DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m a relatively recent divorcee (about 6 months post D-Day) and I’ve had some trouble getting into the swing of being intimate with new partners. I’ve read your blog for a while and have found it quite helpful with dating advice and with self improvement. So I figured maybe you can help me out.

So a little background to explain my situation. I got married very young (I was 20 years old!). And we were married for about 9.5 years. We have 2 awesome little guys together and are good co-parents. My ex and I decided a couple years before we got divorced that we would try polyamory. We had both been interested in it for a while before hand and thought it would bring us together like it had with some friends of ours. We probably should have realized that we were more interested in being just friends with each other but that’s water under the bridge. Eventually we realized that the romance and attraction was gone in the marriage and saw a couple marriage counselors before deciding to file for divorce.

Now to the heart of the matter. I have actually been really successful with dating in my opinion. I’ve actually been mostly focusing on finding myself and living my life for myself and my kiddos. Also on being the fun persons I’ve always wanted to be. I’ve mostly stuck with online dating because it’s the easiest option for a now single dad. I’ve met a few girls I’ve liked and discovered a problem. When it comes to sexy time I panic and get out of the mood right as things are about to get fun.

More specifically I met two girls who wanted to sleep with me and with both of them the time got ruined by my own brain. In both cases things started out okay with foreplay but I just couldn’t get over a fear of being impotent and panicking about how I was going to have another failed relationship. The first girl I wasn’t that physically attracted to so I thought maybe it was that combined with the newness of being single after so long. The second girl I’m really really attracted to not only physically but she and I really hit off when we are hanging out. This time I also panicked because I hadn’t felt a connection like this in a really long time and I thought I must be falling for this girl way too fast.

So I’ve been seeing a counselor for a bit related to depression/anxiety but otherwise I am in pretty good physical health (I’m 30 and ran a marathon this past fall and have started training for more races this year). Do you have any advice for men to help get over the feeling of impotence and the fears surrounding this touchy subject. I love you blog and I hope that maybe this can help not just me but other guys out there struggling.

Yours truly

Single Dad Looking for Help

DEAR SINGLE DAD LOOKING FOR HELP: Dude. DUDE. Go easy on yourself, man. You’re only six months out of a nearly decade long relationship. Even in a mostly amicable divorce, that’s going to do a number on your brain. You need to recognize that you are still in a state of transition. You have ten years worth of habits and behaviors built up like the relationship equivalent of muscle memory, only now half of those muscles aren‘t there anymore. Relationships change our identity at a fundamental level. We don’t just become two people who live together, we merge into a single gestalt entity like a fleshy Voltron that can’t agree on what to eat on Saturday night. Only now part of you is gone and there’s a part of your brain that’s kinda freaking out at that while it heals and you rediscover who you are now.

So you need to give yourself a break here. I’m not saying “don’t date”, but I am saying “turn down your expectations”. You wouldn’t expect to run a marathon three months after having busted your ankle, would you? You’re still in the break-up equivalent of physical therapy; it’s going to take some time to get back into competitive shape again. Rushing things because you “should” be ready is a great way to re-injure yourself.

Here’s how you deal with these issues you’re having.

First: you quit worrying about the future. The only thing you should be interested in with these girls is “right now”. Maybe things won’t work out with them. That’s fine: that’s for the future. You are just going to enjoy what you have right now. Right now, you’re realizing that women still think you’re damn sexy. Right now, you’re remembering that you have options and that being divorced isn’t the end of the word. Right now, you are just going experience things to their fullest without worrying about what may happen later on. The future will take care of itself. You can enjoy what you have right now.

Second: Take your penis off the table. The great thing about sex is that there’s more to it than your junk and hers. If your penis won’t get hard, guess what? You still have two hands. You still have a tongue. You know what never goes soft at the wrong moment? Your fingers. Sex toys. Your mouth. So don’t put pressure on yourself to perform with your penis. Penetration is off the menu for a bit. Make out like teenagers without the expectation of f

king. Use your fingers and your thumbs to get her off. Use sex toys. Go down on her for so long that you grow gills. Learn – really learn – how much you can give someone pleasure without needing to make your cock the main event. The less pressure you put on yourself to have Magic Penis, the less likely that anxiety is going to rear it’s ugly head and deflate things like the saddest pool-toy.

Third: this one is important, so I want you to pay attention. You ready?

OK.

Stop referring to your marriage as a “failed relationship”. Tattoo that backwards on your forehead so you see it in the mirror when you wake up. Shave your head if you need the room.

Your relationship didn’t fail, your relationship ended. There’s a difference. Not every relationship is going to last forever, and not every relationship should. Not every relationship is going to be an epic love story. Some are going to be short stories. Some are going to be dirty limericks. And that’s fine.

You’re not a failure because you or your wife didn’t die in the saddle. You were together for ten years, you have some awesome kids and you are able to co-parent successfully? That’s f

king impressive, man. The fact that you and your ex-wife are able to work together to raise your kids, that you have this core of, if not affection than at least respect for one another and that you don’t look at each other and wish you could just flay the skin off the other and throw them into a vat of tequila? That’s a sign that your relationship was a success. All that happened is that your relationship came to its natural end. That’s not failure by any stretch of the imagination.

So give yourself a break, SDLFH. You’ve got a lot going for you, but I think you’re expecting too much all at once. Take some time. Enjoy the present without worrying about the future. And realize that yes, your marriage may have ended… but it was still a success for what it was.

Good luck.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I am writing in hopes that you may have some helpful or otherwise inspiring information regarding my best friend. He is an incredibly depressed 26 year old virgin with absolutely no self esteem.

As of this writing, I confess that I have exhausted my ability to help and am rapidly losing patience with his inability to be positive, but he is so incredibly smart that it’s hard to argue with him as he makes some depressing yet unfortunately realistic points.

I met ‘X’ (for anonymity sake) in 2009 while working at a local radio station. We instantly bonded over mutual love for music and I will be the first to tell you that he is a great guy. He is extremely smart, funny and good natured but suffers from crippling depression and terrible social anxiety.

X will often avoid the topic of women and relationships like a plague but whenever we do discuss dating, he insist that he has “nothing to offer a woman” or that “his taste is unrealistic” or “guys like me just belong in the Friend Zone.”

The funny thing is that if anyone were to meet X, they may have no clue there is anything wrong. He is very funny and has become good at faking being social, but is so strangely convinced that no woman would ever want anything more than a platonic friendship.

A little bit about X:

He’s not ugly, but honestly not great looking. (Charlie Day with a bigger beard)

He’s only 5’6″ (I’m 5’8″ and my height has never been an issue, but he insists “no woman wants a manlet”)

He was bullied in High School and College for not being a “guys guy” as he puts it.

His last and only girlfriend was gorgeous, but treated him like s

t before dumping him on Valentines Day.

He has no real friends, just me and his band (although they do treat him like s

t)

He doesn’t drink or do drugs which he thinks makes him boring.

He insists that “Online Dating is only for attractive guys”

He is terrified that he’s gonna end up as some single mother’s personal ATM

My girlfriend even admits that she doesn’t like him and refuses to introduce him to any of her friends.

My question to you is Is there any hope for this poor guy? I truly believe that he could make some girl very happy but how do you convince someone who has seemingly only seen the worst of society that good people still exist?

Cheers,

Friend Indeed

DEAR FRIEND INDEED: Oof.  I feel for ya, FI; there really isn’t much that’s more frustrating than trying to help somebody who steadfastly refuses to be helped. And therein lies the problem: he refuses to be helped. One of the keys to changing and improving is that he has to believe that change is even possible in the first place.

Like a lot of people I encounter – in consultations, in the letters I get and in the comments section – it seems like your buddy X has made “I Am Hopeless and Pathetic” part of his identity. Once the idea of “Not Being Good With Girls” and “Nobody Wants Me” becomes part of who you are – and in fairness, having folks bully him for not being sufficiently manly would be a big part of it – it’s very hard to shake. We instinctively want to protect our identity, even when it hurts us. When we run across things that challenge our identity, the Backfire Effect kicks in and makes us double down on what we already believe. Look at the incel (or “involuntarily celibate”) community; it becomes an example of nominative determinism, where by having adopted the identity, you have also accepted that you are functionally hopeless. And while the despair and frustration is understandable… if you define yourself as being uniquely f

ked by the universe, then you’ve basically given away your power. You have made yourself helpless. And it’s very much a self-reinforcing cycle; nobody likes an Eeyore and the guys who are the most vocal about how much it sucks that women don’t like guys like them tend to actively turn off women. I mean, if he’s going on and on about how hypergamous single mothers are gonna steal his money and leave him taking care of somebody else’s kid, I’m not f

king surprised that your girlfriend won’t inflict him on her friends.

Unfortunately, like a Buddhist monk paying twenty bucks for a five dollar hot dog, your friend has to discover that true change comes from within. You can provide him with counter-arguments – Oscar Isaac is 5’7″, Daniel Radcliffe is 5’5″ and so on. You can offer to be his wingman, to take him shopping or to singles mixers or even just drag his ass to therapy. But at the end of the day, unless he decides to change, nothing is going to happen.

What he needs is to do is scrap everything and start over. The first thing he should do ditch his asshole bandmates so he doesn’t have their toxic bulls

t weighing him down. Then he needs to get himself into therapy and talking to a counselor who can help him deal with the very real psychic pain he’s carrying around. If he can start learning that those past experiences were legitimately awful but things he can recover from, then he can start making the life changes that’ll help him become the sort of person he always dreams about being. But none of that can start until he gets his s

t together.

So you COULD get him copies of my books New Game + and When It Clicks, and wave them under his nose like a talisman. But until he makes up his mind that yes, he can change, he’s just going to make things worse for himself.

The only thing I can suggest is that you draw a line in the sand: until he starts talking to a therapist – not just “thinks about it” or “goes once” but actually commits – then you’re not going to listen to his complaints any more. You have the roadmap to his recovery, but if he’s going to refuse to follow it… well, you’re not going to listen to him dig himself in any deeper.

You can lead him to the path he needs to talk, but it’s on him to walk it.

Good luck, FI. And let us know how things go with your buddy.

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 been married for 15 years, and together with my wife for 18, with two children (13 and 10). Two years ago, my wife explained that the marriage was over. We stayed together, largely for financial reasons, until I was able to move out some five months ago.

After so much time in a monogamous relationship, I am now in a panic about dating.

I have tried online dating – your favourite, OkCupid – but have had two replies to 10 messages so far. The two replies have both been from the most speculative messages, courteously explaining that they are not interested. Nobody else has even acknowledged my contact, even though I’ve carefully shown that I have read their profile, chosen people with whom I have, apparently, plenty in common, and couched my message in civilised and articulate terms. (For the avoidance of doubt, I am not messaging young women, but ones of my own, mid-50s, age group or up to 10 years my junior.)

I appreciate that people often do not reply to messages, but a complete absence of interest is disturbing. I am an attorney, self-employed, with a wide range of interests. I have no problem talking with women – in fact I find female company a lot more congenial than male company, and I have plenty of female friends – and although I will never have a career as a male model, I’m in pretty good shape for my age. I suspect the problem may be the fact that I am separated, rather than divorced, but there is nothing I can do about this – under English law, you can’t get a divorce within two years of separation unless you are going to allege adultery (we have both been faithful to each other) or “unreasonable behaviour”, which opens a whole can of worms of unpleasantness. I’m getting the sinking feeling that I’m facing at least two years more of celibacy. (In fact, there are a couple of real drawbacks to me as a romantic prospect – thanks to the recession my legal practice does not produce much money, although things have improved over the last couple of years, and because of the children I still see a lot of my wife and we still cooperate to a great extent in practical matters – believe it or not, we still have a joint bank account and I run the finances for both of us. If a woman found either of these points unattractive, I would not be surprised – however my complete failure so far is in advance of either of these points coming up.)

So morale is pretty low as far as online dating is concerned. Meanwhile, the more traditional approach of meeting people through my range of outside interests (I play in an orchestra, play volleyball in a mixed league once a week, am in a mixed book reading group, and have joined a couple of meetup groups) or getting together with one of my female friends looks very problematic. (And, of course, a major disadvantage of working for yourself is that I have no co-workers at all!)

Before I was married I always had a problem with converting contact with women in a neutral social setting into a sexual relationship. If I joined an evening class, for example, my thought process was always that if I hit on one of my fellow students and was rejected, I would become in some way a pariah in the class – and I always made the mistake of joining classes where I actually wanted to do the study programme – or if I was in a club I would avoid any entanglement with other club members, lest it ruin my participation in the club activities – I would never dare make a move on one of my fellow volleyball players, for example.

Pretty destructive thinking – and it’s been made worse by something that happened in the last month. My wife and I have a mutual friend with whom I have been on very friendly terms for a number of years. Since the separation we had taken to having coffee together once a week for a prolonged chat, and we see each other around the village a lot anyway. It has been the kind of relationship where if we are both at the same party, we will form a huddle in a corner and talk for ages. Unfortunately – you can see where this is going – I like her a lot, and made the mistake of asking her whether I should rule out in my mind the prospect of our friendship developing any further. She expressed herself interested, but saw practical problems; the next day I texted her that I appreciated the problems and that it would not affect our friendship if she said no, and she replied that having thought things through any relationship would have to be surreptitious and that would not be good for either of us. Then she blanked me. The coffee mornings have stopped, the last time I saw her in the village she walked past me without saying hello, and as far as I can see more than 10 years of friendship have just gone up in smoke. 

So, about as tentative an approach as possible to somebody with whom I have for years been very close, with the express statement that I would not hold it against her if she could not respond, and it’s a fiasco. I think you can guess what the prospects are now for me risking making any advances to somebody that I know through a social setting where I want to remain in that setting – I may meet somebody socially, but am frankly terrified that unless I remain 100% platonic, I will need to get out of that social setting for good. (Concrete example, I found there is a local hiking group for singles – decided against joining it, simply because of the thought that I would have to leave the group as soon as I had attempted to make my move.)

Any advice? Is it just a matter of getting a grip on myself? Or do I accept I’m on the shelf for the foreseeable?

– Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer

DEAR UNFROZEN CAVEMAN LAWYER: First of all: welcome to online dating. I recently released a video on the Dr. NerdLove YouTube Channel (youtube.com/user/DrNerdLove) where I talked about how to deal with the frustrations of dating. One of the biggest issues is that men and women use dating apps like Tinder and OKCupid very differently — men try to pick everyone and then narrow things down after they’ve matched. Meanwhile women tend to be more selective in the men they match with and swipe right on far fewer matches than men do. As a result: women are matching with men who may then decide never to message them, while men are encouraged to swipe right as widely as possible in order to maximize the chance of getting ANY messages… even with people they’re not actually attracted to.

Small wonder online dating is so messed up right now.

But even when you do match with someone, sometimes it just won’t work out the way you would hope. Lots of people will just not respond to emails for a multitude of reasons ranging from accounts not being active to seeing how things are going with other matches to having arbitrary deal-breakers that you just somehow hit. Again: this is just how online dating goes, for both men and women. There will be a lot of shouting into the void – and conversations (and dates) that ultimately go nowhere. As the saying goes, every relationship fails until one doesn’t… every approach in online dating fails until, once again, one doesn’t.

On paper you sound like a pretty darn good catch. If this isn’t coming across in your profile, then you may need to consider revising it. You should definitely have a friend look over your profile, especially a female friend you can trust to be bluntly — if insightfully — honest with you.

However, I suspect the problem goes beyond the vagaries of online dating and far more about where you are mentally and emotionally. To put it mildly, you sound exhausted and depressed as hell. You have an incredibly pessimistic attitude towards yourself and dating and if it’s coming across to me, then it’s definitely coming across to the women you’re interested in. And to be perfectly frank, I’m not bloody surprised.

Dude, your relationship of nearly 20 years came to an end and you couldn’t even make a clean break of it – you continued to live with your wife, knowing that the relationship was over and only got out for good five months ago. For f*ck’s sake, that is not enough time for you to heal and recover. You don’t have emotional scars, you have emotional hemorrhages. You’re still one of the walking wounded. You shouldn’t be thinking about dating right now, you should be working on healing yourself. What happened to you was a massive emotional blow and even though you don’t realize it, you’re still reeling from it. I don’t necessarily believe in the old saw that it takes roughly half the time you were together to get over someone, but five months is not enough time to leap back into the dating scene, even on a casual basis.

You need to quit worrying about dating for now; you’re just not ready for it. What you need to do is focus on yourself for a while. Your goal should be getting your life back in order and your head on straight, not trying to find a replacement spouse. I realize right now you’re feeling like you’re never going to find someone who will love you ever again and you’re desperate to prove yourself wrong but all you’re doing is making things worse. You’re not seeing things clearly. Look at what happened with your friend. You thought you were confessing your feelings to her; she on the other hand was hearing you completely recontextualize your relationship . To her, your asking if you had a chance with her sounded like you were admitting that you’d had feelings for her this entire time… including while you were with your wife, who she’s still friends with. So now not only are you hinting – inadvertently – that you’ve been in love with her for the years while you were married, but that you’re asking her to potentially betray her friend’s trust.

(Yes, you can’t call dibs on people, but think of how this looks from her end of things.)

No wonder she’s pulled the fade.

If your pain wasn’t still so fresh and raw, you’d realize how it looked too.

So take dating off the table. It’s just not in the cards for you right now and not putting pressure on yourself to be back on the market it is going to actually make you feel better. You are not open to finding a new relationship and probably should be for at least the next year or so. Focus on your job, your finances and your relationship with your kids. Rebuild your life and get deeper involved in your interests and hobbies. Join groups just because it’s something you want to do, not because you’re trying to find a new girlfriend. Make new friends just for the joy of having friends. Let the pain fade and the wounds heal, let yourself face mornings without dread or self-recrimination.

I’d also suggest talking to a therapist. You’re seriously depressed right now and I think being able to talk about your anxieties with someone will do you a world of good.

And when you do recover to the point of being able to date again – remember, at least a year, if not two – just asking somebody on a date doesn’t mean you’re going to be exiled from your social group. As long as you’re polite about it, take rejection with aplomb and grace and don’t treat it either like a dire insult or the end of the world, nobody is going to get weird. If she says “thanks but no”, then your response is to shrug and say “ok cool. Hey, did you hear about Arsenal’s striker….” and just let it go.  If you don’t treat it like a big deal, nobody else will either.

Good luck.

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