DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I find myself in an odd place. I struggle with anxiety and depression and I am currently attending therapy for it. I say all this to present a background to my question.

I struggle with self-confidence and self-worth. I often feel worthless and being in specific unmasculine. I feel I am too skinny, but I hate eating and am partly fearful of being fat. I have never been in a romantic relationship and am a 25 year old virgin. All these have made me feel especially insecure. That I will never be in a relationship and that if I do, my partner will cheat on me with other men who are more masculine, charming, and etc.

Logically, I understand these are untrue and that I shouldn’t allow these thoughts to dominate my thoughts, but I can’t escape them. I really don’t know how to handle them.

Sincerely,

Not-Quite A Man

DEAR NOT QUITE A MAN: Couple things, NQAM.

First: your being a man has nothing to do with your build, your sexual history or how many relationships you’ve had. Are you a man? Then congrats: you’re masculine. You’re masculine whether you’re skinny or jacked, whether you have a dadbod or not, whether you have a beard or not, whether you’re a virgin or you’ve gotten more strange ass than a dude at a mutant donkey auction with a stolen platinum card. The sort of thing you’re struggling with is having internalized toxic and restrictive ideas about what it means to “be a man”.

One of the first things I would suggest you should do is talk to your therapist about your issues around food and eating. What you’re describing sounds a lot like the beginnings of issues with disordered eating, which is something that a loud mouth with an advice column is not going to be able to help you with. That requires working with a mental health professional, especially with how much it ties into your feelings about your body. I wouldn’t recommend trying to go on your own with this; even if you were to, say, start approaching eating from a body building perspective, that isn’t going to solve the root issues of feeling insecure and tying your self-worth into your weight or pants size. Orthorexia — focusing to the point of obsession about eating “clean” or healthily — is still a form of disordered eating.

Another thing I would suggest is that you pay attention to what you pay attention to. Part of why men, especially men in your situation, feel like they don’t measure up is because they tend to submerge themselves in forums, subreddits and YouTube videos that keep telling them that they’re failing at being men. Whether it’s the incel community, Red Pill and MRA groups or even just assholes on Twitter or YouTube, when you hear people telling you over and over again that you — or people you identify with — are somehow not manly enough, it’s very hard not to take that onboard and internalize it. I realize that it feels like you’re getting The TRVTH in all it’s unvarnished glory but honestly, you aren’t. What you’re hearing are other people projecting their insecurities and their fears about how they aren’t manly enough, externalizing it and proclaiming it as gospel because they need everyone else to go along with it. This is why paying attention to what you feed your brain can be important. Toxic and restrictive forms of masculinity only work as long as everyone buys into it; one of the quickest and easiest ways for a man to shore up his own male bonafides is to police and punish other men. People who refuse to conform and who embrace their masculinity in all its variety threaten that structure.

Cutting out the assholes who tell you that you’re Not Man-ing The Right Way is a start. Another thing to do is to see how other folks express their manhood in ways that don’t align with toxic ideals. Harry Styles and Billy Porter have consistently made waves for being willing to wear dresses (and look damn good in them at that) and to not give a single solitary f--k. The Korean band BTS, likewise, don’t reflect a hard or hegemonic form of masculinity and yet their predominantly female fanbase think they’re the hottest thing on toast. Not being built like Jason Momoa doesn’t make you less of a man, nor does it mean that anyone you date is going to leave you for someone more traditionally masculine.

In fact, let’s address that anxiety for a minute. What you’re feeling isn’t reality; it’s just your anxieties f--king with your head. You’re projecting your own worry — that you’re insufficiently manly — outward and creating a scenario that hasn’t happened… but you’re responding to it as though it has. You are, in a very real way, hurting your own feelings. But here’s the thing: anxiety is a liar. What you imagine is just that: your imagination. You are just as capable of imagining finding someone who loves dudes who look exactly like you, who wants your specific flavor of manhood. And the great thing about our brains is that they respond to those images as though they were real. Which means that you are just as capable of picturing a positive outcome as a negative… should you choose to do so. In fact, doing this — choosing to believe something that ultimately benefits you — is a great way to hack your confirmation bias in your favor. Doing so means that you’re going to be more prone to seeing things that line up with what you’re choosing to believe — which, in this case, would be that you’re damn hot and people who disagree can go f--k themselves with a rusty spoon. You’ll be more likely to see the people who do want a guy like you because subconsciously, you’ll be on the lookout for it.

Consciously reframing how you see yourself, choosing to dictate the future you imagine on your terms and reinforcing those beliefs by paying attention to the folks who don’t subscribe to toxic bulls--t ideas about manhood go a long way towards helping uproot those self-limiting beliefs and replace them with powerful beliefs about how goddamn awesome you are and how the right partner will be goddamn lucky to date you.

(And on the more practical side of things: the imaginary partner who would cheat on you because you’re not “manly” enough or whatever? You’re not going to face that scenario because you wouldn’t be dating them in the first place. As you develop your own confidence, you’ll be rejecting them when you encounter them, and the others would be doing you the favor of self-selecting out of your dating pool.)

TL;DR: start by talking with your therapist about the issues you’re having around food and body image, and get their help to uproot those ideas. And while you work on this, go on a social media diet, cutting out the sites, videos and subreddits that reinforce your negative feelings, while focusing instead on the ones that reinforce your positive feelings. Pay attention to the folks like you who buck toxic masculine ideals and take conscious control over what you imagine happening in your future with your future partners. Choose to believe the things that help you and make your confirmation bias work in your favor.

It takes time, and it takes effort. But the truth is that you’ve got a lot to offer, my dude, if you only give yourself permission to recognize it. Things aren’t nearly as awful as you’re afraid they are, and you can turn things around.

You’ve got this.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: For the last month and a half or so, I went on some dates with a girl (who we’ll call L, for the purposes of this letter) who I met through Bumble. I really liked her, as we have similar tastes in music (which is uncommon among people my age), and it was really easy for me to be myself and remain laid back, light-hearted, and relatively jokey around her. However, earlier today, L let me know that while she liked me as a person, she thought that we should just be friends, as she didn’t she us as being more than friends. I’m open to that, though we both agreed that it would be best to take some time apart, so I can fully process my emotions and come to grips with this. Of course, this is partially because it just happened, but it really hit me hard, as I felt a strong connection with her, mostly in relation to our similar interests. (I tend to become a lot more interested in someone if they have one or more of the same obscure interests that I do.) I also got the “let’s just be friends” speech with a girl (who we’ll call K) who I went on a few dates with a few months ago, though looking back, I didn’t have as strong of a connection with her as I felt I did with L.

It should be noted that I really have only started dating in the past year or so, despite being 29 years old (I’ll turn 30 next month) and I’ve never been in an officially defined “relationship.” My longest time spent dating a girl has been for a few months. I never asked girls out before that, partially because of a fear of rejection, unrealistic expectations about what I wanted in a romantic partner, and having the idea that if a girl liked me, she would automatically ask me out. I also didn’t use touch with girls I was interested in, in part because I didn’t want to be seen as a creeper. After reading your website, I now know the error of my previous ways. However, I sensed a lack of experience with L as well. She never mentioned any previous boyfriends, she mentioned how her parents are very protective of her (compared with other girls, from what I’ve noticed), and she explicitly mentioned that I’m the first person who she went on a date with through a dating app. (She’s in her mid-late 20s) I didn’t ask about her prior dating history, though. Since I don’t have much of a prior dating history, either, I’m thinking that maybe she noticed some hesitation in my actions, as opposed to being confident and truly certain of myself. Obviously, I can’t confirm that this played a role, but I do want to display certain things that will make women romantically attracted to me, like being more confident.

In your articles, you often mention the importance of touch. Before the pandemic, I was able to incorporate touch with some of the girls I went on dates with, though not really since then. With L, we would hug each other when meeting and saying good bye, and occasionally holding hands when we walked together. I made sure to ask her beforehand, but again, I didn’t want to do anything she was uncomfortable with, and when we walked outdoors, for example, we both wore masks. I would have liked to use touch to convey interest with her more, but with us being in a pandemic, I was hesitant towards some things, like kissing her. With K before that, however, I didn’t touch her, as she was much more cautious towards the pandemic, as to name one example, she wasn’t comfortable with eating in restaurants.

Obviously, this makes it harder for a girl to see me as more than a friend, though. While I plan on moving on to messaging other girls online, it stands to reason that there are more than a few women who have a cautious attitude towards the pandemic, and with that, I would have to find other ways to create romantic attraction. I do plan on getting the vaccine as soon as humanly possible, though it’s uncertain as to when that’ll actually be able to take place.

Additionally, in those articles, you mention the idea of bringing up your past sex life to girls in order to create attraction. The problem with that is, that I’m a virgin, so I obviously have nothing to go with that doesn’t involve my right hand. Along with the fact that I’m relatively inexperienced with things like sexual flirting, how can I make up for this? (This created complications with L, as while I did my best to be a little more flirty with her compared to how I was with K, and playfully bantered with her as well, it may not have been enough, and because I sensed some inexperience with her, along with the fact that she generally didn’t talk about more risqué things, made me more hesitant to bring up more sexual-themed flirting with her.)

So, in summary, my main questions are, what are some of the main ways to create romantic attraction with a girl without touch, and how can I create sexual attraction despite my inexperience when it comes to sex?

Always a Friend, Never a Lover

DEAR ALWAYS A FRIEND, NEVER A LOVER: Hey, AFNL, I think I really need to point out something that you’re missing: you’re doing much better than you realize. You say that you’ve only started dating within the last year, but you’ve been on multiple dates with at least two women at a time when going on any dates is like dating on expert difficulty. That’s pretty damn good, man, and I don’t think you give yourself enough credit for this. The fact that you’re so focused on specific outcomes — sex, committed relationships, etc. — is obscuring the fact that for a dude’s first time out ever, you’re doing pretty damn good. You should be proud of yourself, not running yourself down because you’re relatively inexperienced.

The issues you’re having are much more about ignorance than in doing anything wrong. One of the things that people often don’t realize — and, to be honest, one that dating coaches like to avoid bringing up — is that dating is, to a certain extent, a numbers game. You’re looking for people who are right for you, who you have romantic and sexual chemistry with and who are looking for the same things you are. Part of the point of dating is getting to know people and seeing how well they mesh with you in the short term and the long term. That means that you’re going to run into folks who just aren’t right for you, or who aren’t in a place where they’re looking for the same sort of relationship you are. That doesn’t mean that you’ve done anything wrong; it just means that things didn’t line up the way that they needed to in order for the two of you to work as a couple.

The fact that those dates and those women didn’t work out the way that you hoped doesn’t mean that you failed. Part of dating, especially when you’re just starting out, is learning and building experience. You’re learning more about what you’re looking for, what you need from a potential partner and how to connect with folks in ways that align with who you are as a person. And, c’mon man, you’ve already come a long damn way, learned a lot, and made some serious progress. That’s pretty significant improvement in and of itself.

So let’s get to your questions, starting with touch. One of the things you need to keep in mind is that, yeah, we’re still in a pandemic. People are getting vaccinated and the end is in sight, but folks still need to be cautious. A lot of people are more careful about getting physical right now and taking things slower than they might otherwise. Right now, one of the big questions that people need to keep in mind when it comes to dating is: “what are their safety protocols? How careful are they being about masking up and social distancing? Can I trust them to not put my health at risk?” So folks who might be more physical a lot quicker are taking things at a more measured pace while they get to know their dates. Holding hands isn’t much of a risk. Hugging is more of one, and kissing and sex are even more risky than they would be in non-COVID times. That makes things a little more complicated, especially in the early stages.

But that doesn’t mean that touch is entirely out of bounds. Holding hands and other forms of flirty physical contact — playful shoulder or hip-checking, high-fives during emotional high-points, playing footsie under the table, and so on — are fairly safe and ways of flirting and expressing interest. You can take her arm, you can have your hands on each other’s backs while walking, rest your knees on the inside of each other’s legs while sitting across from one another… those are all ways of flirting and signaling interest. It is, however, important to worry less about following a formula regarding touch and physical contact and to focus more on the quality of touch and the way your dates respond to it. Leaning into the touch, or re-initiating contact after you touch them (what’s known as “reciprocal touch”) are good signs; tensing up when you touch them or pulling away, on the other hand, are signs that they aren’t comfortable being touched or touched in that way and an indicator that you should dial it down a notch if and until they’re ready.

Confidence comes into this as well. You don’t want to treat touching somebody you’re interested in like you’re trying to touch a hot stove or reaching out to pet an animal you aren’t sure is friendly. Smooth, assured motions signal confidence and ease; being hesitant and twitchy signals being nervous and unsure. It’s not the death-knell of attraction, but it can make things more awkward. Part of how you can learn to be more confident is to follow a 90/10 split; that is, making the invitation (90% of the gesture) and allow them to decide whether to accept or not (the remaining 10%). So you could hold out your elbow as you’re walking as a gesture for her to take it, or put your hand out with your palm up before leading her somewhere.  The high-five is another great excuse for touch. During an emotional high-point, like her telling a great joke or awesome story, you can say “that’s amazing, you get a high five” and hold your hand up with your fingers spread. More often than not, if someone is into you, when they give you that high-five, they’ll intertwine their fingers with yours; this makes it very easy to just continue holding their hand or moving to another form of touch later on.

As with many aspects of dating, reading theory is only of so much use. You need to be willing to put it into practice in order to learn. Holding yourself back because you’re afraid of making mistakes ultimately means that you don’t have a chance to learn from your mistakes and to improve. It also means that you learn that not all mistakes are the “welp, life is over now” kind; just as you can make no errors and still lose, you can make mistakes and still succeed.

Now as for flirting and sexual inexperience, I think you may have misread things. There’re many ways to flirt, some more overtly sexual, others that aren’t. Flirting is, at its core, showing interest in someone in a way that’s engaging and fun. Talking about sex or bringing up previous experiences in the context of sexy flirting is just one way of building tension. Joking or teasing, silly role-plays, even just looking around and talking about the people around you compared to the two of you — creating this conspiracy of two — are all ways of flirting. The fact that you have little experience doesn’t mean you can’t flirt, nor does it mean that you can’t be sexual. You may not be referring to things you’ve done, but that doesn’t mean you can’t joke, hint at or playfully suggest things the two of you might do together, especially in the future.

To be fair: it can take a little more experience and social calibration to get comfortable with more overtly sexual flirting… but that’s also part of the point of dating. The more experience you have, the better you’re able to develop your social calibration.

The most important thing to realize is that your inexperience isn’t inherently bad or good. It doesn’t disqualify you from dating or make it impossible for people to like you. It just means that you don’t have much experience. But people aren’t dating your social resume, they’re dating you. Experience means you may make fewer — or at least different — mistakes, or you may recognize a good or bad situation earlier than you would have before… but it doesn’t make the difference between “datatable” and “not datable”.

So take heart, my friend: you’re actually doing remarkably well. You should be proud of how far you’ve come and what you’ve achieved. Keep at it, and you’ll be having the sort of social life you’ve always wanted before you know it.

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 man in my early thirties. Growing up throughout my adolescence and, until I was around 25, I didn’t had any kind of sexual or even a casual relationship with any woman. I didn’t go to parties or any kind of social events, my job was menial and going nowhere and I didn’t have many friends. At that point I had just given up and had decided that sex, relationships and love was not for me. However, around that time I met a woman which basically did all the heavy lifting involved at the beginning (flirting with me, asking me out, inviting me to her house, go for the kiss, etc). We started dating not long after and it was with her that I started becoming a grown man (losing my virginity, learning to plan things, learning to drive and move through the city, go to parties, etc).

I never thought of my girlfriend as ugly, but I didn’t find her very attractive either. Everything was so new at the beginning that I didn’t think much of her looks. As time passed I started noticing other girls and me being a more mature, social and responsible man, girls started noticing me too. I’ve never stopped loving my girlfriend but the physical attraction was eventually gone and my desire to be with other women was increasing, so eventually we had an amicable break up.

Over this past few years I’ve been attending therapy and working on several aspects of myself that need improving both mentally and physically. Even though I can’t say I am a fulfilled man, I can really see a difference from the man I was when I was 25 years old, but the issue I have now is that I don’t really know how to establish a connection with women I am attracted to. When the person is very attractive, I don’t really behave like myself but I pretend to be different. Fortunately, this is I problem I have identified by now, but I don’t know how to resolve it. Being myself around attractive women makes me very nervous and anxious, even if my real self tends to be very likeable by other people. 

Over the past few years I have only been with a handful of women, and with all of them at most I felt some mild attraction. The problem is I can’t really build any kind of relationship with these women because I am unable to have sex with them. This is in part because I don’t find them very attractive and partly because I masturbate a lot just to unload all this sexual desire that I have in me.

I know that part of the solution is to stop masturbating so that I have enough of libido to have sex with real people, but since the only people that like me are not very attractive I can’t really find the motivation to stop.

As I final note I want to say that I’m really desperate at this moment and I really would like to find a woman to have a relationship with, which unfortunately is something that some women are able notice and obviously drives them off. I know this part would be resolved by working on some personal or professional goals but unfortunately I’m really apathetic towards life in general, I don’t like anything and I don’t care about anything, I haven’t given up but I don’t expect to find the answer soon and I would like to not be alone until I do.

So my questions are:

How can build a connection with people I do find attractive?

How can I look past physical attractiveness and have a relationship with a woman I don’t find very good looking but is funny and kind?

How can I stop being so desperate about having a relationship?

How can I stop masturbating if I am not having sex either?

Thanks,

Lustful, Lonely and Lost

DEAR LUSTFUL, LONELY AND LOST: Alright, Triple L, you are in one the rare position of having actually zeroed in on the problem you’re having, but you have completely overshot the mark where it comes to why you have this problem.

Here’s a hint: it’s not because you’re masturbating too much.

Masturbation is one of those topics that keeps coming up (er… as it were) as the cause of — and solution to — all of men’s problems. Jerking the turkey gets a bad rap primarily from sex-negative scolds, folks who drastically misunderstand the human endocrine system, and people who mostly want to exploit folks who buy into the myths the first two pump out. Trying to blame masturbation (and porn — the two go together like hand in… glove) for all of men’s woes, from depression to a lack of motivation and ambition to not being able to form relationships is honestly not that far off from blaming ptomaine poisoning on ghosts and telling you to do cocaine about it. And yet, people keep insisting that bashing the bishop is somehow at the root of all evils of modern society.

It’s not. There’re precisely three ways where masturbation is a problem: if you have an idiosyncratic masturbatory technique (aka The Death Grip) that makes it difficult for you to ejaculate during sex with a partner; if you are masturbating so often that you’re causing physical damage to your genitals; and you rub one out either at times and places where it’s inappropriate or in front of folks who didn’t already agree to see you jerk it. Masturbation is healthy, it’s fun, and more people should see it as something other than something shameful that you do when you’re between sex partners.

While masturbation can lower your libido temporarily or the satiate immediate need to have sex, jerking off too often isn’t the cause of your problems. You’re not unable to have sex with these women because you jerk it too often to be horny for them; you’re masturbating because you’d rather do that than sleep with these women. If you were to suddenly go No Contact with your junk, your issues wouldn’t go away, because the problem isn’t that you need your balls drained, your problem is that you’re not attracted to the women you’re dating. At best, all that would happen is that you’d be horny enough to say “enh, I guess you’ll do”, have sex that would likely not be that pleasurable and make you feel bad or unsatisfied in the aftermath. The refractory period would become a period of reflection where you try to figure out how you can slip out and go home because you are just not into the people you’re dating. 

The issue isn’t whether you’re masturbating too much, nor is it that you’re being shallow and not appreciating the women you’re dating for more than their looks. While it’s noble to want to see past the physical, the issue isn’t about shallowness or just wanting a hot girlfriend. The problem is that that you’re pursuing women you aren’t into, rather than ones you are attracted to, because you see those women as “getable”. They’re ones you feel like are somehow on “your level”, rather than being who you’re actually into.

(And before anyone asks: yes, personality, interests, etc. make a huge difference, as does getting to know someone as a person. The more you get to know somebody, the more attractive they tend to become to you, and men find as wide a range of women attractive as women do with men. But all that requires seeing them as a person you want to get to know, not “this is someone I should date because they aren’t ‘above’ me” and then backfilling why you should be attracted to them after the fact.)

You may have come a long, long way since your first girlfriend and made progress towards being a grown-ass man in terms of being able to handle life as an adult. But there’s a part of you that very clearly thinks that you haven’t grown or changed at all.

And that’s an issue.

You kind of trip over the problem when you say that you pretend to be someone else when you’re around women you’re into and that being yourself around women you’re attracted to makes you nervous and anxious. The problem is that, at your core, you don’t think that you’re “worthy” of dating someone that you find attractive. You feel that their attractiveness gives them value or status that you don’t have and that your attraction to them is somehow an inconvenience or affront to them. As a result: you try to fake being someone you’re not with people you’re into — which is off putting at best — and pursue women you don’t find desirable because you feel like they’re the ones who’ll accept you.

Now it doesn’t exactly take a genius to point out that this almost certainly started with your first girlfriend. While I don’t doubt that this was a meaningful and fulfilling relationship for you, and I don’t want to take away from that, it seems pretty clear that there’s a part of you that is still stuck on “but she wasn’t that hot to me.” This seems to have set the tone for you and what you think you deserve or are worth; it set a ceiling for you that honestly should have been a floor. I know we all want to believe we’re enlightened beings and that the mind and soul are more important than the body. I know we live in a world that has commodified a specific standard of beauty, especially for women, and that people all too easily focus on conventional looks instead of compatibility and connection. But we aren’t just beings of pure spirit and intellect, we’re sacks of meat and chemicals being piloted by horny ghosts, with all that entails. Sex is a big deal, and people should treat it like one. You may love someone for their mind, but you want them for their ass.

If you’re going to have a romantic relationship that also entails a sexual connection, then you need that core of attraction and desire for the relationship to work at all. Not prioritizing desire and sexual compatibility doesn’t make you a more evolved person, it just drastically cuts the lifespan of the relationship and increases the emotional pain for everyone involved.

And I do mean everyone. You should be in a relationship with someone you desire and who desires you… and so should the women you’re dating. Dating women you’re not into isn’t fair to them, either; it’s keeping them from being with someone who does want them and who gets harder than Russian differential calculus at the thought of them.

Now, the solution here isn’t to just stop jerking it until you’re horny enough to use someone as a human-shaped Fleshlight, it’s to learn how to see and internalize the value in yourself. You’re pretending to be someone else around people you’re attracted to because you think they’re better than you somehow. You’re trying to impress them with this fake version of you… and that’s a mistake.

First and foremost: they can tell you’re faking being someone else. Trust me: been there, done that, watched a s--tload of folks literally drive themselves crazy in the process.

Second: when you’re trying to impress someone, you’re treating her like your opponent, not a potential partner. Women are your collaborators in a relationship; you’re both working together to build something that’s greater than the sum of its parts… even if that something greater is just some squishy noises and creaky bed springs. Treating her like she’s above you or that you need to win approval, especially to just be in her presence, gets in the way of all of that.

Third: you’re not even trying to connect with her, you’re trying to connect with your idea of her. Treating someone as having more value, more importance or more status than you because you think they’re attractive means that you’re not seeing the actual person. You’re performing for an imaginary person in your head, not the person who’s actually right in front of you. And no, putting a woman on a pedestal isn’t a compliment, it’s an insult. It’s literally dehumanizing, and it’s all about what you think, not about who she actually is. She’s a person, like everyone else. She farts, picks at her zits, snorts when she laughs, stubs her toes and stumbles over her words, the same as you and everybody else does.

Fourth: you’re not only responding to an imaginary version of her, you’re denying her the chance to get to know you. You have already decided — on the basis of no evidence — that she couldn’t possibly like you, and therefore you put on this act that you think she would like instead. You haven’t just pre-rejected yourself, you’ve denied her the chance to meet someone awesome, someone she very well may have been looking for.

So here’s what you need to do.

You need to drop the wishy-washiness about who you date. “Not really attracted to” or “kind of attracted to” isn’t doing you or your dates any favors. It’s a waste of everybody’s time. It’s time — for now — for a “f--k yes or f--k no” mindset. Are you hot for them? Are they your exact flavor of yum, the kind that makes you go “f--k yes”? If so, those are the women you should be trying to date. If the answer is no, then it’s “f--k no”, and don’t date them. Treat them well, be friends with them… but don’t insult them by dating them when you aren’t into them.

The next thing is that you need to stop treating women you are attracted to as anything other than people. There’re a lot of ways of doing this — most of which will probably have to wait until you’re vaccinated and the lockdown is over — but for now, you can start by taking dating off the table. The hot women you encounter aren’t potential dates; they’re just people you’re going to have conversations with. Your job is to get to know them, have a good conversation and find out something fascinating about them. This could be anything: they may be a great soccer player, they may be a molecular biologist or they’re the only person who can actually sing “Ghost Love Score” at karaoke. By taking the possibility of sex and dating off the table, you no longer have to worry about impressing them. You’re just two people talking. The more comfortable you can get with this dynamic, the more you can realize that the women you think are hot are just people. It means you’ll worry less about trying to “prove” yourself and be able to put more emphasis on whether they are right for you.

And finally: talk to your therapist, TripleL. This lack of self-worth and the feeling that you aren’t “good enough” is the sort of thing that they can help you unpack and work through. You’ve put a lot of work in and you’ve come really far; don’t let all of that effort go to waste because you still have these self-limiting beliefs buried inside. The first person who needs to treat you like you’re worth a damn is you. Know your own worth so you can go out and get what you’re worth my dude. This will make you happier, it’ll help you find stronger, more fulfilling relationships, and it means you won’t be beating yourself up over beating off.

Good luck.

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