DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I tend to meet women on Tinder and date a couple at a time. Five years ago, I did this because while I could be charming for a date or two, soon enough the realities of my then pathetic life would shine through. The reaction was girls tended to like me less the more they got to know me. Most ghosted me within a month. To counter this endless loss, I kept a steady stream of new dates coming.

My life is a lot better now. I have a job, am no longer chronically ill. I am also in therapy to work on myself. That has affected my dating life. Just as before, I meet women online and it goes pretty well. The big difference is that right around the 3-5th date mark, when they’d normally show diminishing signs of interest, women are instead sticking around. If anything, I can tell they like me more and more. This makes me happy in general, but has led to some new problems.

I currently am dating three women and occasionally go on other Tinder dates. None of these girls know about one another. Each relationship is “real” in that we go on dates and hold hands and all that, but none have escalated much emotionally.

I’ve never told any of them I love them, and I certainly never said to any of them we were exclusive. I keep expecting one or all to bring it up, but they never do. I have no idea If they are seeing other guys or if they think we’re monogamous. I feel like had I met them knowing they weren’t gonna bail, I would have been more honest earlier.

I’m aware the easy answer is “just ask them!” But I really don’t want to. If one does ask me, I plan to be honest but vague with them (“I like you a lot, but I’m not interested in monogamy. I don’t expect you to follow any rules, either.”) I’m perfectly fine with a don’t ask don’t tell arrangement. But I worry that if I bring this up myself , I’ll make things awkward or tank a relationship I like.

I don’t have much of a game plan because this is all new to me. I like all three girls, but if any found out and forced me to either date just them or end the relationship, I would end the relationship. I’m coming to believe I will never want monogamy. If anything, I suspect I’d be happiest with a “real” wife or girlfriend that 98% of the time we would look normal. The caveat being we both date/bang other people.

It’s hard to consider myself some cheating playboy because there’s no lie. I certainly wasn’t cheating when we’ve known each other for two weeks. Or a month. But it’s like month six now and it feels like a line has been crossed. Has it? Who decides that and when? If this all ends in disaster, I won’t feel like a scumbag, but I will feel bad for hurting a girl’s feelings.

Interested in your thoughts,

Three’s Company

DEAR THREE’S COMPANY: First of all TC: congratulations on all the progress you’ve been making. You’ve come a long way, and your determination is admirable. You should be proud of everything you’ve achieved; it’s taken a lot of hard work to get there and that’s amazing. In fact, that progress is precisely why you are dealing with what we in the dating advice business call “a quality problem to have”. There are far worse things in this world than to have reached a point where your problem is that you’re having to juggle multiple relationships.

Now with all that being said, let’s talk a little about some best practices when it comes to dating multiple people… and where you’re inadvertently tripping yourself up.

The first issue is how much you may be borrowing trouble from the future. Right now, you’re going on dates and “holding hands and all that”. If I’m perfectly honest, it doesn’t sound like you’re at a point where you’d actually need to worry about how to bring up the “by the way, I’m dating other people” conversation. If holding hands is towards the upper limit of your physical intimacy with these women… well, honestly, I think you’ve got a bit before you have to worry about having any sort of Defining The Relationship conversation. Now if you’re sleeping with these women — whether just one or each of them — then the clock is likely ticking and you’re going to be having these conversations sooner rather than later. But if you haven’t reached that point with them, then I think you’re at a stage where you don’t need to be preoccupied with how to bring it up.

The second issue you’re having is how much you’re letting these relationships “just happen”. Right now, it seems like you’re trying to surf the ambiguity wave, having Schrodinger’s Relationship, where you’re both exclusive and not at the same time and you’ll only know which when she calls the question of “just what are we, anyway?” That’s not the coolest move to pull and one that has a high possibility of ending up with one or more women feeling tricked and upset by the fact that you were dating others. And let’s be real: you know that already. That’s why you’re doing this. You even say it yourself:

But I worry that if I bring this up myself , I’ll make things awkward or tank a relationship I like.

Well… yeah. That’s likely to happen. But hiding something that might be a major dealbreaker because you know that it’s likely going to be the end of the relationship is really not cool. Plus, to be perfectly blunt, it ain’t like it’s going to feel like any less of a betrayal if you hide it for longer.

Now in fairness: I’m a believer that folks should assume non-monogamy and non-exclusivity by default until you’ve had an actual conversation on the subject. While it isn’t fair for someone to try to hold you to an arrangement that you didn’t consent to — or even know that you were involved in — it’s also not cool to let folks assume that you’re their one and only when they want or expect exclusivity. “Well, you didn’t ask,” may be technically true, but it’s not going to be much of a guard against feeling hurt or betrayed and realizing that they were investing time and energy in a relationship that ultimately wasn’t one that they wanted.

This is why I’m a fan of making sure everyone is on the same page early on, and that you’re both clear on what this relationship is. It doesn’t mean that you need to say “Hey, don’t forget, we’re totally not exclusive”, but it is important to check in on occasion and make sure everyone understands what’s happening — even if it’s just to say “hey, FYI: I’m not monogamous, and I don’t expect you to be either.” The more dates you’ve been on or the more intense your connection is, the more that conversation is going to be called for. It’s one thing if you’ve been out three or four times. It’s another if you’ve been seeing each other regularly for months. You may not have said the words, but with social and cultural mores being what they are, it’s not an entirely unfounded assumption on her part either.

So it’s best to be dating intentionally and actively looking for folks who are at least open to the same things you are… which in this case is non-exclusivity. As a rule of thumb: this is something best brought up by date three, or prior to sex, which ever happens first. While I know some folks believe in disclosure immediately — and that may be more appropriate if you already have a primary partner — giving it a few dates first lets them get to know you as a person instead of the image of a polyamorous or non-monogamous man they have in their head. But it’s still a conversation to have early on so that both of you aren’t wasting your time.

This doesn’t mean that people won’t still get the wrong idea, or only hear what they want to hear, but at the very least, it’s considerate and ethical.

Frankly, leaving it ambiguous until someone else brings it up is a coward’s move. Date with intent, my dude. You’re going to need to be an active participant in the relationship and actually help steer things, or you’re going to keep ending up in places you never wanted to go.

The third issue is that it doesn’t sound like you’ve done much in the way of research about ethical non-monogamy and how to manage open or polyamorous relationships. I would strongly suggest that you start doing your due diligence before getting any more deeply involved with these women. If you’re going to want a non-monogamous commitment, then you need to know exactly what that entails and how to maintain it.

So here’s your homework: check out Opening Up by Tristan Taormino, The Ethical Slut by Janet Hardy and Building Open Relationships by Dr. Liz Powell (full disclosure: Dr. Powell is a personal friend of mine and has been a guest expert in my column before). Read these and start to learn about precisely what it takes to start and manage an open relationship, as well as how to talk to your partner(s) about it.

But I can’t emphasize this enough: if these relationships are progressing to the point of seeing them regularly, these are conversations you’re going to need to have. Leaving it up in the air in hopes that it will never come up is how you get dumped so hard your grandparents divorce retroactively. And hiding it in hopes that you can thread this particular needle without actually discussing it and running the risk of ending a relationship is how you end up in the special hell. You know the one.

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 really like the advice that you give because it’s fair and takes both male and female perspectives into account. I need some help here. I started off dating a younger guy, J, casually about a year and a half ago after splitting from my ex-husband. For the first like 9-10 months things between us were very casual, I’d show up, we’d have some drinks, get physical, and then I’d go. This arrangement worked well for both of us and I enjoyed it. We had no commitments to one another whatsoever. I left for a few months to work in a different city and was unfortunately date raped. J was supposed to visit me, but I called him almost immediately after my experience and told him he shouldn’t come because I was just too messed up. Apparently, for J, this was the wakeup to realize that he had real feelings for me.

A couple months later, I get back home and we start up seeing each other again. We attended a festival together and had a great time and got really close because of it. He told me he wanted to start dating me, which freaked me out and caused me to run and hide for the next month and a half. During that time I got really flakey. Admittedly it was the wrong way to handle that, but I was really struggling to deal with things. I was just working some things out from my assault and couldn’t get physical or emotional.

Once I began to feel better, I started seeing him again. However, it was very different and both of us developed deep feelings for one another. At some point he tells me he is in love with me. After a couple months of doing that, he asks me to be exclusive with him. Throughout all of that time he treated me with kindness, respect, and understanding. He was very supportive when I was dealing with PTSD issues, although he was hurt that I ghosted him for a while which I apologized for. All this is to say, I thought that based on his behavior and words that he was loving, sweet, and gentle (albeit a supporter of the opposite political party of me, and we are both very politically opinionated).

About 5 months into our exclusive relationship I see messages on his phone to his friend saying things like “I can do better” than this girl and “I really love the girl and she’s given me no reason to break up with her.” Some these exchanges with his friend involved times where his friend encourages him to simply cheat on me; J would reply with “I would, but she’s been cheated on before and she’ll find out.” Well, this infuriates me and I break it off with him immediately. Unfortunately, I’m also studying for a very rigorous exam and I am stressed out to the max, so I take the break-up really hard. He meets up with me and tearfully apologizes and tells me he was wrong, and he can’t live without me. I decide to give him another chance.

Then I discover that he has previously been very involved in this Red Pill movement. In fact, he’s met people he chatted with on Red Pill chatrooms in person. After doing a lot of research on the Red Pill, it becomes apparent to me that his previous comments about me to his friends stemmed from this philosophy. He assures me now that he does not agree with the majority of what that philosophy preaches, and really he’s only interested in stoicism and self-improvement which he learned from that site. I’m skeptical because he remains in contact with those friends and still checks out the subreddit frequently. I’m not even sure how someone who followed that philosophy could have ended up with a person like me; very liberal, outspoken on politics, possesses a doctoral degree, proudly feminist, very assertive and not afraid of confrontation.

It’s been really hard for me these last weeks because I feel so torn. On the one hand, I abhor the Red Pill philosophy and I am very concerned that J either used these techniques on me in the past, or will use them in the future to try and trick me. Admittedly, I’m now on high alert so I doubt that’ll happen. On the other hand, he has been such a source of support and love in my life, we have a great time together, have similar senses of humor, even now the sex life is incredible, etc. He has literally been taking care of me day in and day out while I study for this exam (which I have been doing everyday for the last 8 weeks for 10-12 hours per day), and I have truly not been easy to deal with because the stress of this exam is causing me extreme anxiety (and is doing the same thing to my friends who are also studying for the exam, so I’m not alone in feeling this way). He’s been visibly trying to show me that he values me and wants to be in a relationship and is willing to do what it takes.

How do I reconcile dating someone who (1) at one time told his friends he thought he could do better, but now has backtracked and after our split has literally come back to me saying that it made him realize he needs me and wants me in his life more than anything or anyone, and (2) who has such different views about social relationships between men and women? I love this dude and I want to be happy, how do I do both?

Twice Bitten

DEAR TWICE-BITTEN: I have a few questions, TB, for you and for J.

The first is simple: if all he wants is self-improvement and/or lessons in stoicism and “disagrees with so much of the philosophy”, then why in pluperfect f

kery is he still there? There are plenty of other communities that he could join, ones that don’t involve deeply misogynistic and manipulative bulls

t. The second would be how, exactly, he can reconcile being in love with you and wanting a relationship with you and still being friends with people who keep telling him to hurt you. It’s one thing to have different groups of friends who may not get along. It’s another entirely when one of those groups is actively telling him to ruin a relationship that he supposedly values.

This, incidentally, leads to my third question: which version of him are we supposed to believe: the one where he says that he loves you and values you and wants to make this relationship work, or the one where he says he’s only with you because you haven’t given him some sort of casus belli that would justify his leaving you? Who’s he lying to, you, his asshole friends or himself?

He’s already jeopardized this relationship once. The fact that he seems to be back on his bulls

t doesn’t exactly lend credence to the idea that he’s realized he’s wrong and he’s going to do better. It’d be one thing if he was trying to leave all this behind and was just struggling with breaking years of habit. But the fact that the Red Pill community is still such a big part of his life – even if it’s “just” the self-improvement bits – is a different matter. He may love you… but it doesn’t really seem like he respects you.

Were I in your shoes, I’d want to have a very long, drawn out talk about all of this – why he joined the community in the first place, why he’s still part of it, why he’s still talking to people who tried to ruin things between you and what, exactly, he’s going to do about it going forward. I would also say that it’s on him to show that he can be trusted. He’s neck deep in some toxic f

kery and while you can sometimes manage to filter out the good from the bad – that’s a major part of my secret origin after all – there comes a point where it’s worth asking why it’s so important for him to keep trying to pick the nuggets of corn out of all that s

t. He can find other resources for the self-improvement if that’s what he wants, even communities that promote positive masculinity and camaraderie. They’re out there, if he wants to seek them out.

And that’s a mighty big if.

If he is trying to leave it all behind, then I support that. I honestly believe that it’s important to acknowledge that we can grow and improve over our s

tty pasts. But he needs to show that he’s doing that. And if he can’t – or won’t – leave it behind, or you can’t bring yourself to trust him… well, as the sage says: sometimes love just ain’t enough.

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: So, of my many neuroses, two of them are general anxiety and depression. And… they can get pretty bad.

See, sometimes I f

k up. Everybody does. But because of how my mind works, oftentimes the line of thought following my mistake escalates into what my family calls a “pity party;” I hide in my room, crying because I’m overwhelmed by my emotions, and there’s nothing I can do but wait for the episode to pass.

Here is my concern: I worry that, even if I am handsome and friendly and good-hearted (which people have told me I am), I can’t imagine any woman being willing to deal with my depressive episodes. Maybe they’d tolerate it ONCE, but when it happened again they’d get sick of it and piss off.

I freely admit that I’m a crybaby, and once I get stressed and upset, there’s nothing to do except wait for that mood to end. Because I can’t exactly cure my mental problems, there is nothing I can do to change it.

My friends have told me that any woman worth dating would be understanding and try to help me, but… somehow, I doubt it. I literally can’t imagine a potential girlfriend wanting to stay with my after two of my breakdowns. Humans have limits on the amount of BS they’re willing to tolerate. It’s not realistic.

What do I do about this?

Devil May Cry-Baby

DEAR DEVIL MAY CRY-BABY: You’re right and you’re wrong at the same time CBC. You’re correct in that you are going to have an incredibly hard time finding and keeping a girlfriend if you’re having these breakdowns on the regular. While people don’t need to be in perfect shape – physically or emotionally – in order to date or date successfully, they do need to be in good working order. Nobody, men, women or non-binaries, want to sign onto a relationship just to be somebody’s full-time therapist. Most people have enough on their hands keeping their own s

t together; having to be in charge of somebody else’s emotional state is too much to ask for.

And to be honest, it’s an unreasonable ask. NerdLove’s first rule is “Handle Thy S

t“; you need to be able to take care of yourself. If the slightest mistake sends you into a screaming depression where you have to hide away to cry… well, you’re gonna have a hard time operating in the world, period, never mind in a relationship. Relationships, after all, will involve conflict. It’s an inevitable consequence of being involved with another person with agency and wants and needs.

But you’re wrong that there’s nothing that you can do about this. There’s a difference between feeling helpless and being helpless. Part of why this continues to be a problem is because you’ve decided that this is inevitable and unfixable.

That ain’t true. What you need to do is start to build up your emotional resilience so that these emotions don’t overwhelm you at the first sign of trouble.

The first step is that you need to start learning how to process your feelings. This means that instead of just letting them run wild, you start to note them. That is: you don’t just run off and wait for the thunder and the rain to pass you by, you start to be mindful of those feelings. You need to name them, describe them, get your head around the exact shape, texture and trigger. Are you feeling despair, hopelessness or helplessness? Despite how similar they may seem, those are three entirely different emotions. Why do they hit you so hard that you have to flee from them? What, specifically, triggers those feelings? Is it the sense that failing at something makes you a failure? Is it the belief that you shouldn’t fail at this because someone else wouldn’t? Is it a worry that you’re not as competent or skilled as you should be at your age and stage in life?

The more mindful you are about your feelings, the better you are able to handle them in a healthy and productive manner… as well as working around those triggers.

The second step is that you need to embrace failure. The trick to becoming emotionally stronger isn’t to never screw up, it’s to recognize that failure won’t destroy you. Not being able to do something isn’t a mark against your value as a person; it’s simply a fact. You attempted to do something and it didn’t work. What’s important is what you do next. You can let that setback destroy you, or you can learn from it. Understanding why you failed or f

ked up is crucial, because this is how you eventually succeed. Maybe the way you were approaching the particular task or situation was just sub-optimal. This means that you need to try another approach, one that may work better for you. Maybe it was just pure bad luck. In this case, you just need to take another swing at it. Maybe it’s true that you can’t do that thing, whatever it is. OK, fine… so what can you do to work around that limitation and still achieve your goal?

Accepting failure as something that will happen and reframing it as something to learn from and overcome, takes away its horrible power. You’ll get knocked down, but you’ll know that you can stand back up again and keep going.

The third step is to let go of this all-or-nothing thinking. The fact that you may or may not have a chronic mental health condition doesn’t mean that this is a binary state. It’s not “perfect mental health” or “constant crying jags”. You don’t need to be Jonny Stoic, stonily unfazed by life in order to improve. Even a tiny improvement like speeding up the amount of time it takes to process and let go of those feelings of stress, will make your life immeasurably better. By focusing on the idea that if you can’t be cured, then you can’t do anything, you’re choosing to never find ways to mitigate your problem and make it more manageable. The fact that it may never go away completely doesn’t mean that you can’t find a way to make it something you can live with and work around.

And that’s why the fourth step is simply to get help. The fact that you have neuroses or anxiety disorders doesn’t mean that you’re doomed; it means that you need to find ways of working with them. You may not be able to cure them, but you sure as hell can find ways to manage them. This may mean medication – depression and anxiety can often have a neurochemical component. It may mean talk therapy, where a counselor or therapist teaches you coping mechanisms and ways to defang your triggers. It may involve something self-directed, like the cognitive behavioral therapy exercises from sites like MoodGym. Or it may involve some combination of all of these. There’s no shame in accepting that you can’t just force yourself to not have these incidents; as much as we like to mythologize the rugged individual who doesn’t need anyone else, no man is an island. We all need help from others from time to time. The only shame comes from not getting that help and continuing to suffer out of a mistaken sense that you shouldn’t have to get help.

There’s hope for you, CBC. You just have to reach out and take it.

You’ll be OK. I promise.

All will be well.

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