DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I read your column once in a while and never thought I’d have to be here. But lo’ and behold, here we are.

To get to the point. A dear friend who rejected me not too long ago is being uncomfortably touchy-feely and bringing up how I moved on real fast now that I have a girlfriend.

For context, I met this friend — Hera — a long time ago, but we started to seriously hang out when a mutual buddy of ours organized a weekly Vampire: The Masquerade TTRPG session and invited us as players. From there on we hit it off great as friends and we started hanging out outside of our weekly sessions. The amusement park, playing games together, etc. All great things that we did as friends.

Flash forward to three months ago, and I notice that I’m beginning to develop feelings. Now I know myself and I know that if I don’t address emotions when they are just buds, the ensuing garden will be painful as heck to trim if anything goes wrong. So I tell Hera exactly that, that I am starting to develop feelings for her. She tells me politely but in no uncertain terms that she does not feel the same and that we should reduce our hangouts outside our weekly sessions for a while. I’ve no issue with waiting until if and when she feels comfortable with hanging out off-table again so I respect that. And luckily our dynamic while playing Vampire wasn’t affected by this.

A month passes and I’ve completely moved on. I meet Freya at this time. Freya had been going to the same gym I go to for a decent amount of time. We’d never talked but that day she asked for general exercise advise, and we talked about that for a bit. We went for some coffee afterwards and really clicked together. Freya and I share our hobby of reading, she is a musician and, even though I don’t work in the field, I am a trained vocalist. So since we share that in common, we often go on deep dives on the topic and have jam sessions.

Once it’s clear that we are going to go forward together, we make it official. I only tell people if they ask or if we organize a double date or something. Outside of that I don’t feel like shouting out my private life to the four winds so I don’t particularly bother to tell anyone else, Hera included.

However in the session that came after I made it official with Freya, Hera came up to me almost immediately and asked me if it was true I had a girlfriend. I’ve no clue how she found out, but when I said yes she said something to the effect of “well someone moved on quickly” in a rather snide manner. I thought it was odd but chalked it up to a joke that didn’t land and thought nothing of it.

Nevertheless, as time has gone on, I’ve found that just about every session we have, in the time before we start as well as when we have a break to eat, Hera keeps making comments such as “if we had started dating back then we’d be going to my apartment after this” and though she is already a very touchy person usually, lately she keeps trying to hold my hand and one time she started to rub my upper thigh. I stood up and went to the bathroom after that particular time.

I talked to Hera about how this made me uncomfortable, and she said that it’s her right since she’s known me longer and “knows me far better than Freya ever will.” Which I take to mean she won’t stop. For the previous session, I asked another girl at the table who’d noticed the situation at the table to swap me places so that she sat next to Hera instead of me, and I also arrived slightly later than I usually do so that Hera does not have a chance to ambush me with off-putting comments. And I’ve been avoiding situations where just the two of us might be there together.

My question is: why is this even happening? Moreover what can I do here? I don’t wanna leave the game because it has been years since I have had the chance to have a consistent TTRPG group. And lastly, while I’ve told Freya a bit of what’s happening, I do want to let her know that she’s my no. 1 priority right now. And want to make it very clear to her that I have 0 romantic interest in Hera. What do you recommend me to do to achieve that?

Thank you for reading Dr! And I hope there’s something I can do here.

-Trouble at the Tabletop

DEAR TROUBLE AT THE TABLETOP: OK, TATT, I’m going to skip to the important part: Explaining things to Freya shouldn’t really be an issue here. If Freya is at all a reasonable adult, she should recognize that this isn’t some sort of threat to your relationship with her. Similarly, why Hera is acting like this isn’t as important as what you need to do here – and that’s to tell Hera to keep both her comments and her hands to herself.

The way she’s acting is not cool. She’s making you uncomfortable and I would suspect that it’s making other folks in the group uncomfortable too. It doesn’t matter whether she’s trying to mark territory, make trouble for you and Freya or has a chronic case of “only wants what she can’t have”. You have to draw a hard line and tell her to knock it the f--k off, in so many words.

You need to say – out loud, to her, in no uncertain terms – that you don’t appreciate her touching you like that and you want her to stop. Similarly, tell her, straight up, that you aren’t interested in flirting with her, nor do you appreciate her comments about how “if you were dating”. It’s not appropriate, nor is it funny, nor does it matter if “she knew you longer” or “better” or whatever. Whatever “privileges” she thinks she has because of knowing you for as long as she has aren’t inviolate, nor do they override your desire for her to not act like that.

So you need to make it clear that this is not wanted, not cool and, importantly, needs to stop now. There’re no seniority clauses when it comes to boundaries, and the various privileges you may have allowed her to have are entirely at your discretion – which means you can pull them back at any time, for any reason.

So, why is she acting like this? Well, there’re any number of possible reasons. Occasionally, someone many not realize they have feelings for someone or find someone attractive until they realize that other people might be into them. Seeing them through the eyes of another – the person who did say yes to a date, for example – makes them realize that maybe they felt more than they knew. Or they might have a jealous surge; just because they said “no” doesn’t mean that they want to share or see that other person go to someone else. This can especially be true if they’re getting something from the person they rejected – attention, emotional intimacy, etc. – without also having a romantic or sexual connection.

Some people feel possessive of the people in their lives, especially folks they know are interested in them romantically and have a weird sense ownership over them. Other people get a charge from knowing that someone has feelings for them, when they don’t return them. It gives an ego boost and a sense of power over them, knowing that this person is quietly pining away. They don’t appreciate it when the other person actually taking their “no” seriously and choosing to move on instead of becoming an orbiter.

Or it could be as simple and as banal as you pricked her ego by moving on and finding someone else. If we strip all the unreasonable s--t that Hera is doing out of it, having someone confess that they have feelings and then turn around and start a relationship with someone else can sting. It’s not unreasonable to feel a little irked by that; if someone can say they really like you but then find someone else so quickly, that could make somebody feel disposable or like the attraction was more about fitting someone into the hole marked “girlfriend”.

But there’s having a moment of feeling your ego get bruised and waging a weird campaign of inappropriate comments and touching. You did the thing I tell folks to do all the time after getting rejected: accept it with good grace and move on. You did, you found someone who was a better match and – importantly – wanted you back. The fact that Hera is having a weird snit about it is a her problem, not a you problem. If she genuinely is interested… well, too bad. She had her window of opportunity and missed. If she’s playing weird power games to try to reestablish her place of influence over you, then she needs to grow the f--k up and move the f--k on herself.

But as I said: none of that really matters, because the reasoning isn’t as important as the actions behind them. She’s being inappropriate, and you need to lay down boundaries and be willing to enforce them. If you tell her to knock it off, but don’t do anything if she refuses, then all you’ve done is tell her that your boundaries don’t matter. So draw lines about what you’re willing to tolerate here and make them stick. If she was ever your friend in good faith, she should understand that she’s crossing a line. And if she doesn’t… well, that’s when you may have to talk to the others about her and how her antics are making you feel.

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 not a person known for being succinct, but here’s the tl;dr as short as I can make it (it will not be short):

About nine years ago I had a very tumultuous breakup with a guy who cheated on me, the person he was cheating on me WITH, and basically every other woman in his vicinity. It came at a really bad time in my life, and put me through the wringer for years.

Cut to last year when I was doing a lot better, and soon after a celebrity death that deeply affected me, I saw on my ex’s Twitch channel (yeah, I looked in on his socials once in a while; I’m only human) that one of his pets had died and he was a mess about it. It triggered a flicker of empathy in me, and after mulling it over for a week or so, I decided to reach out to him to offer my sympathies.

That actually went better than expected. After lots of texts and post-mortems on our old relationship and many apologies from his end, we eventually settled into a friendship that lasted for a year and a half. We talked nearly every day and agreed that this was better and we never should have dated in the first place. And we really, truly, got along great when we weren’t all entangled.

Cut to the beginning of last September when things got a little spicy and we ended up sexting. The next day we both agreed that it was fun, but neither of us felt the need to do it again, and it felt like we’d buried the past and could move on. And for a while, we did, and things were just…normal. It was nice.

Two weeks after that he calls me out of the blue to say “I need to come clean to you about something. I’ve been seeing someone for the past two years.”

Which meant…for the entire time we’d been friends again. Which meant he’d been hiding her from me every single day for a year and a half. Which meant he cheated on her with me and made me complicit in that cheating without my knowledge or consent.

I was absolutely livid and told him to a) tell her the truth and b) go the f--k back to therapy so he could figure out why he keeps doing this s--t. Our entire friendship was contingent on one thing that I told him on Day Two: Do not ever do to another woman what you did to me. Which he did. With the same excuses as nine years ago – he was sorry, he loathes himself, he was weak, he doesn’t understand why he lied to me, he hates himself for hurting me, blah blah BS et cetera.

He did end up going to therapy, which I know because he texted me that his therapist’s advice to heal from his situation (HE needed to heal?!) was to not be in contact with me anymore. I was devastated because despite everything, I really did treasure our friendship and wanted to work through it. Instead he dipped out of my life – again – after dropping an emotional bomb on me – AGAIN.

The point of this whole thing is that yes, I know I’m better off without this guy in my life and yes, I broke off all contact permanently and unfollowed and/or blocked him everywhere. But I can’t help missing him like crazy. I’ve journaled pages and pages about how much I miss just shooting the s--t or sharing dumb memes with him. We really did get along like gangbusters. I’m trying so hard to come to terms with the fact that I’m never going to understand his reasons for hiding an entire-ass girlfriend from me for a year and a half…though I have a suspicion it was because he was hoping to get me back in the sack one day. Which I made very clear was not going to happen, despite the one-off sexting.

I’ve distracted myself with every possible distraction at my disposal. I’m in therapy. I’m journaling and not contacting him. How do I finally get this man off my mind? I’m walking around with this friend-shaped hole in my heart and it F--KING SUCKS. And while I’m at it, any theories as to why he would do this to me (AGAIN) in the first place? Chair Leg of Truth me if you gotta.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

DEAR ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK: Let’s address the ex, first: I don’t know if he was necessarily hoping to get you back, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. Nor, honestly, do I think it matters what he was thinking or why he hid (or, at least, never mentioned) his girlfriend to you. It’s completely understandable that you would want to get your head around his reasoning, but I suspect there wasn’t any. Or at least, nothing that would make sense if you weren’t privy to the 24/7 live feed inside his head… and possibly not even then. He may not be able to tell you what the f--k he was thinking.

And honestly, I’m not sure that your knowing would make you feel better.

I suspect this feeling of “there has to be a reason for it” is as much about trying to reconcile how you feel about him and your idea of who he was and what you had with him with his actions and how he hurt you. If anything, I’d guess that maybe part of this is the feeling that there should’ve been some sign or indication that you missed, some way that this pain could have been avoided… and honestly I’m not sure there was, or that anyone could’ve recognized it if there were. Some things can only be seen in hindsight, no matter how glaringly obvious it seems then. Sometimes we simply can’t see the oncoming train; we can only see the evidence of it in the aftermath.   

What does matter is that he definitely screwed this particular pooch, and that’s on him.

I don’t think that he was wrong when he said that he needed to heal; it sounds like he’s got his own issues going on in the background that you and I aren’t privy to. Similarly, I don’t think he was intending for it to sound like he was saying he needed to heal because of you. But there’s a significant difference between “intended” and “outcome”.

Bringing it up the way he did, and phrasing things the way he did, sure as s--t made it sound like he was blaming you in some way. It certainly feels like he was making your feeling betrayed and deceived somehow an injury done to him, despite his being the organizer and ringmaster of this particular goat rodeo. That wasn’t cool of him and he really should’ve thought that through before saying it. 

What he should have done – besides apologize – is not said anything about the therapist (way to make it their fault for cutting ties, big shoots) and just said “hey, I’m not in a place where I can be a friend to you the way you need or deserve, and I think it’s better if I step back from us.”

It still would’ve sucked to lose the friend after you’d reconnected… but at least it wouldn’t have had the effect of making you feel like you were being blamed for this, in a completely unnecessary, unfair and needlessly hurtful way.

(I suspect “unthinking” and “careless” likely define a lot of his behavior in general, if I’m being honest.)

Now, I think part of what happened – and is still happening – is that while he was a s--tty person in important respects, the fact that he was s--tty in those areas doesn’t retroactively undo the fact that at one point and time, you and he had a connection. You were together for a long time, had a lot in common and genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. That’s not the sort of thing that just “goes away” at the drop of a hat.

It’d be nice if finding out that someone we cared about was a s--thead would retconned our history and we could just move on, secure in the knowledge that they were just a s--tty person and the past never happened. But unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

The feelings and the friendship you had were real. The history you shared and the common interests made it easy to fall back into old patterns – including increasingly spicy texts that lead to that sexting session – and it felt good to be back in that place. Like easing into a warm bath or putting on a pair of well-broken-in jeans.

Having the reminder of the good times, painted in the golden light and soft focus of nostalgia, makes it harder when you have to give them up a second time. It feels like even more of a betrayal because, theoretically, you’re older and wiser now. Instead, you ended up with “Second verse, same as the first/ a little bit louder and a whole lot worse”. And that really, really sucks. It’s almost like a glimpse of what could’ve been, but having it snatched away, again.

This is no small part of why it’s so hard to let go. Yeah, he sucks (a lot) and he hurt you. But that pain doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t undo the experiences you shared or the feelings you felt. It’s just the marker of where those feelings stopped. You feel the way you do because you had good feelings with him and they were snatched away again, leaving a vacuum behind. For a year and a half, you were creating a new pattern, a new branch of your life with him in it and then it was gone again. Now you’re seeing the empty spaces where he used to be and dealing with the emotional reflexes of a life where you were still friends… a life that doesn’t exist any longer.

It’s going to take time for those to fade. You’ll unlearn those reflexes over time and life will fill in those empty spaces. There will be other friends and other lovers and you’ll build more branches of your life with them that will soon occupy the spaces where you originally made room for him.

Unfortunately, there really isn’t any way of speeding things up. It can help to go out, make new friends and forge new connections… but they’re not going to have the same heft and weight of a connection with someone you’d known for years, not at first. Those take time to build; you can’t force it, even when the connection feels incredibly intense in the early days.

For now, life goes on, and so do you. Feel the f--k out of your feelings, journal the s--t out of your journaling, hang out with friends and remind yourself that life is for living. Find things you love and engage with them with your full heart and soul. Dance yourself into an ecstatic frenzy until you touch the face of God, if that’s your thing. Giving yourself other things to pay attention to will help ease the pain and make it easier for those empty spaces to fill up again, with new and better people.

Time is the great healer and you just need to let time do its work. As much as it sucks now, it won’t suck forever. This, too, shall pass.

It may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass. I promise.

Good luck.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I am literally not even 20 minutes removed from my first (and probably last) experience with a sex worker. Oh man. So a little background on 1. what led to this moment, and then 2. I’ll talk about the moment, and 3. how I feel right now, after the moment.

1. I’ve been struggling REALLY HARD from a breakup over a year ago. I’ve been miserable since and have seen a multiple therapists about it through the year. Although they’ve helped, it’s been temporary. I also realized through therapy that I have a sex/porn addiction. Anyways, the breakup made me realize I needed a fresh start because other aspects of my life were also in shambles (career, finances, social group etc). So I moved to Spain, and tonight, I was feeling incredibly lonely as I do most nights. So I decided to impulsively look up escorts in my area (the sex addiction trigger popping up). I messaged one and really nervously walked to her place, which leads me to….

2. To sum it up. It was bad. I was nervous, scared, excited, and just confused. It felt weird the whole thing. She wasn’t into it, there was a huge language barrier, and it felt so fake. I also originally booked 30 minutes but my nervousness wouldn’t allow me to relax and so nothing really happened the first 30 minutes other than me just bumbling around (mind you it’s been over a year since I had sex). Then I felt bad for her, for me so I booked another 30 minutes (140 Euro down the drain….gulp). The next was just as awkward as the first 30. Lots more bumbling and me trying to get aroused, but I couldn’t. I also have a history of not being able to get aroused with people I just met, I think I am a demisexual is the term. So overall, the experience was flaccid (intentional use of the word here….). So this leads me to…

3. Wow. I feel copious amounts of shame. Shame that I relapsed hardcore (I’ve gone to some SAA meetings and have been trying to stay sober), shame that I just threw away 140 Euros, and shame that I couldn’t perform. I feel confused, sad, VERY depressed, and even lonelier, and lots of anger for going through with it and wasting my money. I really don’t know what my question is, but just advice would be great on the whole thing. I feel honestly, so s--tty right now. I’m trying to use this experience as a catalyst for change. I know I have a lot deeper issues than just sex deprivation (which is another issue too). I need some help please. Thank you so much Dr.

Not So Casual Encounter

DEAR NOT SO CASUAL ENCOUNTER: That sounds like a painfully awkward and embarrassing experience and I’m sorry you went through it. 

There are a number of things to unpack here, but there’re two areas that I want to focus on. One is dealing with the feelings that you’re experiencing right now. Let’s tackle that first.

So to start with: you really don’t have anything to be ashamed of here. Let’s leave the inability to get aroused aside; that’s something that happens to everyone at one point or another. Penises are divas and will frequently make like Pavarotti and refuse to perform if circumstances aren’t perfect. If you’re prone to first time jitters, had too much to drink or your heart’s just not into it, you’re like as not to find yourself trying to shoot pool with a piece of rope. It’s natural, it’s normal and it’s honestly not that big of a deal. I can all but guarantee you that it’s not the first time the escort has dealt with situations like this… possibly not even the first time that week.

It’s not surprising that you had a lousy time, even if we separate out feelings of shame and humiliation. This was a bad time and not great service. You and she couldn’t understand each other, you were already feeling under the gun (30 minutes is NOT a lot of time, especially if you’re not ready to go or need time to warm up, as it were) and from the sounds of it you picked the wrong provider for the sort of experience you likely actually wanted. You wanted something closer to what’s known as a “girlfriend experience”, rather than just getting down to business and going.

Between the way things were organized, a lack of overall experience, the mismatch of expectations and a language barrier and a time crunch… yeah, that’s a recipe for an awkward encounter getting more awkward as one flails about trying to fix things in the moment.

But also it seems like you were seeking something entirely different than just getting your rocks off. I suspect, if the language barrier hadn’t been there, you might not have had sex so much as just companionship… which is actually fairly common. A lot of escorts have clients who are looking for someone to talk to and to not be alone; sex, if it happens at all, ends up being a secondary or tertiary concern.

So no, I don’t think you have anything to be ashamed of. You were lonely, feeling lost and out of control and you went looking for comfort. That’s a perfectly normal and human response.

I think, if there’s anything to take away from this, it’s to recognize that sex is often the vehicle that people use to find what they’re actually after. Visiting an escort isn’t all that unreasonable a means of easing the loneliness. Paid companionship is still companionship and it meant you weren’t going to be as lonely for an hour or so. But ultimately, you were looking for human connection rather than sex and the difficulties you had stemmed from that.

This was ultimately a learning experience, something that helped you get a little closer to understanding what you were actually looking for. The literal price of this lesson stings, I’m sure, but people have spent far more to learn similar things about themselves. I think that reframing this as “ok, that was awkward, but now I know myself better and I have a better idea how to handle this” will be much more helpful here.

But this leads us to the second thing I want to bring up. To be perfectly blunt: sex addiction and porn addiction aren’t really a thing. I’ll quote the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists on this:

“AASECT 1) does not find sufficient empirical evidence to support the classification of sex addiction or porn addiction as a mental health disorder, and 2) does not find the sexual addiction training and treatment methods and educational pedagogies to be adequately informed by accurate human sexuality knowledge. Therefore, it is the position of AASECT that linking problems related to sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors to a porn/sexual addiction process cannot be advanced by AASECT as a standard of practice for sexuality education delivery, counseling or therapy.”

Now, I know there are a lot of organizations and dubiously credentialed “experts” who will insist that it very much is. However, it’s important to note two related things:

1) sex and porn “addiction” is correlated very strongly with religious belief and guilt; the people most prone to seeking treatment for sex or porn addiction tend to be very religious and frequently have complex and troubled relationships with sex and sexuality

and

2) Many if not most of the organizations and counselors promoting sex addiction “recovery” or “treatment” are religiously based and affiliated with various churches.

This isn’t to say that people can’t have problematic relationships with sex or porn. However, these tend to be a form of self-medicating �– the way that drug addiction is often a result of external factors, such as depression or being unhoused – rather than being addicted to sex or porn itself.  If it weren’t porn or if porn were less easily accessible for one reason or another, the majority of people with problematic relationships with porn would be having a problematic and compulsive relationship with something else.

It sounds to me like you have issues surrounding self-worth and shame than with sex or porn. Dealing with those, finding better coping mechanisms and more effective methods of improving your sense of self, self-control and overall well-being are going to be far more helpful than beating yourself up over an awkward sexual encounter.

I think there’re three things that would be helpful here, from this angle.

The first is to forgive yourself for the awkward encounter you had. It wasn’t a good time by any stretch of the imagination, sure, but it’s not something to be ashamed of. You were trying to meet a need and picked something that seemed right in the moment, but turned out to not be what you actually needed. That’s not shameful; you were making the best decision you could at the time and that’s OK. You know better now, so you won’t make the same decision in the future.

The second is to find a sense of control. Right now, it sounds like part of the problem overall is that everything feels very chaotic and unmanageable. A lot of maladaptive behavior is often born out of seeking a sense of control over some aspect of one’s life – even if that control is ultimately negative. Focusing on even just one area and creating a zone in your life where you feel both at peace and that you have things handled is a very good way to remind yourself that you’re not, in fact powerless, and that you have a much better handle on things than it feels in the moment.

Maybe it’s working on your conversational Spanish. Maybe it’s learning how to make tapas or a window-box garden. Even if it’s just taking a weekend to give your apartment a floor-to-ceiling deep clean, finding some small area to express your agency can be huge in terms of creating a zone of comfort and peace. And when you have that foundation to work from, it becomes much easier to start breaking down those seemingly immense, chaotic disasters in your life into smaller, much more easily managed components.

The third thing is that I think you’d do better if you were seeking help from a therapist or counselor who’s trained in dealing with issues, especially feelings of shame regarding sex and porn use, from a sex-positive perspective. That doesn’t mean that the advice is “EVERYONE NEEDS TO GET LAID, GO GET SOME, YOU’LL FEEL BETTER”; it means recognizing that sex isn’t shameful nor something that needs to be restricted or regulated and that people should be having the sex they want (including no sex) with other consenting adults who want the same thing, in a healthy and productive manner. And if the sex you want to be having is more in the context of a relationship or with someone you have an emotional connection with, then that’s the kind of sex you should be having.

While AASECT doesn’t have a referral directory for therapists or counselors in Spain, many of the professionals they list will do video appointments. I’d recommend you check them out.

Finding that comes much more easily when you are coming to it from a place of understanding and self-compassion, rather than shame and recrimination. You deserve the sort of compassion and understanding you would give to your best friend; giving it to yourself and being kind to yourself is going to be much more productive and easier on your heart and soul than beating yourself up.

Be gentle with yourself. You deserve it.

All will be well.

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