DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I hope you had a good vacation. I’m a longtime off-and-on reader and like how your advice is compassionate and sane, and most importantly doesn’t explain normal human behavior in terms of a conspiracy theory, nor does it degenerate into a word salad of redbulls--t terms by the third sentence. Long story short, I haven’t asked out anyone in 10 years. My first and only attempt was after a nasty case of oneitis dating back to high school. Needless to say, I got rejected and she spent the next 4 years of college spreading rumors about me to everyone in the department, up until the last day before graduation. At one point she tried to accuse me (to our classmates) of stalking her for attending the same classes, which would be right except we were in the same major that I ultimately graduated in. Like what was I supposed to do? Drop out? Like an idiot, I didn’t do anything to confront her because I didn’t want to make it worse, I thought it would go away on its own, and I did not want believe it was actually happening. I did not speak to or of her to anyone at all, and still haven’t IRL. It was so long ago that my current social circle no longer intersects with hers, and I’m pretty sure my own family forgot how bad the oneitis was (or perhaps they’re just playing nice until they need leverage?). Due to some combination of fear of repeating history and legitimate busy-ness with school and later my career, I didn’t date at all. As a matter of fact I could not find anyone attractive either. Like I can find a woman hot (sexually attractive), but I simply don’t have the motivation to do anything about it. Despite everything that happened, I could talk to women as colleagues and even friends, but even there I felt no romantic spark, which is fine by me: your own writing says you can’t reasonably expect to be compatible with everyone.

Outside of work, I do have hobbies I believe are interesting which I regularly engage in. My primary one is historical collecting which mostly amounts to extreme thrifting on top of the usual eBay bidding wars. There’s also the research and networking component, and I have made many interesting contacts all over the world who have done some really neat things through this hobby, but their stories aren’t my stories. Collecting is the most “interesting” thing about me (I can do a few other things too), especially given that any historical interest is rare and unexpected among people in my field and of my ethnicity, but I have a hard time talking about it to others since I have gotten serious flak for it in the past. It went far beyond the typical high school tier “lol what a NNNNNNEEEEERRRRRRRDDDDDDDD” bulls--t, though I’ve had my share of that. Once it got to the point where I had to hire a lawyer to defend myself when my collecting was used as evidence for a criminal legal proceeding stemming from a workplace dispute (can’t go into more specifics here; lawyers are expensive). Fortunately I didn’t become a headline since it was a false accusation. I’m far away from the workplace that pulled that on me, but I still have the scars.

Logically, I know I shouldn’t let these bad experiences define me, especially because the people I am around at work now seem to be positive and accepting, but I just can’t forget no matter what I do. Besides, if I “forget” those hard lessons, then those years would have been an even bigger waste. Most my collecting contacts are in stable relationships, many married with children even, so again, logically this hobby isn’t damning by itself. I think I have stories, but I have no idea how to present them in a positive way, meaning they can’t be told. I am certainly aware that many high fashion brands blatantly rip off vintage garments, and I know enough to dress like I just walked out of a history book or period drama, though there are few situations where LARPing in public are acceptable. I am aware of reenactments, but there have been none nearby me now for over 10 years at this point (I would have to travel across the country), and no real desire to re-start since the majority of the reenactors themselves aged out of the free time and fitness for physical activity range and because everyone’s so wary of negative press if the wannabe Nazis show up (I expect you’ll see some of them in the comments section; I also disavow and condemn any and all racist, genocidal, and extremist ideologies including but not exclusive to fascism and Nazism, so spare me your “weasel words” accusations, please). The pandemic didn’t help either. I do wear more normal-looking items (usually something like a jacket) out, but nobody has ever noticed, which is kind of the point of looking normal, and from my experience people rarely comment on each others’ clothes. Anyways, if I somehow get a relationship, eventually she’s going to have to find out what I do for fun, and what happened in the past.

I would love to find a Marion to my Indiana Jones (perhaps an over-exaggeration), but I can’t seem to open up enough to make this work. Writing this out makes me realize my problem is presentation, and I’ve read your article about it (Talkin’ Nerdy), but I’m having a hard time finding an appropriate angle. How should I talk about my hobbies in a way that won’t bring out the pitchforks and torches?

The Past is a Foreign Country

DEAR THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY: Let me start by making a suggestion, TPFC:  stop playing coy by dancing around your hobbies or using creatively descriptive phrasing in order to avoid saying precisely what your hobbies are. I realize you’re hoping to get advice that isn’t colored or influenced by the polarizing nature of your interests, but the fact of the matter is that you can’t divest your hobbies from the social stigma that comes with them. It’s going to be a major factor in dictating who’s interested in you and who isn’t, who’s willing to date you and who isn’t and trying to play word games by implying things without actually saying it not only makes it harder to give you effective advice (and let’s be real, advice you don’t want to hear) and it’s frankly kind of insulting to do this when it’s pretty clear what you mean.

If we go strictly by the way you’ve laid things out, with no further information, then just about everyone is going to understandably presume that your collection is down to two possibilities: the Confederacy or Nazi memorabilia and artifacts and either Civil War or WWII LARPing.

And my money, based on “extreme thrifting” and “used as evidence against me in criminal proceedings”, would be that it’s Nazi s--t.

Now, maybe I’m wrong. And if so, then you can safely tone down my advice by about 25% or so in intensity. It’ll still apply, just not as loudly. But if I AM wrong… well, that’s an example of why you need to be straight about what exactly it is that you’re talking about. If you were talking about My Little Pony collections or being a member of the 501st Legion, then all this coy wordplay just makes things even worse in the minds of people you’re talking to. Talking about something that may not be mainstream or typical for a person your age and gender like it’s this huge horrific thing is only going to prime folks for a huge negative reaction that the reveal isn’t necessarily going to undo. Part about talking about your nerdy interests is about being able to talk about them to other people without shame or apology.

I read comics, watch cartoons and play video games. For a long while, that made dating tricky because folks would see that and assume that I was an overgrown manchild. And while an argument could still be made (hey, growing older is inevitable, growing up is optional), I would explain to folks precisely why I enjoy those hobbies instead of treating them like a mark of shame. There were folks who would never see those interests as anything other than kid s--t, there were folks who shared my interests who were thrilled to meet me, and there were folks who didn’t share my interests but could at least understand my enjoyment of them and appreciate that they brought joy to my life. Sorting people like this made it much easier to connect with the people who were right for me and skip over the ones who weren’t.

But owning your interests also means understanding how your hobbies and habits can affect your life and others. I know people who, for example, breed rare cockroaches, or who raise venomous reptiles. I know others who do taxidermy or collect animal bones or preserved insects or obscure vintage medical instruments. They’ve long accepted that this is going to be a limit on who comes into their lives. They understood that the squick factor is going to be high for a lot of people who don’t “get” it. They’ll explain their interest in it – even if the explanation is “yeah, I’m just really into morbid s--t” – but they also accept that this means they’re going to be an acquired taste for someone who isn’t also strange or unusual. Fortunately for them, the goth community’s pretty sizable, and their interests, while weird and squicky, aren’t that outré. In fact, there’re a number of sizable faires and conventions that are specifically for selling and trading such items.

If we go back to… well, me, then a lot of my choices mean accepting the consequences. I am very visibly tattooed, including the tattoos on the backs of my hands. Those are going to put a lot of folks off, and I knew it when I got them. That was always going to be part of the tradeoff. But if my hobbies and collections were getting to the point that they were creating issues in other areas then I couldn’t feasibly say that it’s not fair for folks to judge me poorly for it. if I were collecting comics to the point that I no longer had room in my home for things like, say, furniture? Yeah, that’s going to make people think about me in a less positive light. If my home looked like Attic Salt or Hot Topic exploded in it? That’s going to affect my dating prospects. And if my interests involved rocking symbols of hatred or paraphernalia associated with a community of bigots or philosophy of genocide, then people are going to rightfully feel like maybe they want nothing to do with me.

No, it’s not fair. Sometimes it’s not even reasonable. I grew up in the height of the (first) Satanic Panic. My playing D&D came very close to getting me suspended or expelled in middle-school. Thankfully if it had gone further than vague threats, my parents would’ve made sure they had a fight on their hands, but it was a risk that came from wanting to play a game with my friends.

Yes, there’re some areas where the association between the distastefulness of the thing and actual danger are vague or even nonexistent. The folks who’re into vore aren’t going to actually try to swallow people whole. People who have ravishment fantasies, do age play or hardcore BDSM get a lot of side-eye and suspicion – even having those interests used against them – but those are areas where the hype, fueled by the distastefulness of it outweighs the reality of how dangerous those people really are. And to be sure, these have been actively used against people in courts of law; divorce proceedings, child custody hearings, even criminal complaints where no actual crime had been committed.

But in a time when Nazis are marching again and openly-admitted fascists are running for political office, it’s entirely understandable that folks are going to see having a collection of Nazi s--t is going to make them think twice about wanting anything to do with you. You can’t just throw your hands up and say “it’s unfair for folks to think badly of me because of this.” Your collection, hobbies and the way you dress are all choices that you’ve made, and while you may not intend it, those choices signal to others that you’re at least somewhat in alignment with those values.

Is that fair? Possibly not. But part of understanding the social context means recognizing that people are going to have reservations about people who are willingly associating themselves with symbology that tends to indicate alignment with those philosophies. If I wear Doc Martens with red laces, people are going to assume, not unreasonably, that I’m not just racist but a violent racist. If I wear certain Fred Perry polos, people would have every reason to believe that I was signaling my membership in the Proud Boys, even if I was just wearing it because the colors look good with my complexion. Someone may be a sweet and wonderful person, but if I see them rocking a Thor’s hammer, raven and rune tattoos and an undercut, I’m gonna require some really persuasive explanations and a fair amount of evidence before I accept that they’re just really into their Scandinavian heritage and not a member of Wolves of Vinland or something.

S--t, my love of heavy metal means I spend a LOT of time Googling “band name + white power” and “band name + nazi” whenever I start getting into a new band. Even stuff I know isn’t connected but sounds like it could be gets me tense.

Being into something means that you accept responsibility and ownership for liking it, especially if it’s problematic or worse. That’s just life. If you want to try to, say, reclaim the fedora or trilby, then you’re going to have to own the fact that wearing those hats sends a particular message to people around you. If you’re going to collect Nazi s--t, you’re going to have to deal with folks assuming that you believe Nazi s--t until proven otherwise.

And if I’m being honest? It doesn’t sound like you do a lot of owning your choices or taking responsibility for making them. Your letter has a lot of “it’s unfair, what else am I supposed to do?” in it, including in places where there was a lot you could do. Being willing to say “ok, this situation sucks and I’m sorry to have caused it or contributed to it” – even if you feel it’s completely unfair or unreasonable – is important, as is doing your best to avoid making things worse. And quite frankly, if my hobby was being used as evidence in court against me on criminal charges… I’d be putting some serious thought into how much that hobby means to me. Especially if it were something that was already making people deeply uncomfortable.

So what do you do about all of this?

Well to start with, I would suggest is to start deciding how important this hobby is to you and do your best to pull out of the sunk-cost fallacy you’ve found yourself in. You say “if I “forget” those hard lessons, then those years would have been an even bigger waste.” Ok… how so? What was so valuable or important about those lessons that you need to hold onto them or that you’ve learned from them? What is it about your collection that’s so important that you’re not willing to say “maybe I need to let this go?” There’re a lot of things in my life that I’ve enjoyed that I’ve looked at and said “maybe it’s time to let this be in my past instead of my present”, and other things that I’ve looked at and said “this is actively harmful to me/people around me and I need to step away from it”. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was hard, but each time I had to make a choice and decide if it was better to hang onto something and damn the consequences, or to decide that the costs of holding onto it were simply more than I was willing to pay.

If you do decide that you’re going to keep collecting this paraphernalia – including wearing parts of the outfits – then you’re going to have to accept that the cost is going to include people thinking incredibly poorly of you for it. You’re going to have to quit playing coy and take ownership of your interests and actions. That means not dodging around the topic or hinting at it or getting pre-emptively defensive about it like you do here. If you’re wearing a Reichsmarshall hat or a Wehrmacht greatcoat, you’re already comfortable enough signaling to people that this is pretty important to you. To pretend otherwise in order to avoid being judged is disingenuous at best.

You accept that, if you’re going to keep your collection and keep collecting and letting these interests be a big part of your sense of self, you’re going to have to take people’s responses to it too. You can explain what it is about the items that appeal to you, why you enjoy collecting them and you can try to separate them from the political context – I’ve seen folks talk about the engineering of Luftwaffe planes while threading the needle of “not inadvertently endorsing the Third Reich” – but you’re going to have to accept that people are going to make judgements about you, about your associations and what you believe. You can talk about rejecting extremist ideologies and not being a fascist, but if you’re collecting fascist s--t, people are going to associate you with fascist beliefs. Especially if you only are collecting Nazi s--t and not just World War II memorabilia in general. It going to come with the collections, so you’re going to have to make your peace with it if that hobby is so important to you.

If you don’t vibe with Nazi and fascist beliefs – and let me tell you, there better never be a “BUT” in that sentence; to paraphrase infamous Twitter user dril, you DON'T have to hand it to the Wehrmacht – then should seriously consider finding a new hobby. It can still be based around a love of history and even collecting artifacts; there’s literally thousands of years of human existence to pull from that doesn’t involve genocide on an industrial level from an era that’s still in living memory. But no matter how apolitical you’re going to want to claim your interest is, the associations are still there. Even if some of this stuff has real meaning for you, you have to weigh just how much that meaning has vs. the price it carries. There’s a serious difference between “this is the Luger my grandfather took from a German kriegsmarine officer he captured” and “wanna see my totemkopf pins and SS uniforms?”

Yeah I know. It feels like I’m telling you to change who you are in order to date. And that would be because that’s exactly what I’m doing. Yes, we all grew up on lessons about not changing yourself for other people and why being yourself is important. But there’s a difference between changing just to be popular or pretending to be someone you’re not in order to fit in with the “cool” kids and evolving and growing past things that are actively harming you or causing harm to others. You can say “I’m just being myself” all you want, but we still live in a society, and part of that means accepting the social context. Fred Perry polos may have started out as just another shirt but now it  signifies being the member of a fascist street gang, just as the swastika may be a symbol that appears in ancient cultures around the world but now just means Nazis. You can’t separate them from that context or the associations that come with it.

“You” are a fluid concept; the things that make up “you” change constantly. Sometimes those changes occur without effort on our part. Sometimes those changes occur because we choose to make them. And in this case, you need to choose what aspects of history you want to be part of that concept of “you”.

But seriously, ditch the Nazi s--t already.

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 read you a lot, and I think you have amazing advice for men and women alike. I especially appreciate the idea of a pre-date date as a vibe check before you invest a whole bunch of hours in someone who you’d rather just not…  

My question is more practical. I totally get the idea that, for a guy, a pair of well fitting jeans, swapping a ratty T shirt for a nice button down, and spending 5ish mins every morning on general grooming can really elevate a guys overall presentation. My issue is that, as a woman, getting ready for a date takes me 45min (and that’s as streamlined as I can make it). I have gorgeous long curly hair that’s just a bushy Jew fro if I don’t put all the effort (and product) into it. Same thing with makeup. I’m not one of those girls that looks like a different person with a full face of makeup, but I do look objectively better when I put that effort in. These are things I don’t do before I work a 12h shift at the hospital.

It just feels like a lot of work for 15min and a coffee. But the first in person impression is really important and I want to look my best. Do you have any advice? Or do I just have to suck it up and use the time & product?

Thanks!!!�The Price Of Beauty

DEAR THE PRICE OF BEAUTY: Honestly, I’d say don’t underestimate the amount of effort guys put into their grooming, TPOB. We as a gender don’t have as many expectations put upon us, nor do most of us put on a full face, but a lot of men put in considerably more work than “a couple of spritz under the pits and out the door we go”. Especially if we’re going to be meeting up on a first date with someone we’re into.

But that’s us, not you. You have both a challenging schedule and more of a process of getting ready than most men, which, needless to say, can be a challenge. So how do you thread this needle – meeting someone to make sure a proper first date is in your future without spending oodles of time on what may end up being 15 minutes of “thanks, but we’re just not a match”?

Part of this is baked into the general concept of a pre-date date. The idea behind a “pre-date date” is that the meeting up is something you’re fitting into your otherwise busy schedule; the presumption is that you’re between engagements, on your lunch break or otherwise finding time in your busy day to see if you want to invest more time with this person. By setting up the idea that this is a pre-date, something you’re carving out time for, you’re making it clear that this isn’t necessarily your first-date look. You don’t want to look like you just rolled out of bed and into the least offensive clothes you’ve had, but you also don’t want to look like you went to Ulta right before you met up at Starbucks. So presumably someone would be able to understand that this is a mid-range look – more likely to be part of your workday appearance than night-on-the-town.

But as you say: your workday look is no makeup and natural hair. This is hardly a bad thing, but it’s understandable that this isn’t how you want to meet a potential partner. What to do?

There’re two obvious answers. The first is, as you say: just accept that you’re going to be investing the time (and product) on someone you’re planning on only talking with for 20 minutes. The second is, you go in au natural and let the chips fall where they may. You let the prospective beau know that they’re getting you at your frizzy, post-ER shift and hope they’re understanding or into that.

But there’re a few other possibilities to this as well.

One would be to schedule a pre-date date at a time when you’re going to have your hair and make-up on point already – a girl’s night out, meeting family or friends for dinner, whatever your social life may entail. This has both the benefit of not feeling like you may have put in all that effort for nothing – if you don’t click, you’re still going out – and you have a hard limit on how much time you can spend with him. It’s easy to peace-out at a pre-set time when you know you’re meeting up with your former classmates from med school for drinks and catching up.

Another would be to build in the possibility of upgrading the pre-date to an actual date; meet up after work for coffee and if things are clicking, blow off your “appointment” to get dinner, go for a walk or otherwise spend more time with him than you planned initially. If you’re someone who’s good at judging character quickly or who knows fairly rapidly whether or not you’re into a guy, this could work out well; you even have a moment of buttering up his ego by choosing to spend more time with him than whatever your other obligation was. But this still comes with the risk of getting there and realizing off the bat that he’s just not your type or you two just aren’t the match in person that you are on the app.

A third possibility would be to figure out a look that’s somewhere between “no makeup or product at all” and “full face and hair on point”. If, for example, you could get by with minimal make-up – possibly even down to tinted moisturizer and lip gloss – then that might work for you instead of having to do the works. That is, admittedly a big “if”, especially if your streamlined process takes 45 minutes.

At the end of the day, the best thing you can do is figure out what works and is actually feasible for you. You may find that 45 minute prep for a 15 minute meetup to be rewarding, or you may find that it’s a time sink that makes things harder and more frustrating. Or you may decide to  just skip the pre-date idea entirely. That’s absolutely cool too; everything I advocate is advice, not a contractual obligation or The One True Way. Whatever works for you is what works. As long as it makes you happy and helps you get the results you want, then it’s all good.

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 found you on Google and I had some questions:

1: Why is it my husband always tells me I’m not attracted to him (even tho I’m always touching and loving on him and telling him he’s handsome and so on)

2: Why does my husband constantly start a fight to try to get me to sleep with him like I don’t mean to but I always unintentionally forget to be intimate with him, like it literally slips my mind.

And 

3: Why does the constant fighting and him accusing me of cheating even though I’m by his side all the time, make it easier to forget about our intimacy?

Center Cannot Hold

DEAR CENTER CANNOT HOLD: I have a lot of questions for you, CCH, because what starts out like an unfortunate but explicable conflict gets weird by the second question. But, as with many letters like yours, it’s best to roll it from the top. So to start with, why does your husband keep saying you’re not attracted to him? There’re a few possibilities here. One is simply that you two aren’t speaking the same language, as it were. The book “The 5 Love Languages” gets a lot of stick in circles for being… let’s be generous and say religion-focused, but there’re germs of truth to it. One of the things that is vital in any relationship – sexual, romantic or platonic – is clear and effective communication. And part of effective communication means speaking in the language that your partner actually understands.

One of the conflicts I see crop up fairly often is when two people are expressing love and affection for one another, but they’re doing it in ways that the other person doesn’t necessarily hear. Someone who expresses love and caring for others via nurturing behaviors – cooking and feeding them, for example – may get frustrated when their partner doesn’t recognize that this is what they’re doing. To them, this is just the division of household responsibilities, or just something their partner likes doing. On the other hand, someone who expresses love by giving gifts or providing opportunities for their loved ones may be confused when the recipient of their affections feels manipulated; the off-put partner may have issues surrounding financial independence and self-sufficiency, and feels like someone giving them gifts is creating a sense of obligation or is trying to show off.

So if you’re someone who expresses love or attraction via physical touch or though saying the words, and your husband isn’t someone who receives love that way, then there could be a disconnect between what you’re saying and what he’s hearing. You are shouting “love” at the top of your lungs, but that’s not what he’s hearing. To overcome this problem, you’d want to discuss precisely what ways you could express your attraction to him in ways that he would prefer or understand – does he need something that you’re not providing? Is there’s some way of expressing affection and attraction that he would see as being more ‘real’, rather than just standard husband/wife behavior?

Another potential cause is that it’s not you, it’s him. He may not feel like he’s attractive, and he has some deep core of anxiety or depression that’s acting like a sort of emotional desert. You can pour out all the love and affection you want, but it just soaks into the ground or evaporates into the air without ever nourishing life. It’s not that you aren’t showing him that you’re attracted in a real and measurable way, it’s that he can’t accept it. It’s sort of like feeling as though the person saying “of course I think you’re hot” or “I love you” is going through the motions, just saying words out of habit or a sense of obligation. Until he feels that he is attractive and desirable – or feels worthy of being desired – then it never soaks in.

In cases like these, then the matter’s pretty much out of your hands. You can’t love someone out of depression, no matter how hard you try. Nor for that matter, can you convince someone that they’re desirable if they aren’t feeling it; the brain’s just too good at creating reasons why your saying it just doesn’t “count”. And while validation from others, who presumably don’t have the supposed “obligation” you do can push that feeling back, the relief it brings is always temporary. The external validation won’t ever fill the hole at the center of his self-concept; the only person who can truly fill that hole is him. Solving this problem is a question of therapy and counseling. If he’s dealing with depression, he may need medication in addition to talk therapy. If he’s dealing with other issues involving his self-esteem or self-perception, then hey may need to drill deep into the underlying causes; the low self esteem tends to be a symptom, rather than a discrete problem.

But there’s a third potential cause that crops up in your second and third question: he seems to feel like he’s not getting enough sex. In some ways, this wraps back around to the first potential conflict; if sex and a sexual connection is a vital part of how he expresses and/or receives love, then verbal validation or physical (but not necessarily sexual) touch isn’t going to be the same. And to be fair to you, he seems to be going about expressing his frustration in the worst and least productive way possible.

However, this brings me back to my questions for you, starting with “what do you mean ‘you forget to have sex with him’?” That’s not a question asked out of disbelief. I’m literally unsure just what you mean. Did the two of you agree to a particular schedule (or have one imposed by him, for that matter) and you keep forgetting and ending up going to bed early or having scheduling conflicts? Do you have to plan out times to have sex in advance (something some couples do, either by choice or out of necessity) and then it slips your mind as though you forgot to enter it in your Google calendar? Or is sex simply not a priority for you, so you tend to not think about it and – as a result – don’t have as much sex with your husband? Are you someone who simply doesn’t have much of a sex drive? Or are you prone to just taking care of things yourself when you get the urge, rather than sleeping with your husband?

Your third question – about the fights and accusations – is easy to answer, in part because of how it ties into this: his behavior’s a turn-off to you. It’s kinda hard to get in a sexy mood when your partner’s constantly accusing you of cheating – even when there’s no actual way that infidelity could happen. If he was accusing you of trying to poison him when you made dinner, you’d quit wanting to cook at all than deal with the fights about it. Small wonder you’re “forgetting” to sleep with him; his behavior is the Anti-Sex Equation. Why would you want to sleep with someone who just keeps telling you that you’re doing something wrong, even when you’re trying to solve the very problem he was complaining about.

Incidentally, this leads to my next question for you: what do you mean by “starting a fight to get you to sleep with him”. Is he getting upset that you two aren’t having sex and he complains or starts haranguing you about it? Is he trying to have discussions about your lack of sexual intimacy and it just turns into arguments because he has a hard time understanding or believing that you just forgot – again, whatever that means in this case? Is he literally trying to badger you into bed – “You said that if I did X, you’d do Y” or “It’s been three weeks and I’m owed” or something equally anti-sexy?

Another question: is this conflict something that started recently, or has this been growing over months or even years? If the sexual connection you two have (or had) has decreased without warning or explanation (either gradually or all of the sudden), then it’s at least somewhat understandable that he leapt to “my wife is having an affair”. It’s not necessarily logical and has far more to do with insecurity than reality, but I can at least understand how his mind went there. It’s not helpful – in fact, his behavior is the definition of “counterproductive” under the best of circumstances – but I could understand the thought processes that lead there.

I’d also be curious as to what you’ve done as a couple to try to resolve this – if anything. It doesn’t sound like you have – I imagine you’d have mentioned things like couple’s counseling if you had. If it’s all been just the two of you (or just, y’know, you) trying to fix things amongst yourselves, then it may well be time to pull a trained third party in to help mediate things. I would strongly suggest you two go in for couple’s counseling with a sex-positive counselor to help facilitate the conversations that clearly need to happen here. If you don’t have a counselor already, the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists has a referral directory on their site that can help you find a sex-positive couple’s counselor in your area. Make an appointment and hie thyselves to the counselor’s office as quick as you can. If nothing else, having someone act as a translator and mediator can hopefully help the two of you hear and understand each other without the dialogue collapsing into more fights.

And while you’re there… consider scheduling some sessions on your own, either with that counselor or another one. This – to put it mildly – doesn’t sound like a healthy situation for you, and talking to a counselor on your own could help you determine if this is a solvable problem, or if it’s a “get the f--k out of Dodge” situation. It can be hard to see when a problem’s gone on for so long that it’s gone septic and needs to be drained and treated… or if the problem isn’t the relationship but the person. If you’ve been putting in good faith efforts to try to fix things and your husband’s response is to just pick fights and force the issue regarding sex… well, that’s not marriage that needs to be fixed, that’s a marriage that needs to end. Like, yesterday.

The sooner you figure these things out, the sooner you’ll come to a solution. It may just be a question as to whether there’s a failure to communicate, a difference of libidos that needs accommodations from everyone involved, or if this marriage is already over and someone (you, most likely) needs to put it out of its misery.

Good luck.

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