge match, and it’s possible you’re phrasing things differently. But if I were to pick up a similar vibe from someone I’d matched with on a dating app, I’d start thinking twice about whether I wanted to continue that conversation for much longer.

Now to be clear: I’m not saying that you need to get off your ass and get out into the job market. What I’m saying that the version of you that you’re conveying through your words to me strikes me as a negative. If you’re framing it this way with the people you’re matched with, especially if they’re someone who’s goal oriented or career driven, then it increases the odds that they’re going add a mark in the “minus” column. If that’s the sort of person you’re hoping to match with, then either you need to adjust how you talk about  your job or have other things going on that you can point to that would counterbalance things.

One of the things I recommend for people in lousy jobs is to talk about your ambitions – “yeah, this is what I do to pay the bills and keep my insurance. My real passion is $OTHER_THING_I’M_WORKING_TOWARDS…” and talk a little about how you’re trying to get to that place. You don’t need a grand side hustle or some plan about how you’re going to get rich; you just want to show that you’re doing more than coasting along. Ambition and passion are attractive qualities and demonstrating that you’re actually pursuing those goals tells people that you’re going to be more than just an anchor or worse. You don’t need to be rich or upwardly mobile to date; people just want to know that you’re going to pull your share of the weight. If their goals include things like “having a family”, then that weight’s going to be considerable. Your share of the weight doesn’t have to be financial, but it needs to be something that will help spread the burden around so that no one person is going to collapse under the weight of it all while the other just farts around.

(This, incidentally, is also why you should talk up the benefits when talking about your job. Government insurance plans are no joke; I’ve got people close to me whose health issues would bankrupt their entire family if not for gold-plated insurance from state and federal employment.) 

So TL;DR: don’t make assumptions, look for actual patterns. If it is about your job, pay attention to how you’re talking about it and the impression you’re giving about yourself. You can describe it in a more appealing – and more accurate – way that emphasizes the good parts and why it’s a good fit for you right now. And when you do so, avoid the talk that makes you sound less driven and more resigned; that tends to be a turn off.

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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