DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: There is this saying that, when people talk about a certain dilemma, they actually already know the right answer and just hope the other party will tell them what they want to hear, essentially giving them the go-ahead for the dumb decision they have been craving for.

I’m afraid mine is one of those dilemmas. Care to listen anyway?

My boyfriend and I are living together for nine years now. Peacefully co-existing gamers with their cat having the pants on. Essentially, on the most basic level, we have a good and loving relationship, and try as I might, there is not a man in this world I would trade him for. I love everything about him; even his angry stuttering when we fight is adorable. He once most gallantly presented me with a toy lightsaber, which I consider to be the most romantic gift I’ve ever received from a man, delivered in the cutest way. So… everything’s perfect, right?

Well, yeah. Except for my epilepsy and cancer. None of this makes him love me less and he takes care of me in the same way I took care of him when he had his femoral neck fracture. There’s a difference between tending for someone who is going to get better and tending for someone who’s taking the chemo in a worse way and has no real chance of surviving, despite the best efforts. It’s not the cancer that’s worrying me, though. I must sound like a total mensch when I say this, but my foremost concern is my boyfriend. His is carrying all the burdens, and his health is starting to go. He is often ill, worries too much to even be happy for a merciful few seconds, and he’s always exhausted. For his sake, I want to leave. I brought the topic up a few times, but he bursts into tears when I even mention not being here with him anymore.

Back then, I did have options. Not very attractive ones, but still: options. I left my home, my family and friends to live with my boyfriend. A lot has changed, but I could have gone back. This is not an option anymore. Besides having to live with my mother being a torture I would not want to inflict upon myself, she is very poor and cannot take care of me, too. I need a lot of attention and a lot of medication, and she simply cannot provide for what I need. Also, she’s still pretty traumatized thanks to my brother’s suicide three months ago, and I don’t loathe her enough to have her watch me, her last living child of three, die too. My father is alive, but unwilling to burden himself with me. Can’t blame him. We don’t know each other. No other family to speak of.

Now, the way I see it, the only way to cancel myself out of my boyfriend’s life is to go to a hospital, taking my chemo there, and ask random nurses to take turns holding my head while I vomit. I don’t want my boyfriend to go to pieces, and there is really no need for him to be there for me the whole time, going down with me and having a harder time getting back on track after I’m gone and can’t do, again, I apologize, fuck all for him. I told him he’d be better off without me as a constant burden. But he insists that, when I’m gone, he won’t ever recover from it. Which is very sweet, and very theatric. You know, I thought a hospital somewhere around here would be good, so he could visit me when he felt like it, but last time we tried that he visited me every day, sacrificing his whole personal life on it.

He just doesn’t get it. Or doesn’t want to get it. Because I will be gone soon and that is something he’ll have to live with. But once I even start talking about it, he tells me I’m immortal and leaves the room. When I tell him he should do something for himself for a change, he doesn’t know what. I tell him, something that takes his mind off things. And then he either says me gaining a kilo or us going outdoors for a short walk so I get a little fresh air would be something I could do for him. Doc, in all honesty, what the you-know kind of thing is that to wish for ONESELF? Two things I know: I’m probably the luckiest girl in the world, boyfriend-wise, and he’s a nutcase.

I really don’t know what to do anymore. I even asked his father to sit down with us and talk things through, but it won’t go in my boyfriend’s head. Is the right thing to stay here and have him go nurse on me until the inevitable occurs (which is MY best case scenario), or is the right thing to remove myself, a definitely negative influence, from his life? 

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

DEAR BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Sometimes it’s impossible to know what to say. Sometimes there are no answers.

BRHP, I feel for you. You’re facing down something terrifying and you’re being insanely brave about it and it’s remarkable. I feel for your boyfriend too; I’ve been in the position of being a caretaker for someone I care about, knowing that all that remains is making them comfortable and easing their passing. It’s a difficult situation; you feel impotent and angry that you can’t do anything, mourning somebody in advance and wanting to someone to comfort you, feeling guilty because you feel like you’re being selfish when this person you love is so sick and you feel like you shouldn’t be feeling anything for yourself…

Your boyfriend is staying by your side and doing everything he can for you – even at the expense of his own health and happiness – because he wants to do SOMETHING. Feeling helpless can be maddening – we want to believe that somehow we can push back the tide, that there has to be something, some secret that’s been left unexplored that can change everything. We want make things better just through sheer force of our willpower if that’s what it takes. But to sit there and admit that there’s nothing we can do makes us feel like we’ve failed. So he may not be able to save you, but he’s damned determined to make every remaining moment count. He wants to do something, anything because he knows he’s going to have to let you go eventually and he’s just not going to do that without a fight.

Pushing him away isn’t necessarily going to make this easier on him. It’s noble to want to spare him the suffering. And I can imagine that there’s a part of you that doesn’t want him to see what’s going to happen. It’s been 18 years since my father lost his battle with cancer, and it was hard for him to see the looks on our faces when we saw what the treatments had done. But making him leave you isn’t going to make him improve; if anything I’m going to guess that things would get worse and he’d spiral into a deep depression. He’s trying to show you how much he cares in the only ways he has left to him. He doesn’t want to talk about it because he’s trying to be strong for you in the only ways he knows how. You stayed with him when he broke his neck; how could he do any less for you?

And you’re right: you’re probably one of the luckiest people in the world. The dating advice industry is full of stories of husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends who ditched at the first sign of trouble or who abandoned their significant others when they were needed most. He’s trying to show you that he’s going to be there with you all the way until the end of the line. If he can’t stop you from he’s going to make sure that you are cared for and loved and will not be alone at the very end.

This is a man who’s ready to fight God for another minute with you.

Sometimes there are no answers, just ways of making things less shitty.

There are two things that I see here that you can do for one another.

For his sake, you may want to look into finding in-home care . It’s not cheap, but it can be less expensive than going to the hospital and if you have insurance, that should help cover it. It’ll help ease the effort and stress of helping care for you and hopefully let him recover some of his health.

For YOUR sake, he should start seeing somebody – a counselor, a minister, someone – that he can unburden himself to. He’s going to need an outlet to express how he’s feeling and to process the grief and the anger and the pain he’s going through right now. Part of the problem is that he’s holding it all in – guys have a tendency to feel like we have to be rocks in times of crisis and never admit to needing help ourselves – and the stress of keeping it all inside is hurting him.

And you should be aware:  just as you’re lucky to have him, he’s incredibly lucky to have you. It takes an incredible person to be going through what you’re experiencing and to be worried about how it’s hurting someone else. You’re an incredibly strong and caring person and love like the two of you have is rare and hard to find.

Saying good luck seems trite under the circumstances but…

Good luck.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m a new female reader and in the day I’ve known you you’ve already helped me end an abusive relationship.

(That sounds a little dramatic, but your articles have definitely helped. Specifically: “When It’s Time To Break Up (and When It’s Not)”)

My boyfriend and I broke up this morning, and it wasn’t until just recently I decided to look into whether or not my relationship was actually bad, or if I was just overreacting like my boyfriend said I was.

There’s a lot that I want to tell you about our relationship– things you probably don’t care to hear, so I’ll just cut to the chase:

For months my boyfriend would tell me that I disappointed him on the daily. That when he came home from work, I should do things for him to make his life easier because his life sucked. That I should work on these large projects for him because he couldn’t draw and that I promised him that I would animate a cartoon for him a long time ago. And when I first started the project, everything was fine. I had the time to do it. But then I started to go to school full-time and I started working two part-time jobs; one of which was almost full-time on its own for a while.

He told me that in the few hours I had after school and before work, (which I usually spent sleeping, relaxing, or doing homework, after being out 13 hours+ in a typical day) that I should work on his project so that he wouldn’t have to do anything with his life. So that he could coast on his idea and on my hard work. Hard work that he would say wasn’t as hard as writing a script and that drawing that much should be easy for me. Eventually, I stopped working on it completely– a sort of defense mechanism with all of the disappointment he’d been throwing my way, I think. I was afraid to work on it at all, because when I looked to him for encouragement, all I got was: “That’s all you did?”

After a while- after my ignoring of comments like: “My cartoon is never going to happen. I have to give up on my dream and work at dead-end jobs for the rest of my life;” things were okay enough. I knew I would work on it again. I wanted to make his dream come true.

Eventually, if I did race back from school on time to see him for the short half an hour before he went to work, I would get comments like: “It was nice seeing you.” Or, if I stopped at a friend’s house or stayed at school to do homework, I would hear things like: “Thanks for coming home to see me, see you next week, I guess.” None of which he considered anything similar to emotional blackmail. If I even went out for the night– just once to relieve some stress with my friends, he would get jealous that I was making time for others and not for him. At certain points he even got mad at me for taking four hours to go see my family. They lived almost an hours drive away.

The only things that really peaked my relationship-awareness were a couple of friends who pointed out a few similar points about his actions towards me. At first I thought I was just complaining and over-exaggerating. Things weren’t that bad.. My friends were just sticking up for me, because I was only telling them my side of the story. Cody (the ex) was just having a rough-time lately.

My boyfriend and I drifted apart– we maybe saw each other an hour out of every day, and I started liking this guy at my work.. I wasn’t proud of this. I tried not to like this guy– he wasn’t even my type! Technically, still isn’t.. but your post: “The Problem With ‘Nice Guys'” has me getting worried..

This guy is a nice guy. A great guy, from what he’s shown me. He was there for me when I told him about my relationship problems with my ex, and listened when I hadn’t expected him to. I started to feel excited every time he walked into work, and we worked almost every day together for a few weeks. He’s much bigger in the hips and stomach than I’ve ever felt attracted to, so at first I thought it was just a silly crush that would pass. I’ve always been cool enough to be personable with overweight people, but vain enough to have never fallen for one. Previous notions telling me I had too many options, because I was the pretty girl, and that an attractive man would come along and sweep me off my feet– like I once thought Cody had. But this guy continued to be supportive, and I still find myself attracted to him. (I realize it sounds vain, and like I’m a stupid snob, but after more guys liking me than I care to count – more nerds than anything – the thought kind of sticks)…

Neither of us want to go beyond casual at the moment, because anything serious would affect our jobs (one of us would have to transfer). Also, because I just got out of a 3 year relationship that has me feeling emotionally vulnerable and would make him look like the rebound, which I don’t want to do to him.

I hate that his physical appearance has anything to do with it.. but I’m afraid that if anything were to happen in a sexual nature– should his clothes come off– that I would be turned off and unable to continue. I don’t want to put either of us in that situation.

I don’t want to hurt this guy, because of how good he’s been to me and his being exactly what I needed when my boyfriend was draining me of all of my confidence and self-esteem. A part of me is afraid that subconsciously I’ve been using him, and since reading your article: “The Problem With ‘Nice Guys,'” I’ve been afraid a part of him is using me, too. (..or is that vain, too?)

So, out of one problem and into another…

Could you please spare a spec of advice?

-Into The Fire

DEAR INTO THE FIRE: There’s a lot to unpack in this story, ITF and I’m not really surprised. You’ve been through the emotional ringer and it’s going to take some time to get your head straight and let your heart heal. Small wonder that you’re feeling like your chi’s all kinds of f--ked right now.

But as with any complicated situation, sometimes it’s easiest to just take it by it’s component parts, bit by bit until it doesn’t seem quite so daunting.

To start with: your ex. He was a passive-aggressive, manipulative dick by the sound of it, who didn’t have much in the way of respect for you, your wishes or your situation. He also clearly has no idea what goes into trying to work as an artist but that’s a different rant entirely (Can you tell I used to work as an illustrator? Don’t mind me…) Regardless: he was making you miserable and you sound as though you are well rid of him. You should be proud of yourself for being able to leave; it can be hard to extract yourself from a relationship that’s turned toxic, and it says a lot for your personal strength and resolve.

Considering how things went with him, it’s not terribly surprising that you’re a little hesitant when suddenly a new challenger approaches! After all, you’re fresh out of a bad relationship and still sweeping the emotional detritus out from the corners of your love-life when you’re starting to get all sorts of surprising feelings for this new guy. It’s too soon! And he’s totally nothing like what you’ve wanted before! WTF, gonads?

So now you have this new guy you’ve got a crush on and you’re full of questions. Is he a good guy or a Nice Guy? Has he been helping you out because he’s hoping that he can trade in all of his his Platonic Friend proofs-of-purchase for a Free Girlfriend Upgrade or because he’s a genuine friend who’s trying to support you through an incredibly trying time? Worse: are you using him as the emotional equivalent of a security blanket? And what about the fact that well… he’s fat?

Let’s start with the looks. Yeah, you’ve never been into bigger guys before, and to be perfectly frank, the way you describe yourself – being too vain to want to date a chubby – doesn’t exactly cover you in glory. But this guy still hits your buttons in a way that you haven’t felt before. This should tell you something: maybe it’s more than just looks. Maybe, just maybe, you’re into him as a holistic being instead of someone who hit the genetic powerball grand prize. Sure, there’re better looking guys out there… but can they make you laugh the way he does? Do they make your heart race at the thought of seeing them at work the way he does?

Attraction is more than facial symmetry and low body-fat to muscle ratios; it’s also about personality and humor, about shared values and goals, mutual interests and mutual respect. You worry that you’re too shallow to be sexual with him – that when the clothes come off, you’re going to be turned off. It’s understandable – you’re dealing with a body type that you’ve typically not been interested in. But I have a serious question for you: how much of that is just you haven’t been interested and how much of it is because of how you’ve been acculturated? You talk about being too vain to date a fat guy – but is that about how you feel or about how you feel others would judge you? Are you worried about what other people are going to say when they see you with him? How do you feel when you hug him? Does your heart race and your mouth go dry? Do you find yourself relaxing into him and enjoying the comfort of his arms? These will tell you more about how you really feel than trying to intellectualize it. Sometimes the body wants things that the head has problems understanding; many guys who are into bigger women – for example – often have a problem coming to terms with their attraction versus what society has told them they SHOULD want. Sometimes your heart and genitals know you better than your head does.

When you’re into someone, the way they look to you will change; your affection to them will make them more attractive to you. The parts that others may consider flaws are just part of what makes the people we care about uniquely them. You may find, for instance, that part of what attracts you to him is that he’s a big huggable bear.

What about the question of who’s using who? This is where you have to be willing to set emotion aside – difficult, I know – and take a cold hard look at how he treats you and how the two of you interact together. How did the two of you start becoming friends? Did he start trying to move in when you were having problems and he saw an opening? Or was he non-judgmental, offering support to someone who was clearly in pain without making it about trying to separate you from your boyfriend. Does he get in a huff when you bring up other guys, or does he take it in stride? Does he make a point of how much he does for you with the subtle implication that you owe him? Has he been trying to position himself as boyfriend material, or has he been treating you as a good friend who’s been having a hard time? Now that you’re single, has he been making increasingly pointed hints about dating him? Has his hanging out with you been all about how the two of you are soooo compatible and isn’t that just crazy?

Nice Guys are about obligation and entitlement – the problem with Nice Guys is that they feel that they’re owed sex just for base-line decent behavior. If your crush isn’t acting like that… well, it sounds like he’s just being a good guy.

What about YOU using HIM though? That can be a trickier one. After all, he’s been a source of emotional support at a time when you desperately needed it. It’s not difficult to see how maybe you’re mistaking gratitude – and someone who’s not treating you like s--t – for love. And maybe that’s the case.

But there are little clues here and there that tell me that maybe you care about him as a person, not as a crutch to help you hobble along as your heart recovers. The biggest tell: you’re afraid about what all this means. It’d be one thing if you were just merrily rolling along, content to suck up the feels he’s providing you. It’s another thing entirely when you’re starting to worry that you don’t feel as strongly for him as you think you might or that this could all be temporary. The fact that you’re worried about hurting him tells me two things:

1) You’re seriously considering him as relationship material.

2) You care about him enough that you’re worried that you’re going to f--k things up and hurt him.

These are good signs.

I get that you’re afraid of being in a rebound relationship, and it’s understandable. But don’t think that there is some designated length of time that you must wait before even considering a new relationship. Many people who’ve gotten out of long-term relationships have discovered that they were over their ex before they broke up in the first place. This could very well be the case for you: part of what made it possible for you to get out of your abusive relationship was that you were starting to realize that you would much rather be with your friend.

Here’s something I want you to keep in mind: not every relationship has to be with an eye towards Happily Ever After. Some relationships are short term by circumstance and some by design. I think the fear of a “rebound” relationship stems from approaching every relationship as though the end goal is marriage, 2.5 kids and the house in the suburbs. Sometimes a relationship can just be what you need at a particular stage of your life; just because it’s short doesn’t mean that it’s automatically a “failure”.

The key to any relationship is communicate, communicate, communicate. This means being up front and absolutely clear about where you are emotionally, what you can offer and where you see this relationship going. You’re clearly interested in this guy but you have concerns. All well and good. Tell him this. Be up front: you’re into him and you don’t know what this means… but clearly you want to find out. You don’t want to hurt him, so take it slowly and with the full realization that this may very well not work out in the long term.

I think you might be surprised at just how well things work out. Maybe it’s time to stop questioning things SO much and just take “yes” for an answer.

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: My last (and first) girlfriend broke up with me because I’m a virgin, even though she said she wouldn’t hold it against me when I told her. She said she was afraid she wouldn’t love me if the sex wasn’t good.

She also said it bothered her when I told her I loved her.

How do I get over this?

Shot Down In Flames

DEAR SHOT DOWN IN FLAMES: So, I get a lot of comments like this whenever I write about virginity, especially male virginity, and more often than not it’s pretty clear that the story being presented isn’t what actually happened. This isn’t to say that people are lying, so much as slapping a very thick filter over everything that happened. It’s very easy to assume that the thing that YOU are most concerned with was, in fact, the reason the scenario you were afraid of occurred. Especially if it’s something you already believe marks you out as being one of the Great Unf--kables, someone who’s been given the bird by the Fickle Finger of Fate.

In reality, it’s almost never that least and clean. There’re usually other issues that actually prompted the break-up and the ONE issue — virginity, in this case — is the scapegoat.

But hey, you caught me in a generous mood, so while there is definitely a big ol’ [citation needed] appended to your letter, I’m going to take you at your word that this happened exactly as you say it did.

The problem here isn’t that you’re a virgin, SDIF. The problem is that you were dating an asshole. An asshole who, I might add, doesn’t seem to have really liked you all that much.

Now, I’m on the record as being firmly of the belief that it’s important to prioritize sexual satisfaction and sexual compatibility in a relationship. If one or both partners aren’t enjoying the sex they’re having in a relationship, that’s going to be a metaphorical stone in the shoe that’s going to ruin everything. Sex pretty much always wins in the end.

(And to be perfectly clear: sexual satisfaction and compatibility also encompasses people who are demisexual or asexual. Ace folks, especially sex-averse ace folks, who’re feeling compelled to have sex they don’t want are just as badly served by the relationship as couples having bad or unsatisfying sex.)

But while sexual compatibility and satisfaction are important and something to be prioritized, that doesn’t mean that virgins are shit out of luck by definition. To start with, being a virgin doesn’t mean being a bad lover, any more than having had hundreds of partners means that you’re amazing in bed. Much of what makes the difference between bad sex and great sex is clear communication, a willingness to listen, pay attention and take direction without letting your ego get in the way. Lots of folks — women included — have had great sex even though it was their partner’s first time.

By that same token, there are many, many women — including people who’ve written in, people who comment here and people in the Dr. NerdLove and NerdLove Academy Facebook groups — who’ve slept with virgins and many who actively enjoy it.

So while this singular woman broke up with you, presumably because you’re a virgin, that doesn’t mean that all women will. It means that you met one asshole. Maybe she meant it when she said she wouldn’t hold it against you and simply wasn’t able to keep that promise. Maybe she just said it because she felt like she should. Either way, it sounds like she treated you pretty callously and that’s a good sign that you’re better off without her. The fact is that, while this absolutely hurts, she did you a favor. The way she behaved marked her as someone you wouldn’t want to lose your virginity to. It doesn’t sound like she would be a caring, sensitive or communicative partner at all and your first time would likely have been disappointing at best. So you likely dodged a bullet here.

But there’s also the part of where she says it bothered her when you said that you loved her. Now without more detail it’s impossible to really say what’s up with that… but there’re two distinct possibilities. The first is that it bothered her because she didn’t care for you and hearing that you loved her made her feel bad because she knew she was going to dump you anyway. That’s on her. The second possibility is that you fell a little too hard and a little too fast and that weirded her out. Now that’s the result of inexperience and is something a lot of folks go through. That tends to be the sort of thing that you really only learn how to gauge by going through it. Again, it sucks… but it also sounds like your ex was someone you’re better off leaving in your rearview mirror. There are far better — and more diplomatic — ways of dealing with that situation and she basically failed at it entirely.

So all in all: I think you dodged a bullet, SDIF. It sucks it fell out this way, but it’s almost certainly going to be better for you in the long run.

That’s why the way you get over this is to recognize that you got lucky — not in the way you were hoping, granted — and move on to date other people. You met an asshole, but there are many many more women out there who are awesome and would love to take someone like you and show them the ropes. It may be a short-term relationship, it may be next love of your life… but those women are out there. And with time and experience (and you sound pretty damn young, SDIF) you’ll realize that this was a singular point in time, not something that’s going to define the rest of your life.

Good luck.

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