DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve known this couple for about 3 years, and we’ve done a lot of things together through the years. Being their third wheel was never a problem, and I love them both. They were there with me during some of the hardest times of my life in work, dating, or other crises. They were my people, and I always looked forward to the weekends when I’d go to theirs for a movie night, play games, or paint with them. It was the best.

They broke up recently. I had tried to help them through their rough patches, as I’ve been divorced and raked over the coals in dating plenty of times. At the end of it all, they just weren’t compatible. At least not anymore.

Here’s where things got really complicated. These two have been in my life for so long at this point that I didn’t want to just pick a side and abandon the other. They both have requested to hang out individually with me and I’ve obliged. He told me he acknowledges that she and I will get close, and that he’s dating other women and that he’s moved on from the whole thing. Meanwhile, she’s admitted to feelings for me and we did end up sleeping together during a recent hang out.

I feel conflicted. I feel like a snake that played some long con that I never intended to play. She’s such a beautiful person, and we bonded through the years on our love for education, language, art, and our history of the same spiritual practices. It’s made the sex and intimacy otherworldly, and we just physically click in every way we’ve tried. Even our love languages intermingle well.

She’s emphasized that we’re two consenting adults doing adult things together, and that it’s our business, not anyone else’s. I can’t argue with that logic. She’s told me that she’s moved on, that they just weren’t compatible. She seems to understand why I feel conflicted, too.

I guess it’s just that whole question of where is the line drawn? Are we in the wrong for indulging ourselves with each other, and engaging in romance and intimacy together? Have I put myself into a horrible corner that will fracture my social circle? Or, as she’s put it, are we just two adults doing adult things, and that’s our business?

I never felt this way until she and I started spending more time alone together. It just felt different. I just feel like I won’t be able to look him in the eye anymore, and God forbid if he finds out.

I’m With Jesse’s Girl

DEAR I’M WITH JESSE’S GIRL: One of the things I’ve talked about before is how motivated reasoning can be a motherf--ker. The issue is that you start from a particular position or have an outcome that you want or expect and work backwards to justify it. It’s an issue that comes up in dating and relationships fairly frequently; you will see people start from the position that meeting someone is impossible or that women want X or Y and then come up with absurd examples or hypothetical scenarios that are so unlikely that you’d have better odds of winning the Powerball AND Mega Millions at the same time.

Well, that’s part of what you’re dealing with here, IWJG. This is one of those problems that’s only a problem because you’re expecting it to be one and everything is spinning out from there. You’ve created a scenario in your mind were somehow, unbeknownst to you, you’ve been plotting and planning for this exact moment.

Well, let me ask you something in all sincerity: which seems more reasonable to you? That somehow you are secretly Littlefinger, carefully nudging things and biding your time until circumstances lead to you finally getting what you want, or that you’ve been spending time with someone who shares a lot of your values and passions and has a similar background and a mutual attraction has developed organically?

While you mull that over, I’d point out that propinquity – the tendency to start relationships with people you spend the most time with – is one of the strongest and most underappreciated aspects of attraction. Considering that you’ve been hanging out with both of them for a long time and with her on an individual basis since the breakup, I wouldn’t say that this was inevitable, but one or both of you catching feelings to some degree is hardly a surprise. So I think you can give yourself a break on that count.

The next thing I would point out is that getting worked up about this and how your friend would feel is basically denying agency to his ex/your current snugglebunny. She’s hardly a naif or some babe in the woods to your big bad wolf. I have to agree with her on this: you’re both consenting single adults, doing the things that single consenting adults do. This really isn’t anyone’s business, and anyone who has a problem with it are welcome to keep that information to themselves. This includes any busybodies in your social circle who might feel like this is some grand betrayal. They’re welcome to think whatever they want, but their opinions only matter in as much as you allow them to. Relationships aren’t democracies; people can have opinions, but they don’t have a vote.

But even if you weren’t being a snake in the grass this entire time, what about bro code? What about your bro’s feelings? Aren’t you betraying him by being with her?

Well… what about them? I realize this is a stance that gets people annoyed at me, but… yeah, he may be your buddy, but this is no longer any of his business. They broke up. I’ve long said that you can’t call dibs on people and the corollary to that is that there’s also no rule of “I licked it and now it’s mine forever.” The fact that they used to date might – and I stress might – be temporarily awkward, but they are no longer a couple. There’s no more expectation of exclusivity and neither of them has the right to decide who the other can date or sleep with. Even if your bro has opinions about your seeing her, he doesn’t get a vote. The only people who get a say in who she sees going forward is her and the person she’s seeing. Which in this case, is you.

Just as importantly, he’s practically signed off on this hook up anyway. He told you in no uncertain terms that he expected this to happen and that he’s dating other people. He said, straight up, that he has moved on. He may not be standing on the flight deck, guiding you in for a landing but he certainly made it clear he’s not standing in the way either. If he discovers that no, he was only cool with it in the abstract… well, that’s a him problem, not a you problem, and it’s for him to deal with. And hopefully he’s got the emotional intelligence and maturity to recognize that rather than making it something for you to handle.

Will this fracture your social circle? I don’t know. People can get weird about the damndest things. I remember people I know who had an honest-to-god summit in order to hash out a couple’s break up and decide the best way to handle it, who got to stay and who got to go. The key, however, was that everyone involved wasn’t even of legal drinking age. I would assume that you all aren’t in high-school, and you’ve gotten over high-school drama, but for some folks, high-school never ends.

Should you conduct your affairs (as it were) as though that were the case? Absolutely the f--k not. I could see this being a concern if one or the other person were a monster during the relationship or the way they behaved during the breakup was especially heinous. But from what you’ve said, it was a fairly amicable and clean break: they were compatible until they weren’t and so they ended things. If other people think that it’s wrong, somehow, for a single woman to sleep with a single man simply because they were all in the same social circle, then I don’t know what to tell you except maybe you need friends with more emotional maturity than a high-school junior.

But honestly, nobody’s opinion, mine included, matters here. The only ones that do are yours and hers. You and she have found happiness together and that’s no small thing. Maybe this will be a fling like a comet – bright as it streaks across the sky but gone in the blink of an eye. Maybe this will be a love to last the ages. Either way, you don’t need to borrow trouble from the future. The fact is that right now you and she have something that brings you both joy and comfort; giving that up because of brain weasels and hypotheticals would be a low-down crying shame.

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’m 42 now. About a year ago, my relationship of five years ended. She broke up with me over sexual incompatibility issues, and likely other ones she never told me about, either before or after the breakup.

She had variously identified as ace or demisexual. I am very much not, but I absolutely respected her boundaries and never pushed for sexual contact. She occasionally (4-8 months) would ask me what I was missing from the relationship; while I always said it was just sex, I was always extremely clear that I was comfortable with her taking her time to figure herself out.

Six months before she broke up with me, she decided she would go to a specialist therapist to find herself out. I supported her throughout this, including financially. She decided that she did not want to have sex, ever, and broke up with me.

After she moved out, however, she told me that she had already decided she was going to break up with me two years prior. This information absolutely devastated me. Not immediately, but over the past year, I have recontextualized many incidents and I feel somewhat betrayed. Not only that, I had asked her about them at the time, and she assured me that all was fine and I had nothing to worry about. I no longer really trust my reading of other people now.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be alone. Online dating is absolutely awful in my area. Women my age are either politically incompatible or have children in their teens to early adulthood, and I do not want to get into that kind of situation at all. Younger women (as in early 30s) don’t really seem to be interested in men my age, or also are politically incompatible. I’m most certainly not a conservative, and I absolutely cannot date a conservative either.

My friends are close to my age, and they’re almost all married or in stable relationships, and so are their friends. I’m not as able to get into hobby spaces, and the ones I’m more interested in (models and painting them) are very much more male dominated than not, and I straight up do not want to be “that guy” either, so I am avoiding talking to women at hobby spaces because I don’t want to risk putting anyone off of a hobby they enjoy.

I just don’t know. Maybe I’m being overly paranoid. Maybe I’m giving up too soon on online dating. But I feel terribly alone, and I just don’t have any tools to solve that issue.

All By Myself

DEAR ALL BY MYSELF: This is an awful experience and I’m so sorry you’re going through this, ABM. I know this feels like the world is ending and everything feels hopeless and pointless. But I promise you, it’s not nearly as bad as you think.

The first thing I think you need to keep in mind is that you are still neck deep in dealing with the shock of it all. One of the things that we don’t talk about when long-term relationships end is what it does to our sense of self. For several years, you weren’t just one person; you had adapted your life to incorporate another person into it. It’s easy to think that this just means sharing space with another person or having to factor them into your weekend plans, but in practice it means that you both restructured your life around having this partner with you. It goes beyond managing your social calendar or having someone to split the rent and chores; it means that every aspect of your life has been rearranged to accommodate the fact that there’re two of you now, not just one.

When you go to the grocery store, you’re taking your partners’ tastes and preferences and restrictions into consideration, not just yours. You factor their schedule into all the mundanities of life alongside yours. Gotta call the HVAC service to look at your furnace? You and your partner have to work out who can be around to let them in and show them where everything is. Gotta take the car in for an oil change? Well, maybe they can give you a lift. Want to go on vacation? The two of you are figuring out places you both want to go.

It’s really not hyperbole to suggest that this is very akin to someone losing a limb and having to adjust not just to the loss, but to the changes that you have to make because of it. You have these habits and routines and decisions that you’ve been making for so long that they’ve become muscle memory, things you do without thinking. But now suddenly she’s not there and her absence makes it clear just how much you lost. Not just her physical presence, but all the aspects of your life that she had become a part of. All those little things that you never really thought about, up until things changed and you realize just how much of a hole that she’s left.

Everything you did for half a decade was based around the expectation that your partner was part of the equation, in ways both large and obvious but also small, subtle and easily forgettable… right up until you get smacked in the space by their absence.

So right now, you’re having to relearn who you are without her and how to live as just one person again, instead of half of a couple. That’s hard. It takes time, and it’s going to be painful. As you relearn and readjust to your life, you’re going to find those negative spaces where she used to be in places you never thought of, and it will strike you like a hammer to your heart. But as time passes, you will find that those holes eventually close and before long you’ll realize with some surprise that you feel… almost normal. You will realize that the pain you’ve been carrying around has lessened without your perceiving it until suddenly you do. And it will feel weird, because it will happen both sooner than you expect and take longer than it feels like it should have. But it will happen.

But part of what you need to do during this transition period is to not worry about relationships or what comes next. You need to focus on the now and to process your feelings. And you’ve got a lot of feelings to process.

One of them is, honestly, a feeling of betrayal. It’s understandable and human to feel this way. You’ve been hit with the knowledge that she’s been feeling a particular way for longer than you thought and it’s forced you to reconsider everything. A breakup is almost always going to hurt, but this means that it is also going to feel like you’ve been lied to. And you have, in a way. She may not have realized it except in retrospect, and she may have done so in an attempt to spare you unnecessary hurt, but it still happened. So now you feel like you’ve been betrayed by someone you trusted. It may not be rational, it may not even be fair, but nobody said feelings were fair. They just are. We can argue whether it’s accurate or deserved, but the feelings are real.

But I think part of what you need to understand – as hard as this may be – is that this wasn’t about you and it wasn’t about you getting things wrong. She wasn’t being asexual at you. You didn’t turn her ace, nor did she do this maliciously. If anything, it sounds like she was trying to do the opposite and make it possible to stay. Those check-ins she did? Those tend to be the actions of someone who’s trying to make things work, to find a path that didn’t end with the two of you breaking up. I think that, at the end of the day, she genuinely cared for you and that ending this was the last thing that she wanted to do.   

But as the song says: sometimes love just ain’t enough. There was a fundamental incompatibility in your relationship, one that was at the core of who she was as a person, that could never be overcome. It wasn’t anybody’s fault; to say that it was would be like blaming someone for being left handed. It was just an obstacle that was ultimately insurmountable and at the end of the day, leaving was the least bad thing that could happen for the both of you.

Yeah, it hurts. It hurts a lot. And in retrospect, some of it is hurt that could’ve been avoided. It would’ve been better if she had ended things earlier, when she realized that she’d been thinking about leaving. But we make decisions based on the information we have at the time, and sometimes those decisions are the wrong ones. It seems likely to me that she stuck around those two extra years trying to change things, rather than doing so out of spite. With the perspective that comes with time and distance, I think she’d agree that her staying added an unnecessary level of pain to what was already a painful situation.

And to be perfectly frank, I think she was wrong to tell you that she’d decided to leave earlier than she did. I think this was needlessly cruel and absolutely unnecessary. While it doesn’t sound like she did so out of maliciousness, it was still information that you didn’t need to know, certainly not now. We talk about the importance of truth or honesty, but there’s a difference between truth and knowledge. It may be true that she decided to leave before she finally did… but that was knowledge you didn’t have or need. It didn’t clarify things or make things easier to understand; it just served to force you to reconsider everything in your relationship and cast a shadow over memories you had thought were happy or content. Sometimes we have a right to not know things, especially when knowing them does us no good and only causes more hurt.

But it is what it is and the only thing you can do now is move on. But you need to move on in ways that are actually good for you.

Part of the reason why you’re struggling right now is that, frankly, you’re still in mourning. You’re still processing everything, coming to terms with everything and you’re in a lot of pain. You’re still being haunted by those empty spaces and trying to make those feelings go away. But trying to fill them with bodies isn’t going to help – not the way you’re hoping it will. You’re looking for someone to not just to ease your loneliness but also to ease the sense of betrayal, the sense of confusion, that feeling of needing reaffirmation that you’re not just the guy people leave. You want to feel like you’re still capable of being loved. And you are. Her leaving didn’t change that, nor did it prove that you aren’t. But right now, diving into another relationship isn’t going to fix things. The wound is too raw, the hurt too deep. Any relationship you start now would be an attempt to fit someone into the spaces she left, and that’s a mistake.

Nobody could replace her, and nobody will. But that doesn’t mean that you’ll never date again. It just means you’re not ready, yet. You have to give yourself time so that you fill in the negative spaces she left behind yourself, so that you feel complete and whole again. You want to be in a place where you can welcome a new person into your life as that specific person, not as a replacement for your ex, like an understudy or recasting a role when the actor left. Otherwise, all you end up doing is prolonging the pain and the time it takes to recover.

Like an athlete who’s suffered an injury, you need time to recuperate and rehabilitate, so that you can get back in the game without making that injury worse.

But you will get there.

So here’s my advice for you. First, I want you to take care of yourself. Part of this is going to be to let yourself just feel. You don’t have to be reasonable about it, you don’t have to be fair; you’re allowed to be hurt and upset and angry without turning it in on yourself or blaming yourself because ultimately, there’s nothing to blame. Express that pain, that hurt, that betrayal. Let yourself be angry about it. Let the pain out. Yell into the night about how unfair it is. Lance that particular boil and let the infection drain away so that the healing can start.

Then the next thing I want is for you to take care of yourself. We talk a lot about self-care and it’s easy to think of self-care in terms of comfort or reassurance and some of it is. But the larger part of self-care is to literally care for yourself, to treat yourself as someone who deserves to be in good working order. In this case, taking care of yourself means making sure that you’re eating well – trying to make sure you’re getting healthy meals along with food that brings you comfort. It means getting exercise and making your body move. It means doing a deep clean of your house, like a spiritual cleansing of sorts to chase away the darkness of the past year.

And it means addressing your loneliness. Right now, a new relationship isn’t what you need; rather you want to look to your old relationships, your existing ones. You want to reach out to your friends and say “hey, I need you right now”. Let your friends offer you comfort and companionship, to help drown out the feeling of being alone. They may not be able to be with you 24/7 the way your ex was, but they will remind you that you’re not in this by yourself. No matter how much it may feel right now, you’re not as alone as you think.

And while you’re doing this, I think it would be good for you to find a purpose to devote yourself to. Feeling like you’re part of something bigger and contributing good to this world can be very important, especially in times like this. You clearly have a lot of love to give, so perhaps it’s time to give it a little more and to causes and communities that could use it.

This may be a good time to connect with your community and see what you can do to make it a little better, a little stronger and a little brighter. Maybe this is a time to take this love you have and share it with folks who could use it. Perhaps it’s time to foster a cat or a dog and give it a loving place to rest while it finds its forever home. Or it may be time to find a cause to volunteer for, whether it’s helping the unhoused and vulnerable, the people who’ve been cast off from society or the children and families who’ve been forced to flee from oppression. Knowing that your presence and your actions have made life better for others will go a long, long way to reminding you that you’re a good person, a loving person, a beloved person and that you matter.

That, I think, is going to be more important than trying to date. You’re not there yet, but you will get there.

It hurts, I know, but the pain will fade in time. It’s dark now, but there will be light again. It’s quiet, but there will be music and joy and laughter. There will be love again.

You’ll be ok. I promise.

All will be well.

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 this is a very hard issue for me. I have been divorced for 2 years from my wife. We were together for twelve and a half years and have three boys together. While I was stationed overseas, I admitted to cheating early on in our relationship. Holding that information from her drove a lot of guilt and negativity that turned me into an angry person who used alcohol a lot to try to mask my issues. Fast forward 2 years after coming clean, she decides that she can’t deal with everything that’s happened and my actions and divorces me. We tried a few times, but I couldn’t swallow my pride and accept my failures and then I would leave when angry and go and do my own thing.

Finally, I found an amazing woman and realized a lot of my failures and how I am as a person, allowed myself to be vulnerable and just had an amazing 3-4 month relationship. 

Recently I saw my ex with another man and something hit me that I wanted to rekindle our relationship and become a family again. I feel like a total piece of s--t because I have this girl who I was dating who is “in love” with me, and my ex who I never wanted to divorce but wants to try again and I do also but then there’s this innocent bystander who gave my her heart and I have this love that left me that I had almost totally given up on. 

I know it sounds like a mess which it is but I really think the best thing to do is try to give my new self to my ex who I feel deserves it but then I know this other woman I was in a relationship doesn’t deserve to be left.

Do I Stay Or Should I Go?

DEAR SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO: Long time readers of my column know that I have a series of questions for people who are trying to decide whether to get back together with their ex. These questions are:

Question #1: Why did you break up in the first place?

Question #2: Has the reason why you broke up changed?

Question #3: Why Now?

Question #4: Do you miss THEM, or do you miss what they represent?

Question #5: Are they right for you, NOW?

The point of these questions is to get people to think about what they actually want and whether the desire to get back with an ex is because they honestly think that things will be different and better, or simply because they miss the familiar and the known.

Now, if we go through the questions, we have pretty solid answers to questions #1 and #2. But as soon as we get to question #3, I think we hit a snag. You’d been doing the work, you were getting your demons under control and you’d gotten over your ex-wife and were in a relationship with a lovely young woman who was making you very happy…

…and then you saw your ex with another man.

I think that’s the real issue here. This is a tale as old as time; it’s easy to be over an ex when they’re not actually there. It’s another when you see them having not just gotten over you, but having gotten over you and under someone else. Suddenly there’s a whirlwind of emotions – not just “someone is touching my stuff!” but the weird jealousy of someone getting to experience the little things you used to think of as exclusive to you, the little things you found special or significant or exciting. Now not only are you reminded that you no longer get to have them, but you see proof that someone else does.

This can trigger all sorts of weird covetous feelings under the golden veil of nostalgia. Maybe the sudden reminder of the absence makes it feel acute and immediate. Maybe the idea that someone gets to experience similar intimacies with an ex makes you feel less special, and you want that feeling back more than you want the person. But ultimately, the specifics matter less than the fact that this is often less about your ex and more about you.

And that’s where I think the problem lies: this feels a lot less about you wanting another chance with your ex specifically, so much as this is about you. You were doing just fine and happy with your life right up until you saw her with this guy. That sounds to me like you’ve got something to prove more than feeling like this relationship could still work if the two of you gave it another try. 

Then there’s the fact that right now this is entirely one-sided. From what you’ve said, you saw her and suddenly decided you want her back. You haven’t so much as had coffee with her, never mind asked her about the possibility of another try. You don’t know if that’s even something she’d want any more. She’s a person in the world; she hasn’t been sealed in amber or put into cryogenic suspension. Yes, you say she never wanted to get divorced in the first place, but a lot can change in two years. You’ve seen it yourself in how much you’ve changed; there’s no reason to believe that she somehow has managed to remain exactly the same as she was before the divorce was finalized.

I would also point out that y’know, you saw her with someone else. While the specifics of that relationship are currently unknown, you’re setting yourself up for trying to convince her to not just give you another chance, but potentially to ditch her current relationship in exchange for you. That’s gonna be a really high bar to clear under the best of circumstances. This isn’t a Hallmark Christmas movie where the new (or current) boyfriend (played by James Marsden because apparently he’s just destined to play the dude who gets dumped) is just an obstacle to be worked around and they give up easily because who’s going to be the asshole who stands in the way of true love? This is (possibly) an ongoing, committed relationship that you may be trying to insert yourself into with no warning.

Oh and then there’s also your current girlfriend. She’s a factor in this too.

I think you should take a lot of time to really sit with your feelings and think about what you’re hoping to have happen and why before you decide to do anything. And whatever you decide, you need to decide definitively. No half-assing, no wishy-washy-ness. Which means that if you’re really going to entertain the possibility of trying to approach your ex-wife and get back together, you need to break up with your current girlfriend now. The last thing she deserves is to be treated like the back-up plan in case things don’t work out with the ex.

Yeah, she doesn’t “deserve” to be broken up with, but she does deserve to be with someone who is with her because he wants to be with her, not because he couldn’t get with who he really wanted.  

Good luck.Top of Form

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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