DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I (she/her, 33) always crush on unavailable people. For instance, my last three crushes have been a woman who was too young for me, a straight friend of mine, and a friend who is both sapphic and in an open relationship, but is not looking for love (plus she’s way more talented and funny than I am, so it wouldn’t work out anyway).

Is there a way to 1) deal gracefully with this constant feeling of inadequacy and romantic despair and 2) crush on more suitable people? I’ve tried dating apps but I haven’t been able to get much out of them, maybe because of being trans or because there’s something I’m doing wrong (I thought I had a good, descriptive bio and decent pictures, but over 1 year of constant use I had few matches and those I had weren’t interested, although I was able to make one friend, so yay).

I think I pass the Grimes test in that I have a few passions and am a sweet (maybe too sweet and that’s why people aren’t attracted to me? they might get childish vibes from me?) and articulate person, but couldn’t form any romantic connection whatsoever on apps. However, I have made lots of friends in the past year, something I’m happy about, so maybe I’m not so bad socially. I clearly am doing something wrong, though.

Thank you!

Let The Wrong Ones In

DEAR LET THE WRONG ONES IN: One of the things I’ve learned in my time — as a dating coach, as an advice columnist and in my own dating adventures — is that our brains are bastards. One of the things that we often forget is that our brains aren’t designed to make us happy; they’re designed to keep us safe. The problem is that not only can being “safe” make us miserable, but a lot of times, the thing our brains are “protecting” us from is… well, ourselves. Specifically, they’re not protecting us from real threats, but from the things we’re afraid of.

I realize this doesn’t make sense, but hey: brains aren’t logical. They’re hallucinating wads of tapioca and electricity that drive a big-ass robot made out of rocks and meat, plunging from one crazy situation to another spurred on by various drives and desires. Logic doesn’t enter the picture… at least, not in any form that we’d recognize.

Case in point: you continually get crushes on folks who aren’t available, who are wrong for you or who can’t (or won’t) return your affections. This is actually very common; a lot of folks find themselves attracted to people who they know aren’t suitable or who will never care for them the way that they do. But here’s the thing: the reason why folks are drawn to unavailable or impossible relationships is precisely because they know, on some subconscious level, that this relationship can never and will never happen. It’s an act of self-preservation disguised as an act of self-sabotage. They are choosing unsuitable partners because it guarantees that they won’t pick someone who might actually love them back. While this may seem absurd, it’s almost always a response to a deeper, more significant issue, a way of protecting themselves from harm.

For some, it’s because they don’t believe they deserve to be happy. There’s some part of them that feels as though they’re flawed or broken or just unworthy. By crushing on folks who are unavailable, they’re punishing themselves and protecting others, keeping folks at arm’s length because they don’t feel like they have the right to get what they want. Others have been so hurt or traumatized that they can’t bear to let someone get that close to them again; while unrequited love may be painful, it’s a lesser pain, a familiar pain and one that keeps them safe from the greater, more damaging sort of hurt that can come from being vulnerable and letting them in. And for still others, it’s a fear of success.

Again: this seems absurd: why would we be afraid of success? Isn’t rejection worse?

And the answer is: not really. Because at the end of the day, rejection is ultimately a return to the status quo; yes, it hurts, but it leaves you where you were before. That status quo may not make you happy, but it’s familiar. It’s a known quantity, and one you already know how to deal with. Success, on the other hand can be mind-blanking, pants-s--ttingly terrifying. A frustrated fantasy is one thing. It’s is not and can never be real, which means you never have to take responsibility for it. The fantasy can live forever, exactly as you want it to. Success, on the other hand, means that you’re responsible for what happens next. Your choices have consequences. If you make a mistake — and you will, because you’re a human, like all of us — then there’s no undoing them. You can get hurt or, worse, hurt someone else. Or worse than that: you may get what you want, only to screw it all up and lose it. F--k “it’s better to have love and lost,” sometimes it’s better to have always lived in Hell than to have been snatched out of Heaven.

Here is a truth: that’s bulls--t. It’s fear f--king with you, your jerkbrain dripping poison in your ear and whispering things that sound true because you’re hearing it in your own voice. It’s the voice of the part of you that’s absorbed too much bulls--t from the petty and small minded, from the assholes who want to drag you into their misery and from people who’ve curdled their souls with hate. It’s all too easy to take other people’s crap onboard and internalize it, never realizing that you’ve done it.

Here is another truth: you know, on some level, that you’re capable of so much more. That you deserve more. That you’re worthy of love and affection and tenderness and intimacy. You know this because you’ve already gone out and made new friends, people who care for you and want you to be happy. Success or failure on dating apps has less to do with your desirability or your attractiveness and everything to do with your skill at working the apps and the algorithms that run them. The same qualities that draw new friends to you are the same qualities that draw lovers to you, just as the same skills that help you make new friends are the skills that help you find new partners.

But to do that: you have to be willing to open yourself up to risk. To being hurt. And to being willing to believe that you deserve love and affection.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s still worth working on the apps as a way (not the way but a supplement) to meeting folks. But meeting folks on apps is a skill in and of itself, not a summary of your desirability or worth as a person. Letting the silence of strangers — many of whom aren’t worth your time in the first place — dictate your sense of self-worth is a recipe for madness and despair. As you’ve seen: you’ve made amazing friends and brought awesome people into your life; your results from Tinder don’t detract from that.

So if you want to stop developing crushes on unsuitable people, it’s time to do some introspection and see where the commonalities lie. It may be part of accepting yourself and recognizing your awesomeness. It may be a question of how much you’re willing to trust and how vulnerable you’re willing to be. Or it may simply be a matter of being willing to give up a level of control and accept the risks that come with loving someone who might love you back.

That’s part of the problem with love and dating: no matter how careful you are, how sensible you try to be, at some point it becomes a leap of faith. And with every leap, sometimes you don’t make it. Sometimes you fall.

But sometimes you take that leap and you fly. 

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 met my fiancé, we’ll call him A, in 2019 on a dating site. He was sweet, funny, educated, and driven. He told me he had never been married and didn’t have children. I have one boy from a previous relationship. A was a travel nurse and I was a staff nurse at the time. We went on our first date the day after my 30th birthday. We hit it off immediately and the relationship moved pretty fast.  

After a few months, I introduced him to my son and after a year, we decided to travel together. We get time off between our assignments, usually a couple weeks which we use to spend time with our families.

Last October, A proposed to me and I said yes. He met my entire family and everyone loves him, I told them we are getting married, etc. I’ve always found it strange that he had never taken me to meet his family though. I tried not to push the subject, because he said he had a strained relationship with everyone.

When he returned from his family this time, however, I found another woman’s underwear in his laundry. I panicked and did a background check on him. As it turns out, he has been married for 13 years and has 4 children. I’m so shocked and angry. I told his wife, who he has since left to be with me. I don’t know what to do. I love him, but he has lied to me everyday of our relationship and has been unfaithful as well. It’s hard not to curl into a ball and give up. I feel so stupid, I told whole family we are getting married.

What do I do?

Unintentional Homewrecker

DEAR UNINTENTIONAL HOMEWRECKER: Alright, before I get to the question, I want to remind folks about my policy around fake letters and the like: I don’t get terribly worked up about whether letters are fake or not. 99% of the time, they’re glaringly obvious and never make it further than the inbox. Of the remaining 1%, it’s worth remembering that letters to advice columns aren’t just for the person writing in. Most questions are functionally just theoretical exercises to majority of the readership, but even when a letter isn’t relevant to your life circumstances, there’s still often a lesson to be learned from them.

But it’s also worth remembering: sometimes s--t that sounds too extreme or unbelievable can be all too real.

So with that in mind, let’s start with an obvious fact. The answer to this is incredibly simple, UH: you dump the dude. You dump this guy so hard his grandparents divorce retroactively. You dump him so hard that his caveman ancestors look up and say “what the hell was that?”

Now, granted: it’s easy enough for me to say that. I’m the loudmouth with the advice column, not someone who invested two years and who knows how much energy into this relationship. That alone can make it difficult to want to pull the trigger on the break-up. Then there’s the humiliation factor. It’s easy enough for those of us on the outside to say “wait, how is this even a question?” But for you, there’s the act of ending things with him, and then there’s dealing with all the fallout of ending a relationship with someone. After all, you and he were engaged! You were making plans, you may have been actively researching venues, checking out bands and DJs, tasting cakes and planning guest lists. You may have already asked folks to be your bridesmaids and maids of honor or even sent out save the date cards. Now it’s not just a case of having a good cry with your friends, binging some comfort shows on Netflix or Hulu and hitting the gym like it owes you money. No, now you have to cancel everything, recoup your deposits and — oh yeah — explain to folks why the wedding is off.

It’s bad enough when a relationship ends. But facing down the fact that you were lied to — that this guy hid an entire goddamn family — and you bought his lies, hook, line and sinker? That means facing people’s judgement. The looks of pity on people’s faces, now that you’re The Woman Whose Fiancé was Already Married. The way his s--tty behavior ends up being grafted onto your identity. And if that’s not bad enough, there’re also the questions of “how did you not know this?” There’s the pain of not just having been lied to, but having been fooled so thoroughly by someone that you had no idea that, again, this dude hid an entire family from you. This is just an extra layer of pain, a chef’s kiss of “f--k you” on top of what is already a pretty devastating situation.

But as awful and terrifying all that is?

You should do it anyway.

There’re times when someone’s sins can be forgiven. There are times when you can, if not excuse someone’s lies, at least understand the reason for them. Yes, they hurt you, but everybody is human and sometimes their actions may have caused harm, but it’s harm that can be repaired. They can re-earn your trust and work to make you whole again.

This ain’t one of ’em. This is so far from being one of those times that the very concept of “can you get over this” will take thousands of years to reach you even travelling at superluminal speeds.

It doesn’t matter that he’s left his wife now. It doesn’t matter how much he says he loves you. This isn’t a case of “he was in the process of getting divorced and there was some unfortunate overlap with his relationship with you.” It’s not even some strained romance novel-esque “you were a mistress and his marriage was loveless and he couldn’t leave her just yet for understandable reasons, but now he has and while your start may have been rocky, true love will help guide you from here.” This is someone who — and I can’t f--king stress this enough — hid an entire f--king family from you for two years. He proposed to you, not only while still with his wife, but when you honestly and sincerely believed him to be single.

If sheer chance hadn’t caused you to discover the truth, what in pluperfect f--kery was he going to do? Keep pushing the wedding date back far enough that a quickie divorce came through before you ever found out?  Pray that when you applied for the marriage license that his name didn’t pop up in the database already? Was he going to spring this on you and hope that you were too committed to leave him? Or was he just going to play it out for as long as possible and then leave when things got too close?

Trick question: the answer doesn’t matter. No matter what his plans were, this was a lie so egregious that there’s really no place for understanding. This is not the sort of thing that you come back from. This is a “nuke the site from orbit” sort of situation, a relationship extinction-level event to make the Tunguska Event look like a firecracker with delusions of grandeur. And, I might add, it was about yay-close to being a literal crime. 

So, no, there really are no questions about what to do about him besides kick him to the curb with the rest of the trash. He doesn’t get any reward for coming clean now, especially not one that gets him what he wants.  The only question is how do you handle the fallout of it all. My advice? Be honest about it. Tell your story: this is someone who preyed upon your willingness to love and trust. He was a grifter and a conman, someone who went out of his way to deceive you. You did nothing wrong here; the only “fault” of yours is to trust that someone wasn’t secretly the villain of a s--tty Hallmark Christmas movie. And if folks think that you should have “known better” some how… ask them how many times they have run into someone who was so committed to the bit that they were willing to propose marriage after years together.

Here is a truth: your only flaw here — such as it is — is that you loved not too wisely but too well. You trusted someone who went out of his way to deceive you, to gaslight you and to trick you. That is not your fault. You are not to blame. Trusting people is not a character flaw. Loving someone who turns out not to be deserving of your love is not something to be ashamed of. The flaws are all his. The shame is all his.

Your only job for the immediate future is to forgive yourself for loving someone who took advantage of that love. Take time to surround yourself with the people who love you and support you and let yourself heal so that you don’t develop a callus on your soul. This will take time, but you will heal. You will get over this and move forward in life, a little wiser, a little more guarded, but no less worthy of love.

But first, you have to excise this dude out of your life. Kick him out and let the story of what he did go on to be a warning to others.

You’ll be ok. I promise.

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: Last year, I got into a FWB situation that got really messy, and I’m having a hard time moving on. I met this guy through an app, we hit it off, and hooked up. The sex was surprisingly good, because even for just a hookup: he was really interested in my pleasure, and it was the kind of sex where you really feel connected with your partner. Since that was the vibe I got just with a hookup, I was very interested in finding out how that got better with time, so I pursued him. We talked about what we were looking for, etc, he said he wasn’t ready for a commitment yet, but was definitely looking for something more casual. I was coming off a divorce, so I was in the same spot, and we agreed to friends with benefits. Simple enough, right? Well, turns out…not so much.

Shortly after this, our area upped the pandemic lockdown measures as case rates rose. Since we both wanted to be cautious, we agreed to be “COVID monogamous”: there wasn’t an expectation of monogamy, but if we were going to do anything (romantic or otherwise) that would up our risk level, we’d let the other know so they could make informed decisions with their health. All very adult and reasonable. But…turns out having amazing, highly connected sex with one person exclusively, on top of great hang-outs and conversation…it’s not easy to keep things casual. I was vulnerable with him about my needs and how I was feeling. And, eventually, I told him I was falling in love with him. He was pretty obviously shocked by this admission, but didn’t say much of anything. We had sex again, but that’s when things started to feel off. During the act, amongst other sexy-talk, I whispered “I love you” and he didn’t say anything back, just…went at it with more ardor. When we finished, he kind of shuffled me out the door with an “I’ll call you later” because he had therapy. Admittedly, I’d decided to tell him on a day he had therapy because I thought it would be a good chance for him to unpack his feelings. When I had previously been vulnerable about my feelings, he said he “wasn’t ready for a relationship yet” so I wanted to give him a chance to dive into what exactly it was he wasn’t ready for, talk that through with his therapist before responding to my admission. Based on the connection we shared, I thought he was falling in love with me too, and the problem was that we were both scared of some aspect of defining a “serious relationship” between us. 

Apparently I was way f--king wrong, because he told me the next day that he wasn’t falling in love with me. At all. He wasn’t holding himself back, he’d just straight-up never even felt butterflies for me in the 5+ months of sex.

F--king ouch.

It turns out, I’d been reading him all wrong. The connection I was feeling wasn’t mutually falling in love, it was because, basically, he liked to roleplay being in love during sex. He just never told me it was a sexy game for him, and I thought it was the real deal. So all this time, when I was getting mixed signals out of the bedroom, I was blithely ignoring the pink flags while figuratively singing “It’s In His Kiss”: Sure, he didn’t seem as excited to see me as I was to see him, but he always seemed so reluctant to leave! Sure, he wasn’t returning my vulnerability in kind, but he’s just scared! Sure, he said he wasn’t ready for a relationship, but there was always a “yet” tacked on the end! There weren’t any completely red flags, he always was honest (seemingly) and sung my praises and treated me well, even if it wasn’t with the same enthusiasm as how I treated him.

In the conversation that finally ended it all, he admitted that he knew he’d been treating me unfairly. That trying to pass what we shared off as “just FWB” was dishonest of him. That having me act in a loving, adoring way was actively a turn-on for him: when I confessed I was falling in love, it made him hard even though he knew he didn’t feel the same way. He intentionally withheld his true feelings with the excuse of “I don’t want to hurt her” but really because he was having fun, hot sex and was adored by a wonderful woman and he liked it all enough that he didn’t want it to end (these are his words, paraphrased). Ultimately, I let him know how hurt I was, broke things off with him, and haven’t talked to him since. 

Now for the issue itself: this situation combined with good old-fashioned ADD rejection-sensitive dysphoria is making it feel impossible to move on. I can’t get it out of my head, the ADD just wants to dwell on it. And I feel like I can’t trust myself. I used to think I was a great judge of character. Hell, my job relies on it. But I thought a guy was falling in love with me when I never even gave him butterflies. How could I miss that? 

I tried to move on, date other guys (yay vaccine!). But hooking up has been a mistake because instead of mediocre-to-fun decent sex to help me forget, I’ve had disappointing-to-“he tried to stealth me” bad encounters (for readers: stealthing is taking off the condom without getting consent from or even telling your partner, and it’s rape). Not trusting myself has led to either being over-accepting or over-paranoid, and I feel like I have no ability to accurately figure out if a guy is genuinely interested in *me* or just wanting to take literally any woman who will put out. It makes me scared to pursue guys I’m really interested in, because I know if they’re not the one chasing me from the start, I’m going to want an impossible level of proof of their interest.  And, in the process of falling in love with him, I did a lot of work to figure out what scared me about relationships, what was holding me back, so intellectually I felt better prepared to approach figuring out the definitions of a relationship. But now that’s putting the cart in front of the horse, because I’m too spun-up about the butterflies thing.

My therapist and social support circle don’t really understand the ADD/RSD part of it, so they try to point me in the direction of “these are irrational thoughts”/”he’s an asshole” respectively. I know both of these things, but it’s not stopping the RSD. Sitting with my feelings doesn’t really help, because my brain is happy to turn that into ADD spinning out of control and hyper-focusing on the bad feelings/upsetting parts/parts I can’t control. And I don’t want to keep trying to date like some s--tty romance movie character who’s just waiting for The Right Guy to come along and See Just How Special She Is. I’m not a teenager in a vampire romance, I’m a successful, smart, fun, funny, full-grown thirtysomething woman: I know I’m special, and I know I deserve better. I deserve mutual butterflies. But how do I get past this all enough to trust myself to find something better?

-Friends Without Butterflies

DEAR FRIENDS WITHOUT BUTTERFLIES: Oof. That’s pretty goddamn brutal, FWB, and I’m sorry you went through this.

Now, before I get to your question, I want to zero in on a concept for the rest of my readers: the idea of rejection-sensitive dysphoria. This is a term that refers to an unusually high level of sensitivity and emotional reaction to the perception of rejection and criticism that’s a frequent symptom of mental conditions like ADHD, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not that folks who suffer from RSD are too sensitive or less able to handle criticism, but more that their brain’s tendency towards hyperfocus latches on to the fear and pain of rejection and amplifies it to an absurd and unrealistic degree. In many cases, it can cause social phobias, damage relationships or result in maladaptive behaviors in an attempt to ward off rejection.

So imagine the worst break up of your life and then apply that feeling to when someone uses a period in a text instead of an exclamation point. Or when someone takes longer than normal to text back because they’re busy at work.

What I’m saying is, it’s a goddamn party when you have it.

Now with that out of the way… holy hopping sheeps--t FWB, that’s not just your RSD hitting you particularly hard. What you’re feeling isn’t out of proportion to what happened, what you’re feeling is an entirely f--king understandable response to a dude’s f--ked up kink. It’s understandable that you got your wires crossed with this guy.

On the one hand, yes, you were getting caution flags from this guy and I’m sure that there was more than a little wishful thinking going on. I mean, who hasn’t gotten a little twitterpated when the sex is mindblowing? Especially at a time when our emotional bandwidth is occupied by the stress of survival during a pandemic and you’re basically locked into a relationship with this person. Under other circumstances, I would tell you that yes, you read a little too much into this situation and got in over your head. And while that sucks… well, it ain’t like that isn’t something I’d done back in the day myself. Sometimes we let our hopes and dreams color our reality more than we reasonably should, we miss the glaringly obvious and we get ourselves hurt in the process.

However, while there may have been a little wishful thinking there’s also the fact that apparently the dude was, y’know deliberately acting like he’s in love with you during sex. You know. For grins and also because it made his orgasms that much better. For five months.

Like ya do.

And this is not a case of post-hoc rationalization or interpreting the facts in the most positive light on your end. The dude straight up told you that he was doing this. He said — specifically — that he knew what he was doing was hurting you but damn it, his dick just got so f--king hard that he couldn’t bring himself to stop.

So I’m willing to lay down my not-an-actual-doctor card here and say that no this isn’t RSD turning everything up to 11, this is “having a very reasonable reaction to a very unreasonable situation”. It’s not that you are having irrational thoughts or fears. An irrational fear is the way that turbulence makes me try to hold a plane in the air by sheer willpower, despite knowing that everything is fine and no crash has ever been caused by bumpy air pockets. This is something that happened to you. If you’d been bitten by a shark while swimming, you would have a very understandable reason to be afraid of going back in the ocean.

This is a dude who — depending on how you want to interpret things — either actively lied to you or at least knew how his actions were making you feel and allowed you to believe things that weren’t true. Either way, your inability to trust and fear of being lead on is entirely reasonable.

The part where your RSD rolls into the picture is in the hyperfocus on the past and worst-case scenarios. It’s the inability to quit seeing it or to push past those fears and give people a chance. And that part gets tricky because… well, unfortunately, part of the whole point of RSD is that it’s baked into your condition. It’s hard to deal with because it tends to come at you like a speeding train and knocks you on your ass for a while and keeps you there until things subside enough that you can get back up again.

Now speaking strictly for myself: medication has been a huge help for getting things under control. The same meds that let me control my ADHD have turned the volume on the attendant RSD way down. If you’re not on a medication to address your ADD symptoms, that might be a good start. It may also be worth talking to a psychiatrist about a supplemental medication; I’ve seen reports that suggest that an alpha agonist like Guanfacine can be effective in dealing with RSD symptoms, especially in folks who can’t take stimulants for ADD and ADHD.

However, another part of moving forward is recognizing that part of what is likely f--king with your head is that you ignored your instincts.

One of the problems with “trust your gut” is that sometimes a person’s gut isn’t trustworthy. A lot of folks have a hard time relying on their intuition, their gut, their Spidey-sense, because it’s miscalibrated. Sometimes out of trauma, sometimes out of cultural issues, sometimes because they bought into s--tty beliefs about love and sex.

But for a lot of people, their intuition is spot on, as long as they listen to it.

It’s like you said: you were getting pink flags and a lot of his behaviors were telling you that s--t was hinky. You ignored them in part because hey, mindblowing sex but also because he was actively deceiving you. But the important part is that your Spidey-sense works as intended. You had reasons to believe that this wasn’t love and that it was still just an FWB situation, you were just incentivized to ignore them. So the lesson here is trust your Spidey-sense. When you start getting that tingle that tells you that something’s wrong, listen. Take a moment and take stock of the situation, as rationally as you possibly can. Take a step outside yourself and ask: if someone was coming to you with this problem and these suspicions, what would you tell them?

It sounds stupid, but that’s actually a pretty solid way of short-circuiting your RSD; it’s not your situation, it’s a friend’s, and so that fear of rejection doesn’t come into it.

The third part of going forward is… well, it’s just time, really. Time heals all wounds and wounds all heels. Taking a break so that you can let this f--ked up situation fade into the past is a viable option. When things aren’t as fresh and you’re feeling ready to try again and to (cautiously) trust again, then it’ll be easier to see folks as potential partners and not just another s--tty dude who literally gets hard playing mind games with people.

Good luck.

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