DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I feel completely and utterly hopeless. I’m sacred, afraid and have massive inferiority complex about a lot from my body, my desirability and my sexuality.

I’m gonna be upfront: I’m a gooner aka a porn addicted loser, I consume it and even buy it. I think this excessive porn consumption might be the source of a lot of my sense of insecurity and inferiority. That I can’t measure up, that I’ll never score with women like that and I won’t preform like that in bed. Because for once I’m very physically mediocre painfully average sized cock and soft doughy body the Dad bod if you will (a body type that is only truly desired and appreciated by gay men because it’s actually featured in their porn and smut, women who say otherwise have ulterior motives or are small fringe of fetishists) and men of my body type and size are not featured in this porn. Now I have chatted with some of the porn stars, some quite prominent who tell me straight up that size supposedly “doesn’t matter” or that it can “hurt” and they supposedly that they find my soft doughy body attractive. Gonna be honest; I don’t believe them because well their words say one thing but their actions (filming themselves with chiseled men with big members) and well yes *actions speak louder than words.*

On top of that I’m already paranoid about my excessive porn consumption and top use an incredibly nerdy Warhammer reference it’s like I’m falling to the Chaos God Slaanesh where “vanilla” porn doesn’t do it for me and I have crank it more. More spitting, more slapping, more roughness and is it gonna reach the point where I’ll have to engage in auto erotic asphyxiation to at least feel something, I’m not so much “pleasuring myself ” as I am torturing myself because well after having some “post orgasmic clarity” I just feel like s--t and garbage and total loser.

Because frankly I am a totally loser. I’m a virgin at my late 20s perhaps one of my darkest and most shameful secrets. I say that because I feel like if I were to tell someone especially a potential partner she’s gonna react with disgust or humiliation I.E the only logical reactions a woman might have to am older virgin male. Because I highly doubt if I were to open up about my lack of experiences and insecurities with another woman, that she’ll understand cause we’ll women aren’t really shamed, mocked or made fun of for being an older virgin or being inexperienced. That’s just a thing that doesn’t happen, if anything most guys might act pleasantly surprised or even appreciate it. So yes I want the experience but with my virginity status and my gooner brain I feel like I’m completely tied down and idk what to do.

What do I do Doc? How do I break these chains of doubt and addiction? How do I stop feeling like such a worthless loser?

Sincerely

Hedonist of Slaanesh

DEAR HEDONIST OF SLAANESH: One of the things that’s interesting about being in the Advice Column Industrial Complex is that if you’re in it for long enough, you truly start to understand what “there’s nothing new under the sun” means. I’ve been writing this column for more than 13 years now (Jesus, time is a weird soup) and in that time, I’ve noticed how many letters fall into particular genres, each with their own tropes and recurring motifs.

Regular readers will be familiar with the classic “I’m Too Ugly To Date (Except I’m Really Average At Best)” and it’s cousin “Women Only Want One Kind of Man (And It’s Not Me And That’s Not Fair)”. Some connoisseurs may think of the “I Have A Crush On A Celebrity, How Do I Get Them To Date Me?” And of course, we have the “Porn Makes Me A Bad Person” genre, which, unsurprisingly, tends to spike as we get closer to No-Nut November which – in a Christmas Creep kind of way – has been leaking out of containment with the advent of Locktober.

Now where things get interesting is the Venn diagram of what so many of these letters have in common: a perpetual Fallacy of Asymmetric Insight – the belief that while we are a mystery shrouded in an enigma wrapped in a crunchy shell, women are an open book and guys know them better than they know themselves – spawned by listening to Accepted Wisdom from other dudes who learned it at the feet of still other dudes who haven’t talked to women and a stunning lack of media literacy.

(And continuing the “nothing new under the sun” theme, in the days before Reddit, YouTube and TikTok the Accepted Wisdom used to be passed down from random slapdick older brothers and cousins sharing the wisdom they learned from the magazines they found in the woods. The only difference is the medium, not the message.)   

I bring this up, HoS, because… well, that lack of media literacy is precisely the issue here. I’m going to forgo my usual “porn addiction isn’t actually A Thing” rant – God knows I’ve got enough examples in the archives to paper my office bathroom. I will also skip over the part about dad bods or the fact that “average” penis size means that you have the same penis as the majority of men, and instead say that yes, you’re correct: porn is why you have body issues and insecurity.

Not, mind you, because you watch and masturbate to porn. No, it’s in no small part because somehow you really don’t understand how porn works… which is an extension of not understanding how media works in general.

Oh and also not understanding what logic is or assuming you know how women think despite not actually interacting with them. So… Yahtzee!

So let’s start with something obvious: porn sex is to real sex as The Fast and the Furious movies are to driving. There’re superficial similarities in as much as some of what you see on screen resembles those activities, but in practice are nothing like what any reasonable person would expect in the real world. Dom Toretto is driving in as much as there’s a steering wheel, a gear shift, a gas pedal, brake and something that at least looks like a car with four wheels and an engine. But you would be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that cars work on Road Runner physics where, as long as there’s something under the wheels, the car can still drive forward without issue (or at least until Wile E. Coyote looks down).

The same goes with porn: it’s “sex” in as much as bits are going into other bits. But everything else is the sort of thing that you only see in porn and trying to bust those moves in the real world will result in “ow, what the hell are you doing?”, “stop it, I’m getting a cramp” and “No, seriously, beating the s--t out of my cervix/colon isn’t fun”, not oohs, aaahs and paroxysms of pleasure.

The difference between porn sex and real sex is what’s present in porn that’s absent in actual sex: the camera, the director, the editor and the audience.

(Most of the time, anyway. I’m not here to yuk folks’ yum.)

Everything you see in porn is there because of those unseen co-stars, lurking around like black-clad stage hands in Noh plays; you may know they’re there intellectually but part of the agreement between show and audience is that you pretend that you don’t see them.

The problem arises when folks – like you, HoS – forgot about that agreement.

Take, for example, the various contorted poses that porn actors f—k in. Nobody has sex like that by choice, even if they have the hypermobility of a Cirque Du Soleil acrobat. That “Standing on one leg, the other leg to the side, torso twisted the other way, arm held back” pretzel position isn’t because that pose makes it easier to stimulate the clitoris and g-spot at the same time, it’s because the actors are trying to be “open to the camera”. That is, they’re trying to show all the actors’ bits so that the audience can see that they’re actually f—king instead of apparently being pleasured by someone’s belly-button.

The same goes for the “money shot”. The purpose of ejaculating on one’s co-star isn’t because women love getting hit in the eye with something the consistency of warm, salty mayo, it’s to emphasize that yes, someone actually came. Occasionally with hints of domination and degradation for flavor… but mostly to emphasize that they are actually having sex.

In the days when porn was being shot on film (and later on video), when resolution was closer to “viewed through a grease-smeared window”, seeing someone finish on the actress’ face was far more visible than filling whatever orifice happened to be in use in the scene. The grooming aspects of porn – many of which were actually adopted from gay pornography – is, likewise, about visibility. Less pubic hair means that penises look bigger, vulvas are more prominent and the close ups – to borrow from Robin Williams – don’t look like “an industrial film covered in fur”.  

I would also draw attention to what doesn’t happen in those sex scenes: there’s on meaningful foreplay. There’s no discussion about what they want to do, what kind of sex they’re in the mood for or even if they’re not feeling it at that moment. There’re no pausing to get a condom or lube, or to reapply lube midway through. In fact, condoms are only used when it’s legally mandated and lube is almost never “necessary”, except to give someone’s breasts or butt a shine like a freshly detailed Coupe de Ville. Nobody fails to orgasm, or ejaculates too soon or realizes that it’s just not going to happen for love nor money nor apple sauce. Nor do the participants complain about how long they’ve been penetrated and how it’s starting to chafe or their muscles are giving out.

Shifting positions comes from the desire to keep the audience from getting bored, not because someone is uncomfortable or needs a different angle or their legs are getting tired. Nor are there the times of someone having to sneeze, no giggling, farting, smacking something against the head board or nightstand, the cat jumping onto the bed at precisely the wrong moment or any of the other little imperfections that demonstrate how silly and absurd it all can be…

You know, those little moments that remind us of our humanity and all its attendant weirdness and how wonderful it is.

Nothing that happens on screen – even in amateur porn or “real world” sex videos – is happening organically. All of it is planned, blocked and staged specifically to appeal to the unseen participant: the audience. And 99.9999999% of porn is designed to cater specifically to a straight cis male audience. While there’re plenty of women who enjoy and actively consume porn, every decision made and everything you see, from the scenario to the positions, the acts, the actors, even the camera angles is made with that straight male audience in mind.

I mean, s--t, just look at the hands of actresses who do girl on girl scenes – specifically, their finger nails. No woman who sleeps with other women on the regular is going to have a manicure like that, for what I would hope are obvious reasons. Those scenes aren’t meant for bi, pan or gay women, they’re meant for men who want to see two women together.

Those ripped, muscular Adonis’ are the avatar for the audience… and they’re a fairly recent evolution of the aesthetic. Go back and watch some vintage porn and you’ll see dudes who look a lot more like your dad than Olympic swimmers or muscle twinks. They look like that so that the men watching can fantasize about being those men. So, those ripped muscular bodies? Those are there for men. Those massive penises? They’re there for men. The camera focusing on said dicks or the loving depictions of semen – including the volume, color and consistency – are all there because that’s what the straight male audience wants to see. You will literally never find anyone more obsessed with penises or ejaculate than straight men.

Those female porn stars you talked to aren’t lying to you, nor are their actions  “speaking louder than words” because unless they’re the producer and director, they aren’t choosing who to shoot a scene with. They are told who they’re shooting with, and occasionally they don’t find out until they get to the set.

In fact, there was a point where actresses in porn had to fight to have clauses in their contracts that excluded specific actors (such as Ron Jeremy, James Deen and others), so they wouldn’t find themselves paired up with them. And not – to forestall the obvious objections – just because they’re unattractive, but because a lot of those guys are violent rapists.

And even when the actresses are shooting and filming their own work, if they’re catering to a straight male audience, they still have pressure to pick guys with a particular look because that’s what the men consuming their porn want to see. There are distinct financial incentives to conforming to those aesthetics and risks for not doing so.

So, as with so many other issues that cause insecurity in men, if we were to pull the Scooby-Doo mask off the boogan, we would see that – say it with me folks – it was capitalism all along.

So, yes, porn is at least in part responsible for your insecurities. But it’s responsible in that you don’t seem to understand the artificial and constructed nature of it all. Instead, you’ve convinced yourself that this is what sex is like, what women want and expect and that it’s the yardstick against which all things are measured. That’s not a porn problem, that’s a you problem.

Everything else you talk about spirals out from there. Porn isn’t making you choose more “extreme” videos (and trust me, slapping, spitting and the rest barely counts as extreme), you’re seeking out stuff that is scratching a very particular need. Whether that need is seeing the women you supposedly “will never” get with be degraded or whether you’re doing it to degrade yourself, this is about you, not about what your porn “addiction” is doing. It’s about how you feel about yourself, an expression of psychic self-harm. All you’re doing is engaging in an eroticized loop of arousal and punishment; you get hard, you get off, you punish yourself for engaging in the things you’re into. Before long, the punishment becomes the reason why you do it.

The remainder of your complaints – about being an older virgin, about what women “really” want or would or wouldn’t accept all likewise come from that core of your own self-esteem and an unwillingness to believe otherwise. You make lofty declarations about what “logically” must be true, not only is there no logic, but you have absolutely no basis of comparison. You’re making assumptions based on nothing except what you imagine things would be like if you were a woman. If you think that no woman has been mocked or shamed or felt shame for being an older virgin or being inexperienced or not liking sex, then you definitely haven’t talked to women. S--t, you can find examples of women who feel shame about their inexperience in the letters to this column. And that’s before we get to other sex advice columns like Dan Savage, Therapy Jeff, Jessica Stoya and others.

All you’re doing is begging the question – assuming the inherent truth of the claim in the question you’re asking, instead of questioning whether it’s even true in the first place. And it’s not. You’re making these grand, unverified declarations because they “feel” true to you and the only reason why they “feel” true is because you need them to be in order to make yourself feel worse. As I said: past a certain degree, the punishment becomes the point. You dislike yourself and so you have created a world that makes disliking yourself not just permissible but mandatory. All of the self-shaming in your letter – calling yourself a gooner, lovingly describing your body in diminishing and dismissive terms, emphasizing the supposed shame of being an older virgin – is in service of continuing to commit self-harm.

So what do you do about it? Well, it’s not every often I say this but the first step is put down the porn and back away slowly. Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with porn (and trust me, there is… but none of it has anything to do with your issues), but because you have proven that you can’t use it responsibly. It’s just the tool you’re using to hurt yourself.

The same is true of the online communities you are very clearly a part of. Trust me, I can smell a no-fapper like a fart in church, especially when it’s paired with incel bulls--t. Reddit is clearly not a good place for you, and as is so often the case, the answer to “doctor, doctor, it hurts when I go like this” is “well, stop going like that.”

The second step is that you need to get to therapy right the f—k now. You’ve spent years cementing this outlook to the point where you are actively accusing people of being liars or closet fetishists in order to avoid the possibility that you are wrong and this is all one long, continuous self-inflicted injury. This isn’t the sort of thing that you can shift with some visualization and affirmation exercises. You need an experienced therapist to bring a jackhammer and a pickaxe to start breaking away the protective shell you’ve built up and expose the meaty underbelly of your true self and actually start confronting these issues.

And before you say it – because I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord – this isn’t proof of how f—ked up you are. This is simply that you’ve been doing this for so long and so deliberately that you’re going to need someone with experience to help you fix it. Getting help is no more proof that you’re a loser than going to the doctor because you need a broken bone to be set properly; it’s not something you should be doing on your own.

Yeah, it’s going to make you feel worse before you feel better. But that’s the discomfort of lancing an infected boil, the sting of having to squeeze out the puss and the burn of the alcohol to disinfect the wound. Because that’s what this all is; these self-negating, self-harming beliefs are an infection that’s set in and you’ve been feeding it instead of treating it. So now the treatment is going to suck that much more.

But while you may come out the other side feeling weak and trembling… for the first time in a long time, possibly the first time that you’ll remember, you won’t be hurting. 

But none of that can happen until you’re willing to admit that maybe you’re wrong about all of this and to go get help.

The choice is yours.

Good luck.

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 tried to search for that sort of thing on this site, but I can’t find anything about it. This is unusual because the internet is literally full with it. Especially Reddit.

Now I saw that women claim that they wouldn’t leave their boyfriend just because he lost in a fight but they never claim that it actually happened and they stayed together after it. Also they tend to say that the fighting ability of their boyfriend doesn’t concern them in the slightest, especially because he can’t escort them every time they go outside. So the latter means that they have to be able to handle themselves anyway, so they can do it the same way even if their boyfriend is there with them.

But then there are the cases where the belligerent is actually targeting the boyfriend for a fight so he won’t stop the harassment and the woman can’t get him to stop unless she is willing to use force to do it. There are other cases too where the woman starts something with a man only to drag her boyfriend into a fight (usually inadvertently as she doesn’t realize that he might get attacked if she antagonizes the wrong kind of guy). This applies to guy friends too who is only a friend of the woman, like that case here that you answered ten or so years ago (it’s under the “protector” category)

So do you think women won’t end the relationship just because the boyfriend loses a fight? I mean Reddit is literally flooded with this issue, you can check it for yourself if you want to.

The main reason I’m asking this is because I’m really into self-defense, so I know how easy it is to die in a fight. (Or end up paralyzed, brain damaged, with organ damage, PTSD, imprisoned, you name it.) Also anyone who is into self-defense, martial arts, combat sports and the like will tell you that they go to great lengths to avoid fights because of the danger involved.

BTW the women I know form SD think the same way about fights as I do. They too use every pre-violence SD method in order to avoid fights. (Sit. Awareness, moving away, tactical retreat, de-escalation, etc)

I Know Kung Fu

DEAR I KNOW KUNG FU: I’m going to level with you IKF: I was really tempted to keep this letter for another lightning round column and save this for the “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” slot.

But I haven’t. Because after having to actually dig in, untangle this mess and figure out what the hell you were talking about, I decided that there’s enough here that ties into classic, toxic and restrictive ideas of masculinity that it’s worth addressing. And considering the number of suburban commandos that feel like they need to wear 8k worth of ill-fitting battle-rattle in order to feel safe going to Costco after spending tens of thousands of dollars to go to Navy SEAL fantasy camp and dudes who hold elaborate, detailed fantasies about home invasions, talking about guys who pretend that the world runs on Conan The Barbarian rules feels relevant.

Let’s start with the really obvious: the reason why you can’t find anything about this in my archives is because what you’re talking about is bugf—k nuts. This isn’t A Thing. This is the sort of “guys talking to other guys who pretend to have talked to girls who said that Ferris’ girlfriend dumped him for getting knocked out at the 31 Flavors last night” sort of s--t that continues to convince the impressionable, gullible and terminally online that masculinity is in crisis and that the only people who are dating or having sex are six and a half foot tall Vikings who wear Audemars Piguet Royal Oaks and drive McLarens, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The fact that it’s “all over the Internet” (it isn’t) and “especially Reddit” (surprise surprise surprise) isn’t proof that I’m somehow missing or ignoring the story, it’s telling me exactly what accounts you’re following on TikTok and YouTube.

Let’s start with some stats first, because these are going to be relevant. We’ll run with the stats from the Pew Research Center, which tells us that crime in general and violent crime in particular in the US are at historic lows, and have been on a downward trend since the 1990s when they were at their peak. According to the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime in general has dropped 49% from 1993 to 2022 and aggravated assault specifically has dropped 39%. The most common form of crimes people experience are property crime, specifically larceny theft, motor vehicle theft and burglary; violent crime comes fourth, with 268 incidents per 100,000 people and robbery comes fifth at 61 incidents per 100,000. Compare this to larceny, which occurs at a rate of 1402 incidents per 100,000 people.

And while there was an uptick of violent crime in 2020 – not terribly surprising considering how people lost their s--t at being told that they should maybe hold off on going to Applebee’s for a couple weeks – even that is down 2.8% as of 2023 and simple assault against men decreased from 9.5 per 1,000 people in 2022 to 6.9 per 1,000 people in 2023. The site Statstia provides a visualization showing just how steep the drop in violent crime has been within our lifetime.

(Amusingly, there’s very good reason to believe that much of this change is entirely down to reduced lead poisoning after leaded gasoline was banned in the 70s.)

I bring this up because reality is starkly different from the world view of would-be Billy Badasses who want to imagine that they’re the only thing standing between their family and the roving gangs of Riffs, Rogues, Boppers and Baseball Furies from The Warriors. The idea of “man as protector” that you bring up is based entirely around scenarios that are so rare that you would literally have better odds of winning the Powerball.

This is the reason why you see women saying that they’re not going to leave their boyfriend if he lost a fight, and why you don’t see corresponding reports of women saying “well my guy got in a fight and I’m still with him.” It’s not that women are lying and just omitting the time they dumped a guy because he got KO’d leaving the bar at closing time, it’s because the likelihood of getting into a fight like that is very f—king low. It requires a belief that the world looks like Kamurocho in the Yakuza series and assuming that people are much more violent than they actually are. This is, in fact, one of the most missed points of Fight Club: when Tyler Durden gives his crew instructions to go pick a fight and deliberately lose, the biggest challenge is getting other people to fight them.

The idea that women want a man who’s a “protector” isn’t about some belief that the world is only held at bay by men willing to do furious violence, it’s misunderstanding that women want someone who’s going to take care of their family and participate in keeping them safe. But safety doesn’t mean “from violence”; in fact, all of the fantasies these dudes LARP over don’t actually reflect the actual threats to their family’s health, safety and well-being. The men who talk about how they would do anything to “protect” their girlfriends, wives or families will make a lot of fuss about being willing to shoot to kill during a theoretical home invasion, but won’t lift a finger to do laundry (cut down on the spread of disease), make sure their kids brush their teeth and get comprehensive dental care (one of the most common causes of death in the poor and underprivileged) or even making sure there’re no guns in the house (one of the biggest predictors of someone dying of gun violence).

Strange how protection seems to only mean “I get to inflict violence on other people,” not “I will make sure that my family is safe from the things that pose actual risks to my family’s health, safety and well-being”. It is a case, as PJ O’Rourke famously said, of “everyone wants to save the world, but nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”

It’s all part and parcel with the idea that one’s measure of being “a real man” is one’s willingness and capability of inflicting violence on others. And since being “a real man” is theoretically supposed to come with rewards of hot and cold running sex, there’s an inherent need to believe that women desire this in their partners, much as they supposedly exclusively desire a man with a 600 HP car (that can’t fit a single bag of groceries anywhere in the trunk). As always, the source is “dude, trust me”, strip-mall Spartans, sub-Reddits and some chinless goniff selling them an MLM and tanning their asshole as the path to “true manhood”.

You know who these dudes forgot to check with? Women. Women who are actually dating men and not trying to get in on the manfluencer grift. As I said: the reason why you keep seeing women saying “actually, I’m not really concerned with whether my boyfriend is the best fighter in the province” is because that’s not a thing they’re looking for. They’re not expecting Frank Dux to win the Kumite for them or waiting for someone to defeat their seven evil exes or even prove that they’re the toughest man in Letterkenny, and they’re not looking to recreate scenes from The Bodyguard.

This has far more to do with guys feeling like they aren’t wanted and thus have to be needed… and assume that this would conveniently include the violence they’re supposed to be ready, willing and able to inflict at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile, women aren’t worried about dudes jumping their boyfriend at the bar or hoping for a man who’ll go challenge catcallers to a duel for her honor. In fact, a guy who’s really good and eager to do violence is probably going to be a threat, not a protector. Women have far more reason to worry about their partners slapping them around than whether they know how to react to Bob the Goon leaping out from a dark alley.

(For real fun, go look up the domestic abuse rates of police officers.)

And it’s kind of telling that you’re not extrapolating from people’s responses so much as inventing s--t out of whole cloth and late night movies on basic cable. I mean, even if we leave out the Cynthia Rothrock of it all (“they have to be able to handle themselves anyway”), the whole “woman started s--t with another guy so now her boyfriend is getting dragged into the mess”, while marginally popular in b-tier schlock movies from the 90s, is not often found in Washington D.C. ��Or Atlanta. Or Couer d’Alene. Or Minneapolis. Or Saratoga Springs or Midlothean or Daytona or Chicago or… well you get my point.

The fact of the matter is that you’re begging the question; you’re starting from the premise that this is true rather than questioning why you think this would be the case in the first place. The fact that you don’t have examples of it is being taken as evidence that it must be happening because surely someone would say that “well it happened to me and I still love my boyfriend” as opposed to, say, dealing with the trauma of having watched her boyfriend being the victim of a violent assault.

Now I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is able to pull up a specific example of a woman dumping her boyfriend because he lost a fight. Not because he’s someone who gets into fights, or who’s violent by nature, but specifically because he lost a fight. In a population of billions, you’re gonna find some weirdos. Humanity is amazing that way. But quite frankly, all of this sounds like an attempt to retroactively justify how “being into self-defense” makes you attractive when it doesn’t seem to actually be moving the needle for you.

Were I you, I’d worry a lot less about theoretical women dumping you for trying to avoid a fight and focus a lot more on developing your social skills and charisma instead. And if you really want to burnish up your “protector of women” credentials, maybe go help people who are going to be affected by the incoming administration get access to reproductive health care.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Hi, it’s me again. I left a question earlier this year about my polyamorous boyfriend calling me controlling and now I’m back. I eventually broke up with him, reluctantly, and we were mad at each other for a while. But he told me he was sorry, and I said I was willing to try polyamory again.

That was clearly stupid. He shunned me a bit, and I broke up with him, to his later comments of “I was planning to break up with you soon anyway. She and I never have arguments like I do with you.” (that hypocritical butt. Like 2 weeks later he had three arguments with her in a row.) And also, before the first time he announced he was poly, he had spent a week trying to convince me that he didn’t like her.

Anyway, (you can clearly see I have ADHD) we became friends again and he helped me with my problems.

Then, at the beginning of this year, I realized I liked my best friend who lives pretty close. Just to get it off my chest, I told my ex-bf that I still liked him. I don’t know if I really do still like him, I just liked our relationship. I had a pretty terrible, abusive relationship before him, and he was like the only person I didn’t lose feelings for halfway through. So anyway, he tells me he doesn’t like me back, and I get set up with my best friend by a mutual friend of ours, and we start dating. Dating her feels more comfortable than being friends because for some reason it was always kind of awkward. It’s like it was meant to be.

About a week into our relationship, my ex texts me and says he still loves me, and is losing feelings for his girlfriend (who was the one he was dating while dating me) As you can imagine, I was like, REALLY MAN? I accidentally let it slip to his girlfriend later that he was losing feelings for her, and she was mad at him. I told her that it was better to break up than be in a failing relationship, and they broke up. Now, back to my relationship.

As much as I love her, I’m now for some reason starting to lose feelings for (my best friend). I want our relationship to be like the one with my ex before it went bad. But I know if I break up with her, the rest of our whole EXISTENCE together will be awkward and we might not even be friends. It’s so hard to avoid each other since we have a lot of the same classes. I don’t want our friendship to fail, but she’s also a great girlfriend (though she sometimes can be embarrassing). I’m kind of lonely in life, and my close friend group is crumbling. Most of us just date each other, scared to branch out. So yeah. In conclusion, my life is, well, a tornado would be an understatement.

I know this is a lot of questions and a lot to unpack, but HELP.

Life Is Like A Hurricane

DEAR LIFE IS LIKE A HURRICANE: I’ll be real, LILAH: it sounds like things are kind of a hot-mess express right now and maybe you should be dealing with that instead. Sometimes the problems we become most concerned with aren’t the ones we need to prioritize; they’re just the ones that just feel more important either because they’re the most recent or simply because they feel like one we can actually get our hands around.

The thing is: those problems tend to be symptoms rather than root causes, reflections of the real issue that just seem more manageable because they’re not so systematic. They’re often much simpler than they feel, but we put greater importance on them because we feel like maybe we actually can resolve those, even though there’re bigger and much more impactful issues lurking behind them.

I bring this up because you drop a couple pretty big clues about the real issues in the end of your letter: you feel lonely and you feel like your social circle is falling apart. And to be blunt, I think the group has already fallen apart; it’s just that nobody wants to admit it. 

And to be even blunter,  it sounds to me like some of this is a self-inflicted problem. Your situation with your ex-boyfriend is a prime example. I stand by what I said in your previous letter: I have no idea why in pluperfect f--kery you were dating him and why you’ve tried to stay friends afterwards considering the way you’ve both behaved. He’s either not able to be honest with himself or with you about how he feels and he seems to be stuck in a loop of wanting whichever person he ditched the last time. You on the other hand aren’t covering yourself in glory, either. I’m sorry but I’m going to have to call bulls--t on your ‘accidental’ disclosure that he was supposedly losing feelings for his girlfriend. You decided to chuck a bomb into his relationship, apparently out of spite for the way he’s been behaving and frankly that’s not cool. Even in a poly relationship, it’s not your place to get involved, especially since you had already decided you weren’t interested in seeing him again. Especially when you’re already feeling hurt by his seeming inability to decide who he actually wants to date and why.  

And look, I get it. I’ve got ADHD as well, I know how rejection-sensitive dysphoria can f--k with you and how ADHD plays merry havoc with impulse control. I can also see where the desire to be a chaos goblin with a vengeful streak can be very appealing. But this is precisely the sort of s--t that’s going to cause friend groups to fall apart. If the rest of your social circle is composed of similar drama llamas, I’m not exactly surprised that you’re locked in a cycle of dating Gotterdammerung. 

But the issue with your current girlfriend – and to an extent, your ex-boyfriend – is pretty simple and rather obvious in its simplicity. In and of itself, the problem is that you may be attracted to your friend, but you rounded that attraction up to “love” when there simply wasn’t enough there to sustain it. Under other circumstances, you might’ve had a one-off hook-up or a quick fling and learned that you weren’t compatible in the long-term. But because you were on a mission, you invested far too much and made things complicated.

And this was something you could’ve avoided if you addressed the actual underlying problem. You hit on the issue yourself at multiple points in your letter: you don’t want your ex-boyfriend back so much as you want The Relationship (in capital letters), and you thought your best friend would be able to replace him like an understudy filling the role when the original performer is unavailable. This is an almost literal example of trying to shove someone, anyone into a hole marked “Relationship”, regardless of whether they actually fit. When your ex-boyfriend couldn’t stop being an indecisive flake, you tried with the next easiest candidate and, surprise surprise, it’s not working there, either. But because you made this A Production, now your friendship with her is at risk too.

You’re lonely. I get it, I really do. I empathize with that. You want to stop feeling lonely and, like everyone else, you want to love and be loved. The problem is that you’re focused on The Relationship and not on people you might want to have a relationship with and unfortunately, that’s not going to work. The Relationship you’re thinking about – the one you theoretically had with your ex and want to find again – really only exists in your head. It’s not going to manifest in the real world, no matter how much you will it to, because you’re trying to cast people to play parts, not actually dating them. If you were to let things develop organically instead, you might find someone you could actually connect with. But then it wouldn’t be the exact Relationship you’re imagining; it would be a different beast entirely.

Here’s the thing: you’re lonely and you’re worried that your group of friends is about to crumble and leave you even more alone than you feel now. That’s the bigger issue at hand. I think you would do much better to stop worrying about dating and focus more on why your circle is falling apart and what can be done about it. And the answer may well be “nothing”; you may be in a period where this group simply cannot stay together the way that things currently stand and part of what you’ll need is to learn the lessons about why it crumbled so that you can avoid those mistakes the next time around. Owning your own part in it will be important. So too will recognizing how others contributed. If you can take those lessons, apply them and let them be an opportunity to grow, you may find yourself in a better position to build and grow a new network – one that’s stronger, more resilient and less prone to drama.

In the meantime, I think you may need to let your romantic relationship with your bestie simmer down while you process these lessons and deal with these feelings. If you want to be with her, you should be with her because you want to be with her specifically, not because you simply don’t want to be alone. That’s not fair to either of you, and that’s the sort of thing that will damage a friendship beyond the point of repair.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “you have to put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others with theirs”. Well, this is one of those times. You need to sort out your s--t – processing your understandable complicated feelings about your ex and your behavior with him, your feelings for your BFF, your anxieties about your social circle – before you worry about actually dating. Otherwise, you’re going to run into the same problems over and over again. The only difference will be the faces they’re wearing at the time.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com