DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: My mum belongs to a social group for older women who don’t get out and socialize much. The group used to meet in person prior to the pandemic but since the pandemic they meet via landline group phone call, a task that requires a phone operator in order to connect the participants. Anyway apparently the women in the group have gone absolutely crazy for the male operator, quite a few of them have even developed crushes on him. They’ve never seen the guy in real life, but his voice on the phone is apparently so sexy sounding it turns the women in the group on.

Apparently being turned on by the speaking voice of certain individuals with sexy voices is quite common among people of all genders. I’ve done some “research” (googling) and apparently straight women find men with deep voices extremely attractive, the deeper the voice the better. They apparently like men like this because it indicates a larger body size and more testosterone. Celebrities like Benedict Cumberbatch and the late Alan Rickman are examples of such “sexy voices”. Men on the other hand apparently prefer women with higher pitched “breathy” voices, since it indicates a smaller body size and higher estrogen levels. Furthermore men and women will change the pitch of their voices when flirting, women will raise the pitch of their voices to be higher and more feminine while men will lower the pitch of their voices to sound more masculine. I’m not sure if this is true or not and as the great Abraham Lincoln once said “don’t believe everything you read on the internet”. I can definitely say for myself that I’m attracted to women with feminine speaking and singing voices. My last crush had a very sweet feminine sounding voice.

I’ve started doing exercises to lower the pitch of my voice naturally without straining my vocal cords. My speaking voice is already fairly deep to begin but I want to lower it even further naturally so that it will sound extremely attractive to women. If I have the time I’m either planning to either join a choir or take vocal lessons because apparently men who sing are extremely attractive to women. I may never sound like Frank Sinatra or another handsome crooner and I don’t want to strain my vocal cords but I want to make my voice sound as attractive as possible. You’re stuck with the vocal cords you’ve had since puberty but breathing exercises can make the voice sound more masculine without putting strain on them.

How much of a role does vocal attractiveness matter in relationships? Is it worth improving my voice to woo women or am I better off focusing on something else? Or is this just a major insecurity of mine?

Sincerely

The Not So Handsome Sounding Voice

DEAR NOT SO HANDSOME SOUNDING VOICE: This one’s easy: it’s a major insecurity of your and you’re letting it run away with you.

One of the things that people don’t realize is how much they reinforce their own insecurities without meaning to. Confirmation bias – a cognitive bias where we give greater weight to things that agree with what we already believe and discount the things that disagree with them – means that we’re much more likely to listen to things that confirm our anxieties, even when the “proof” is poorly reasoned, researched or ludicrous. I mean, you were pulling stuff from random websites and not, say, Google Scholar, and it sounds like the answers you were getting were already a) poorly sourced with dubious data collection and b) dips straight into evo-psych woo.

Do some folks prefer higher voices from women and deeper ones from men? Sure. I mean, Vin Diesel’s bass rumble is impressive as s--t, Idris Elba and Keith David are both charisma factories and Alan Rickman was… well, he was Alan f--king Rickman. But other folks who’re sex symbols don’t necessarily have voices that register on the Richter scale. Chris Evans has a fairly normally pitched voice. So too does Brad Pitt. But you can also look at the number of male singers with huge female fanbases and see that not all of them sound like mountains that just started to speak. Many of them have higher pitches, some verging on falsetto. Nobody’s gonna confuse Harry Styles or Bruno Mars for, say, Barry White. And of course, there’s always Prince…

It’s also worth noting that, if you’re talking about things like, say, opera, the heroes and romantic leads are usually tenors, not baritones.

I’d also point out that a sexy voice has a lot to do with how you use it. Something as small as going up or down a register when you’re speaking can utterly change the meaning of a simple sentence. Case in point, you can watch as voice actor Erika Ishii shows just how much a change in register can affect interpretation on her Twitter feed: https://nrdlv.co/3MDAfSp

Just as importantly though: you can’t really permanently “change” your voice. The pitch and timbre of your voice is a function of the tension of the folds in your vocal chords, and once you’re through puberty, your voice is more or less set at its natural tone. You can affect the quality by, say, smoking or drinking  – the classic “whiskey and cigarettes” rasp of Tom Waits is a prime example – but that’s mostly just adding texture, not changing pitch. In terms of going higher or lower… that’s not going to happen.

(It’s also, notably, caused by damage to your vocal chords, so keep that in mind.)

What you can do, however, is learn to speak from your chest, rather than your nose or head. This puts far less strain on your vocal chords – especially at volume – than speaking with your head voice. If you say something as though you’re commanding a dog, then you’ve got an idea of what your chest voice sounds like. Learning to speak from your diaphragm rather than from your nose or head will help you speak in a tone and pitch that’s lower than what you may be used to… but it’s still just going to be your voice. It’s not going to suddenly turn you into James Earl Jones.

The thing to realize is that having a good voice is basically a value-add, not a make-or-break situation. Being able to sing is definitely a way of bringing something to the table – lord knows rock and roll has long been joked about as “the gods’ gift to ugly people”, just like at Tom Petty – but if you’re looking at it as “this is what’s going to make people fall in love with me”, then you’re going to be frustrated. It’s kinda like having six-pack abs. Leaving aside the question of who’s attracted to them, unless you’re always showing it off, which gets obnoxious very quickly, there’s going to be relatively few times that this comes into play. I mean, I guess you could make a point of hitting open mics and karaoke bars, but that seems like a lot of work for little return.

(However, if you really want to impress someone, sing Thunderball. If you can hit that last note like Tom Jones can…)

But, as is often the case, I think you’re latching onto something that doesn’t mean nearly as much as you think it does. This sounds like anxieties and insecurities talking more than anything else, and while I’m certainly not gonna talk you out of taking voice lessons, I would advise you not to expect miracles or sudden changes. If you want to take those lessons for their own sake, then hey, awesome. Learning to carry a tune is always a good thing; I can’t do it with both hands and a bucket. But they’re not going to make your insecurities go away. Focusing on your sense of self-worth and being your best, most polished self and connecting with folks instead of trying to impress them or flip evo-psych ‘attraction switches’ will go a lot further and more effectively than any ability to hop up to the mic at a karaoke night and say “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”.

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: First off, I’ve been following you for a while and, as far as I’m concerned, nobody else on the internet can destigmatize male virginity as well as you can.

With that said, I think that the line between an incel and a sexually frustrated men is very thin, and all over the internet people use the two terms interchangeably. I also think that, even though I’m not an extreme misogynist nor do I have any desire to hurt or kill people, I still relate a lot to the incel community and their frustration with being unable to find a partner in our overly-sexualized society, where virginity is highly stigmatized, and where we are made to believe that everyone is having sex except us. I think that relating to this struggle makes me an incel automatically, and I think that finally finding someone to have sex with, even just once, would absolve me of having this “incel” identity, because I managed to achieve what none of them could and am therefore no longer “one of them.”

My other belief is that, as someone on the autism spectrum, I believe that a lot of incel traits and behaviors can be explained with an autism diagnosis. Autism would explain why these incel men are unable to make connections with people of the opposite sex and explain other things too. Autistics see things in “black and white” and they don’t have theory of mind, so that makes them believe things like “women only date tall men, and if you’re short, you’re never gonna get laid.” Autism is also the reason why a lot of these guys get it into their heads that they’re “owed” sex (because they watch movies and TV shows and assume that real life operates the same way), and why they will spaz out and behave violently if they don’t get it (because autistics have poor emotional self-control.)

For myself, I believe that being on the autism spectrum is the reason why I’m in my late 20s and never had sex or a girlfriend yet, and also why I have what most neurotypicals would consider to be a “naive” understanding of what love and sex are. Autism is really the only thing that makes me any different than the average guy, and that has to be the reason why I’m having a problem that only incels and autistic men can have. We know that Elliot Rogers was autistic, so was the van guy from Toronto, and so is Chris Chan, who some people say was the first ever incel. Even though I’m not an extreme narcissist, or a potential spree killer, I still think I have more in common with Saint Elliot than I would like to. Much like him, I also think that when I find someone to have sex with, that it’s gonna feel “heavenly” (as he puts it,) and I also find myself feeling envious of those who are in relationships, or who have had their first relationships at an earlier age than me.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Chris Chan, the most bullied/ridiculed person on the internet, is on the autism spectrum. I hate that guys like him share my diagnosis, and I hate that most incels share my diagnosis. I know I dumped a lot on you, but I would like these toxic views to be disproven so that I can stop feeling s--tty about myself and change the way I see my diagnosis.

Autistic and Frustrated

DEAR AUTISTIC AND FRUSTRATED: OK, AaF, there’s a lot to unpack with this, but I think the first thing we need to do is to clarify something: there’s a difference between someone who isn’t having sex but wants to and an incel. Yes, incel is a portmanteau of “involuntarily celibate” which, theoretically covers a wide range of people across the gender and political spectrum. It’s also true that, when the term was first coined (by a queer woman, I might add…), it was as part of an online community for folks who were late bloomers who struggled to find loving and satisfying relationships.

The problem, however, is that it evolved over time; even the original community that Alana created (and had walked away from) had devolved into what we refer to when we talk about incels today. When we talk about incels and the incel community, we’re not talking about folks who have a hard time negotiating the world of love, sex and relationships. We’re talking about people who feel that they’re being excluded from something that is rightfully theirs, who blame women for their plight and whose dominant philosophy is one of anger and hopelessness. This rage comes part and parcel with some absolutely stupendous racism, sexism and, of course, the weird obsession with new forms of phrenology to explain their lack of sex. And it’s important to note: this isn’t a change in definitions that was imposed upon them by popular use; this was, quite literally, something they embraced.

The plight of incels isn’t that they can’t make connections with people, especially of their preferred sex. It’s not that they’re genetic dead ends (that’s not a thing, especially on the individual level), nor is it that they have the “wrong” brow-to-jaw ratio, the “wrong” testosterone level, or the wrong whatever. Their problem is that they’re stuffed full of anger and hate like a turduken of choleric s--t, and nobody wants to let Typhoid Gary in their personal space. Just as importantly, the incel community is a self-reinforcing, self-radicalizing and self-perpetuating bucket of crabs, where the ability to grow, change and improve is rejected, having hope for a better future is shouted down as being delusional and that the only thing that an incel can do besides “lay down and rot” is try to make other people feel their pain first.

It’s also important to note that this has nothing to do with being autistic. There’s nothing about autism that, for example, makes someone decide that “rape is infinitely less bad than NOT having sex” or that women are subhumans ruled by biology who either can’t control themselves around certain kinds of men (the mythical Chads) or are manipulative harpies who trick and cheat some men into raising cuckoos while going out and f--king all those Chads out there. Being neuroatypical doesn’t make you more prone to hate or make you more violent, nor does it mean that you’re incapable of critical thinking or that you passively accept pop-culture as reality. It doesn’t even mean you’re doomed to never have sex. As has been pointed out many a time before: autistic people have sex. Autistic people have relationships, get married, raise kids and so on. And the idea that autistic people have no emotional self-control or no theory of mind has all come from bad science and has been rather thoroughly debunked.

The examples you choose are, incidentally, not relevant. Chris-chan rather famously has and had a lot of mental health issues which had nothing to do with her being autistic, and much more to do with the perpetual and constant abuse from the chan-boards and subsidiaries who viewed her as a “LOLCow”. Elliot Rodger, on the other  hand, was never actually diagnosed as being autistic, nor for that matter does it seem that he ever even referred to himself as being autistic or on the spectrum in his rather voluminous Internet history. It seems that the evidence for his being autistic was mostly speculation and heresay that was treated as fact.

What Rodger was, however, was incredibly racist and self-loathing, as well as being a screaming misogynist. It’s telling that much of his manifesto was about how much he hated seeing AAPI men with women, especially white women because those men were “less manly” than he was… despite the fact that Rodger was half-Asian, the son of an Asian mother. He saw his having a white father as something that was supposed to elevate him over Asian and Black men; he was, in his words, a “beautiful, superior Eurasian” and wrote extensively about how outraged he was to see “ugly, lowly, inferior” Black and Asian men with white women… women who he saw as being “rightfully” his.

That had nothing to do with autism or neuroatypicality. That was racism, self-loathing and violence wrapped up in the belief that he was being denied something that was rightfully his by birth – something that’s been a long-running theme amongst violent fascists, I might add.

And honestly, placing the blame on “this overly-sexualized society” is displacement as well because hey, the problem isn’t sex. The problem is, to paraphrase the sages, “toxic masculinity ruining the party again”. It’s not exactly like one has to be Sherlock Holmes to see this; part of the central complaint of incels is that they don’t qualify as ‘men‘. They quite literally call themselves “manlets”, amongst other things, because they supposedly never get to “be” men or even boys. The complaints about not having the right jawline or the right build or being the correct height are textbook examples of toxic and restrictive ideas around who is (or isn’t) a “real man”. Even the very name – involuntarily celibate – is baked into the toxic masculinity package; after all, when your value and status is based on how much sex you’re having or how many partners you’ve had, then not having easy access to sex means you’re less of a man.

The same goes for the virginity stigma which, in this case, is entirely aimed at men. Women who haven’t had sex at a certain age are seen as unusual or odd; men who haven’t had sex by a certain age are seen as inherently defective. This is, again, part of the toxic masculinity package. If you aren’t having any sex and never have… well guess, you’re not a man, huh, Stu? It also applies to being taught that men are owed sex. That’s not something that comes from movies or television, that’s something that’s been in our culture for generations. As a 20-something, you may not have seen the sort of dating advice women used to get, but ideas like “don’t order the lobster on a date” have been around since before I was born and only started to fade in the mid to late 00s. The implication, in this case, was “if you order an expensive meal on a date, you’re going to be expected, nay obligated to put out.” So too, for that matter, was the idea that if a woman got you aroused, then she had a duty to “take responsibility” for it, that a woman who went home with you had basically given up the right to say “no” or even if she didn’t say no the right way.

If we go back to “the problem isn’t sex”, let’s dig into something that you said earlier: that you feel like you could leave this all behind if you could have sex “just once”. Leaving aside that no, everyone is not having more sex than you (in fact, sexual activity amongst Millennials and Zoomers is down, prompting as many hand-wringing op-eds about the “sex recession” as about “toxic hook up culture”), this is eminently and easily achievable. You could easily hire an escort and get that taken care of by next week. If you are worried about the legalities or the possibility of hiring someone who’s been trafficked against their will, that’s easy enough to avoid: you can go the legal route by going to the brothels in Carson City and surrounding districts. Flights to Reno are relatively cheap and easy to come by. You can fly out on a Friday, get your ashes hauled, catch your return flight that night and be back home in time to get to work the next day. Hell, many of the brothels will send a car to take you to and from the airport.

But let’s be honest: would that actually change things for you? Or would there be reasons why that ‘didn’t count’? Say, because you paid for a service instead of someone “choosing” you? Well, ok, let’s say that paying a sex worker wouldn’t count (though this would likewise imply that eating at a restaurant ‘didn’t count’ for some reason). You can – and often will – find folks at last call at bars who don’t want to go home alone. Sometimes you don’t even have to wait that long; you may, depending on the bar, find someone who’s looking to get laid for a multitude of reasons and would be happy to have a quick one. Will they be someone you’re necessarily attracted to? Possibly not. Will the sex be any good? Almost assuredly not. But technically speaking, they will have chosen you and you will have lost your virginity.

However, I am here from the future to tell you that no, this wouldn’t actually make you feel better. If anything, it’ll make you feel worse. Because when you get right down to it, what most people want when they talk about being an incel isn’t orgasms with another person, it’s that they want validation. They want to feel like they were “chosen” by the person who slept with them, that having sex says something about them and their value as men and that they had more value than the other guys. Otherwise, as I said: paying an escort for a girlfriend experience would get the job done. In fact, it would probably ensure that you had a better first time than many whose first time was a random hook-up; you would, at the very least, be with someone who had an interest in your comfort, your pleasure and overall helping you have a good experience. But again: this would mean choosing  the act of sex over what sex would represent. And what it would represent in that bar hook up… wouldn’t be any better, frankly because hey, you did it, you just had to turn your standards down to “breathing”, so hey, you can get chosen as long as you don’t mind “having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find someone who’d be willing to touch your penis.”

There’s a reason I keep saying that women aren’t Mjolnir, man. They don’t only sleep with “the worthy”, and treating sex as a measure of your value or worth is a great way to just keep perpetuating that incel mindset you’re afraid of developing.

So now I’m going to pivot back to something I say all the time on here: the problem you’re talking about isn’t the problem you have. The issue isn’t that you’re a virgin, or even feeling envious of folks who haven’t had the dating struggles you’ve had. The issue, it seems to me, is that you’re equating being autistic as being broken. I mean, holy hopping sheep s--t dude, look at how much you run yourself down by talking about other autistic people. Insisting that autistic people have no theory of mind, that they uncritically believe whatever they see on TV or lash out in violent tantrums whenever they don’t get their way? That’s some really f--kin’ awful s--t to believe about people in general, but especially about yourself. I mean, do you, an autistic man, honestly believe that life is exactly like it is on TV? Do you have violent episodes due to poor emotional self-regulation? If you don’t… then why in pluperfect f--kery do you vomit out this kind of s--t about other autistic people?

What you need, more than to get laid, is to get the ever-loving f--k off of Reddit, 4chan and everywhere else you’re picking up this crap. Even if it’s coming from other autistic folks, that sort of self-loathing horse s--ttery only serves to drag you down and convince you that there’s something fundamentally broken in you as opposed to the fact that your brain is wired differently, you have different needs than neurotypical folks and society is very bad at addressing those needs. You would be doing a far, far bigger favor by working with a therapist to unpack and unravel these negative beliefs about your diagnosis and yourself than you would getting balls-deep in some strange.

And it’s important to break those associations because, in the one place where autism and incel beliefs are overlapping in your particular Venn diagram is the belief that progress or improvement is impossible. Incels believe that they’ve been doomed by genetics and the shallowness of women; you seem to believe that you’ve been doomed by being autistic. That isn’t true at all. You might have to work harder in some areas than a neurotypical person might, or you might have to find workarounds, support structures or other ways of addressing autism-related hardships… but even if it’s difficult, that’s still a galaxy away from impossible.

If you truly think that sex would solve this problem (it won’t), and you want to get better at finding a loving relationship, start with yourself. Loving yourself enough to stop believing the worst about yourself and to get help uprooting those beliefs can be one of the most important and meaningful steps you could take towards getting laid. Letting go of this idea that you’re somehow incapable of growing or improving and connecting with others will make it much easier for you. Yeah, dating can be a messy, complicated business. Don’t make it harder than it already can be by having to fight past your own self-loathing first.

Sometimes the most important loving relationship you can have is the one with yourself. Everything else flows from there.

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: Just wanted to say a massive thank you for all you do. Your stuff hits home about a lot of my issues and you argue your point in a very intelligent and well rounded way. I have a lot of rage and resentment towards women and you help me understand why and try to work through it. I thought I would ask your opinion about my current relationship issues. It’s a complex situation and I’m still working things out but thought I would ask if you had any opinion. It’s a long set up but would love your opinion (if you can be bothered to read the whole essay below!)

Been in a long term relationship for around 6 years now. This is my first serious relationship, (I’m now 36) as I didn’t loose my virginity until I was 27. We both have fairly significant mental and emotional issues, I have problems with OCD, anxiety, IBS and depression while she has a lot of fears about acceptance which make her very needy and clingy. Both of these stem from our upbringing (we have both recently started therapy and are finding out a lot of interesting ideas and points but the process is expensive and slow!), her dad died when she was young and her mother is a textbook narcissist, while my mum was and is fairly critical and overbearing while my dad is very passive and does everything he can to please her, regardless of how ridiculous she is being. The relationship is a bit co-dependent, we both support each other through all our s--t but the relationship became really strained a few months ago when we stopped communicating well.

I was always working or playing Warhammer (massive nerd I know!) while she became distant and passive aggressive. We ended up having a big talk where I said I needed some space and left the house. Been thinking for ages that I’m not sure about the relationship, we have very little in common and we barely ever have sex, but half way down the road I realised I didn’t want to lose her. We got back together, with us both agreeing to work on our issues. I am more a ‘love avoidant’, whereas she is more of a ‘love addict’ pattern (recently read ‘The Truth’ by Neil Strauss). She wants me to promise to be with her forever whereas I want her to open up sexually (I always initiate, she never gives me a blowjob, it’s always standard missionary and happens about once every 2 months). I have classic nice guy issues (which I have been working on and am getting better at) as well as problems with intimacy, commitment and very low self esteem (I just read your piece on internal vs external validation, was really good!). I have a deep seated need to be desired sexually and have spent a lot of hours looking through adult dating sites recently, not looking to cheat but seeing what’s out there and enjoying the show and fantasy.

I have only recently got onto Twitter and follow a lot of cosplayers and models who share my interests. I have been thinking about polyamory and open relationships for a while but am not sure if this is just who I am or just me needing the validation that comes with seducing as many beautiful women as I can. I know that porn stars and the girls on twitter are putting on a show a lot of the time and it’s a fantasy but I can’t help but feel that there is someone better suited to me out there, someone who has a higher sex drive, is kinky, beautiful, happy to sleep with other women (obviously this would be the dream!) shares my interests but I know that this may be wishful thinking and I have a big problem attracting women I am attracted to. Although I love my girlfriend, I am not entirely happy in the relationship or in my life. I am trying to work out what I should do next, I am going to therapy to try and work through these issues but as you can probably tell, I have a lot of issues to work through and this all takes time. I have just read your piece on becoming more attractive and feeling like you need to make up for lost time, I am conscious that I am coming closer to 40 while I am still mainly attracted to women in their 20s and 30s. I just feel stuck, I really don’t want to hurt her or lose her but I am not sexually satisfied, reaching for fantasy and the stunning, flawless, sexy women I see online.

My therapist seems to think I’m with her because I don’t think I can get or deserve to be with anyone else (I don’t feel I deserve my current girlfriend either to tell you the truth) and there may be some truth in that but I do genuinely care about her and enjoy her company. It’s the fact that I do not feel sexually fulfilled, she’s always ‘too tired’ for sex but will not let me seek sexual fulfillment outside of the relationship. I feel like I’m in a lose-lose situation and have no idea what to do apart from continuing to go to therapy and read around all these subjects, which all take time.

She is in a fairly low paying job so I support her a lot financially (I’m paying for her therapy for a start) and we’re thinking about buying a house together, which is bringing all these issues a bit more to the surface. I simultaneously want to stay and leave the relationship and have no idea what’s for the best.

Sorry for the essay but leaving bits out would put the question out of context. What would be your opinion on the whole thing?

Many thanks and keep up the good work

Mister Fix-It

DEAR MISTER FIX-IT: OK, I’m gonna just skip to the end here, MFI: break up with your girlfriend. You’re already heading in that direction, so it’s just a matter of when and how, not “if”. Frankly, I’m of the opinion that, once you know that you want out, it’s better to leave than to let things drag out; all that this does is make things worse when you finally do break up. Not only have you wasted time that you and your soon-to-be girlfriend could have used to find a new partner, but the knowledge that you’ve wanted out before you finally said it out loud is painful to experience. It demands that your girlfriend re-examine all the memories she’s had of the relationship with you and wonder just how long you’ve been sitting there like Meat Loaf at the end of “Paradise By the Dashboard Light”, waiting for the end of time to hurry up and arrive. ]

Now let’s dig into the why, shall we?

The first and most obvious issue: you’re not happy with the relationship. The sex isn’t doing it for you – and apparently not really doing it for her either – and it’s boring the piss out of you. You don’t feel desired, which is very real. Not having that is a legitimate problem. If we’re in a relationship where the sexual connection is important, then yeah, that’s something we want and deserve from our partners. However, not only are you not getting that, but your desire for it is leading towards your starting to tiptoe your way towards cheating. Yeah, some folks will fart around on personal ads or dating sites because they like the charge of knowing people are into them, not because they’re actually going to do anything. You on the other hand, are setting yourself up for something to happen “accidentally on purpose”, and it will happen with the way things are going. It’s a pretty clear “slam your fist on the eject out of relationship” button and one you can’t take back as easily – unlike the last time you tried to leave – but it’s also honestly one of the s--ttier ways to do it.

And look, yeah, you tried to leave before but realized you didn’t want to lose her. But if you really think about it: is it that you didn’t want to lose her, or is it that you didn’t want to be single? Is it about losing her, specifically, or is it that you’re used to being in a relationship with her and the idea of being alone again is intimidating to you? Are you sticking around for her or because you don’t want to lose the warm body you have in your life?

My guess is that, based on everything you’ve said, it’s the latter.

Second: yeah, you’re looking for validation and you’re not getting it, either from yourself or from your relationship. This in and of itself is an issue, but I can also tell you, with certainty: you’re not gonna find it in polyamory or non-monogamy. Were I to wager money, if you did open up this relationship and you found an outside partner, this would just end in your breaking up with your girlfriend and likely settling in with the new one. This is not an uncommon story in poly circles, and one that drives a lot of folks crazy… especially because it’s the sort of thing that tends to repeat itself until you deal with the underlying validation issues.

I mean, let’s talk about the part where you say you’re conscious about closing in on your 40s and being more interested in women in their 20s and 30s. While yeah, it’s tempting to read all kinds of things into this (and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of folks who will do so and read you the riot act over it), let’s be honest: is it about your feeling more in common with people who happen to be that much younger than you… or is it because you want to be someone who can get younger women? And yes, I used “get” deliberately, because that’s how a lot of folks look at it; it’s about the validation of being so cool/sexy/sophisticated/whatever that you’re able to just “get” these young and desirable folks that prove your studliness.

The real clue is in this list of what you’re looking for: beautiful, kinky, bisexual and willing to perform her bisexuality for you and loves all the same things you do. This is, admittedly, a fairly standard, even generic list… but it really comes down to ‘if I had a girlfriend who was all of these things, wouldn’t my past self be envious? Wouldn’t my friends be envious? Wouldn’t strangers be envious?” Yeah, we all want partners who are sexually compatible with us… but would you be as happy if you got these things in a way that other people might never know about what you got up to?

I think your therapist is right: part of what’s driving you right now is that you’ve got something to prove. While I don’t doubt that your relationship isn’t working for you – which is absolutely legit, don’t get me wrong – it sounds like you still have those feelings about whether you could do better or deserve better. And to be clear: I don’t think that you started dating your girlfriend under false pretenses or from a “this is the best I could do” mindset. What I think is that what worked for you at the beginning doesn’t work for you now, in part because you both have things to work on… but also because you didn’t have the qualities you both needed for a successful long-term relationship. But culturally, we still don’t really acknowledge the validity or value of short term relationships and see length as being the benchmark of quality and validity; the longer the relationship, the more significant or “real” it is. Short term means you didn’t like them that much or that you didn’t value the relationship or that doesn’t have significance or meaning. This is, needless to say, not true at all… but as I’ve said many times before, uprooting what culture has taught us all our lives is a motherf--ker.

It’s also worth noting that breaking up doesn’t mean that you don’t care for her, that she doesn’t bring value to your life or that you didn’t value the time you’ve had together. You can have all of those things and keep those things… without being in a relationship with her.

So, yes, it’s well past time to break up. The relationship ended a while ago, I think, and you’re only just starting to realize it. You’ve reached a point where your relationship isn’t meeting your needs, nor is it meeting hers. For the love of all the gods, goddesses and assorted minor deities, do not get a house together. And when you do break up… take a breath for a moment instead of trying to swing straight into – as you put it – “trying to seduce as many beautiful women as possible”. Not only are you going to find it harder than you think, which is going to frustrate you, but there’s still the question of why you want that and you should dig into that. If you’re just someone who isn’t monogamous or who needs novelty in relationships, hey, then you do you. But if you’re doing this for proving something, either to yourself, to others, or just to someone in your head that represents the people you’re really seeking approval from, then it’s going to be a negative experience for you.

Speaking as someone who did precisely that, I can tell you from experience: what this is going to do is lead to your prioritizing trying to rack up numbers instead of actually connecting with people you like. That ends up being dehumanizing and unsatisfying to everyone; the people you’re sleeping with and yourself. It’s not going to fill the hole you’re feeling because there’s no amount of external validation that’ll do it; there will always be reasons why it doesn’t completely work. And for the folks you’re sleeping with… well, even under the best of circumstances, if you’re going into this with that validation mindset, then all you’re doing is using them as a tool to prop up your sense of self-worth. If they’re worth sleeping with, then they deserve to be treated better than that. And honestly… you deserve better than that.

(I would also point out: even in happy, fulfilling relationships, you’re gonna want to bang other people and fantasize about folks you’re not dating. So will your partner. That’s got nothing to do with the quality of your relationship or your connection to one another; that’s just being a primate with a sex drive. Monogamous commitments don’t mean that you won’t want to sleep with other people, it just means you choose not to do so.)

So, TL;DR: break up with your girlfriend. It’s the kindest thing for the both of you. When you do, take a beat and focus a little more on therapy before you dive back into dating, so you have a better idea of what you’re actually doing instead of repeating a cycle that doesn’t work for you. Once you have a better idea of what you authentically want – as opposed to chasing external validation – then you’ll be in a much better position to actually pursue it with integrity.

Good luck.

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