DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  I’m a 30 year old guy who was sexually abused as a child by a woman. When I was younger, dating and even flirting with women brought about anxiety and a vague sense of dread.

A few years ago, I got myself into therapy, started being more mindful of things that trigger me and subsequently got much more confident around women. I’ve been doing the online dating thing for the last couple of years and it’s generally been a good experience. Even when the women haven’t been a good match for me, I’ve generally enjoying meeting and talking to new people.

As a result of my abuse though, I’m not really capable of physical intimacy with women until I get to know them a bit and feel comfortable around them. I usually tell them that, “I just want to take things slowly,” since I don’t feel like disclosing my abuse to people that I’ve just been on a date or two with. Unfortunately, many of the women are totally baffled by a guy who turns down sex and they often get upset.

The last girl I went on a few dates with actually called me a f

t for not wanting to sleep with her. Is there a way that I can communicate my boundaries while making it clear that I’m still interested? Thank you Dr. NerdLove you’re my only hope!

Signed,

Don’t Know What to Say

DEAR DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY: First of all, DKWTS, I’m sorry for what you went through and I’m proud of you for not only having survived it but for having been strong enough to get help and work through your issues. It’s entirely understandable that you have scars from your experience – after all, you went through hell! – but those scars aren’t something to be ashamed of. They’re proof that you’ve been through the s

t and came out on the other side.

So far, you’re doing the right thing for you: taking your time and establishing a level of comfort and trust with the women you’re interested in and that’s good. You’ve got every right to want sex on terms that make you the most comfortable and feel safe. From the sounds of things, it sounds like you’re having two issues. The first is communication. It’s a social trope that all guys are horny at all times and can’t wait to bone. Sometimes when a guy wants to take things at a slower pace, this gets read by others as “not actually interested”. Now you don’t say where your limits are and depending on how you’ve set them, this may cause some confusion; if you’re uncomfortable with, say, kissing or making out, it’s understandable that – even when you say you want to take things slowly – that women may feel as though they’re getting mixed signal, especially on the first couple date. If there’s no sign of physical chemistry, even a good night kiss, then your date may think you’re just not interested in her at all or that you’re only interested in her as friends. If you’re setting the bar towards heavy fooling around (mutual masturbation, oral, etc.) or penetrative sex, then it’s a bit easier to explain.

Either way: you want to say more than just “I want to take things slowly”. Frame it as being part of who youare, not anything about them. Say “Hey just so you know: I think you’re amazingly hot and incredible and I’m attracted to you, but I really prefer to go slow when I’m with someone I really like. It’s just my thing.” And you leave it there. It’s short, simple and respectful. It won’t be a big deal because you’re not treating it like a big deal, and others will take your lead. If they push for details, just reiterate: “Its just my thing”. You don’t need to explain or justify it. The women who are right for you will understand and respect that. When you do have that level of trust and comfort, you’ll have established that attraction and you’ll seem like you’re just practicing restraint or are the sort of person who has a slow-burn rather than not being interested. When you know them better and feel comfortable with them, you can explain. But until then: “It’s just my thing. It’s just how I am. That’s all. No big deal.”

And by the by, DKWTS, thank whatever gods you believe in that you didn’t sleep with that last girl you mentioned. Between tossing “f

t” out as an insult and berating you for having boundaries, you very clearly dodged a massive bullet. Her awful attitude and behavior is on her, not on you. That woman volunteered her status as an a

hole right up front and life is too damn short for dealing with (or dating) a

holes.

But you see: that’s the great thing about having boundaries: you filter out the a

holes who don’t respect them or try to push past them.

Good luck!

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: My now ex-husband and I had a threesome. It was always a fantasy of mine to be with a woman. I wanted him to just watch but he said I was being selfish so I said he can join. Not only did he penetrate but he also ejaculated inside of her and that tore me up. I did agree to the threesome but seeing him finish with her was something I could never forget it. Was it wrong of me to feel like that if I’m the one who initially wanted it?

Conflicted

DEAR CONFLICTED: Oof. Remember what I said about a

holes pushing past people’s boundaries earlier? This is what it looks like.

Conflicted, the way you feel is entirely correct. An important part of any successful threesome is establishing firm rules and guidelines BEFORE you’re in the bedroom – and preferably before you’re connecting with your third. The reason for this is because you ideally want to avoid what happened here: people get hurt. Now you haven’t given me much information to work with – you don’t say whether you established that this was supposed to be about just him watching you be with another woman or you all decided this in the moment. As a general rule of thumb, it’s a bad idea to decide on rules while you’re all naked and horny; what seems like a great idea in the heat of the moment often is the cause for regret later on. But even if communication was poor, there’s a LOT of badness involved here.

You established the rules for your encounter – you wanted your ex-husband to watch while you were with your guest star. Your husband decided in the middle of things that he wasn’t cool with this and demanded to be more active. This is a HUGE no-no: no changing the rules in the middle of things. If you want to do things differently, you do it again. But changing things up before everyone’s had a chance to think it through is a bad, bad idea.

The fact that he was pressuring you into changing the rules – calling you selfish and implying that you owed this to him – is supremely sh

*ty behavior on his part.

The other mistake made here was your husband finishing in your guest. This is a really bad idea for a couple’s first threesome, especially if they’ve been strictly monogamous up until now. The generally accepted rule for threesomes: the primary couple gets most of the attention – including his orgasm – unless explicitly and specifically negotiated otherwise. As you found out the hard way: making decisions in the moment can lead to people being hurt.

So, no Conflicted, it’s not wrong for you to feel hurt. Your husband’s actions were selfish and inconsiderate at best, actively s

*ty at worst and ended up causing you pain. Sounds like you’re well rid of him. If you decide to have another threesome again in the future – and honestly, I can hardly blame you if this experience turned you off them entirely – make sure it’s with people you trust and establish the ground rules long before your clothes come off.

Good luck.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m going to start by saying I think you writing is just great, you bring knowledge PUA yet at same time temper it with real sensitivity and respect for women. Your article ‘Creep Week – How to reform creeper’ resonated with me deeply and I’ll think you’ll see why once I share the story of a recent screw up I made. And, boy did I screw up. Over the past decade I have been, nearly all the time in long term relationships. At the very start of each these relationships I did something for the girl in question, which had always been appreciated and enjoyed by them. I would write a short story – erotic fiction – that would feature both of us and be explicit but nothing too kinky. This would invariable take the relationship to a sexual place very quickly nearly every time.

My last girlfriend (of ~3 years) was a sexually liberated woman who put me in touch with my dominant side. She would often encourage me to be more extreme in bed especially in the things I would say to her. She ended the relationship about 2 months ago.

I joined tinder and started dating again about 3 weeks ago.

I met a very attractive girl, who gave me her no, we texted each other for a while and she asked me to connect on facebook with her. When I asked her on a date seemed genuinely excited at my proposition. The first date went about as well as you could expect, we had a meal, talked for hours and kissed at the ended, arranging to met a few days later for lunch.

Lunch date went well and she invited me over to her place Tuesday the following week, and I said I would cook for her. And this is where I made the 1st big mistake. Yes, you guessed it, I went her wrote an erotic fiction short story. I asked for her email address saying that I had written something for her that would be unsuitable for work. I sent it.

She texted back saying that it was weird and she didn’t want to see me again and unfriended me on facebook.

My 2nd mistake:

I tried to apologize by email but guess I had not fully realized the distress I had caused this girl, or was apologizing for the wrong reasons. She replied to the email saying i was a creep and a pervert. She told me what I had written was an ’emotional invasion of privacy of such a personal nature’. She said if I came near her or tried to contact her again she would have up on a sexual harassment charge.

It was only once I read that I completely understood what I had done.

I had completely and utterly, rode rough-shod over this girl’s boundaries and committed a criminal act in the process.

Lessons I learned from this:

Never, ever again will I send a girl erotic fiction unless I have their expressed permission to send them explicit written material.

Slow the hell down and learn to chill.

My questions to you Doc are:

1. I am broken? Is my inability to recognize and respect this girl’s very basic and obvious boundaries a sign that I should seek professional help? Bear I mind that I not been called or acted like (I think) a creep in over a decade.

2. I know I should not use excuses for my behavior but do you think I could have been carrying around behavior I had learned from my last long term relationship, which was deeply sexual in nature?

3. Should I not date for a while, get myself off tinder and just spend some time by myself? I still feel a desire for intimacy in my life and I miss the emotional and physical connection of being with someone. I am currently dating, in contact with a few women, nothing serious yet though.

4. How can I be more aware of a woman’s boundaries so I don’t push past them again and balance that with the dominant sexual side of my personality that has been awoken by my last relationship? Or is that dominant side the source of my new creepiness and something I should be seeking to rid myself of?

Regards

Creeps Anonymous

DEAR CREEPS ANONYMOUS: It’s good that you’re recognizing that you did something wrong and are trying to take responsibility for it CA… but you want to fix things then you should focus on what actually went wrong instead of spiraling into the self-flagellation-fest you’re engaging in. Unless you recognize WHY she was creeped out, it’s hard to take measurable steps to not do so next time.

Here’s what happened: you jumped the gun. HOLY HOPPING SHEEP S

T you jumped the gun with your little gift. You had gone on a couple of dates with a bit of kissing at the end. All well and good but then you jumped about a dozen steps ahead – not just trying to start sexting with her but personalized erotica. I want to emphasize this: this is before you’d even gotten to the “sloppy make-outs” stage, never mind “random sexy gifts” or even “seen each other naked” stages. This actually leapfrogs well past “unsolicited pics of your junk” and straight into “it puts the lotion on it’s skin or else it gets the hose again”. It’s no wonder that not only was she seriously wigged out by this – damn near anyone is going to be freaked out when somebody they’ve only seen twice casually is sending them detailed sex fantasies.

So it’s not just that you pushed past her boundaries, it’s that you were massively inappropriate and apparently unaware of the message you were sending to her. Even if we try to view things in the best possible light, it makes you out to have low social intelligence, which is a very unattractive trait.

There’s nothing wrong with being sexual, sexually expressive, kinky or dominant, but part of making any of that work is understanding when it’s appropriate and when oh HELL no it isn’t. And telling somebody what you want to do to her when she’s not given you any indication that she wants to know? That’s an “oh HELL no” situation.

It’s great that your previous relationship was that sexual CA, but you need to remember that it was your previous relationship. Each relationship is going to be different, and those early stages are for finding out whether the two of you are on the same page in what you’re looking for. Just as you don’t send pictures of your junk without clear signs that they’d be welcome, you don’t send personalized erotica to someone who hasn’t asked for it.

I can’t give you any specific rules – no custom smut before X dates – but I will say that if you two haven’t actually had sex or done things that make it clear sex is in the cards, then keep those stories to yourself. Once you two are at a point where you know that she’d find it hot to get those stories… then you send them. And if you’re ever unsure whether that’s something they’d be interested in? Ask.

In fact those are good rules when it comes to consent: when in doubt, just ask. And if you need a creative outlet for that erotica… well that’s what anonymous Tumblrs are for.

Just, for the love of God, don’t write and share porn about people you’re dating without their permission.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I made a terrible mistake and accidentally got myself into a relationship with a friend. I need to apply the brakes with her to (at least) slow things down before getting into a serious relationship.

Yesterday I was having Easter dinner with my family, and an old friend from high school. We are both nineteen years old. Everything was going well and eventually the family ranks thinned out as they went to bed or drove home, leaving myself and my friend in the living room. We were talking for a few hours and she eventually got tired and lay her head on me and we continued to chat for a bit. Eventually she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. She was very nervous, and I have never been kissed before and it was so exciting that we kissed each other on the mouth a couple of times and basically agreed to have a relationship right there and then. About thirty minutes later my uncle and I drove her home agreeing to see each other again soon, I have not told anyone else about this.

The next morning I realized I had made a mistake. The first thing is that this is the first time I have been with this woman since the summer of 2015. I knew her throughout the last year of high school and were good friends then. I had considered asking her about half way through the year, but she went out with another man (she ended that relationship a year ago, and I am not aware if she has been in a serious relationship since then) which ended any thoughts of me doing so. As what often happens when a friend gets into a relationship, she began to distance herself from me. We had texted one another for long periods off and on since then (she is going to the same college as I in a few months), but overall we have not been in serious contact. When she came through the door of my house last night, she was a friend, when she left, she was my girlfriend. The second problem is that I was not at all preparing for a relationship mentally or emotionally. I had not thought of being in a relationship with anyone for months, and now in an instant, I am in one, and I am not sure what to do.

We are due to meet in early May at my place (I live with my parents), and I need to find a way to slow things right now, quickly. I love being around her, and I did enjoy kissing her, but I am not sure if I want to be in a romantic relationship with her, and I for sure know that I do not want one at this very moment (at least, without any kind of preparation). I know I made a terrible mistake, and I should never have led her on nor kissed her, but I need some advice on how to say to her that we need some time to figure things out, without pushing away a friend.

Sincerely –

Rock and A Hard Place

DEAR ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Did you ever see that Seinfeld episode where George accidentally promises his secretary a raise in the middle of sex and then spends the rest of the time trying to find out how to take it back? It’s one of my favorites because it illustrates a universal fact: people tend to say things they don’t actually mean when they get carried away in the heat of the moment.

In your case, you and she were caught up in the awesomeness of your make-out session and while your hormones were surging and blood was starting to flow away from your brains and to your junk, you made some decisions that you wouldn’t have made if you’d been thinking clearly. This doesn’t mean that kissing her was a mistake, mind you… just a reminder that it’s a good idea to not make any decisions when you’re horny. Or as my father once told me: “Son, a good lawyer is worth twice what they’re charging you.”

No wait, wrong fatherly aphorism. It was “Never make promises to a woman while you’re naked.”

So now you know: next time, enjoy the make-out but don’t make plans.

But that’s for the future and you need to deal with the here and now. And what you need to do is use your words. Hell, all you need to do is tell her what you just told me: You love being around her, you enjoyed making out with her and you want her in your life but you don’t know if you want to date her or anyone right now. I would leave off the “it was a terrible mistake” part because a) no, it wasn’t and b) that is going to make her feel like crap.

And here’s something you may not have considered: she may feel the same way you do. She may well feel the same awkwardness and doesn’t know how to bring it up to you.

So take a deep breath, preface things with “OK, this is going to be a bit awkward, but I need to put this out there” and just lay it out like you told me. Yes, it’ll sting. She may want some time apart to process how she feels. Or she may say “Oh thank God you said it first.”

But it needs to be said. Before she visits.

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 have a question that is somewhat outside of the normal range, but I respect your view point and I have no one else to ask. In brief-ish, narcissist gas lighting mother is dating the guy that molested me as a small (under 5) child. I haven’t spoken to her in three years, and my dad in almost as long as his response when I tried to talk to him about it was “get over it already.” He is 2nd adoptive step-father, so he wasn’t around at the time. I am 36 and I have three younger siblings, 31, 24, and 18. The youngest is a senior in high school, the 24 is so stunted (thanks mom!) he might as well be. The oldest has already once broken my rule about providing our mother with my contact info. That’s the history.

Here is the problem. I am getting married next spring. My initial urge is to not tell anyone. But I very much want at least one person at the wedding that has known me longer than 3 years. At my first (baaaaaaad choice) wedding, my sister closest in age was a giant a

hole about the whole thing. Admittedly she was 14, but that’s just how she is about most stuff. In her 20s she threw fit on Christmas because the baby of the family got one more present than she did. She counted 15 vs 16. She is also the only person who could arrange for the younger ones to be here, as I live 1,000 miles away and have no money. I would also like to have my dad there, but I don’t know that I can trust him not to tell my mom. He is the epitome of the religious right wing privileged white man. Been supporting Huckabee since I was a teenager. Which is gross, but he does love me and would definitely hold a massive goddamn grudge if he finds out later.

So….what do I do? Get drama llama sister involved? Sneak out the younger ones and hope they can keep a secret? Risk my mother crashing my wedding? I’ve spent the last three years undoing a ton of damage to my psyche and I desperately don’t want to invite all the bulls

t back in. But I love my siblings very much. If none of them come, it will just be me and my partner’s friends and family. I don’t have any close friends, it’s hard to meet people when you are either crying or having panic attacks and can’t trust anyone.

Something Blue

DEAR SOMETHING BLUE: I’m so sorry for what you’ve gone through with your family and the damage that it’s done to you over the years. It’s a tragedy when the people who are supposed to love and support you unconditionally are the ones who’ve hurt you the worst and the deepest. It’s entirely understandable that you cut off contact with your folks and that you have to keep the remainder at arm’s length; if you can’t trust them to respect your boundaries or not to leak your information to your mother, then keeping them at a distance is a necessary form of psychic self-defense. It’s sad that this is what you have to do to be healthy and happy, but frankly you have to put you first.

Before I get to your wedding questions, I hope that you’re seeking help with a counselor or a therapist. I understand that money is tight, but many counselors will work with you in terms of payment, and Captain Awkward has an excellent guide for finding low-cost (or even free) mental health care options on her site that I highly recommend you check out.

Now with that out of the way, let’s talk about your wedding questions. Your wedding is ultimately about you and your fiancee. As such, you get to decide what it means, how it’s going to happen and who gets to be there. If you want to have a simple signing of the license and call it good, then whip out the pen and get it done. If you want to have a private ceremony for just you and your partner and a backyard barbecue later for your nearest and dearest, then go for it! If you want the full fairy-tale wedding, then knock yourself out. This right to define your terms includes who gets to know beforehand and who gets to be on the guest list. Somebody else’s hurt fee-fees don’t trump your right to celebrate things the way you want and once you get into obligation invites, things can spiral out of control before you know it.

Now from a personal experience, I have had a close friend get married who had a family member that she absolutely did not want to come; this was a person who had committed actual assault on other members of her family at a similar gathering. The catch: this person was married to her uncle, whom my friend loved to pieces and would have been heartbroken not to have at the ceremony. So when she invited her uncle, not only was his name the only one that was on the invitation, but she reached out to him privately and explained that while he was welcome, his wife was not and if that meant that he couldn’t come, then she understood. Not having her uncle come was going to be the price of not dealing with the stress, drama and potential danger of having her at the wedding.

You have the right to do this too. You can invite the siblings and family members you trust and specifically leave out the ones you don’t, with instructions not to let them know until it’s fait accompli. There will probably be grumbles, but if you can live with that then that’s the price that comes with having them there. If you want to weigh the chances, you can reach out some tentative feelers to those family members you would want to attend – have some conversations about your relationship, your relationship with your mother and how this affects your plans for the future and see how they respond. If you feel secure in trusting them with more information, then you can make with the actual invitations.

Alternately, you are also perfectly welcome to give a carefully edited version of the truth (or just straight up lie): circumstances and monetary limitations mean an incredibly small wedding and limited guest-list of people who were already there; then you can have a simple post-wedding get together for select friends and family later when finances allow. I suspect this may be easier than convoluted levels of skullduggery, especially when you can’t trust certain members of your family to not leak the information to your mother.

I’m sorry I don’t have anything more concrete for you. You’re in an awful situation and there really aren’t any clean-cut or easy answers to your predicament. I just want to you make sure that you take care of yourself first and foremost; you don’t need the toxic members of your family doing any more damage to you than they already have.

But there’s other thing I want you to consider: we have two families in life. We have our family by blood and our family by choice. Sometimes the two are the same. Sometimes they are not. Part of the point of a wedding is that you’re joining your partner’s family, just as they’re joining yours. I presume (and I hope) that your partner’s family loves and respects you and that you love and respect them – this is part of what makes them your family by choice. While I totally understand not wanting your side of the metaphorical aisle to be empty, if you can’t risk the damage it does to you then it’s not worth it to have them there.

But their absence doesn’t mean that your family won’t be there… it just may be that it won’t be the ones you share blood with.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I have a problem (or more likely, a laundry list of them, haha): I can’t stay interested in a guy for longer than a couple of months after we start a relationship. And it’s not just losing sexual interest. In the beginning, I am completely happy to boink like bunnies at every available opportunity. But at the end, my sex drive is still high and totally functioning, I just don’t want his assistance anymore. Most of it is that all the things that seemed minor and easy to look past in the beginning while everything was sunshine and puppies starts to really drive me nuts and seem like insurmountable obstacles that, frankly, I don’t have the emotional investment to even want to try. Like the fact that a guy (like my current BF) just doesn’t have an opinion on anything or initiate anything. I’m as happy as the next girl to get to do what I want sometimes, but I hate being the one who has to make ALL of the decisions (including big things like being the one to ask him out or little things like what to have for dinner EVERY. SINGLE. TIME we go out). And I know that a solution could be reached, but I’m just not motivated enough to keep him to try.

And this happens every time I try a relationship. And it isn’t that I just don’t know them beforehand. Even with casual encounters I prefer to be friends first, much less trying a relationship. So I’ll have been friends with the guy and crushing on him for a month or two before I ever agree or try to initiate something more. And for a couple of months, it’ll go pretty well. But it takes me a long time to get truly attached to people. And in every relationship I’ve had, the man gets way more emotionally invested way quicker. And then they usually start to get upset that I don’t want to spend as much time with them as they do with me (even though I’ve told them from the outset that it takes me a while and that I’m one of those introverts who requires several human-free hours a day to unwind). And I resent their demands though I try to accommodate, and then get irritated over little things, and then run for the hills of singledom.

I’ve never even been in love. It’s starting to get me worried that I’m defective or something. Surely a 25 year old with an otherwise healthy social life and plenty of romantic opportunities should have fallen for somebody at some point by now, right?

I thought that maybe it was just that maybe I needed another introvert and the magic would happen. Current BF has the same level of social interest, is a great guy, and we even geekgasm over the same things. Plus I’d known and been friends with (and totally crushing on) him for a little less than two months before I asked him out. And the beginning was so promising! But yet again, after three months, I’ve hit that wall where I’m thinking, y’know, I’m not really that interesting. I have never, even in the beginning of any relationship when things are happy-fuzzy-funtimes, been emotionally invested enough to muster more than a vague sense of disappointment at the thought of a breakup. Am I broken?

I know that I do have some issues with emotional intimacy. My first real relationship threatened suicide if I ever left him within the first month of dating. (And really, what does it say about me that I left anyways?) The next one wanted both a mother and a girlfriend all rolled into one. (Which really bothered me since I’ve been completely self sufficient since 19 and am proud of it. I really value my own and any partner’s independence.) He repeatedly told me that I was the only reason he wasn’t getting back into drugs, and I had to very carefully extricate myself from that one, since he was also very emotionally fragile. So guys getting really emotionally attached rather quickly really freaks me out. And I’ve told everyone that I’ve tried to date this. I’m rather upfront about it. And they insist on doing it anyways. And once they start showing obvious signs, I get irritated at that, and then at everything, and then I just want to escape.

So any advice, Doc? Any way that I can possibly have a relationship that lasts into the longterm? Because while I’m not one of those girls who can’t be happy single, I do at times think I’d like to have a partner in life. Which results in me trying the whole relationship thing over instead of ignoring my crushes, which inevitably ends up with me feeling like a bitch for breaking up with yet another guy after just a few months. Am I doomed to serial short-term monogamy?

—Maybe I’m a Robot?

DEAR MAYBE I’M A ROBOT: I don’t think you’re defective, MIaR, I think you’re still working on your relationship style and needs. When someone is right for you, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be right for you forever. Not every relationship is meant to be a long-term one, and the fact that you broke up didn’t mean that the relationship is a failure. Some relationships are just short-term by their nature; that doesn’t make them lesser or not valid. You may well just be a serial monogamist who has short-term flings and gets her emotional needs met through other means besides a long-term partner, and that’s totally cool, as long as you’re cool with it.

Now with all that being said: if you’re seeing patterns in every relationship you have, then you need to look at what they all have in common. And sometimes the only common denominator is you. And if you’re having the same issue over and over again, I think a lot comes down to who you’re picking and why. It seems to me that -based on what you’ve told me here – that you hold yourself back in relationships. It’s not without reason; your first two relationships were pretty bad, and you don’t want to get hung up in a bad situation again. Totally understandable. It could also be that there’s some part of you that thinks that you don’t deserve to be happy or to let someone in. This is a different situation entirely, and something you may need to work out with a counselor.

But regardless of the root cause, I have to wonder if you’re not necessarily dating people out of a sense of obligation that you should be dating someone and you end up picking people who’ll do, rather than someone you really connect with. If that’s the case, then I’m not surprised that you’re continually finding deal-breakers; you may well be subconsciously choosing people you know on some level aren’t a good fit because it makes it easier to leave them later. 

And if I’m right – and you’ll have to tell me, since you know yourself better than I do – then it’s no real wonder that your boyfriends get more attached than you do. After all, if you’re holding yourself back from opening up and really connecting with someone, then of course they’re going to fall for you faster and get more invested than you do.

If that’s the case, then the first thing I would suggest is to change your dating style until you’re ready to let people in. Right now, your boyfriends are going into this with the assumption that you’re both on the same page and looking for something that has the potential to be long-term. If you aren’t letting yourself open up to connecting and caring for them… well, you’re kinda dating in bad faith, and that’s not fair to them. It may be easier all around to stick to more casual dating then aiming for something more committed; without the pressure and/or expectation to be “official”, you may find that your interest lasts long enough that you feel comfortable opening up and investing in them.

Or, like I said, it could just be that you’re 25 and this is how you date for now. As long as you’re cool with it – and upfront with your potential partners about how you work so they can make an informed decision – there’s no real reason why you need to change if you don’t want to. The fact that this is how you’re dating now doesn’t mean that you’re going to be dating like this for the rest of your life, and it may be a while before you’re in a place where you’re ready for a long-term partner. There’s no cut-off point where you’re no longer able to have a life-partner and finding one in your late 20s (or 30s or 40s or any age) doesn’t make it any less meaningful or special.

So unless this really bothers you – not just in a “I should have an LTR” way – then it’s really not that big of a deal. If it does bother you and you want to change things, then do some soul searching, maybe talk with someone and work on it. If not then, hey, you do you.

Good luck.

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