DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Funny story, my [now] ex introduced me to your column many years ago, as he felt you gave practical advice to all those who had perhaps, lost their way.

I now feel I am that person and I honestly have no clue what to do about my current predicament.

We met under unusual circumstances, I had an accident and he was the law abiding person assisting me with my situation. We went out on a couple of dates, once the matter had cleared and I just felt he was too immature and wasn’t feeling it (he was 21 and I was 23). Unfortunately, he was. However, we attempted to remain ‘just friends’ for a couple of years after. But we knew when we would catch up, there would always be kissing at the end (or maybe in the middle of the date).

Jump to to New Years Eve, and he came and picked my friend and I up from the city after his lengthy shift (it was 2am and he had driven a long time to pick us up). He and I got into a disagreement about ‘finally’ taking that step and sleeping together or just progressing in general.

I was scared because my previous relationship ended with the guy cheating on me.

So, we did it. We met a few days after New Year’s Eve, went on a date and I initiated the sexy times. And that’s how our little love story began.

We dated for the next three years and you could say there were a few issues. Our first year of dating, he moved in with a few housemates — one being the girl he lost his virginity too. She had a new partner, but she made it clear she never liked me one bit, even though I attempted to gain her trust. Nothing worked. My boyfriend was finally forced moved out after discovering a torrid secret about one of the flatmates, meaning it could affect his job.

The year after, I went through a stressful work situation, and so did he. I thought we really stuck by one another.

I’ve never felt feelings before until he stepped into the picture. We just clicked. In every aspect. We were best friends and lovers and we could mess around and have fun, yet, still have a serious conversation when the moment called for it. We spoke about marriage and kids and even our kids names.

Right up until a few months prior to our eventual break up, he was showing me engagement rings.

2019 — my parents were going through a divorce and I was trying to be there for my mother. However, my boyfriend and I had made arrangements to move out at the end of the year. He did not believe I was going to go through with it. Stating that I would move in with her, or just up and leave him. We had a few serious discussions and I tried EVERYTHING to ensure he KNEW I was moving in with him. He was my future. We were ready to take that next step.

I don’t think I was convincing enough, and a week before we broke up, things had started to really affect me. My parents’ divorce, my stress at work… and even my boyfriend. We tried to go out one Saturday night to a comedy festival and a good friend of mine tagged along. It was a complete and utter mess! She got lost at another train station and my directions kept getting her lost and when I went to try and find her, I couldn’t. So I went back inside to where my boyfriend and I were waiting, and he said he would go and get her. He finally found her and when he came back inside to where I was eating, he made a snarky response and I blew a fuse.. The entire night was in shambles, however, we continued onto the comedy show and I tried to remain ‘calm’ and ‘in control’

Later that night, he asked what was wrong and I brushed it off. I wasn’t in a good head space and I (now) realise I was putting my relationship on the back burner and I wasn’t communicating well with him… at all.

He broke up with me a week later.

‘I love you…I’m just NOT in love with you anymore.’ He was crying as he said it, yet part of me knew he had shown up randomly at my house to break up with me.

We parted ways. For a few months (at least). Then we started sleeping together for the next 6 months. I was also trying to meet guys off Tinder and went on dates with them. One guy really appealed to me, and we started seeing each other every weekend (but it was strictly casual). I always knew though, that I was still into my ex. I tried to break things off with my ex, and that didn’t go as planned. My ex knew about this guy as well and he thought that things were getting serious between the Tinder dude and I.

My ex and I were texting a month ago, when he told me he had met someone a few days prior and wanted to ‘give things a go with her.’ That’s when I cut all communication and sent him a message saying my feelings had resurfaced, however, I was done. With him.

I then proceeded to block him. On everything.

Stupid, right? I didn’t get to see his reply. Maybe he didn’t? But I couldn’t face another rejection from him. I was still in love with him, whilst he was clearly moving on.

Sooo. Dr. NerdLove, as you can see, I still love my ex and care for him deeply. I realise the mistakes that we were made on my part, albeit too late.

My 30th birthday is coming up and I honestly thought I would be spending it with him celebrating… still together. Clearly I was REALLY wrong.

Can you please help me move on?

Hopelessly (still) in love.

DEAR HOPELESSLY (STILL) IN LOVE: So I think there’re two things going on here that are making it hard for you to move forward.

The first is the story of your relationship. One of the reasons why it can be hard to move on from a relationship is the way we tell the story of that relationship to ourselves. Like I said to Round and Round, our beliefs are the filter through which we see the world. That doesn’t just mean the things we expect to see or the things we want to see but the story we tell ourselves about our lives and experiences. This can affect the way we interpret what happened, colors our expectations and directly affects our emotional relationship to things. If, for example, your story is how awesome your relationship was and how it all fell apart out of the clear blue sky, it sets up a filter where we have a hard time moving on because we had perfection in our hands and we lost it.

The problem is that this is very rarely the case; a lot of times, we tend to gloss over the cracks and the flaws or not realize just how bad things could be. We as a species tend to focus on the beginning and the end and sort of just… overlook a lot of the middle.

The movie Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is a great example of this; Joel Barish has a hard time understanding how Clementine could just wipe her memory of their relationship because it wasn’t that bad, right? Then, as he is living through his own memories of things, he starts to realize just how flawed and conflict-filled things were. The golden glow of nostalgia — especially for the times when everything was great and it was all easy — can cause us to overlook or paper over the hard times and the times when things were a lot rougher than we realized.

It’s also possible to tell the story about how you “ruined” things and take on undeserved guilt. Just as people will tell themselves the story of how perfect their relationship was until it wasn’t, people will tell the story about how they destroyed their relationship because… well, because it ended and if they had loved hard enough or worked hard enough, they could’ve saved things. And unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Sometimes relationships come to an end; no amount of effort or love or talking things through can stop that. It doesn’t mean that anyone involved made mistakes or f--ked up or that the relationship wasn’t strong enough. Sometimes a relationship comes to the end of its natural life. That doesn’t mean that someone killed it or could’ve saved it. Not every relationship is meant to last until someone dies in the saddle, and that’s fine. But holding onto unearned guilt or self-recrimination is another way that we make it hard to let go and move forward.

I suspect things were starting to fracture earlier than you realize. From what you describe, it sounds like two of those there years were pretty contentious and stressful. From both of you having dire work situations — which can take a toll on relationships — to your parents getting divorced and the clear doubts and insecurities he seemed to be having about your relationship, it sounds like times were pretty damn rocky. And while I get that it seems like a judgement on the quality of your relationship, the truth is that purely external factors can detonate incredibly strong and loving relationships. Job loss, the death of a loved one, disease or disability… these all can trigger the cascade that leads to a relationship coming to an end. Sometimes it can be worked through. Other times it can’t.

That doesn’t mean that you and your partner didn’t love each other or care for each other; it just means that circumstances changed and the relationship you had wasn’t necessarily the one that met your needs in that moment.

I think understanding this will help you move forward.

The other problem is that you seem to be holding onto guilt for taking the nuclear option on your ex, even though you still have feelings for him. But also like I told RaR: you are allowed to prioritize your own emotional health and well-being. And while you may have strong or complicated feelings for your ex, the fact is that staying in contact with him, especially right now, is going to do you more harm than good. Pulling away, closing off avenues that would make it easier for you to reach out and — in the process — reopen old wounds… this is how you heal. You need time to process your feelings, to heal and to recover, and you can’t do that when you’re either hooking up, or you’re dying inside because he started seeing someone else. Closing that door is vital for you to move on. While it absolutely sucks and it absolutely hurts — stitching a wound is gonna do that — it’s necessary. The lesser pain is the price for healing and avoiding worse pain — both now and in the future.

So here’s what I think you need. The first thing you need to do is forgive yourself — for the relationship ending, for what you feel was your part in it and for your (understandably) complicated feelings. You also need to forgive yourself for doing what was necessary and prioritizing your own emotional health and healing.

The next thing is to give yourself permission to feel the ever-loving f--k out of your feels. A relationship ended. That’s something to be mourned. So mourn. Give yourself some time to cry it out, then find the forms of self-care that’ll help you recover. It may be drinks over Zoom with friends, long walks out in the sun, even giving your place a deep, floor-to-ceiling cleaning to symbolize a new start. Pick something that’s going to be useful for you.

The third is to give yourself time. The cliche is that it takes half the time you were with someone to get over them; that’s not actually true, but moving on after a break up takes time. Especially when the break-up was protracted in some ways; in your case, it’s not the day you two officially called it quits, but starting from the day you told him you were done and blocked him. That’s your starting point. And it’s going to be a slow process. It’s not gonna be a matter of a couple weeks and you’re good; you’ll have days when you’re convinced you’re better and absolutely over him and then you’ll be hit by a wave of feels. And that’s normal. But it’ll happen less and less over time, and the day will come when you realize that you don’t hurt as badly and that you haven’t for a while. And while you may not be ready to get out there and date again… you’ll at least realize that this wasn’t the end of love for you. It’s just the end of one chapter; soon it’ll be time to start the next one.

You’ll be ok.

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 about a year ago I met this girl, we’ll call her K. K was the new girl at work and we had a “will they/won’t thing” for bit. We did go out for a bit but it didn’t work out. The problem was we kinda went back into a “will they/won’t they routine.”

It was a frustrating experience, sometimes she acted like she wanted to try dating again other times she acted like she didn’t really want to do anything with me. Eventually the dance ended when we out for a Valentine’s dinner (neither of us has ever had a date for Valentine’s Day so we decide to be each other), and at the end of it she told me she had feelings for a different guy. Our relationship really hasn’t been the same since, because whenever she’s around me she sometimes still acts like she’s interested in me.

The only that I can think of that explains her behavior is that she misses the attention I used to give her but doesn’t want anything more than that. Which comes to my question should I drop her from my life?

She’s not a bad person but the constant back and forth just hurts me to be honest. Like I know we are never going to be thing, I really don’t want to be a thing with her after all this. The whole experience has left me feeling confused.

Any advice you could give me would be nice.

Thanks

Round and Round

DEAR ROUND AND ROUND: This is the sort of letter that gets frustrating to answer because of the lack of detail. It’s a little difficult to give much insight as to what happened when there’s so little to work from or base a judgement or best guess on.

That having been said, I have a fair amount of experience with folks dealing with “will they/won’t they” relationships… and the truth is that a lot of times it was never a “will they/won’t they”, it was a “does someone not recognize this relationship for what it is?” The whole idea of a couple with simmering sexual tension that just keep dancing around the possibility of getting together or getting THIIIIIS close before something intercedes is great for television or serial fiction, but in real life, it very rarely plays out that way. More often than not, one of two things are happening. The first is that one person is misunderstanding or misjudging the interest of the other — usually mistaking friendship, even a flirty friendship for sexual or romantic interest. The other is that there was interest, at first, but it never actually went anywhere. Sometimes that’s because nobody ever made their move and asked the other out. Other times, there were some dates that went nowhere because of some x-factor; the physical chemistry wasn’t there, the timing or the circumstances weren’t right or they just weren’t compatible. Sometimes both parties will agree that yup, this didn’t work. Other times, one or the other will still be interested, while the other just isn’t feeling it; not in the way that the first person does, in any case. So you end up in a situation that feels fairly cut and dry to one person, but seems frustratingly opaque or contradictory to the other.

And that difference in perception can cause problems for the relationship itself because our beliefs are the the filter through which we see the world. If someone believes that they’ve got they’re doing this will they/won’t they dance of mutual interest that never quite gels properly, it can feel as though their crush is being maddeningly inconsistent. Meanwhile, for the person who isn’t interested in a non-platonic relationship, it gets profoundly irritating when their friend keeps trying to put them in the Relationship Zone.

Now, is that what happened with you RaR? I can’t say; I’m not there to observe like Richard Attenborough, and you don’t give much information or detail. So you’re going to have to look back at everything, as clearly and unbiased as you possibly can. This is always difficult because, frankly, it’s hard to separate our desire for a particular outcome from what’s actually going on. There’s that desire to see things in a particular way because that helps give us hope that things will work out the way we want. But try to be as rational as you can and look at possible explanations besides her teasing you and demanding your attention?

Was she being flirty to a level she isn’t with other people? Was she making a point of making sexual or romantic overtures, or was she spending time with you and being emotionally effusive? Were the times that she didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with you truly random, or did they correspond with times when you were trying to get her to start dating you again?

You say that she’s acting flirty with you again, even though she’s seeing somebody. Again: is this flirting that she does only with you, or is she like this with all her friends? Is it possible she’s treating you like a friend?

Is it possible that she’s keeping you around for the attention? Well, yes, it’s certainly possible; there’re folks out there who like to keep folks around because they like the feeling of knowing this person’s into them and they like having that sort of power over them. However, there’re far fewer of those than people would have you believe. Now, if your crush is always signalling just enough interest to keep you coming back when you start pulling away, then that might be an indicator that she’s one of them. But again: this falls into the question of “is she tempting you with the possibility of getting together, or is she trying to be a friend?”

And I can’t answer that. Only you can.

But to a certain extent, all of that is of lesser importance, because there’s another factor at play here: how do you feel? Whether this is a case of misreading things or you’re correct and she is jerking you around ultimately doesn’t matter if having her in your life is causing you pain. That’s the more important question that needs answering.

Is being friends with her or just having a platonic relationship with her upsetting to you? Is having her in your life causing you more pain and frustration than joy and companionship? Then yeah, you’re well within your rights to decide you don’t want to have a relationship with her — platonic or otherwise. While friendship isn’t the consolation prize for romance, you also don’t have to be friends with someone who turned you down, especially if that friendship makes you miserable. You’re allowed to prioritize taking care of your emotions. You can say “hey, you’re a great person and I like you, but the relationship we have isn’t going to work for me. I wish you all the best, but I’m gonna have to step away.”

I do think it would be good to see if the problem you’re having are expectations that’re coloring your interpretation of your relationship with her. If it really is the case that you’re seeing teasing and flirting where there’s only friendliness on her end, then recalibrating your expectations might solve the problem and the two of you can get back to being friends.

But if being friends with her is causing you pain, then you have every right to take care of yourself and make the decision to end your association with her.

You’re the only one who can make that call, RaR. Just be sure you’re making the right one for you.

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 remember your ‘Geek Girl’ post on your blog, about the fantasized nerdy girl who will play video games with you and then f--k your brains out, who is also a model. It’s fantasy, not real, except when it is. Or is there a catch?

I met one, or rather, she met me. She’s a model, red head (a plus), plays video games, and get this, is an artist/animator too!  But. . . she has a boyfriend, who she is having issues with.  This doesn’t mean the game is up, after all she contacted me, we hit it off, and she was quick to let me know that the relationship is not a stable one. Subtle hints perhaps?

Now comes the real complications. She has also confided in me that she has multiple financial issues, can’t get a job, doesn’t really have a place to stay (is moving between friends), and I realized that recently I was listening to all this for about 30-40 minutes on the phone while just nodding my head and going ‘mhm’.

Am I becoming the white knight? It’s in the back of my mind.  I want her to get a job, reach her goals on her own and not present myself as that savior, or person she can depend on. I’m looking for someone to hang out with, have fun, and have sex, and not to worry constantly about ‘if she needs me’ or anything so dramatic. I feel as though she might be trying to push me in that direction, or at least into the friend zone, perhaps involuntarily by needing someone to vent to. I see that pit and I don’t want to fall in, but at the same time this girl is amazing and I’d like to keep the relationship going. 

What’s a nerd to do?

Animators In Lurve

DEAR ANIMATORS IN LURVE: Let’s see: gorgeous girl – a redhead even (BONUS), model and artist contacts you out of the blue; I’m assuming it’s via a dating site or something similar, since you don’t say. She can’t pay her bills. She doesn’t have a steady address. Can’t find a job.

Oh, and she’s got a boyfriend buuuuuuuut… it may or may not be on the rocks.

Am I really going to have to say it?

You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?

OK, fine:

IT’S A TRAP.

So let’s game out this scenario a little. She’s into you, but she has a boyfriend. But hey, that relationship may be ending soon… and wouldn’t you look like an awesome dude if you were able to help her out with her problems a little? Not that she’ll ever suggest that you should, in fact, she’ll be quite shocked if you made the offer, even push back against it. But it’s so hard bouncing from couch to couch and the job market’s so goddamn tough right now. And did she mention that she and her boyfriend had another fight? She has no idea why she’s still with him really…

Your issue isn’t with risking being a White Knight, it’s with risking getting conned.

Now I’m not saying she’s a gold-digger, but I AM saying saying that this is looking an awful lot like someone’s trying to find herself a sucker.

Frankly, everything about this is setting my Spider-Sense to tingling.

In fairness: yeah, it’s hard out there right now. The job market still sucks, there’s a pandemic on and there are plenty of people having to couch-surf in order to have a place to sleep. However, I’ve been gulled before though (though thankfully not to the point of serious financial involvement) and this sounds entirely too much like a con job to me.

Y’see, that Schrodinger’s Boyfriend of hers is the honey-pot; that’s what she’s going to be dangling over your head as the incentive to help her out. It’ll always be juuuuuust out of reach, but maybe if she were able to get back on her feet she might actually leave him. It’s that potential that makes it so attractive. What we can’t have is always more appealing than what we can, and so her relationship status will always be in flux – tantalizingly close, but far enough out of reach that it you still aren’t able to grasp it (and by “it”, I mean her body). She’ll never outright ask for your help finding a job. Or to crash at your place. Or to loan her a little money to keep her on her feet… because it’s way more powerful if you think it’s YOUR idea. Especially if you think it’ll get you closer to what you want – her.

Whether you want her to love you for being her savior or whether you just want to tap that is irrelevant to her; your wallet and/or ability to provide her with things (like a job) is.

You don’t say whether you’ve met this girl in person; I’m guessing you haven’t. I’m further willing to bet that you’re gonna have a hard time managing to convince her to meet up. She will likely have a very plausible reason why she can’t hang out with you or Skype or FaceTime with you, but wants to keep talking via email, WhatsApp and the phone. Why? Because I’m willing to put down actual money that she doesn’t really look like her pictures.

Maybe she does. Maybe she’s willing to meet up in person. That wouldn’t really assuage my suspicions; it just means she’s a little bolder than others out there. Doesn’t matter.

This whole thing stinks to high-heaven and you should be proceeding with absolute caution if you insist on trying to keep things going. Do not offer her money or assistance in finding a job or a place to stay. If she hints at it, you can point out relevant listings on Craigslist or NextDoor. Watch out for hints of how “grateful” she would be for some help. She may have a sudden “emergency”. She may even get mad at you or try to guilt you into helping her. You must, must remain non-reactive. If I’m right – and I’m certain I am – she’ll be looking for any leverage she might be able to use to get at you before she moves on to an easier mark.

Remember: the penis has no conscience, no memory and no ability to look more than 20 minutes ahead and she’ll have no problems using this against you. Keep your blood in your brain, not in your shorts.

I could be wrong. She could be legit.

But I seriously doubt it.

Good luck.

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