DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  had a nervous breakdown some time ago. I was depressed, not interested in life or anything, except my own misery. I recovered, with therapy, exercise and a great deal of blind luck. I’m healthier, stronger, more fit than I ever was. I’m doing very well right now. I am enjoying the attentions of a few ladies. Apparently I’m charming and handsome.

Well, until now. (Prepare yourself for the cringefest).

I met this girl A. through a common interest. I found her fun and extremely intriguing. After a while I realized that I had a crush on her. A few months later, at a party we attended together, I told her that I crushed on her and she gave me her number. She told me that she had a great opinion of me from when we met so I was overjoyed.

We texted for a while. In some occasion I texted her while drunk, but she found that extreme adorable and charming for some reasons. She invited me to go on a weekend vacation together with some friends of hers but I didn’t managed. I gathered the courage and asked her out for a date. Her reaction was “interesting”. She told me that asking her out for a date was something from the ’50s, giving the whole thing an air of sacred stuff. She told me she thought that going out was more in line with her thinking.

After sometime in which we texted almost daily (She got a nasty infection that put her out of commission for a while) I asked to see her and go together to a museum (a silly idea we put up together). In this time I dated other people without any problems, even with a great deal of fun. We agreed to have dinner together, (gently offered by her) while I booked the tickets.

It went awful. Like really really bad. I was so nervous that I even have problems recalling what I did in the specific. I remember that the conversation was lacking, and I had been annoying. But she laughed at a few jokes and the dinner was nice, I think. I remember her teasing me because I wished a good-day to the bus driver when we got off and because I tipped our waiter (I had better chemistry with the waiter than with her).

She told me that she had an awful day and that I behaved very badly towards her. I cracked few jokes, but she laughed so I thought it was fine. I don’t know what I did in the detail, I can only remember the awkwardness. I apologized and asked her if there was the possibility of a second date. She told me that she is not opposed to that, but not in the near future, because of the awfulness of the first one.

The problem is not this. I think I can manage with disappointment.

She told me a few things that shook me.

When I told her that I wasn’t behaving like myself, she told me that is a very hard thing to act like a different person for an entire afternoon. She also told me that she is good with people, but that I didn’t showed anything, comparing me to a hollow mask.

People I dated in this time told me they liked me because I was passionate, intelligent and kind. I never been happier in my entire life. I even picked up new hobbies and interests, managing to find new friends and people. I can’t stop thinking about what she said. Is this new me just a likable mask that I managed to fool different people?

Thank you for your attention,

Freezing Frog

DEAR FREEZING FROG: Ever notice how much easier it is to believe negative criticism than it is to believe positive comments, FF? Ever notice how we tend to seek out negative comments with an eagerness that we often only reserve for french fries and sex but how we tend to let compliments slide off of us without a trace?

There’s a reason for that. We have a psychological trait known as “the negativity bias”; we give greater emotional weight and importance to negative emotions and feelings than we do to positive ones. In fact, it takes about 5 positive comments to match the figurative weight and impact of one negative one. Back in the early days of human development, this was a necessity for survival; that prioritization of negative feelings meant that our Spidey-sense was highly tuned to danger. The fact that we couldn’t just brush off that weird feeling that something was wrong often meant the difference between getting eaten by a saber-tooth tiger in the brush and living another day.

Unfortunately, while we don’t live in the savannah with apex predators waiting to eat us any more, our brains haven’t gotten the message. We still have that negativity bias rattling around in our headmeats and it absolutely screws with us at times for no reason.

Case in point: the aftermath of your hot date with your crush. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort on yourself and you’re doing better by every objective measure. And yet now, one bad date and you’re feeling lower than a snake’s ass in a drainage ditch. All that hard work and well-deserved good feelings down the drain.

But speaking as an outsider and from an outsider’s perspective? All that’s happened is that you went on a date with someone you were radically unsuited for. And frankly, from the way you’ve described her and the way you describe your date… she sounds like someone who would describe herself as “quirky” and most other people would describe as “irritating.” Like someone who’s convinced that she’s a manic-pixie dream girl. Asking someone for a date was “like something from the 50s with an air of the sacred”? Um… ok? Asking somebody she’s only met a couple of times on a weekend vacation with friends – friends that you evidently had never met before? Well that sounds like a long and awkward weekend in the offing. “I’ll go on another date with you but not for a while so I can forget how awful the first was?”

Look, she sounds like she’s off in her own little world and it’s rapidly running out of oxygen.

Regardless, the evidence you’ve given speaks less to the idea that you’re a person who was acting out of character and more to the fact that you and she had next to no chemistry on an actual date. Maybe the two of you got along like a house on fire over text… but attraction has a physical component and the fact is that you didn’t mesh on that level. You wanted things to work and the fact that you two weren’t connecting threw you into panic mode. You were scrambling to make things work and, like the plot to a hacky rom-com, it just made things worse. Now, I don’t think you should’ve tried to say you weren’t acting like yourself; that’s ultimately an excuse. Unless you accidentally switched brains with someone, that was you… just a version of you making a series of mistakes, like people often do. But by the same token, her telling you that you’re just a hollow mask? That’s just her being cruel for no apparent reason.

(Also: teasing you for being polite to a bus driver and for tipping the waitstaff? The hell?)

Look, my dude: all that’s happened is that you’ve had a bad date. Dating is often a crapshoot; there will be times when you are just going to have dates where things wouldn’t go right if you held a gun to its head. It happens to everyone. It sucks… but all there really is to do is to get up and walk it off. It sucked, it’s over, now learn from it so you don’t make the same mistakes again. Just… not with her. I’m sure she’s a lovely woman in other respects, but nothing you’ve said makes me think that she’s right for you.

Oh, and one more thing:

There’s a phrase I like: if one person calls you a horse, then you’ve met a weirdo. If you meet four people who call you a horse, then you should start getting fitted for a saddle. That is: what one person says is one person’s opinion. When several people – presumably people whose opinions you can trust – tell you something, then the odds are higher that they’re seeing something you aren’t. You have had one person – a person whose judgement I find highly questionable – tell you that you’re faking all of the improvements you’ve made. You’ve had many others tell you that you’re good looking, charming, passionate and kind. The odds that you’ve been faking all this time and have fooled everybody but this one woman are so remote that I’m pretty sure scientists haven’t invented numbers to describe it. The far, far likelier scenario is that you’ve put in a lot of hard work – work that you should justifiably be proud of – and you met one weirdo.

Hang in there, FF. You’re doing awesome.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: A few months ago, I met one of my sister’s friends at a track meet. She kept asking me if I was gonna come whenever her and her other friend were moving spots. After the track meet, she invited to get Taco Bell with her friend. During our time at Taco Bell, she was asking a lot of questions to get to know me and a lot of questions about the Air Force since I’m enlisting in it. Once my friends found out that I’ve been talking to her, they all started teasing me that she liked me.

The following Monday, we entered school like 10 seconds apart and she saw me ahead of her, so she ran up behind me and did the classic “tap a person on one shoulder and appear on the other,” which then led to us talking until school started. Two days later, she asked me if I wanted to walk to school with her which I said yes because I started developing feelings for her around that time. After we walked together, I started thinking that she likes me, because she was the one who asked me  – which is actually what one of my friends said later.

Prom was coming up and I was seriously thinking about asking her, but I didn’t know what she would say since she was friends with one of my sisters, so I had a friend ask her. She said my sister would get mad and left it at that, but when she found out that I was serious, she said she probably would’ve said yes. A week after we started talking, she told me that my sister was mentioning me to her more often, so I figured that couldn’t be a good thing… especially when she said she couldn’t tell me what my sister said. We talked a decent bit throughout the summer and hung out a few times. I really like her and want to make my move because I know it’ll eat me alive and probably regret not making my move because I’ll be leaving for Air Force BMT in October-Novemberish. I’m started to think that she might’ve liked me at the beginning but slowly stopped. While we did have some lengthy text conversations, I started all of them and she always ended them by her having to go to bed. I feel like if I hangout with her a few more times before I leave, it would help. She’s not friends with my sister anymore, so she wouldn’t be a problem. Recently after I told her she looked good with her new haircut because she was freaking out because she thought it was too short. A few minutes later, she sent me a video of an elephant eating another elephant’s ass then followed it up with elephants having sex.

Could those two videos mean something and be a weird way of dropping hints or is she trying to scare me away? How can I tell if she’s interested in me? And from the info that I gave you, was she interested in me at all? How exactly should I make my move as I don’t want to miss this opportunity and mess it up? Lastly, is there anything I can do that will get her to start text conversations more? I feel like I’ve been giving her signs that I’m interested in her but it’s hard for me to tell if she gave some back, especially over text. Thanks in advance and I look forward to hearing from you!

Mixed Signals?

DEAR MIXED SIGNALS: First things first, MS: I realize I’m an Old, but I’m pretty sure that, in the words of Sigmund Freud, sometimes a wacky video of elephants boning is just a wacky video of elephants boning.

But more to the point: yes, odds are that she likes you. Things like asking you to come with her as she moves around the venue, coming up to talk to you unprompted and asking to spend time with you are all generally pretty solid signs that someone likes you, at least a little.

(Now please notice very carefully that I’ve been using the present tense.)

Of course, there’s a simple way to find out if she’s into you: use your words and ask her out on a date. Not “send someone to ask for you.” Not “ask to hang out some time.” A proper “yes, I like you as more than a platonic friend” date. It doesn’t need to be an elaborate thing. All you need to say is “Hey, $NAME, I really think you’re awesome and I’d like to take you on a date. How do you feel about $COOL_THING and $COOL_THING on $SPECIFIC_TIME?”

And then you’ll have your answer. She may say that yes, she does like you and would love to go on a date with you. She may say she does like you but can’t make it on $SPECIFIC_TIME but what about $OTHER_TIME? She may say that she likes you but doesn’t feel like she can do anything about it because you’re about to head off to boot camp.

Or she may say “no, thank you”. And while that won’t be fun… it’s still an answer. And now you can head off to the Air Force without regrets and fantasies of “but what if?”

But just remember: if you want to know for sure if someone’s into you – especially as a potential lover, rather than a friend – then the surest way to find out is to just muscle up and ask them out on a date.

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 was dating a girl for about six months (I should qualify that I am also a girl), and things had been pretty good. I (still, even now) care about her, and she made me happier than I’d been in a while. She’s still publicly closeted, so we were secret even from close friends and family, which I was fine with. No, really, I was. I’m a very private person and my slowness to make relationships public has caused issues with girlfriends in the past, so I had no problems with being secret for as long as she wanted.

Things were a little rough for a while, mostly because work was hectic (a colleague was away and I was covering for them) and her parents (who are a good third of the reason she’s still closeted) were in town. We sat down and talked about it, and mutually decided to take a break. I could focus on work for a while without worrying about always being absent, and she wouldn’t be lying to her parents when she said she wasn’t dating anyone. This break was supposed to be about a month, with the understanding that we wouldn’t see other people during that month.

A week after that conversation, I visited a quiet restaurant a bit further out of my way than usual because it had really good reviews, and saw her tucked away in the back corner of the place, on a date with a guy.

I wanted to avoid jumping to conclusions and definitely didn’t want to make a scene, so I opted to leave quietly. She evidently noticed me as I did so, because when I glanced back at them she was staring at me like she’d seen a ghost.

I’ve mostly ignored her calls and texts, which has been difficult because, well, I’m pretty angry. I had made sure she knew that I was okay with an open relationship, and she’d said that she wanted to be exclusive.

My coping strategy for bad breakups (which is what this is rapidly becoming) has always been talking about it with friends, but I can’t really do that this time. Outing her would be a first class scumbag move, and my friends aren’t stupid. If I tell them I broke up with someone, they’ll notice the sudden absence of my ex from social gatherings and put two and two together. I know my friends knowing that she’s not straight probably isn’t a big deal, but for me it’s more the principle of it. If someone’s closeted, for whatever reason, you respect that and keep the secret.

I’ve made this needlessly complicated, but here is my problem in essence. My ex broke my trust, and not being able to talk to my friends about it is messing me up and making this far more draining than it needs to be.

Sorry for the rambling letter, 

Stressed and Emotionally Exhausted

DEAR STRESSED AND EMOTIONALLY EXHAUSTED: It really sucks that this happened, SEE and that you can’t really share this with your friends. This is one of the issues with dating closeted people; they drag you back into the closet with them, which has the effect of cutting you off from major sources of support and reassurance.

But before we get into what to do next… I have some questions. A lot of things just aren’t sitting right with me about this.

First: what’s with the “technical” honesty issue here? If she’s already lying to her parents about not being straight – and presumably lying by omission at the very least by not mentioning you – then I’m not entirely sure why saying “nope, not dating anyone” is going to make such a difference. If she’s that bad of a liar, I’d imagine her parents would’ve figured out the “not straight” part by now.

(And really, I think you didn’t need the “break”… or even to avoid being around her. Never underestimate the willful blindness of straight people to mistake flagrantly obvious lesbian couples as “just gal pals”…)

Second: how often were you seeing each other? Was this a case of you only saw each other on a sporadic schedule, or were you joined at the hip? You mention that you’ve evidently spent enough time together that your friends would notice her absence, which suggests you’ve spent a lot of time together. But if your relationship was a secret, even from friends… is it possible you were her dirty little secret?

Third: are you sure you saw what thought you saw?

I don’t want you to think that I don’t believe you. It could very well be exactly what you saw – your girlfriend was on a romantic date with a dude. This wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened to… well, anyone, really. And there’s the perversely conspiratorial part of my brain that wonders if your ex’s parents actually came to town…  or if the guy did. It doesn’t take much to start spinning a narrative in my brain that she’s had a long-distance thing going on with this guy and now he’s in town to see her.

But honestly, that doesn’t feel quite right to me. I mean, God knows I’ve seen people do weirder crap to justify stepping out on their partner, but arranging a month-long break in order to fool around is a bit baroque.

But considering the circumstances, it could be other things as well. How do you know that she was on a date? Were they snuggled up in that back corner, doing couple-y things? Were they holding hands, making out and generally being a public nuisance for the people around them? Were they sitting with their heads too close together in a way that would suggest greater intimacy than with a friend?

Is it possible that this was an outing with a friend, not something romantic? Is it possible that this date was, for lack of a better term, performative? Considering that she’s still deeply closeted, is it possible that this was a stunt date, something that she’s doing to keep her – evidently deeply disapproving – parents off her back? Hell, is it possible that this is something her parents set up when she “honestly” said she wasn’t seeing anyone?

Fourth: have you listened to any of the voice mails she left or read the texts she’d sent? Are they all begging for your forgiveness and admitting culpability, or is she trying to tell you that it’s not what you think?

I’d really be curious to get the answer to these, because honestly, this feels hinky to me on multiple levels.

But, failing that… the way I see it, you have a couple options. The first is that you talk to friends outside of your immediate circle. Do you have friends who don’t live in town that you’re still close to? Or people who are completely disconnected from your primary friend group? If you have confidants who aren’t part of the overlapping social circles, and you have the level of friendship that you can discuss these things, then they might be the people to talk to. There’s no guarantee that this won’t end up outing your ex – even not using names, people can put things together pretty quickly – but it will give you an outlet for emotional release.

Another option might be to talk to a stranger. There are a number of mental health services that straddle the line between therapy and a sympathetic bartender – essentially trained empathetic listeners. Peer listening services – even therapy apps – have people who are trained to listen and offer support and comfort for people who just need a friendly ear and a virtual shoulder. While not the same as having a good vent with your friends, it might be an acceptable substitute in the meantime.

And a third option is one that you might not like… you might want to talk to your ex.

Now if you’ve read my column, you know my general feelings on closure are “decide you have closure” and that there’s nothing wrong necessarily with cutting off an ex as what did you wrong. But, honestly, even in big cities, the LGBTQ community tends to be very small and interconnected, which means that the odds of your running into your ex again is pretty good. Confronting this issue head on now might make future interactions easier. And taking the time to meet up and ask – in a genteel way – “yo what the ever-loving hell?” might do you some good. If nothing else, you might at least get some answers that will help close the door on this relationship. And who knows? Maybe this would lance the boil of resentment that’s building in you right now.

It’s a lousy situation, SEE, and I’m sorry you had to go through it. Hopefully you can find some comfort with your team… even if you can’t give them the details.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I recently read a Kinsey Institute article about how much sex people are having per year, on average. For the 18-to-29-year-old demographic, it states that the average number of sexual encounters per year is 112.

112 times?! Holy s

t! And that’s not even counting all the sex I’m NOT having as a 28-year old virgin male, dragging down the bell curve!

This figure is completely demoralizing. I would need to have sex roughly 1200 times to catch up to my peers and achieve social parity, an impossible feat (my DeLorean is in the shop)!

To quote Wacko from Animaniacs: “The mind boggles!” What can I do to not feel totally inferior in the face of this titanic task?!

Tail End of the Bell Curve

DEAR TAIL END OF THE BELL CURVE: Dude, you seem to have missed the key word here: “average”. As in, the sum of total encounters divided by number of participants to the study. It doesn’t take much to skew an average, especially if someone at the far end of the curve has an absurdly high number. Over at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, geology majors have the highest average salary post-graduation… because Michael Jordan is sitting on one side of that particular curve. If you average out my net worth with Bill Gates, it’s going to come out in the billions.

Of course, that’s not the only thing to keep in mind. The number seems to be misleading you too. This is 112 encounters, not partners – that is, couples having sex. This comes out to a little over twice a week… not exactly unusual for a young couple during the honeymoon phase of their relationship. And anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship can tell you: that number ain’t constant. Sex and sexual frequency does dwindle naturally over the course of a relationship.

And more to the point: ultimately it’s a meaningless number when it comes to personal value, it’s a statistic. Feeling bad that you didn’t have sex 112 times this year is like feeling bad that you only have two kids instead of 2.5 or one car instead of 2.28. You’re not even trying to keep up with the Jones, you’re trying to keep up with an entire generation at the same time and let me tell ya dude: life don’t work that way.

The person who only has sex 50 times in one year isn’t any better or worse than the person who had sex 150 times… or once. Or, for that matter, none. Numbers of partners and amount of sex had is ultimately meaningless. The guy who’s had a hundred lovers, but can’t keep any of them, isn’t automatically better than the guy who’s been married to one woman for 85 years. The couple that has sex 300 times a year isn’t better or worse than the ones that can only do it 10 times a year because they live across the country from one another.

To quote Yoda: “All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.”  That’s you, chief. You’re so focused on a meaningless number that you’re losing focus on where you are. Spend less time worrying about playing catch-up and more on your own development and living an amazing life. You’ll get where you’re going soon enough; spending your time worrying about what everyone else is doing or has done just means that you won’t be able to enjoy the journey on the way there.

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: A few days back, my girlfriend bumped into someone she knew from school but hadn’t connected to since at the subway stop. They chatted for a bit, and then her train came. To her surprise, the guy got on the train with her despite the fact that it was not going in the direction that he was. During the trip, he mentioned several times how lonely he was, and how bitter and angry that makes him. In school, my girlfriend had been kind to this person after his diagnosis with Aspergers, during which time he shared that he had suicidal tendencies. Now, she’s worried that he doesn’t have anyone with whom he can share these feelings. Other than a mutual appreciation of the same TV series, they don’t have anything in common.

This evening, the person sent my girlfriend an email asking to go to a movie together. On one hand, she feels like she has a responsibility to help someone so obviously in need of companionship. On the other, she has no interest in spending any more time with the guy, and has neither the time or energy to become this person’s emotional support system, because she’ll be starting an intensive program in Engineering soon. She doesn’t want to agree to one meeting and give the impression that she wants to be his BFF, but she doesn’t want the guilt of ghosting him or turning him down and later learning that he had hurt himself or others. He doesn’t seem to take hints very well, or he wouldn’t have followed her home.

Should she give him the one hang out he wants, or should she find a way to turn him down gently? She wants my advice, but I don’t know what to say.

What About Bob?

DEAR WHAT ABOUT BOB: It’s good that your girlfriend is concerned about this guy’s feelings, WaB. But There’s a difference between “being concerned about someone” and “signing on to be their emotional cruise director.” One of the issues that comes up with folks who are in the center of the Venn diagram with “lonely” on one side and “socially awkward” on the other is that they tend to imprint on the first person to be nice to them like an awkward duckling. Which can be sweet at times but it’s also exhausting; more often than not, it means that they’re putting all of their emotional intimacy eggs into that one metaphorical basket. That in and of itself is a problem, but it also means that they tend to rely on that person for all of their future social connections.

And then there’s the fact that this dude is waving some red flags around. Getting on the train going in the wrong direction to keep talking to her… ok, he may not quite get appropriate behavior. It’s still creepy, but it’s a one-off. That plus advertising his bitterness and rage and dropping subtle hints about his loneliness… I can’t really blame your girlfriend for feeling weird about this guy.

Plus: she’s got her own life to live. She’s busy as it is, and her job isn’t to be this dude’s therapist, surrogate or nursemaid. And this guy is already giving signs of attaching himself to her like a lovesick lamprey.

Look, this is a case where there won’t be just one hang-out. If she meets up with him once, she’s going to be opening up the door to even more demands on her time… and she’ll feel guilty not giving it to him. Blame the same socialization that women go through that teaches them to be overly-giving to others, even at the expense of themselves.

The best thing your girlfriend can do is turn him down, gently but firmly. It’s important that she makes it clear that she’s not interested in hanging out with him; a soft “no” like “I can’t, I’m busy right now” will be read as a “…so keep trying.” She doesn’t have to be cruel or harsh about it, but she should be clear that she’s not available or interested in hanging out with him.

The other thing to keep in mind: she’s not responsible for whatever he does or doesn’t do after she turns him down. That’s bulls

t that people try to use to leverage others – especially women – into doing things they don’t want to do. Just as Shana Fisher wasn’t responsible for Dimitrios Pagourtzis shooting up the school in Santa Fe, Texas, your girlfriend isn’t on the hook for this guy’s actions. He may be lonely, he may be autistic, but he still is making choices of his own free will. That’s on him. 

Tell your girlfriend the best thing she can say is “thanks but no thanks, best of luck on your search.”

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I am a screw-up trying to unscrew his screw-ups with women. Several things happened in my freshman year that reinforced my need to get better with interacting with women: I was falsely accused of stalking a girl in my orientation group, I torched a friendship with a female friend after groping her by accident and making her even more uncomfortable in my attempts to apologize, and learned that I had creeped out the girl I’d had a crush on since the beginning of the year. This is compounding on the screw-ups with women I had during high school, and suffice it to say, there are a lot of them. 

I was tired of repeating history, so I went Google searching for advice on not creeping out women, which is how I found your ‘Don’t Be A Creep’ series of articles. I learned about “soft ‘no’s”, “oneitis”, the importance of eye contact and observation of personal space, and a bunch of other helpful stuff, and for a while, it seemed to work. I fully realized some of the creepy actions I’ve done in my past, reached out to the people I could and apologized. I apologized to my crush and became, if not friends, someone she’s OK having around. I kicked porn and masturbation for four months and enjoyed the results. It was a little exhilarating. 

Well, school’s out and reality came crashing in. I had talked a little to my ex-friend, and she said she was open to me texting her, which I tried and got left on read. I had gotten my crush’s Snapchat a few weeks before school was out; it’s going on 3 weeks into summer, and she still hasn’t added me back. I tried to contact a victim of my creepiness and got no response, not even a ‘Read [insert time]’, which makes me believe she blocked my number, a horrible feeling. Porn and masturbation came crashing in, and my streak was broken within 48 hours of being home. I know I’m not entitled to forgiveness or love or whatever it is I’m looking for, but that doesn’t change the fact that the lack of whatever I’m looking for SUCKS. 

Coming home from school made me realize what was seemingly a lot of old feelings going away was just a delayed reaction, and they’ve all come back with a vengeance. That ‘I’m going to die alone’ feeling. That ‘accept your fate’ feeling. That ‘Scarlet Letter, every girl on the planet knows you’ve done some creepy stuff and wouldn’t want to be around you for a million dollars’ feeling. That ‘I’m the only one who feels this way and has these problems’ feeling. I know these are all BS, but yet another thing I’ve learned this year is the huge difference between comprehension and acceptance.

So I guess the advice I’m looking for throughout all of this gut-spilling is: what do I do moving forward? How do I take the blinders off and see the mistakes I’m seeing in the present instead of with hindsight’s 20/20? Is there some way to go from comprehension to acceptance with what’s probably never going to happen? Is there some sabotaging aspect of myself you can see that I can’t? Give me a diagnosis, Doc. Believe me, I need it. 

Needing The Truth

DEAR NEEDING THE TRUTH: OK NTT, remember that you asked for this. This is going to be harsh, but I promise you: go through all of this and you’ll come out a better person on the other side.

Here’s the mistake you made and are still making: you haven’t processed the fact that apologizing for being a creeper doesn’t make things better if you don’t change the way you act. Apologies are great, but they’re just the start of the process. The next step is to quit behaving like a creeper. Part of this entails accepting the consequences of your actions. You’ve made people feel deeply uncomfortable, and those people may very well not want you around afterwards, even with your apology. People aren’t always going to give you a second chance, and frankly, that’s their prerogative. They’re neither required to accept your apology or give you another chance, and it’s on you to accept this.

And honestly? You haven’t. You’re trying to act like what you’ve done has been erased and it hasn’t. It can take people time to feel comfortable around you again; rushing in like everything’s back to the pre-creepiness status quo just tells everybody that you don’t get why what you did creeped people out. Jumping on your crush’s Snapchat? That was exactly the sort of thing that tells them that you haven’t learned your lesson. This is the sort of behavior that makes people think “this is going to be exactly the same as it was last time.”

It takes time to earn people’s trust back – often months or even years. Some may never want you around again and hey, while that sucks? The only thing you can do is acknowledge their wishes and move on.

You need to take the L right now and accept that things are going to suck for a while as you show through your actions that you’ve learned and are a better person. That may mean that you’re going to have to let these people go and accept that they just don’t want to have anything to do with you going forward. Which, hey, sucks. But it is what it is. You can only learn from this so that you don’t screw up the same way, next time.

And while you’re doing all this, you should take time to get some help. The answer to getting better emotionally isn’t joining the no-fap movement, it’s talking to a professional. Fortunately, you’re in college, which means you have access to low-cost, or even free mental health services. Make an appointment with the counselor and start talking all of this out. They’ll be able to help you process everything you’re feeling and give you some strategies to not only handle things, but to help move forward in a healthy and productive manner.

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