DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: How do you make it so that dysfunctional relationships with your family of origin don’t carry forward to your future romantic relationships? And how do you help your bf understand that is the case?

I’m asking because my boyfriend (31M) spent Thanksgiving with me (36F) and my parents (70s) and was able to meet them for the first time. While he was there, he noted that I really do not help them with the housework/dishes. At all.

This is entirely accurate; I don’t. When I was growing up, they were both a mess of (probably) untreated OCD and hoarding disorder, and my mother used housework as a tool of power and control. Some examples.

– I would clear out the clutter in my room to have livable space, and my mom would “rescue” utterly unusable items from the trash and donation pile and keep them, or insist that I kept them, and then stuff the cleared-out livable space in my room with more utter junk, even when I begged her to please leave things as they were because it was comfortable now.

– If I (a child) was a little rough with or damaged anything in the house, no matter how minor, my dad would corner us and scream at us. He did this to one of my cousins and their family stopped visiting.

– Any time I did help out with dishes, etc. I would get a lecture on how they had this amazing system for folding the damp paper towel as I was dusting/loading the dishwasher/bagging groceries at the store, and I wasn’t meeting their exact expectations.

– I went to an extremely rigorous private school whose homework workload ate up most of my outside-of-school time. (No, seriously– I would get home, start in on homework, and be done around 11 PM. The students who played sports were routinely up until 1 or 2 AM.) The rare occasions when I did have time off, and tried to get together with friends, my mom would make me cancel my plans and do cleaning projects instead.

– At extended family events, the women did all of the cooking and cleaning, and the men sat around and talked. Misogynist garbage.

…anyway, we can debate how much of this was real abuse vs. kid not understanding household needs, but the point is that I grew up with the strong impression that the whole system was sexist, my housework efforts were useless anyway, and it was really just an opportunity for me to get screamed at. You can understand how my #1 coping mechanism was not to engage. It took me well into adulthood to figure out how doing chores and running a household worked and find a system that worked for me, and really, it’s still a work in progress.

Anyway, when I started staying over a BF’s place, I made a point of noticing what and how much he did in there by way of cleaning, and undertaking part of that myself, and cleaning up messes where I saw them, and asking him afterwards if I had, say, cleaned up the kitchen to his satisfaction. Again, I had no real model for how to do this! I just watched and asked questions. But what we have going on now seems to be working, and the house is clean enough and nobody feels taken advantage of, so, yay.

But then my bf said that after Thanksgiving and I was worried that he was judging me. I tried to explain about my earlier life and all, but my parents were on their best behavior around him and he didn’t see any of the yelling or power plays or petty sniping. Obviously one option would be to just help my parents with the stupid dishes already, but they’re never open to a discussion of how to, you know, not scream at me and all the times I tried helping in adulthood only resulted in more of the same.

Anyway, help? I want to be responsible and not a freeloader, but I also like having my dignity.

Signed,

I wish dishes were just dishes

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DEAR I WISH DISHES WERE JUST DISHES: Alright first of all IWDWJD: politeness and being a considerate guest doesn’t mean signing up for being yelled at or insulted, especially for no reason, even when it’s your parents.

Hell, some would say ESPECIALLY when it’s your parents.

I’m not Miss Manners, so I’m not going to say that you did wrong by not offering to help or whatever. While I imagine the vibe may – and we’ll come back to this – have been strained while you were at your folks’ for Thanksgiving, the dynamic of how your family had treated you (and others!) growing up has given you every incentive not to go along just to get along. Certainly not when going along doesn’t actually lead to the “getting along” part. I think refusing to participate in a system that has only served to cause you pain and misery is entirely justified.

Now, what I am wondering is whether there’s an actual problem here, or if the anxiety weasels are bouncing around for no real reason. You mention that your boyfriend made a comment that you hadn’t helped with the dishes. I can understand why this would make you anxious, especially since you’ve been stressed, but I think from his perspective, this would seem out of character for you. After all, you not only have made a point of helping and doing chores at his place, but you made a point of making sure to learn how to do it his way. The fact that you would do this for him but not your parents might strike him as being strange. After all: if you’re that conscientious about it, wouldn’t you also be as conscientious about it with your parents?

This is why I’m not sure that he was judging you, so much as trying to make sense of a seeming contradiction. It’s understandable that you’d worry – you’ve faced harsh judgement and criticism for most of your life – but I don’t know that this is necessarily what’s happening here. I think it’s most likely that he’s just trying to make sense of the difference between the you who stays with him and the you he saw around your parents.

Now, one thing that might explain any disconnect he was feeling would be how much your boyfriend knew about your parents and your experiences growing up before all this. Did he get the broad brush strokes about things like your mom’s hoarding tendencies or the way your parents would treat you and other family members? Or did he only get the download after he met your parents?

In both cases, I could see how the story vs. what he saw would be confusing. I would hope, at least, that he knows people well enough to know that s--tty people can hide their s--ttiness when they choose. Similarly, I would hope that he knows and trusts you enough to not just assume you’re lying out of hand.

Seeing as you’re not a freeloader by any stretch in the rest of your life, I think what you’re feeling are the anxiety weasels gnawing on sensitive parts of your brain. Considering your childhood, I’m not the least bit surprised that you’re hypervigilant to other people’s moods; you basically had to be, growing up. But the problem is that our defense mechanisms don’t go away once we’re out of the situation where they’re needed. It’s not that unusual for the things that used to protect us outliving their usefulness and going on to become a hindrance instead.

Unless your boyfriend has said anything or is acting weird – and I mean notably weird, not “If I parse his body language and vocal tonality in this particular way and assume Y, then this would suggest he is secretly judging me” hypervigilance – I think it’s just garden variety confusion. You obviously make a point of trying to be a good partner and houseguest, you keep your own place clean, so this one difference is going to be odd to someone who doesn’t know your history. Now he does, and hopefully he’ll be more alert to how your parents act.

With all that being said: I would really suggest that you talk to a therapist, especially someone who deals with childhood abuse and C-PTSD. I know words like “trauma” get tossed around freely, but trauma doesn’t just come from being hit or physically abused, nor from being screamed at constantly. Constant mistreatment and toxic behavior – like, say, having your room used for storage to the point that you couldn’t even live in it – can cause trauma as well, especially when it’s been going on for years and you can’t get away.

The anxiety you mention and the hypervigilance stand out to me, and I think it would be good to talk to a professional about it. I think it might really benefit you to talk to someone about it and possibly get some tools to help manage those feelings.

But in terms of your boyfriend and his response? I don’t think you have to worry, especially if he understands what you went through growing up.

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 am yet another early 30s virgin writing to you. Like all the other men before me, I too feel like women look down upon/are disgusted by virgins. And like all those men, my views on this are also formed primarily on Reddit (and one throwaway remark from an online person).

Anyway, my question isn’t the usual “how do I lose my virginity,” because you’ve already addressed that at length in all your posts.

My question is more about your advice of not looking at Reddit and all those other places. My question is why? I feel like the responses on Reddit are by real women. So, it’s obvious that there are real women who actually feel that way about virgin men. And thus, those Reddit posts can be taken as indicative of what (at least some) women think.

Furthermore, since I’ve noticed more women over 30 saying they don’t want virgins than those saying they don’t mind, I feel that it indicates the actual attitudes women have towards virgin men over 30.

So then why is your advice to ignore Reddit? I find myself unable to do it because I can’t stop thinking that Reddit does provide an accurate sample of the attitudes of women towards virgin men.

Yours,

Why Not?

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DEAR WHY NOT: I’m going to be honest: at first blush, I was tempted to skip over your letter because, as you’ve said, I’ve covered this topic fairly often – including why relying on Reddit (or TikTok or Instagram or YouTube or…) as definitive “proof” isn’t useful or helpful.

However, you’ve laid out your reasons in a fairly clear and concise manner about why this all makes sense to you, enough that I’m willing to accept that this is being asked in good faith.

(If that seems a bit dismissive or condescending, trust me when I say that I get a lot of letters and comments that are basically trying to import sea-lioning arguments from Twitter and elsewhere – not to mention the occasional flood of red pill and black pill folks when some of the topics I cover hit their mediasphere.)

There’s also the fact that, having done this job for a while, I know you’re not the only person who feels the same way. So I’ll break down what the issue is.

Strap in folks, this is gonna be a long one.

The first thing you have to understand is that I’m not saying that Reddit is inherently bad or useless. I quite like Reddit, in fact. But I am also an Old Man of The Internet, from the days of USENET and the September That Never Ended, and I Have Seen Some S--t. I can tell you from extensive experience that what you see online is not representative of the populations as a whole, especially when you’re talking about social media, and is highly prone to manipulation and influence. While this sounds like I’m talking about sinister cabals and mustache-twirling masterminds, it’s more simply a nature of how the human brain works. We like to think that we’re gimlet-eyed objective observers of reality and that all of our choices and beliefs are carefully considered positions that we came to after much rational examination. But the fact of the matter is, humans are very bad at understanding why we feel the way we do and we rely on vibes far more than we do facts.

Much of this is inherent in human psychology. One of the “fun” aspects of the human mind is our readiness to believe. If we hear something stated over and over again in a confident voice, we are more likely to believe it, regardless of whether it’s true or not. This also combines with a tendency in people to mistake volume and frequency of exposure for popularity. That is: it’s very easy for people to mistake hearing a small number of people saying something very loudly and constantly for widespread belief and acceptance.

This is something that political opportunists use all the time. Note, for example, the number of districts where city councils and school boards are banning “unacceptable” books from schools and libraries. On an objective level – backed by polls from large, reputable and reliable polling agencies – the book bans are deeply unpopular and unwanted. But very small, fringe activist groups like Moms For Liberty are very good at making a lot of noise, showing up and being obnoxious at schoolboard meetings and the like, organizing postcard and letter campaigns and so on. The actual numbers of people showing up and making a fuss are fairly small, but they’re good at making noise and “flooding the zone with s--t”, and so it helps create the illusion of this being a widespread, grassroots movement instead of a fringe group propped up by a couple right wing billionaire backers.

The same thing can be found online, where it’s much easier to create the illusion of widespread popularity or widespread acceptance of a particular belief. It’s not very hard, for example, for one person to go on a retweet/reposting spree and flood your timeline on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook with posts about their particular bugbear. See enough of those posts, especially if they form the vast majority of what you see, and you’ll be much more inclined to think that this is a widely held, widely felt position instead of one person who won’t shut up about it.

And that’s before we get into issues like “context collapse”, where posts or stories “escape containment”, as it were, and what makes sense in a particular context – like someone sharing their personal experiences about a singular event – is seen differently outside of that specific context. So a person talking about a bad date on TikTok or a guy, singular, who was being obnoxious on a particular day and time, becomes something that people see as universally applicable.

You can also see it in a recent example, where a woman posted on Twitter about having successfully defended her thesis and had thus finished her PhD program. She was immediately leapt upon by hordes of people who wanted to yell at her because of the supposed irrelevancy of her thesis, who thought that women in academia were bringing down the “tone” with their supposedly light-weight intellectual explorations and so on. A post, primarily intended for friends and followers, became fodder for hundreds of strangers who immediately decided that she was the avatar of their personal grievances regarding the straw-man feminists in their head. If you were to stumble upon all those people yelling about it, you might be inclined to think that they had a point, simply because so many people were up in arms about it.

On Tumblr, there have been many times when someone has been “called out” for what would seem to be horrible things that they had done or said or believed… except many of the people who are joining the call out have no idea what the actual details are and are responding to second or third hand summaries and posts, which get reposted and quote posted over and over again. There was a notorious example of a woman being hounded out of a fandom because she was supposedly a toxic and bigoted person… when in reality, the core issue is that the person who started the pile on was jealous of her relationship with another artist the accuser admired. The accuser insisted that the target’s fan art “proved” that she was fatphobic, since she drew a character slightly off-model and pushed the accusations over and over again until the whole thing took on a life of its own. Most of the people who joined in on spreading the word had no connection to anyone actually involved; they just saw it and took it as gospel because they were seeing it over and over again.  

There’s also a very noted and well-studied effect of a narrative forming around things based, not on the actual events, but around other people’s beliefs and summaries about things. In a way, it’s like a cancerous form of the “yes, and…” improv exercise, where people would amplify and expand on things until it metastasized in a number of absurd and toxic ways. This gets amplified by the algorithms that most social media sites use, because almost every algorithmically driven media site prioritizes engagement… and nothing gets engagement like outrage.

A particularly prime example of this would be the infamous TikTok Couch Cheater, where a woman posted a video of her surprising her long-distance boyfriend by showing up unexpectedly at his apartment. What was meant to be documenting a cute moment in a couple’s relationship quickly turned into chaos as a few people decided that he wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic or happy when she arrived and concluded that he must be cheating on her. The story rocketed around TikTok, picking up new “details” and narrative changes like a snowball growing as it rolls downhill. This became its own mini-industry as self-proclaimed “body language experts” and others would “analyze” everyone and insist that this “proved” that he was not just cheating but cheating on her with multiple people, while other would-be sleuths would track the guy down and demand that he answer their questions.

Again: everyone watching the video had no connection to the couple or anyone else involved. They didn’t know the context of their relationship, the personalities of the people in the relationship, anything… but they all “knew” what had to be going on because… well, because it was all over TikTok and people kept saying it.

And that’s before we get into issues like how communal identities affect how we interpret things. Incels are a prime example of how beliefs are based less on reality and more on trying to fit into a communal identity, shifting their world view to fit their self-applied label. The modern-day phrenology that incels apply, the insistence of certain “biological realties” that have nothing to do with biology or human sexuality… all of this is pure in-group belief, something that the members must accept as gospel as part of their being a membership of that group. Everything must be filtered through that belief and everything that contradicts that belief must be disregarded as “copium” at best or out and out lies because… reasons. To challenge those beliefs would imply that you haven’t fully accepted the reality of your situation; they’re not wrong, you’re just a delusional manlet who’s still huffing the copium and not accepting that the only option left to you is to lay down and rot. Acceptance within the group requires acceptance of the belief.

However, there’re many people in the incel communities online who, despite admonitions from their fellow crabs, actually managed to climb out of the bucket and interacted with people in the physical world. Rather than being pelted with stones and rotten fruit for their obvious biological inferiority, they quickly discovered that nobody cared about their brow ridge, their hairline or anyone’s supposed “sexual market value”. They believed all of this, simply because everyone around them kept insisting that it was true. Exposure to people in actual, real-world circumstances, proved otherwise.

Now, compounding all of this are three very significant effects: confirmation bias and negativity bias and group polarization and identity threat.

Confirmation bias is the tendency for people to give greater credence to things that they already believe to be true, while dismissing things that contradict those beliefs, as well as being more primed to see things that conform with what they believe and not notice the things that go against it. You have experienced this many times without realizing it. If you’ve ever, say, bought a pair of shoes and suddenly noticed that it seems like you’re seeing people wearing those same shoes all over the place, when you hadn’t before, you’re experiencing confirmation bias. The number of people owning that pair of shoes (or that brand of car, or that type of shirt or…) hasn’t meaningfully changed; you simply had no connection to it and no reason to notice. Similarly, if you are walking down the streets at night and notice that the streetlights all seem to be blinking out as you walk by… well, you might be inclined to think that you’re somehow causing this. But what you didn’t notice – or rather, didn’t pay attention to – are all the lights that didn’t flicker when you walked past. Why? Because they were behaving normally; you paid more attention to the outlier because it was the outlier, and primed yourself to notice it more frequently, while the ones that conformed with the majority were disregarded.

Negativity bias is akin to confirmation bias, in as much as how it’s about how we subconsciously give more attention to things over others. Negativity bias is how our minds give greater weight and impact to negative thoughts, beliefs, emotions and experiences than positive ones. A negative comment – say, about your hair style – hits much harder than a positive comment on it. In fact, the negativity bias means that it takes five positive comments to have the same emotional impact as one negative comment. The same goes for positive and negative memories or experiences; you’re more likely to remember those negative experiences, even when they’re not as meaningful or significant as positive ones, because those hit five times harder. It also means that things that make you feel bad or sad or upset are more likely to catch your attention and linger in your mind, while positive stories or stories that make you feel good have the emotional consistency and duration of a soap bubble.

And all of this combines with the tendency of people to become defensive about their identity and sense of self – much of which aligns with the ways we label ourselves and the communities we see as being definitional to who we are. When we find information that challenges beliefs about who we are or how we see ourselves, we’re much more likely to reject it out of hand, because it feels like a threat to our sense of self… even when it challenges our negative beliefs. If you believe you’re a horrible person, you’re much more likely to disbelieve people who tell you that you’re not, or assume that they’re mistaken or lying, because you know you’re horrible and they’re objectively incorrect. Yes, that belief may be harming you and causing you intense psychological pain… but you’re much more likely to hold onto it because it’s a part of your sense of self.

All of this combines to create circumstances where you’re going to end up seeking out information that conforms to what you already believe, validates your belief in it, and gives you more reason to ignore information that contradicts it.

So when someone – an older virgin, let’s say – sees a post on TikTok or an IG reel or Reddit post about how women just don’t like virgins or look down on them, they’re much more likely to take that on board because it is in line with how they already think and feel. They weren’t fine being an older virgin until they saw that, they already thought being an older virgin was shameful, and this just further entrenches that belief.

And I really want to emphasize belief here, because that’s ultimately what this is about: beliefs. Vibes. Not facts.

If we dig into your letter, in fact, we can see multiple examples of this. To start with, I note how much this is about how you feel, not about how it’s the ultimate truth backed by facts and logic. You say this repeatedly in your letter: “I too feel like women look down upon/are disgusted by virgins”; “I feel like the responses on Reddit are by real women. So, it’s obvious that there are real women who actually feel that way about virgin men”; “I feel that it indicates the actual attitudes women have”.

You aren’t presenting facts or objective truths, or even accurate polling, you’re responding to things based on how they make you feel. Moreover, you’re talking about how the things that you’ve seen emphasize the negative more than the positive – “I’ve noticed more women over 30 saying they don’t want virgins than those saying they don’t mind”. That doesn’t mean that there are, objectively, more women who look down on older male virgins, you’re just noticing those particular posts and – critically – giving those people greater credence than the ones who say they don’t mind. You don’t know these people, nor do they know you, but you’re more inclined to believe that they not only must be real, that you are interpreting what they say accurately and that they are right or being truthful where the others aren’t… because you already agree with them.

(And this is before we get into the ecosystem that exists to perpetuate these beliefs. Bobble-throated slapd--ks like Andrew Tate, Fresh N Fit, and a whole host of other would-be “masculinity influencers” eagerly promote and amplify the belief that being an older male virgin is shameful because they make their money by stoking your feelings of hopelessness, anger and resentment so they can sell you the ‘cure’ for it… which just happens to involve giving them all your money. Twice. Because they didn’t scam you, you just didn’t do it hard enough the last time.)

What’s just as important is the fact that you say that your belief is due to online posts from strangers, not experiences you’ve had. That in and of itself should be the first thing to give you pause. You’re relying on other people’s statements and assuming that these must be objective reality, rather than anything else.

But consider for a moment: where are you reading these? I am going to go ahead and make an educated assumption that these have been on subreddits aimed at folks who are ashamed of being older virgins, people who struggle with or are dissatisfied with dating and complaints or discussion about feminist issues – seeing as these tend to be the sites that come up the most often when others have complained here and elsewhere. I could be wrong, granted, but as I said: I’ve been doing this for a long time, and both years of research and handling these arguments makes me feel like my guess is on fairly solid ground.

But where you’re finding these comments is important because the venue or forum is going to be important. This is not a site for finding accurate representation of general feelings on a topic, simply because Reddit in general and the subreddits in particular has a self-selected user base, and that’s going to affect what topics get attention, what beliefs get promoted, what narratives coalesce around those beliefs. Particularly when it comes to the more niche subreddits, such as ones involving dating or relationships.

Reddit as a whole – that is, the entire site – is not a representative slice of the population, whether of the world or the United States or any particular country. Overall, Reddit is overwhelmingly white, male and under 30; 44% of the users are 18-29, nearly two-thirds (64%) are male and nearly half (48%) are American. So already, you’re dealing with a population that skews to a specific demographic: young white men. That’s going to affect many things, not the least of which being whose voices get heard, which get amplified, and which get muted. You’re going to find more people talking about AAA games in the biggest subreddits for console or PC games, simply because that’s what most people play; moreover, it’s going to be a primarily white, male audience in part because that’s the dominant demographic on Reddit. Other voices �– people of color, women, etc. – aren’t going to be as represented, nor are as many people going to be talking about tiny, quirky indie games. Many of those voices and users that don’t fit neatly into the interests of the majority of the users may get downvoted or simply ignored.

Once we subdivide further into subreddits, you are now talking about subsets within a subset, and primarily for people who are inclined to certain issues, problems and beliefs. One of the biggest ways that this is going to affect things is in who is going to be drawn to those particular subreddits and why… especially with how Reddit is used.

If you go to, say, a subreddit for a cellphone service provider, you’re going to find more people complaining about problems they’re having, the price they’re paying for their service and so on. This doesn’t mean that this service provider is especially bad; it’s just that people generally don’t go to r/Verizon to sing their praises. They’re most likely there because they have a problem and want a solution or because they want to vent.

Similarly, if you go to a subreddit about dating or relationships, you’re not going to find a lot of people who are there just to talk about how much they love their partner or how great their marriage is. Most of the time, the people going there are looking for advice, information or wanting to vent their frustrations. That’s the nature of these groups, just as there’s a dearth of letters coming in to Ask Captain Awkward, Savage Love, Dear Prudie or, well, me who just want to say “yup, just wanted to let everyone know I have no problems, my partner is incredible, kthanksbye”.

And taking it a step further, the members and regular posters of this subreddit have self-selected to be part of it. So, of the folks who are posting there, they’re a niche of a niche – people who a) are more comfortable with the Internet that people who stick strictly to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, b) are frequent enough visitors that they created Reddit accounts and c) have chosen more niche topics than r/awwww, r/gaming or r/funny. Once you’ve sliced things down that finely, you have a very particular subset of people, who are already primed to particular beliefs or feelings that don’t necessarily correlate to mainstream popular belief or even knowledge. What may seem like common knowledge to you, because everyone you know is talking about it or agrees about it, may be completely incomprehensible to the average Internet user.

(Ever tried explaining who Dril is to someone who isn’t terminally online? Or why getting ‘ratio’d’ is bad? How “Bigolus Dickolus Wolfwood” caused a sci-fi novel to be one of the best-selling books on all of Amazon? Or why it seems like the world got angry at a dude who didn’t open a can of beans for his daughter?)

And because of what we’ve already established about confirmation bias and negativity bias, we already know that the more confrontational, angry or upset posts are likely to get more attention and thus more amplification via upvotes. Those upvotes mean that more people are likely to see those threads over others, creating the illusion that these are much more widely held beliefs or experiences than they actually are. That not only encourages more posts in the same vein – it gives the impression that this is what this subreddit is for – but also creates the overall tone and attitude of the subreddit by creating the illusion of group consensus. The dissenting voices get voted down and thus don’t appear as often, even if they’re actually more accurate or more representative of real-world experiences.

If we step away from Reddit and to other social media like TikTok, YouTube or Instagram… well, the same thing applies, except the thumb on the scale is The Algorithm. Because algorithmic favor means certain topics get more views (and thus greater promotion, which means greater visibility and greater opportunities for monetization), people are encouraged to lean into those topics and those narratives. This, again, increases volume, which creates the illusion of the width and depth of a particular belief… but in reality, it’s a Potemkin village, one that’s propped up with very little behind it. It’s what the algorithm thinks people WANT to see and thus it shows it to more people, which then encourages more people to chase that topic in hopes of similarly currying algorithmic favor.

Ironically, this also can serve as a sort of venue for self-discovery. If your FYP or Insta feed is primarily filled with people telling you that being a male virgin or an older virgin is shameful, that’s in no small part because this is what you’ve been interacting with or seeking out, not because it’s the most widespread belief.

Once you realize that this is what you’ve been feeding your brain, you can also understand how this has become the filter through which you’re seeing the world. This is the definition of a self-perpetuating cycle. You feel some underserved shame about being an older male virgin; you go looking for what other people say about older male virgins; you find “evidence” that women “don’t like” older male virgins; you take this onboard as proof that being an older, male virgin is shameful. Now not only do you keep reinforcing this – consuming more content about how it’s shameful – but it affects how you interact with the world.

Because you already believe that there’s something wrong with you and that women aren’t going to like you, you’re disinclined to talk with them in the first place. When you do, you’re coming to the interaction with the script running in the back of your head that tells you that she’s already not going to like you because you’re an older male virgin and thus you’re primed to interpret what she says in the most negative way, regardless of actual meaning or context. Your behavior won’t be as confident or attractive because you’re already feeling defensive and threatened; you’re worried that she already doesn’t like you and you have to prove he wrong and so you’re more likely to be trying to play to what you think she wants to hear instead of trying to find out more about her. You’re not as likely to try as hard because you believe you’ve already failed, which means that you’ll pass up opportunities to ask her out on a date or get her number, and you aren’t likely to follow up if she agrees or offers to connect on social media. And if things don’t work out the way you hope, then you’re going to take even longer to recover from the disappointment, be far less likely to try again and give even less effort the next time around… and so the cycle keeps on going.

If you want things to be different, then you have to be willing to do things differently. If you don’t want the cycle to continue, then you have to make the conscious choice to break the cycle. And one of the steps in breaking that cycle is to stop treating the Emotional Contagion And Confirmation Bias Machine that is the social media algorithms as an authoritative source, especially a source where a tiny and specific subset of people are claiming to be the voice of authority for millions of people that don’t resemble them even slightly.  

This is one of the reasons why I tell people to pay attention to what you’re paying attention to and how it makes you feel. If you’re consuming content that just reaffirms that you’re f--ked or generally makes you feel awful, you’re not “facing harsh truths” or “just being realistic”, you’re just engaging in emotional self-harm, the social media equivalent of cutting. It’s masochistic epistemology: truth hurts, so if it hurts, it must be true. Except it’s not truth. It’s just pain. And it’s pain you’re inflicting on yourself for no good reason. It doesn’t make you stronger, it doesn’t make you more able to face your problems or resolve them in a meaningful and satisfactory manner. It just makes you feel worse about yourself, saps your energy and your will and encourages you to just lay down and rot.

Yeah, choosing to look for and focus on positive or more uplifting content – especially ones that give hope around areas where you’re most anxious – can feel naïve or like you’re doing some woo-woo-fluffy-bunny bulls--t. But it’s that bulls--t belief that “real men have to face the pain so you can learn to endure it” and that feeling good or consuming media that makes you feel optimistic and hopeful is a sign of weakness is part and parcel of the same toxic horses--t that tells you that being an older virgin is shameful and bad.

In reality, the things that give you hope and comfort give you strength. There’s no emotional resilience without hope, comfort and even joy; there’s only more despair. That misery isn’t making you stronger like iron being tempered in the forge; overheat the metal or beat it too much with the hammer and all you do is make it brittle and prone to fracture. And even if all it does is make you feel a little better about yourself, that good feeling affects the rest of you – giving you more confidence, more strength, improving your attitude and charisma and making you more likely to succeed.

And besides, even if it is pure woo and feel-good s--t… well, if what you believe affects what you see and experience, you may as well believe in something that actually helps you instead of convinces you that you’re worthless.

But as I said: that can’t happen if you’re drowning yourself in s--t. And the first step is going to be “stop getting into the s--t pool underneath the effluvium waterfall coming from those sewer pipes”.

Like I said at the top: Reddit can be great. But it’s all too easy to get misled there, especially when you’re not mindful about what you’re looking for, what you’re finding, why you’re finding it and how it’s affecting you.

Do yourself a favor: do a digital detox. Give yourself… let’s say 30 days, minimum, where you don’t go to Reddit. Ideally, don’t do any social media, but Reddit in particular. Instead, put that focus on just going out, talking to folks and generally interacting with people in the physical world and see how you feel at the end of those thirty days. You don’t need to be hitting on people, and you don’t need to go around announcing that you’re a virgin; just, go out, touch grass and talk to people – especially women – without any agenda. See how people are when you’re dealing with flesh and blood individuals, not other people’s projections.

I think you’ll be amazed at the difference. And then when you come back… well, maybe it’ll be time to delete your Reddit account and move on.   

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’ve got what I could call a mutant problem. A problem I’ve had for years, but which regularly changes shapes. My problem is about friendships.

I recently realized I might have too high expectations and might take friendships too seriously. I grew up with a lot of social anxiety, awkwardness, shyness and huge introversion which made developing friendships very challenging, to say the least.

Now at an adult age, I still have some of these issues, to a lesser degree. It’s still very difficult for me to build and maintain healthy friendships. My low self-esteem, my abandonment issues, my difficulties to open up often get in the way. I tend to expect a lot from some friends, not all though. I tend to seek validation, emotional support and a lot of communication. I tend to misinterpret and take a lot of things personally.

All this stems from my nonexistent social life during my formative years. For years I’ve wondered how come some people could always have someone to hang with, never face rejection and have super close friends they text all the time, all stuff I couldn’t achieve, and I still somehow struggle with. Seriously, how come these people have all I want super easily, without much effort?

It also stems from society as a whole, where not having a big social life makes you a somehow flawed person or where friendships is seen as something essential to happiness. So when you struggle with any of these, you just feel like a green skinned alien coming from an estranged planet.

For a long time, I believed friendships would make my so imperfect life perfect.

So yeah, for months I tried to form these friendships, as if my life depended on it. I put huge pressures on myself and guess what, it caused me a 6-month depression. All this while I was writing my master’s degree thesis. I finally made friends, even some close ones, but as you can guess, it didn’t fix my problems and even made some of them worse. I developed a huge friendship anxiety which hinders my ability to keep these friendships healthy and peaceful. I also sometimes think I don’t have enough friends, or they aren’t close enough or my friendships don’t last long enough, compared to EVERYONE else. (Yeah, I still feel like this green skinned alien sometimes)

So, how can I cut myself some slack and take friendships more lightly?

Little alien needing to calm down

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DEAR LITTLE ALIEN NEEDING TO CALM DOWN: Ok, I know this isn’t going to be helpful right off the bat, but I have to ask: are you going to therapy? A lot of what you are discussing isn’t just extreme introversion but sounds instead like an ongoing anxiety disorder. Working with a therapist, particularly someone who may specialize in cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy, can help give you the toolset you need to wrestle with those anxieties and intrusive thoughts and fears.

Now some of it also has to do with the fact that your expectations are out of whack with reality. I know that you know at least some of this intellectually, but there’s still the difference between knowing something intellectually and actually taking it on board. The idea that all these people made friends super easily and never struggled a day in their lives is a prime example. That’s not just comparing your unedited footage to their highlight reel, that’s comparing your unedited footage to the Mary-Sue/Marty-Stu fanfic version of their life. It’s actively s--tting on yourself by wiping away the humanity of the people you’re envying and wondering why you, a lowly creature of meat and bone, can’t achieve their levels of perfection.

And it’s that very deification that you give to others, along with the sky-high expectations of what friendships are and can do, that are part and parcel of the anxiety you feel and the worry that you’re doing something wrong. You’ve given yourself a baseline expectation that is stratospheric, and then you beat yourself up when you can’t live up to those expectations, because nobody could. You can’t even find that sort of relationship in fiction precisely because it would break people’s suspension of disbelief.

I realize “lower your expectations” seems like an insult – an implicit “quit reaching for the stars, f--ko, learn to love the sewer where you belong” – but sometimes it’s more about bringing them in line with reality rather than expecting a level that God, The Doctor and Pinkie Pie couldn’t achieve.  

Now, remember what I said about knowing things intellectually? This is actually good, because it means that you recognize that what you’re expecting is unrealistic and unfair of you. While you haven’t processed those truths emotionally, you at least can recognize when you’re experiencing those feelings. One of the things you want to do is start being mindful of when you’re having those feelings – beating yourself up because you don’t have those perfect, effortless friendships, taking things personally when they aren’t personal at all, and so on – and start using that recognition to challenge those feelings. I want you to not just notice when you’re having that anxiety or feeling those feelings about your friendships, but to push back against them. I want you to name those feelings – “oh, here’s my anxiety about my friendship with X” – and then to challenge the validity of them. Is what you’re feeling legitimate – is it something that’s reasonable and actually happening – or is this another example of your jerkbrain and anxiety creating problems where they don’t exist? Ask yourself: “what if I’m wrong about this? I know this is an area where I’m sensitive and prone to anxiety; what if it’s not as bad as I think? Am I 100% sure that this is happening right now, the way I think, or am I getting myself spun up?”

The benefit of this is that it forces you to step away from the emotional immediacy of that thought or feeling, when all your neurons are activated and elevated and just pause for a moment. In taking a moment to question, you give your amygdala an opportunity to settle down and cancel the red alert. That in and of itself is often enough, but by actively challenging those thoughts and doubts, even doubting your doubts, you push back against the anxiety. You give your rational brain a chance to help get things back under control and, in the process, take another step towards taking that intellectual understanding and internalizing it so that you don’t have to challenge those thoughts as often.

I also want you to note very carefully that I said “feeling anxiety” or “having these thoughts”. This is important, because that’s what they are. They’re feelings. They’re thoughts. You’re experiencing anxiety. You’re feeling worried. They’re things you’re experiencing or doing; they’re not definitional. They don’t describe you nor do they delineate you. They are just moments, experiences, there for a brief minute and then gone… if you allow them to go, instead of believing your limbic system when it tells  you that things are wrong RIGHTTHEF--KNOW.

This is, admittedly, a process that takes time. You have to be consciously aware of it at first and to consciously decide to give yourself that moment to breathe and think. It’ll take a while before you catch those thoughts every time, and at first, you’ll struggle with it. But by keeping at it, you turn those moments from something you have to think about to habit – something you do out of routine – and from there to muscle memory, where you don’t even have to consciously push back.

Will this change everything for you? No, probably not. Not by itself. But it’ll go a long way towards turning down the volume on those anxieties and giving yourself a chance to tell your brain “shhhhh”. It’ll mean that you no longer give automatic credence to every anxiety flare up, nor beat yourself up when things don’t match the movie in your head. It’ll encourage you to give yourself grace in those moments when you worry that there’s something wrong with you and to give that grace to others when you misunderstand others or encounter a moment where you take something far more personally than was intended. And that’s pretty important.

Taking this approach will help you set your expectations where they should be and make it much easier to meet people where they actually are. It’ll help break you out of that pattern that’s been holding you back and keeping you hypervigilant for tigers in the brush that don’t exist.

And all of that’ll make the rest much, much easier… especially if you pair this with, y’know, talking to a mental health professional instead of a loudmouth with a blog.

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