DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I tried searching your site to find any stories about this, but didn’t find anything in the results mainly by title. Anyway, to the point, I wanted to ask if you have any tips in dating when the issue is that you may like the girl (or guy) you are dating, but you dislike (some of) her friends? Specifically, if you think some are enablers of bad behavior and/or having a negative influence on the girl (or guy) you are dating; and even worse if they also may not even like you anyway in return.

I think you must have come across this situation before and/or been asked this question right?

I am somewhat conflicted about this topic. For some things I read online, they seem to indicate that the friends your date have may determine your own compatibility with the date; that they can be red flags of issues to come. Other things I’ve read mentions about how you should try to be friendly with and/or impress your date’s friends so that they can provide some sort of positive feedback to your date by winning their approval. I know I can’t expect her to confront or disregard her long-time friends just for me as just a new date in her life. But I also definitely feel there are some stark contrasts/difference between her friends and I – compared to herself and I – which can lead to tensions, if not now then in the future.

How should I approach this situation?

Love Me, Love My Friends?

DEAR LOVE ME, LOVE MY FRIENDS: As a general rule, you can tell a lot about someone by who they hang out with. The saying that “you’re the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with” is fairly accurate. After all, we tend to connect with people who are like us; if you’re not a big fan of their friends, then the odds aren’t great that you two will be a good match.

But that’s not necessarily a hard and fast rule. God knows plenty of people don’t have friends so much as “friends”; people they associate with and may call their friends but who are actually incredibly toxic.

Similarly: it’s generally true that the opinion of a person’s friends can affect their decision about who they date or how long their partner sticks around. But it’s also incredibly common that folks date someone that their friends all hate.

(Notice very carefully that I’m trying to be gender-neutral about this. This is a phenomena that reaches across the entire gender spectrum.)

Now it’s a little unclear from your letter whether this is a thought experiment on your part or if this is something you’re dealing with right now. But in either case, I’d say that if you’re finding that you and your date get along like a house on fire, but you and her friends don’t mesh, it’s worth examining just why that may be. There can be a number of reasons why you and they may not get along that doesn’t mean that they’re either toxic for her or that spell doom for you. It could be that she had some bad experiences and her friends are very protective. It could be that you are someone who’s outside of her norm and they feel put off by that. Or you may have accidentally made a faux-pas out of ignorance or not being as up on some topics as they are.

Or it could be that you and they are just diametrically opposed in some way and that’s going to make it very difficult to get their approval (or for them to get yours).

But while our friends can influence who we decide to date… dating isn’t a democracy. If your partner is into you and you and she have something good going on, then that’s between you and her. The best thing I could recommend is to demonstrate that you’re somebody with honor and integrity who treats her with respect. You and they may never click or mesh well, but that’s ok; you don’t need to be best friends with HER best friends, any more than she needs to be BFFs with yours.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with having “your friends, my friends and our friends”; having separate social lives is good for the long-term success of relationships.

Although if they’re assholes or Trump voters, then nobody would blame you for not really wanting to hang with them in the first place.

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m a woman with a dating question—particularly a dating app question! I matched with a guy on Hinge about 2 weeks ago. I sent him a like first, he liked me, then we matched. He left it up to me to start the conversation; I was super busy so I never got the chance to message him, but I finally messaged him a couple of days ago. He hasn’t answered yet, what do I do?

We happen to attend the same university, and we have a mutual friend or two. We’ve never spoken in person, but would it be weird to friend him on Instagram (in hopes that he replies to my message on Hinge)? Thanks in advance—I really want this to work out with this guy!

Left On Read

DEAR LEFT ON READ: You don’t do anything, LOR. The ball’s in his court. It’s on him to respond or not respond.

Here’s the thing: there’re a lot of reasons why someone might not have responded yet. It could be that he’s not terribly active on Hinge and so he hasn’t seen that you responded or hasn’t logged in to see your message. You, after all, were super-busy before you messaged him; the same could be true on his end. Or it could be that he’s shy and isn’t sure how to respond. Alternately, he feels like it’s been too long for him to reply and now it would be awkward if he did.

Or — and this one always kinda sucks — it could be that he’s not that interested. He might have been just casually browsing Hinge and swiping on people without really being that interested in dating. Alternately, he might have matched with you, but decided to pursue something with someone else who messaged him before you did. Or — in what is the most unfortunate but likely scenario — he wasn’t that into you but swiped right on you just in case. This, unfortunately, is a really common thing that men do, especially on dating apps with swiping or “yes/no” mechanics: they swipe right on everyone in order to maximize potential matches, and then decide who they’re actually interested in after they match. Women, on the other hand, tend to only swipe on people they’re actually into. So many times, women will match with somebody that they really liked, only to discover that he was just trying to get a little serotonin boost from seeing the number on the notification badge go up.

What you don’t want to do, however, is jump to a different app to to try to connect with him. Or take it offline for that matter. This is a thing that a lot of guys do; they may get rejected on Tinder or Hinge, but message that person on Instagram instead in hopes of trying to get a second shot. It’s intrusive, it’s cringey and it’s an indication that they feel like their desire to get a date (or a blowjob or…) overrides her stated lack of interest. And while the dynamics are different when you reverse the genders — on average, women pose far less of a physical threat to men than men do to women — it’s still intrusive and not cool. Doing so in person is, likewise, not cool, for much the same reason; it ends up tells the person that you’re ignoring what is, in all likelihood, a soft no, because you don’t like the answer.

I say this because, at the end of the day, no answer is an answer. It’s “I’m not interested”, and that’s the end of the discussion. If he is interested, but hasn’t gotten back to you for reasons… well, he knows you messaged him. It’s on him to make the next move.

And if you do run into him in person… I wouldn’t bring this up unless he does. You can chat, flirt and see if the in-person interaction makes things easier than the potential awkward of a late reply on a dating app, and “hey, you never responded to my message on Hinge” can be a cute thing to discuss down the line if the two of you hit it off and go on a date or two. But unless that happens, bringing it up is going to be more cringe-inducing than romance-facilitating.

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

Good luck.

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I was hoping to get your opinion on a concern of mine.

I am in my mid thirties and foolishly waited until mere months before a global pandemic to start getting serious about living life and as pertains to your specialty, looking for love.

I wasn’t especially concerned as things kicked off, but as the situation worsened, I grew more and more despondent about it all. One thing in particular that I wanted to talk to you about was that most people where I live are not taking this at all seriously.

While I have observed plenty of carelessness in the general population, I thought I would look at my fellow employees as an example.

I work in a small company, and don’t know the exact number of employees off the top of my head, so let’s say more than thirty or so. Of these, I can count the number who are social distancing and wearing masks in both their professional and personal lives on the fingers of one hand. Many outright brag about not wearing masks off the clock, talk about their vacations to, I s--t you not, other states with extended family and friends, often pull their masks down off their noses or off entirely at work, say they will vote for whoever will stop this stupid mask nonsense, etc.

This obviously includes the potential dates I would be interested in, well, if they weren’t almost all already attached. Sucks to show up late to the party when everyone else already hooked up, but let’s not forget the Abundance Mentality that says there are more elsewhere, right?

Well, about that: I have decided for better or worse that not taking COVID-19 seriously is a dealbreaker for me. So, if these women are indicative of the general population, my available options have dwindled to basically single digits even in a crowd of more than a hundred people. What are the odds that any of these single digits also happen to mesh well with me otherwise and also happen to be single? How much abundance is there really? (A recent study or poll said that around 49% of Americans actually wear masks like they mean it…)

I guess what I want advice for here is: Am I wrong to expect anyone I want to date to care enough to wear a mask? Am I being overly critical? If so, how do I deal with essentially viewing everyone not taking COVID seriously in, shall we say, a rather bad light? Am I putting the cart in front of the horse here, since I have yet to actually get anyone to actually say yes to a date? Do you think I should consider dating someone who didn’t take COVID seriously in the future? Do you think I would have better luck moving elsewhere after all this is over? (I ask that because I was already planning to move to a larger city, but that kind of got put on hold…)

-No Longer Feeling the Abundance

DEAR NO LONGER FEELING THE ABUNDANCE: There’re a couple things to touch on here, NLFA. The first is the idea of perception vs. reality. Our brains don’t necessarily do all that well with a lot of abstract concepts. We tend to do a lot of extrapolation and filling in the gaps based on things that we already assume to be true because we feel like it is. Sometimes that comes down to simple confirmation bias, where we give credence to things that confirm what we already believe and dismiss the things that don’t line up with those beliefs. Other times it comes down to what’s known as an anchoring bias, where we tend to latch on to the first piece of information we got about a topic and use that as the basis for our decisions, even when it’s not necessarily relevant.

The other is simply a question of fundamental compatibility. I recently released a video on my YouTube channel about how to tell when somebody is right for you. One of the most important indicators of compatibility is that you and your potential partner have matching or well-matched values. This means looking deeper than just things like “we like the same tv shows or music” and focusing on things like “we have similar feelings about the role of faith in our lives” or “we’re on the same page that having children would be irresponsible”. Or, as Chidi Anagonye might posit: “What do we owe to each other?”

That last one hits dead bang in the center of your issue.

One of the things that’s incredibly frustrating about the various anti-maskers and people who don’t take COVID safety seriously is that they aren’t seeing past their own interests, comfort or convenience. It’s easy — if misguided — to be fatalistic and assume that “if I get it, I get it”. But the problem with that “If I get it” outlook is that getting infected with COVID doesn’t stay with them. If they get exposed and contract the virus, they may or may not suffer the consequences… but they also may end up infecting and killing other people, people who didn’t make the decision that they were cool rolling those particular dice. After all, the fatalities resulting of one the most infamous super-spreader events of the last several months — a wedding in Maine — were all people who weren’t at that event. They were innocent bystanders who died because of choices that other people made. And while those people may have been ok with taking that chance, the 170+ other people who got infected were never given the option to choose.

And even the upcoming vaccines aren’t going to be an immediate fix; it’s still going to take time to make life safe again, and that means continuing to take precautions.

It’s pretty clear that you take COVID seriously. You want to not just protect yourself, but the people around you and in your orbit. That’s a pretty fundamental value, something deep that reaches to the core of who you are. It gets at that question of “what do we owe others”. People like your co-workers, on the other hand, are less worried about what they owe others. They’re not as concerned, they don’t take it seriously and they don’t seem to consider the potential fallout of their choices. Hopefully they will never be in the position of realizing they harmed or even caused the death of people in their lives because of that choice… but right now they don’t seem to give it much thought.

That sounds like a pretty clear example of a deep, fundamental incompatibility to me. So no, I don’t think you’re being overly critical by not wanting to date someone who doesn’t wear a mask or take precautions. This isn’t like preferring to date a non-smoker or preferring to date folks who don’t drink alcohol; this comes down to the question of “do we have a responsibility to others, as well as ourselves”. And it seems like the answer for your co-workers is “not really”.

Now, I don’t think you need to limit yourself to dating folks who take COVID precautions to extremes or will only go outside wearing a hazmat suit, but wanting to date people who mask up and are careful about avoiding exposure or exposing others is an entirely reasonable choice. That is as decision that says far more about them as a person, and how well your core values mesh. And that’s going to be true both now and in the future, when the pandemic has ended.

But let’s go back to the part about perception vs. reality. Like I said: it’s very easy for us to make assumptions based on faulty assumptions because we’re not a logical species. When you hear and see the same thing over and over again, it’s easy to assume that it’s more widespread than it actually is. It’s very easy for me, for example, to assume that most of the folks I encounter will be familiar with Critical Role, because a lot of the people in my online circles are fairly devoted Critters. But if I step away from Twitter and talk to other friends of mine — friends who are also geeky and into tabletop RPGs — lots of them will look at me strangely if I make a “hello bees” joke or say “I would like to rage”.

(And then there was the time when one of my friends told me they were doing CBT and I had to double check that they meant “cognitive behavioral therapy”…)

You’re working in an environment where you’re seeing more people who treat masking up and social distancing like an annoying option — something they don’t take seriously. It’s understandable that, seeing this every day, you feel like this is far more widespread than it actually is. It’s more immediately present and it gets reinforced by your day to day experience. But what you’re seeing is a limited and, to a certain extent, self-selected population sample. According to Pew Research, the number of Americans who wear masks regularly has actually been growing steadily; as of August, 87% of Americans wear masks when going out and about. In June, it was only 65%. So while it may feel like you’re limiting your dating pool drastically by prioritizing mask use, the numbers are actually in your favor. While yes, you will be limiting your dating pool by filtering out people who don’t mask up… you won’t be limiting things that significantly. You may need to start looking for partners outside of your social circles at work, but I can promise you that there are far more sexy single folks out there who mask up than it may feel right now.

Fortunately, you aren’t stuck dating the people you meet at work or their friends. Online dating has exploded since March, because people are still meeting, hooking up and falling in love. It has meant that people are having to settle in for a longer preliminary courtship, as they weigh not just chemistry and compatibility but safety. But at the same time, this gives you more of an opportunity to qualify folks for the traits you’re looking for… including their COVID safety precautions. If you meet someone on Hinge or Bumble or Tinder and you’re both feeling like you’re ready to meet up in person, that’s a good time to bring up the question about COVID prep and what social distancing would mean for you two. While you may find that some of your dates are a little more laissez-faire about safety than you’d prefer, that’s ultimately just a sign that they’re not right for you. On the other hand, someone who wants to make sure you’re both masked until you both feel safe enough to take things a bit further? That’s a pretty good sign that you’re talking to someone who’s right for you.

And yes, if you’re finding that you’re not happy where you live or that the culture isn’t a good fit for you, then that’s a great reason to move if you can. And honestly, moving to a larger city to improve the odds of finding someone you’d want to date is just as legitimate and valid as moving for work. But don’t let concerns about whether it’s “reasonable” to move somewhere to improve your odds of dating keep you from changing locales if you’ve got the resources and the inclination.  Life’s short, the world is chaos; there’s no benefit to staying some place that makes you miserable if you have the option of leaving.

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, first things first: my partner (38NB, they/them) and I (28F) both have histories of abusive relationships. Their most recent partner before they met me was physically, sexually, and emotionally violent towards them; I had gotten out of a sexually predatory and abusive relationship with a much older man. We both understand that the trauma we’ve undergone shapes us, but does not define us. We’re working through it.

My problem is that I’m scared that I was simply the first partner in a long time to show them kindness and compassion, and that because of that they’ve spent the last five and a half years in a relationship in which, on some fundamental level, they do not want to be. This is in large part because I have a lot of flaws as a partner.

We live together and have done for nearly five years, but it was a case of me moving into their flat straight from my parents’ house rather than us picking a place together. I am long-term unemployed and contribute to household expenses as much as I am able but they’re still the primary breadwinner and I feel like I am leeching off them. I have triggers relating to showers (which I would rather not go into) that make personal hygiene difficult for me. I clean and help out and cook and the like, but I’ve had to learn how over the time we’ve lived together. I have serious depression and anxiety, for which I am receiving treatment and medication, but they had to poke and prod me into getting any treatment at all. I constantly feel like I have nothing to offer but being a considerate and caring partner – something that should be the default for any relationship, though the both of us are keenly aware that it is very much not.

Both of us drink heavily, something which lockdown has made worse, but they’re getting through a litre of gin every couple of days. They’re much more outgoing than I am and not being able to see their friends has hit them very hard indeed. When they’ve been drunk on the sofa, they’ve talked about how they didn’t see themselves ending up like this. Illness took their dreams of being a dancer in the West End, and now they’re pushing forty in a provincial fishing village that makes Toshi Station look like the height of urbane cosmopolitanism. And they look so sad when they say it. And then the next day, it’s like a switch has been flipped and it’s all smiles, and when I try to bring it up they brush it aside as me being paranoid. Which, to be entirely fair, is one of the symptoms of my anxiety disorder.

I love my partner, I really have to stress that. I love them with all my heart. I’m just terrified that I’m not worth loving back as much, and I can’t help but wonder whether or not I’m making my partner as happy as they make me. I struggle to tell what’s my paranoia and what’s a genuine issue that I should talk about with them. They’re a really awesome person and I just… worry that I’m nothing more than the first person to be a good partner, and that having had such an unbelievably fucking shitty partner for five years makes me look way better than I actually am.

We’ve been together, like I said, for five and a half years. I’ve been really happy. The happiest I can ever remember being. And I wonder if I’m the only one in the relationship who feels like that.

Or if it’s all in my head.

Thank you for reading,

Relevant Black Sabbath Song

DEAR RELEVANT BLACK SABBATH SONG: Well let’s get this out of the way first, RBSS: yes, your partner is settling for you. But you are also settling for them. This doesn’t mean that they’re choosing you because you’re the closest warm body that said yes, or only person they could end up in a relationship with. It means that everybody looks at their list of what they want in a partner and realizes that no one person can provide ALL the things they want. Everybody goes into a relationship saying “Ok, I’m willing to give up on X, Y or Z because what I do get from this person is worth it”. And that goes for you too; nobody gets 100% of what they want in a relationship, but they get enough that they’re happy with the exchange.

Problems only arise when somebody prioritizes “having a relationship” over “a relationship with a person I want to actually date” — they’re just trying to fill a whole marked “relationship”, rather than choosing that person specifically.

Now with that said, let’s talk about the specifics of your situation. First and foremost, I think you’re drastically undervaluing offering someone kindness and compassion and what that can mean to someone… especially someone who was in a horrifically abusive relationship. Being somebody that they can trust, somebody who is safe and reliable and lets them feel secure is no small thing. The sense of being able to let your guard down and let somebody in without having to tense up or be afraid of how they’ll treat you is huge. That’s not “well anyone could provide this” or something cheap or meaningless. It’s very, very important and I suspect it was at the top of your partner’s “must have” list. So stop talking yourself down on that level.

Similarly: you have your flaws. Ok… and? Everyone does. Maybe it means that you wouldn’t be compatible with some people. But you’re not dating those people, you’re dating your partner. Similarly, you have depression and anxiety and your partner has been poking and prodding you to get into therapy. Here’s the thing: they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t care. People, on the whole, don’t try to push folks they don’t like into getting help. And hey, if it helps you process things, look at this as your partner saying “here’s something you can do: taking care of yourself will make our relationship better.”

You’re also seeing this relationship on a transactional basis and worrying that things aren’t perfectly balanced. But perfect balance is for Thanos… all the rest of us deal with things being a little unequal on one side or the other. But not only is that not inherently a bad thing, successful relationships balance those aspects out in other ways. You aren’t the primary breadwinner, but there are other ways you contribute, both to the household and to the relationship. They can be anything from housework to being the emotional port that provides them safety from the storm.

And then there’s the part about “I didn’t think my life would end up like this”. First of all, a thing you need to keep in mind is that alcohol is a depressant in the literal and emotional sense of the word. As I’ve said before: we’re bad at understanding why we feel the way we do. Our brains don’t just feel emotions, they interpret the input they’re getting from the body and backfill the reasons for it after the fact. As a result, getting drunk can make you feel lower than you actually are because it’s depressing your nervous system. It can even drag up feelings that you’d resolved because it removes filters and hinders your judgement. So, just as getting drunk impairs a person’s ability to consent, because they may be agreeing to something they don’t actually want to do, your partner’s discussing how their life isn’t the way they expected doesn’t mean that they don’t like the way things are now. It just means that there’re things that they wish could’ve been different. And hey, we all have that. Show me somebody who doesn’t look at aspects of their life that they wish  could’ve gone differently and I’ll show you a fictional character. But life not going in the direction you expected doesn’t mean that they can’t be — or aren’t —  happy now.

Shit, 90% of Christmas movies are people discovering their lives aren’t going the way they expected and realizing that this is OK.

(The rest are about terrorists invading Nakatomi Plaza or crime waves in Gotham.)

The biggest problem you have isn’t that your partner is “settling” for you. It’s that you aren’t recognizing that what you’re giving them is actually very goddamn valuable indeed. Safety, security, care and love are huge. Are you perfect? No. Neither is anyone else. Are you The Perfect Partner? No… but neither are they. Are there things you could possibly do to make things balance out a bit more? Probably, and you can talk with your partner about ways that you could do this. But that’s not the same as “being a bad partner” or “being the first person to be nice to them”. The important question to ask is are they happy? And are you happy?

And then it’s your responsibility to listen and take yes for an answer. Because the thing that’s worse than “settling” for somebody? That’s being told you’re settling, when you really aren’t. It’s telling your partner that you love them and being called a liar for saying that. Yes, there are things you can work on; everyone has those. And it may well be worth doing so, when you can differentiate actual areas of improvement from your anxiety dripping poison in your ear.

But most importantly: you need to recognize your worth and value and how important the things you contribute actually are. Being kind, caring and supportive isn’t just baseline, it’s important and it’s clearly something your partner lacked, desperately needs and that you provide. Don’t diminish that. And don’t steal misery from the future; enjoy what you have now.

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