DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: First and foremost, I want to say I love what you do. Your column has been my geeky relationship north star for some time now. But I’ve hit a snag that I’m hoping you can help with.

Here’s the situation: When it comes to the dating scene, I feel like I’m stuck in a loop of rejection. You know those characters in movies and series who are always just on the cusp of getting the girl or guy but never do? Yeah, that feels like my life.

I’m not the type to get easily discouraged, but it’s starting to wear on me. Whether it’s asking someone out for coffee or trying to take a more serious relationship to the next level, the outcome seems to be consistent: I’m not what they’re looking for. And honestly? It’s getting harder not to take it personally. Each “no thanks,” or “I just see you as a friend,” or the dreaded ghosting feels like another blow to my self-worth.

I’ve tried different approaches: online dating, being set up by friends, joining hobby groups, you name it. The results are often the same. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a few short-term relationships, but they always seem to end with them moving on to someone “better.”

I believe in personal growth, and I’ve taken steps to improve myself, both for my own well-being and to be a better partner. But with every rejection, I find myself questioning, “Is it me? Is there something fundamentally unlovable or undesirable about me?”

So, the million-dollar question: How do I handle the sting of constant rejection without letting it erode my self-esteem? I’m hoping you’ve got some insights or strategies up your sleeve to help me navigate this. I’d hate to become cynical and jaded because deep down, I still believe there’s someone out there who’d be thrilled to be with me.

Looking forward to your guidance,

Forever Player One

DEAR FOREVER PLAYER ONE: So, here’s a question for you: if you were looking for a tasty salmon for dinner and you were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, would you be blaming yourself for being a poor fisherman? Or could you understand that sometimes, not finding what you’re looking for means you’re in the wrong place?

Now, I ask this because so much of rejection has nothing to do with us. You can, quite literally, do everything right and still fail. As Dita Von Teese once said: you can be the sweetest, juiciest peach in the world, but some folks just don’t like peaches. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the peach. It just means that some folks don’t want peaches; they want pears. Or oranges. Or they may not want fruit at all.

Rejection is something that you can’t ever fully account for, because rejection so often has more to do with other people and their own baggage. You don’t – and often can’t – know what makes someone decide they’re not into you. They may have just gotten out of a relationship themselves. They may not be interested in relationships at all. You may remind them of their ex in some ineffable way and they just can’t vibe with that. That doesn’t mean that you did something wrong; it just means that there’s something there that triggers something in them through no fault of your own.

This is also why someone dating somebody else after you – even going on to have the kind of relationship you wish you had with them – doesn’t mean they found someone “better”, objectively. It means that they ended up in a relationship with another person; end of. You know next to nothing about why they chose to settle down with that person. It may have been as simple as “that’s who they happened to be dating when they decided it was time to commit”; that doesn’t mean this person is better than you, it just means that it was a quirk of fate and timing.

Rejection – even strings of rejection –  also can just be bad luck. One of the things we often forget is that random chance is random, and that means you can end up on streaks that seem improbable… including losing streaks. Even losing streaks that seem to last for years. The idea that a string of losses means we’re doing something wrong is a form of the Gambler’s Fallacy. Just because the coin keeps coming up heads doesn’t mean that you’re “due” for tails soon, because the odds aren’t cumulative. Each flip of the coin is entirely separate from the previous one. So it is with dating. And so it is with rejection. Unless you’re working exclusively from a pool of potential dates who all know each other and know exactly who’s dating or been asked to date whom, each rejection is unique and separate from the last. 

We often treat dating as though it were poker, where you’re competing with other people and you need to play “correctly” to ensure that you win and they lose. It’s far more akin to blackjack – everybody is playing their own game, and their success or failure is functionally independent of what you do. Yes, you can play “correctly” and shift the odds as best you can, but chance is always going to be part of the system. Just because someone else got a lucky draw doesn’t mean that they were “better” than you or that they took the card that “should” have been yours. It just means they got a lucky draw. That’s it.

Now, you can and should do your best to optimize your chances. Some of this is self-improvement – being your best, most polished self, and so on. Some of it is demographic; you may be in an area where “your” people are just thin on the ground. Queer people in particular know this struggle; being gay or trans in a small, conservative town means that you’re not going to have as many options, if any. That doesn’t mean they’re doing anything wrong, it just means that they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or it may mean making sure that you’re looking for the right people. If you’re a peach, you want people who want peaches. It also means looking for people who really want what you have to offer. When we say “don’t be everybody’s cup of tea, be a few people’s shot of whiskey”, what that means is that you don’t necessarily want many people who only kinda like you, you want someone who craves you.

It is important to look at what you’re doing and how, because that can influence things. But there’s a difference between “make sure you’re not doing the things that make you roll with disadvantage” and “you’re a flawed, unloveable person”.

It may mean that you’re trying too hard, that you’ve let the rejection get in your head and now you’re trying to prove something to yourself by getting a win, any win. That desperation can put people off. Or it may mean that you’re going after people who you just aren’t compatible with. Sometimes what we want isn’t the same as what’s right for us, and we haven’t balanced the two sides of that particular equation.

And still other times, the issue is that you’re not putting yourself into fortune’s path. I’ve lost track of the number of people who seem to think that if someone’s right for them, that special someone will track them down and kick in the door of their apartment and sweep them off their feet. Or you might be experiencing a lot of rejection because you’re putting yourself out there a lot and thus courting rejection more often. This is one of the unspoken issues with online dating; you’re “approaching” more people than you would in person and thus courting rejection more frequently than you would be if you were going out and talking to people in the flesh.

And yes, sometimes it can be a skill issue. Or a “your pool may be smaller than others’” for any number of reasons that don’t have anything to do with you as a person. Sometimes it’s something that can be changed and improved upon. Sometimes it’s something you have to learn to work around.

None of this is to say that rejection doesn’t hurt or that it can’t get to you. It’s gonna sting. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to sting the same every time; sometimes it’s really painful, other times, its less noticeable than a mosquito bite. But if rejection starts becoming the worst pain every time, that often means that you’ve let it get set up shop in your head rent free. You’ve ended up focusing more on the outcome – being rejected – than recognizing that not everyone’s going to be right for you and that’s ok.

If it gets bad, then take time off. Focus on other things, connect with friends, do the things that are good for your soul and make life amazing. You’ll often find that taking a break is far better than continuing to pound your head against the wall or taking another dive into the thorn hedge – both for your self-esteem and for your odds. Sometimes the difference between success and failure is to just step away for a bit and come back when you’ve had a chance to relax and recuperate.

After all:  “it’ll happen when you stop trying so hard” tends to be true. Often we get so caught up in the process and outcome dependent, we forget why we started in the first place. But when we stop, take a step back, relax and reconnect with who we are and what we want… we often put ourselves in a place where not only are we at our best, but we have the energy and resources to not just recognize an opportunity, but to take full advantage of it when it appears.

Good luck.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m a single gay man in my early 40s. I was doing fine dating despite the relatively small pool of age-appropriate gay- or bi- men in my Rust Belt city. The assorted apps were quite helpful in finding prospective partners, given both population size and a lot of my hobbies being fairly solitary. Then the pandemic began, and the idea of spending indoor time with strangers whose risk tolerance was likely greater than mine became really unappealing, so I essentially stopped, especially when I found out that the guy who had been an FWB turned out to be an anti-vaxxer.

I have reluctantly concluded that we’re likely going to be dealing with repeated waves of Covid for years, and probably the rest of our lives, given the public’s general attitudes towards vaccination and wearing masks. So this is the new reality of dating, and wishing it were different isn’t going to change anything. But: I’m a biology professor. I know in quite a lot of detail how high the risk is of long term complications from this virus (substantially higher than with Polio, for goodness’ sake), how easy it is to catch, etc. I’m still masking in the grocery store, picking up take out instead of dining in a restaurant, working out at home, etc, to limit my risk.

How do I find a balance between not really wanting to be celibate for the rest of my life, wanting to keep my risks fairly low, and also not come across as a complete nutjob to potential dates or hookups (for this reason, at least)?

Love In The Time Of COVID

DEAR LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The timing of this letter is… I don’t think fortuitous is the right word, but certainly well-timed, seeing as (at the time of writing) we seem to be looking at a potential surge of new COVID cases. There’s currently a lot of discussion about risk management and mitigation, especially when mask requirements and risk mitigation have become politically charged in the extreme.

It's also (again, at the time of writing) just as we’re on the verge of the FDA approving a new COVID vaccine booster that is showing signs of strong neutralization against Omicron and the new variant that seems to be emerging in early tests. So by the time you read this, you may be able to get the booster along with your flu and RSV vaccines.

Right now, a lot of people are trying to gauge their own risk tolerances and to what extent they’re going to try to avoid getting COVID (or getting it again), and there’re many who kept to a heightened state of vigilance, even as cases receded. So you may take some comfort that you’re in good company, at the very least.

I wish I had some easy answers for you. The politicization of just wearing masks made prevention and mitigation a minefield, and it can be difficult when you feel like the only person bothering to mask up or keeping to previous restrictions while the rest of the world acts like COVID disappeared entirely. Pandemic fatigue is very real, and even people who were religious with their preventative measures may have reached a point where they just feel exhausted by it all.

Of course, this is matched by the most vulnerable of our population, who feel – with good reason – that they were abandoned and told that their safety was worth less than “returning to normal”.

And it certainly isn’t helped when grifters, bulls--t artists deliberately poison the information well and some well-meaning-but-misinformed make it that much harder to get real, meaningful and accurate information about population spread and risk. It’s hard to gauge risk when some of the loudest voices seem to be dramatically overstating or understating the dangers and what may or may not happen to folks who get multiple infections or the long-term effects.

The good news is that, unlike at the start of the pandemic, we have far more resources than we did before. The vaccines don’t give 100% protection against infection, but it does make infection far less likely and far less dangerous than before. We also have more treatments for people who do get COVID that make the vast majority of infections inconvenient and unpleasant, rather than life-threatening. We’re much better positioned now to weather the storm than we were before. It’s still potentially deadly – influenza still kills tens of thousands every year, after all – but circumstances now are better than at the start of the pandemic by orders of magnitude.

But hey, you know this already. The question you need answered is “so, what now?”

Well… that part is trickier. There’s less societal support for the sorts of preventative measures than we took at the start and we’re all dealing with a metric s--tload of PTSD and trauma from 2020. Some people want to act like we’re back to pre-pandemic times, some people are swearing up and down that they’ll mask up and stay home until the bitter end and most are somewhere in the middle. And it’s easy to say that something’s a risk that you’re willing to take, but that often leaves out the other people around you who didn’t consent to that level of risk.

But that level of risk tolerance is where you start. All dating is, in part, about balance of risk vs. reward and risk tolerance. Right now, you know the degree of prevention that you’re comfortable with. If you don’t feel comfortable a more elevated level of risk than you currently accept – by whatever measurement you feel is relevant – then your risk tolerance is going to be your filter. You’re going to want to look for people who are more or less on your level with regards to their prevention efforts.

Practically speaking, that means making it clear in your app profiles (since you’re not going out and meeting people) that you’re only interested in dating people who are as risk-conscious as you and who are willing to meet that level of mitigation. If that means strict masking, outdoor dates only and COVID pod rules, then make sure that’s front and center. You’re still going to be accepting a certain amount of risk – think of how many people discovered that people in their pod were playing fast and loose with who they were seeing – but you’re never going to reach perfect safety. There’s always going to be an element of risk; it’s just a matter of how much risk you’re comfortable with.

However, this also means that the tighter your requirements, the smaller your available pool will be. You may well find that you’re one of a handful in your area who are willing to take that level of risk management. If that’s the case… well, you have to decide whether the tradeoff is worth it. Either you have to be willing to accept a much more restricted dating life, or decide if the reward (more dates, more potential partners) is worth the risk (higher chances of COVID infection).

And unfortunately, this is a case where demographics aren’t going to help as much. The larger, more cosmopolitan cities may have a higher population of gay men, but that’s not likely to track to an equally higher number of potential partners who’ll have a similar level of risk tolerance.

Now, maybe you’ll get lucky and find the Frank to your Bill right off the bat. Or you might have to give it more time until the current surge fades, new vaccines increase COVID sterility and immunity and the dominant variants become more akin to the modern flu (as opposed to The Grey Lady of 1918).

At the end of the day, my opinion on the matter is irrelevant. You’ll have a much better grasp on the risk to yourself and your loved ones than I would. Under the current circumstances, you’re the only one who can decide what level of avoidance and management is right for you and what trade-offs you’re willing to accept.

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: Here are the basics: I have a friend, we’ll call her June. Me and June go to the same school. Both of us have social anxiety, and she has ADHD. Both of us don’t have a lot of friends (I am planning to make more, the school year just started anyway). I am trying to decide whether or not I should just stop being her friend.

June doesn’t talk to me much. She’s a not a great conversationalist and can go several minutes without saying anything if I let her. I don’t like the silence and I prefer to talk to friends when I’m with them. We have some interests in common, and hang out occasionally, even having a few classes and clubs together. When I’m around her, I feel like I can’t be myself. The friendship feels half-dead and kind of obligatory, the only reasons I’ve stayed thus far being that we both don’t have any other friends. I don’t like the idea of being alone again, as I know making friends takes time and I already have trouble with it, but I don’t wanna be around June anymore and I feel kind of bad stringing her along. I don’t really like her and it feels selfish to pretend I do just because I don’t wanna be alone. I don’t hate her, but I don’t like her either. She’s just tolerable.

Also, even if I stopped talking to her as often, we share a few classes and clubs, so I’m not sure how things would be if I just stopped being her friend. I could just only interact with her in those environments, but I’d still like to get your perspective if possible. I appreciate you!

(a separate but related issue: I don’t feel like I’ve really had any totally comfortable friendships where I could be myself. Some superficial ones, but none yet with any emotional depth)

Moving On Down

DEAR MOVING ON DOWN: I wish you gave me your age along with this, MOD, because that can make a difference – especially if you’re still in high-school or younger.

I admit, I have to wonder how June feels about things and whether she’s on the same page as you regarding your friendship or not. You all sound fairly different from one another. It doesn’t seem like you have much more than proximity and a lack of other friends to act as the glue to this relationship. You have different temperaments and, from the sounds of it, different social needs. She seems to be the sort that’s comfortable with silence and parallel play, you need more interaction. She may well be feeling as mixed about things as you are.

I also have to wonder whether you’ve ever actually tried seeking more emotional depth with people – June or otherwise. It sounds like you’ve been coasting along on fairly shallow, low-effort friendships, which could be part of the problem. Friendships require investment from both parties. A lot of seemingly shallow friendships are only shallow because nobody actually put the effort in to see if there was more – or missed the other person’s bid for greater connection.

If you want closer, more emotionally connected friendships, you’re going to have to actually make the bid for it. If you’re waiting for someone else to take the lead, you may well be waiting for a long time. Someone needs to make the first move and if that’s what you want, then it may as well be you.

That having been said: you aren’t obligated to be friends with anyone you don’t want to be friends with, any more than you’re obligated to stay in a romantic relationship when you want out. You can end a friendship for any reason, same with a romantic relationship. If you’re done with June, then you’re done with June and that’s all you really need.

Now, not every friend break up requires an actual discussion or saying “hey, we’re done”. Many friendships don’t end with fireworks or high drama; many just quietly fade until you realize you haven’t talked with ol’ wazziname in how long? It’s not impossible for you to just quietly let this fade out as you both just do your own thing and spend less time together. This happens more often than you’d think; not a conscious decision so much as just one week of not hanging out becomes two, then three and so on.

But this is also why I asked about how June feels about things. She doesn’t sound terribly communicative in general, but sometimes a friendship fading away hurts more than you’d expect. That feeling of “wait, why did we drift apart” can sneak up on a person like a snake in tall grass. So too can the feeling of “did I do something wrong?” That lack of clarity and self-doubt can be deeply unpleasant, especially if that triggers any hidden anxiety landmines.

It’s also kind of a s--tty thing to do to someone you presumably liked and who likes you. I don’t think you necessarily need to say “hey, we’re done, peace out cub scout”, but the impact of ghosting someone after a first date vs. six months in is pretty significant. It’d be a good idea for you to consider how it would make you feel if someone (other than June) were to pull the fade away on you deliberately.

What I wouldn’t recommend is trying to Tarzan your way through this; hanging on to this friendship until you’ve got another one that you can grab onto. I understand that you don’t like feeling lonely – very few people do – but “I only stuck around until I had another vine to swing on” is the sort of thing that feels personal, pointed and frankly, more than a little callous and incredibly disrespectful. If you don’t want to be friends, don’t be friends, but don’t make her your safety net until you find someone else. That’s just needlessly painful, and in any break up you should do your best to avoid unnecessary pain.

Now, seeing one another afterwards is going to be somewhat inevitable. Unless you’re going to a fairly large college or university, you’re probably going to be running in similar circles. Much like dealing with a romantic break up, the key to dealing with your ex friend or ex-lover is to be polite and respectful. They deserve at least that much. Unless things were  really bad or ended badly, you don’t need to avoid her like she’s got the latest COVID strain. That’s only going to add insult to the injury and cause more unnecessary pain. Even if you don’t want to spend one-on-one time with her, you can at least show her respect. You can be friendly without being friends. You can be polite and distant if you absolutely need to, but you can’t skip the polite part.

If it helps, think of this as treating her how you would prefer to be treated by an ex; after all, they’re not going to just disappear into the ether after things end any more than you will if someone breaks up with you.

Meanwhile, if you do decide to talk about why you’re ending things – or if she brings it up – keep it short, simple and about you. Using “I” statements here are important; she should understand that it’s not that she did anything wrong or that there’s something wrong with her. You have different needs and different temperaments, that’s all. It’s still going to hurt – there’s no avoiding that – but, again, you want to avoid unnecessary pain, and letting her think that it’s her fault is very unnecessary.

Good luck.

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