DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Over the years, I’ve cultivated a physique, lifestyle, and sense of charisma that have opened many doors for me. I used to focus heavily on getting matches or likes on dating apps, believing those numbers defined my value. But as time went on, I realized that simply being myself — showing up with my presence, energy, and confidence — brought me far more success with women than any swipe ever did. I’ve connected with fascinating, beautiful women in real life, and those experiences have been meaningful and validating in ways dating apps never were.

This brings me to my question: why was I so fixated on Tinder matches in the first place? Looking back, it didn’t set any real limits for me; instead, it made me feel terrible about myself. And I wonder why so many younger men put themselves through this cycle of comparison and rejection. It feels like there must be an epidemic of low self-esteem fueled by these platforms — not caused by women, but by the design of the apps themselves. Yet many men end up directing their frustration and anger toward the easiest target rather than the system that’s actually harming them.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this dynamic. Why do so many young men fall into this trap, and what can be done to break free from it?

Thank you for your time and for the work you do.

Sincerely,

Me myself and I

DEAR ME, MYSELF AND I: Oh this one’s easy, MMI: it’s a numbers game.

No, seriously. It’s numbers all the way down.

In the Before Times, the Long Long Ago, when dating apps were branching out beyond Spring Street Personals and online dating was something you were vaguely ashamed to admit to be doing, the numbers were about how many sexy singles you (the generic “you”) could potentially meet in your pajamas, compared to how many you could meet out at bars or at the park or the company mixer.   

What they were doing in your pajamas I’ll never know.

The vague shame of “having” to use the apps tended to be outweighed by the fact that it was possible to message more people and set up more dates in the span of an hour than you could in an entire weekend. It had the benefit of ensuring that you knew everyone you encountered were single and ready to Christian Mingle, and if you were a little shy or anxious about talking to someone in person, you had the benefit of text. You didn’t have to have to be a silver-tongued graduate of the Lando Calrissian School For Players, you could let your fingers do the talking and have enough time to think of what you would say next instead of blue-screening in front of someone.

That all changed when the Tinder Nation invaded. Tinder’s jab-jab-hook combo of showing matches by proximity, swiping mechanic and open “we’re all just here to f--k, right?” attitude swept over the public like smallpox and changed the game. It was the first time you would click a button on your phone and see people you would swear would never be on a dating app, never mind one that had the self-consciously edgy safe-sleeze like Tinder, which gave it the sort of underground cachet that immediately precedes mainstream acceptance as all the normies rush in and ruin the vibe. It quickly became the most popular app… and the one that cemented the idea of swipes-as-validation.

See, Match was kind of for squares, eHarmony was for marriage minded people who didn’t want to admit they were using a dating app, but OKCupid had the nerds and the geeks and freaks who were loving the idea that for once they could use their words instead of relying solely on their looks. Fun little quizzes and answering the right questions could give you percentages that suggest just how compatible you were with people you saw – and to a degree, it worked. If you and some anonymous hottie had a 95% match rating, you had good reason to expect that you would at least get a reply to your initial message.

Tinder, however, was openly marketing itself as The Hot People F--k Store, and that set a certain tone. With its focus on pictures, minimal profile text, no messaging unless you had a mutual swipe right, on the other hand, meant that you might never know who saw or didn’t see your profile. You had to hope that your hometown honeys were swiping on you, otherwise you had no way of wowing them with your wit and wisdom. You were sending swipes into the void and hoping to get something back…and that made it clear who was Hot and who was Not.

It also didn’t help that OKCupid was doing “social experiments” on its users and blogging about the data. I’ll spare you my usual rant about sample size errors, a lack of control groups and blatant P-hacking, but their supposed ‘studies’ that were no such thing set a lot of the groundwork for the incel s--tstorm we see today.

The most infamous of these data-driven discoveries was the infamous “who messages who” post on their blog, that helped give rise to the idea that women were only messaging men who were their “equal” in looks.

(They weren’t; in fact, one of things that gets missed is that while women rated men as less attractive than men were rating women, women were messaging a much wider array of men, while men were all messaging women of around the same ‘hotness rating. In as much as hotness can be meaningfully measured in a 5-star standard with no real delineation for looks, personality or skill at making a profile.

I was THERE, Gandalf…)

This helped kick off the wildly misunderstood Pareto Principle into meme legend by trying to apply it to dating: first positing that 80% of the women were first messaging, and then as the original idea continued to be corrupted, dating the top 20% of the men.

And once Tinder monetized things further with benefits like being able to see who swiped on you… well, suddenly you had actual “evidence” as to whether you were one of the Blessed 20 or not. Lots of dudes, taking it as gospel that women were uniquely blessed with attention, while men were struggling for crumbs, would prioritize trying to match with as many people as possible, often by trying to shotgun love into existence. They would swipe right on every profile and then try to decide who they actually wanted to date after the matches rolled in.��Tinder, for its part, started playing silly games too, setting up its internal algorithm that tried to pair the pretty people who wanted to party. The internal ranking system would assign you a score and show you to people who had similar scores – scores based on, paradoxically, how many people had already swiped right on you vs. left and what their score was �– assertive mating done by data nerds. If you had lots of hot women swiping right, your score went up and you were shown to numerically hotter people. In theory, this was supposed to make for better matches. In practice, fives were feeling like they were being told to clam up because a 10 was swiping.

Getting more matches – not dates mind you, matches – became as much of the goal as anything else because it was like a digital data dick measuring contest for dating. Get lots of matches and clearly you were hot stuff. But the problem was – and still is: matches mean precisely two things: jack and s--t, and jack left town. Matches don’t mean a thing if you don’t actually turn them into dates, and that’s where a lot of folks were falling down. Even the supposed digital dimes weren’t getting the dates they thought they deserved.

Since then, the Trouble With Numbers has continued as Match Group has continued to play games with hotness. Everyone on Hinge, for example, has complained about Rose Jail, where they try to convince you to convert by saying “sure, we’ve shown you people we think you’re a good match with but let’s be real: the folks you wanna see are behind this here paywall and you only get one shot per week with them if you don’t pay up.”

Ironically, being put in Rose Jail meant you were often less likely to get messages because people get really squirrely about paying to message people and even squirrelier about getting a SuperLike or Rose or someone paying to talk to you.

So now, the numbers are already dismaying, but you’re also being told that the real hotties, the stars of the show, are waiting as long as you kick in an extra ten bucks per. So, you’re not just getting no-dates from the mid-tier, but the S-tier weren’t even seeing you. And this, on a service that you’re paying for, and being told that it is the way to meet people in the 21st and a half century.

It certainly didn’t help that as the popularity and ubiquity of dating apps grew, the number of people meeting in person wasn’t growing in parallel. Worse, 2020 rolls around and now none of us are out and about, so dating apps are the only safe-ish method of meeting and mating. And since social skills follow the pattern of ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if you don’t take it out and use it, it’s going to rust’, fewer people put in the practice to put themselves into the path of love.

All of which only serves to confirm the confirmation biases of the loneliest, angriest and frequently most entitled awful people who have a hard time understanding that “what, women are things!” doesn’t get you a lot of dates.  

And it’s the entitlement aspect that’s part of what’s leading men to blame women – the same entitlement that keeps framing the male loneliness epidemic as something women need to deal with and solve. Even wags like Scott Galloway who supposedly decry the Red Pill Mythos still validate it when they play into the idea that it’s women’s standards that are causing problems. Certainly not a problem of dudes not raising their game or recognizing that toxic tropes about what makes a man desirable get doubly dangerous when social mobility is a distant myth and the seemingly sole path to prosperity is lined with grift and graft. So start that drop-ship side-hustle, invest in crypto and hope that NFT line go up because that’s the only way you’ll reach the supposed low-end of the “your bank account must be THIS high in order to ride”.

As for what’s to be done: well, honestly, it really is a matter of “go outside and touch grass”. I’ll wave my hands at the overall archive where I’ve written extensively about what guys need to do to get better with women, but much of it can be distilled down to “you gotta live your life in meat space and actually talk to people like a person.” The vast majority of road blocks tend to be self-imposed and helplessness that people don’t’ want to unlearn – to the point that a thirft-store decorated apartment and a small group of friends seems like an unimaginably impossible goal to a truly shocking number of people.

But like I said: it’s numbers all the way down – a 1 to 10 scale in 1s and 0s that started with good intentions and turned toxic the more people focused on the numbers and not the people.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: My boyfriend and I have known each other since we dated many years ago. We are both “mature” adults. My problem is that BF constantly talks about his (well-used, high milage) “d--k”. Not just to me, but also to others. He inappropriately changes conversations and “jokingly” says things like “Do you want to see my d--k”? He even says this to other men! The last straw came when I was grief stricken and sobbing, because my best friend had died. He started talking about his d--k! I said “Why are you talking about that? He said “I thought it would make you feel better.” I guess that was supposed to replace true compassion and sympathy. I will admit that he is pretty “highly skilled” with his d—k; however, if he tap-danced 24/7, he would probably be a pretty good tap dancer too. What’s up with this?

“Dick’s Chick”

DEAR DICK’S CHICK: Normally I would put my usual “fake letter” disclaimers here, but at this point I don’t think there’s really a question about the reality of this one. But hey, deadlines are deadlines and sometimes a guy’s got word count to hit, so let’s roll with it anyway. ��So, quick question, DC: how old are you and your boyfriend? The two of you may be adults, but frankly, I’m seriously questioning the “mature” part of the equation. For both of you.

This is the sort of behavior I would expect from children who just figured out that saying certain words in public makes the adults squirm or late-teen edgelord prankster wannabes who think they’re cool when they’re really just pizza cutters – all edge, no point. If you’re both old enough to drink or rent cars, I would assume you’re both old enough to have grown out of both acting like this and tolerating it – especially in public.

I also have to wonder what precisely is the appeal of your relationship with your boyfriend, DC. I guess his stroke game must be off the goddamn charts, because it sure as hell seems like he has the emotional intelligence of a turnip. And not a particularly smart turnip. A turnip that’s been held back a few times because it won’t stop drawing big veiny penises all over the chalkboard when its supposed to be solving for X. I mean, maybe I could see some way that he thinks he was being helpful by being “funny” when he was offering you some penis to get you through that trying time. If I squint. A lot. But this is one of those times where not only is intent not magic, but I would question how he made it to adulthood without having certain lessons reinforced by kinetic and percussive reinforcement.

That’s part of why I question whether this is an actual letter or someone’s s--tposting. To be blunt: if I knew someone who consistently acted like this in public and kept dragging conversations to be whether folks want to hear about his magic wand, I would be seriously worried that maybe he has had some sort of stroke or aneurysm that damaged whatever part of his brain that says “hey, maybe don’t talk about your penis to complete strangers, no matter how well used it is.” This is the sort of disinhibited behavior that leads to explaining that Papaw has to go live in the home that smells like disinfectant and despair, with round-the-clock caregivers who make sure he’s not going out into the street and masturbating at the passers-by. At best, it’s a matter of God watching out for fools and Irishmen than he hasn’t had his face pushed in by someone who emphatically did not see the humor in hearing about his junk.

But I also have to wonder why you’re putting up with this or treating it as though it’s a quirky character trait and not a dude apparently itching for a beating or a sexual harassment complaint. The level of this is neither normal or acceptable behavior is off the charts to a degree that makes me question how you haven’t said anything yet. If anything, it seems like you’ve let things go unsaid until it reached absurd heights. Saying that he does this “even to men”, as though this makes it sound as though it was at least “reasonable” that he was talking about it to women but doing it to men was crossing the Rubicon. His unit isn’t like ketchup or mustard; there’s no reason for it to be on the table in the first place without very specific context, and that context ain’t “well, I’m very good with it.” Bringing it up to people who haven’t shown direct, clear and affirmative interest or curiosity is something that just about anyone who’s allowed outside in polite company has been taught, regardless of the gender of the person getting the invitation.

So maybe the question you should be asking isn’t “what’s up with this?”, it’s “why haven’t I told him that nobody wants to hear about his breakfast sausage?”, “why haven’t I said ‘Stop talking about your genitals to other people’ when he does this in front of me?” and “Why in the holy name of Jimmy Dean am I tolerating this behavior and why am I still with him in the first place?” Because I don’t care if he’s the Gregory Hines of f--king, there’s no amount of tap-dancing that will make this sort of behavior acceptable in the public and non-consenting spaces. It’s definitely going to get him in trouble – one way or another – if he continues on like this. Staying with him, especially if you aren’t going to say “what the actual pluperfect f--k is wrong with you?”, means that the odds of your getting caught in the social splash damage keeps getting closer to 1 the longer it goes on.

So – again, assuming this is all real – unless he’s legitimately had some sort of damage to his dome, you should be worrying less about the ‘why’ of it all and focus more on the “knock it the f--k off” side of things. And failing that, dipping out, so at the very least you’re not dating someone whose response to grief is to whip it out and wiggle it at you. 

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, I grew up in what did not seem at the time like an abusive household (there wasn’t any hitting! and not that much yelling!), but in retrospect, hooo boy. My mother (among other things) systematically cut my father and me off from having any sort of outside relationships – friends, family, clubs, or acquaintances – under the guise that we had to get *all* of our homework/job/household responsibilities out of the way before we could go out or spend any time with friends. And, Doc, would you be surprised to know that there was never any way a person could possibly hope to fulfill those requirements? Not when they included things like “clean the entire house, which hasn’t been touched since the last holiday party, and whose carpets have never in 20 years been steam-cleaned” or “repair the car’s engine.”

Fast forward to today. I have escaped! I have a lovely boyfriend! One who is very gregarious and very much has a social life, and I literally have no idea how to deal with this. Intellectually, and also emotionally, I like his friends, who range from “absolutely my kind of people, would hang out with them even if my BF wasn’t involved,” to “whatever, they’re fine, not my thing.” I want him to keep spending time with them and having a nice relationship with them! On the other hand, the entire pattern of my life has been that every evening is spent at home and not doing so is DISLOYALTY.

Sometimes I start feeling really neglected and worried that he doesn’t love me or take the household responsibilities seriously when he’s spending a night out with friends. (Note: I’m not counting days when I legit have some mini-crisis I want him there for, like, I’m too sick to cook myself dinner or we’ve got to get some urgent paperwork sorted or whatnot. This is just…me.) 

I’m usually free to come along (assuming it’s not something sensitive between them) and I often do, and I have no general complaints about the amount of time we spend together, but… the anxiety weasels, doc. The anxiety weasels.

I don’t want to become my mother! How do I re-train myself to a normal that I’ve never had?

Thanks,

Breaking The Wheel

DEAR BREAKING THE WHEEL: I want to start off by pointing something out important: you’re feeling things, BTW, you’re not doingthem. You’re not cutting your boyfriend off from his friends or family, you’re just experiencing something you’ve been trained into feeling. That’s very different than perpetuating the cycle, and it’s important to recognize this. The fact that you’re having these feelings isn’t the same as acting on them. You may be afraid of becoming your mother, but you’re not doing the things your mother did. Quite the opposite, honestly. Which is why being upset at yourself for having these feelings – as though it were as bad – isn’t helpful for you.

It also ain’t easy to live with. Let’s be honest, BTW: habituation is a motherf--ker. One of the greatest strengths of humanity is, ironically, also one of our greatest flaws: we can get adapt to literally anything. Is this a location so desolate that creatures evolved new and exciting ways to ensure they are able to get the nutrients they need because those nutrients sure as hell aren’t available in any easily obtainable form? Sounds like a place for a bunch of go-getters to set up a community! Is there a climate that kills people dead and their bleached bones should, by all rights, be left as a warning to others? Is trying to live there is like living in defiance of God and sanity? Cool, let’s post up in the worst part of it and make living under the heat of the Devil’s smile a point of pride!

The problem is, that adaptability and capacity to get used to even the most hellish living conditions applies just as much to our emotional connections and associations as well. If you grow up in an environment where emotional abuse, manipulation and arbitrary punishment is constant and unending… well, that’s often your “normal”, and many times you may not realize just how not “normal” it is to others until you see the dawning looks of horrors on their faces as you try to tell an amusing anecdote from your childhood. It’s the “fish don’t have a word for water” situation; until a certain point, this is just How Things Are, and you had no reason to question it or even any reason to suspect that there were other ways of living.

But that’s precisely where the heinous motherf--kery of habitation comes in; you may recognize intellectually that this was – to use the clinical term – profoundly f--ked up beyond all rational belief, but it’s still what you grew up in. You spent years being told that this was Right and Good and How Things Work, and that’s carved a hell of a groove in your brain like a pit in the road. You may want to travel in one direction, but your wheels get caught in that groove and you find yourself being pushed in a different direction altogether. Now, if you want to go in the direction you originally wanted, you have to do all sorts of work to force your wheel out of that groove and back onto the asphalt.

Of course, this gets hindered by the fact that our brains are inherently lazy efficient and don’t want to expend the energy and effort it takes to get out of that groove. It’s so much easier to just follow the groove, even if that groove is leading away from where you need to go! In fact, it’s so easy, that if you aren’t paying attention, you end up stuck in that groove without even realizing it until you’re miles off course and hours out of your way in the wrong direction. So, climbing out of that groove, avoiding it and carving a new one – one that takes you in more positive, helpful directions – takes not just effort but attention and reinforcement. You have to invest an absurd amount of energy to retrain your brain, fill in the old groove and carve a new one. It’s a task that’s almost Sisyphean in its frustration.

This is why the first step you need to take is be kinder to yourself when you feel the anxiety weasels start to spin up. Sure, it’s hard to feel any grace or compassion for yourself when your Spidey-sense is going off like you’re in the middle of Murderworld, but that’s when you need it the most. Recognizing that what you’re feeling is irrational and unfair and incorrect is one thing; not beating yourself up about it is another. It’s hard enough to muster the energy to make the weasels quiet down after they’ve had paint-thinner dabbed on their nipples; being upset at yourself for “letting” it happen just saps even more of your energy. Especially when you know damn good and well that you’re not “letting” anything happen.

This is why it’s important to recognize and acknowledge those moments for what they are – the residual echoes of your abuser telling you that this is real and true. Noting them and giving them a name helps you separate it from yourself – “right, this is just the pattern of my mom’s abuse trying to assert itself.” It reminds you that this isn’t you, it’s a feeling that you’re having and feelings are just that: feelings. They aren’t definitional. They may be real – you’re definitely experiencing it – but that doesn’t mean that they’re true. Calling them out for what they are makes it easier to remember that this isn’t something you’re doing by choice or because you’re a bad person; you’re doing it because you’ve been trained into it by someone who harmed you and you’re trying to break this pattern.

The second step that you need is to remember that emotions and thoughts have their own laws of physics, and that can inform how we relate to them as well. In this case, the relevant information is that it takes a lot of energy to overcome inertia and momentum; you need to match it with equal force in order to stop it in its tracks. However, it takes a hell of a lot less energy to redirect an emotion. Instead of trying to force it to stop, you simply move it in a different direction and allow metaphorical friction to slow it down on its own, without effort from you.

To strip away the poetic language for a moment, what this means is that when you have noted that you’re experiencing this emotion and you’ve named it, you don’t try to force yourself to stop feeling it. Instead, you redirect your conscious attention elsewhere – whether that’s on a task that you need to accomplish or something that’ll bring you more satisfaction and contentment than flinging weasel chow at the rampaging emotional mustelids. The benefit of turning your attention elsewhere is that you don’t have to expend energy changing how you feel; you just take advantage of the fact that our brains have very limited bandwidth, and you’re using more of it on something you want to think about, something that’s easy to think about instead. While you’re doing that, your trained anxiety reaction starts to slow down and peter out because it takes a lot of energy to maintain that reaction. It’s similar to a wheel rolling on a flat surface; without an external force exerting effort on it, the friction between the wheel and the surface bleeds away the momentum until it comes to a halt. If you don’t give it energy, that emotion tends to fade – often within minutes at most.

(This, incidentally, is part of why when you don’t want to lose your cool, you focus on controlling your breathing and count to 10; it’s giving yourself time to let the anger or frustration bleed away into nothing.)

Giving yourself something useful and satisfying – and satisfaction is useful, especially at times like this – will help occupy your mind so that you don’t have the capacity to pay attention to the anxiety weasels. And without that attention to motivate them, the weasels calm down and fade back into the background, which lets your rational side kick back in.

The third step is… well, honestly, it’s to return to the first step and repeat it. Because here’s the thing: you’re trying to replace an old habit with a new one – and yes, not worrying or not seeing this behavior as BETRAYAL!!!!! is a habit. A habit is simply something you do without thinking that you’ve trained yourself through repetition. If you fight with those anxiety weasels over and over again, you’re creating a habit of unleashing them and fighting them whenever your boyfriend spends time away from you. If you simply let the feeling fade while you do something more important or engaging, then you’re getting in the habit of not unleashing them. It’s hard to imagine not doing something as being a habit, but the repetition is how you carve that groove.

And the nice thing is that this repetition eventually becomes self-sustaining. As I said: our brains are lazy. Once you’ve gotten your train of thought out of that one groove and you’ve started to carve the new groove, it becomes easier and easier to keep your train of thought there. The amount of energy it takes to fall back into the old pattern becomes greater than the amount of energy that it takes to develop and deepen the new one.

Now, the tricky thing is: your brain will fight back. It’s a weird and perverse part of the human experience, but trying to break an old habit, even one that’s causing you harm, will often trigger what’s known as an “extinction burst”. Like I said: our brains don’t like change, and will fight tooth and nail to prevent it. The extinction burst is the Wave Motion Cannon of holding on to old patterns; when you’re reaching the point where this change is going to shift into the new pattern, your brain will fire off a veritable explosion of feelings to draw you back to that old pattern. So don’t be surprised if there’s a point where you feel like you’ve been making progress and then suddenly the number of anxiety weasels multiplies like one of them just heard someone say “on your left”. So, be aware that this is a completely normal thing that happens and just be ready to grit your teeth and white-knuckle your way through when it does.

Now there’re are a couple of things that can help support your ability to quiet those anxiety weasels down. As silly as it may sound, having a prop like a chore list that you could point to when the anxiety spins up can be helpful. Being able to look over and see that yes, the dishes have been done or the garbage has been taken out can help you ignore the weasel’s whispers. So too can an occasional “just thinking of you!” text or little note before he goes out. But I’d recommend keeping those as occasional boosts in the early days of this new habit, rather than folding them into how you avoid those anxiety thoughts; you don’t want to let it morph into a “you must text me every X hours when you’re out” situation.

But as I said: the most important thing to remember is that your worry is understandable, but not necessarily reasonable. The thing you’re most worried about is the very thing you’re not doing. Worries and feelings are inherently neutral; they don’t mean you’re a bad person for having them or experiencing them. They’re just feelings. Giving yourself grace and compassion for how difficult it is to break these patterns is a big part of making sure you have the strength and endurance to do so.

You’ve got this.   

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