DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I am 30 years old, I live on my own and mostly introverted. In my free time I like to read, work out, cook and even started getting back into playing the piano again. I’ve been on some dates throughout my life and couple years ago, I was in a brief romantic relationship with someone; it ended and I still regret the things I said to her. It’s a long story but throughout my high school years I was desensitized by social media and all those teen movies (I still am today) and I also had a porn addiction until the beginning of this month. I decided to stop but it wasn’t easy. There have also been times when I tried not to think about relationships at all and even tried going celibate but I couldn’t even make it for a week without masturbating.

So most of my days I just live the same day over and over again, waiting for serendipity or something random to happen to break the monotony. I don’t know what “just be yourself” means anyway. You may think what I’m doing is putting the cart before the horse, but what if you’re not that social or awkward or have anxiety, should you just be that? I’m so confused right now.

Who Is “Myself”?

DEAR WHO IS “MYSELF”: OK, WIM, there’re a lot of implied questions in this, but I think they all really culminate in the question of “just being yourself”. So let’s unpack this for a moment.

It sounds to me as though a lot of your struggle is that you’re not all that fond of “you” right now. You mention all of these other aspects of your life that you struggle with and don’t feel like you have much control over them. But they’re also part of that general sense of “you”, who you’re supposed to be. So what the f--k is up with that, right?

Well, let’s start with something fairly simple – why people get “just be yourself” wrong. The general point of “just be yourself” is that you don’t want to put up a false front because you think someone else wants to see it, or to pretend to be someone you’re not in order to gain other people’s approval. To give an example: one of the reasons why the pick-up scene was so famously toxic wasn’t just the overt misogyny – it was also the idea that you had to be a particular kind of man. They held up a very narrow, very restrictive vision of what sort of man you “had” to be in order to be successful with women. In order to fit into that mold, you often had to give up or carve away all sorts of aspects of yourself and try to live up to a version of man that was likely nothing like who you were, or even someone you liked.

Trying to force yourself into that narrow and restrictive mode was frustrating and damaging for many reasons – it meant that you never had friends, just competitors, you never had a genuinely authentic connection with the women in your life, and the people you did connect with were rarely folks you were actually compatible with. After all, you had to give up a lot of who you were in order to be who you “needed” to be. Small wonder so many people I knew in the scene would have major depressive episodes or actual breakdowns; trying to force yourself into someone else’s vision of who “you” should be can be incredibly harmful over time.

OK, so obviously the answer is “be yourself”. But what if you suck? What if you don’t like yourself? What then?

Well that’s where you have to recognize that there’s a difference between trying to be someone else and trying to be a better version of “you”. Here’s a truth: “you” – that sense of self, who you are as a person – is a concept that’s always in flux. Who “you” are is a concept that can change and, importantly, can be changed, deliberately.

I’m sure you’ve had moments where you wished you could do something – talk to a pretty woman, wear cool clothes, whatever – and said “that’s not me” or “I’m not someone who can do those things”. Those things are true… in as much as you passively accept it to be true. You could be the person who does those things, wears those things or otherwise accomplishes the thing you have decided isn’t “you”. You have to just decide to do it. When we say “that’s not me”, or “I’m not the kind of guy who”, what we really mean is that we’re not comfortable doing it or we’re afraid of making the attempt. But when we frame it as “that’s not me”, that’s often about framing it as an impossibility, rather than saying “I would prefer not to”.

To give a personal example: if you were to look at me in high-school vs. who I am now, you would be more than half convinced that I showing you two very different people. I always thought I wasn’t someone who could talk to women I was attracted to and I’d have to just hope someone I was into would do the work for me. That wasn’t true; it was just my fear of rejection and my sense of self-worth speaking. It was a way of protecting myself from things that were scary or painful. However, while the intent was good – protecting oneself is generally a good thing – these were patterns that weren’t actually meeting my needs. They were just holding me back, instead. I had to make a concerted effort to get out of my comfort zone, do things that scared me and make changes that would let me see that yes, I could be the person who does those things – and does them successfully.

The key was recognizing that I could decide who “I” was. I had to remind myself that I have agency in my own life and I could make changes.

Now, as I’ve documented over the years, some of those changes took me down paths that turned out not to be right for me and I had to backtrack a fair amount… but those were all part of the journey to finding the best, most polished version of the “me” I wanted to be that was also authentic to my values and passions.

Right now, your biggest issue is that you’ve let go of your agency. You’ve been trying to force yourself into other people’s ideas of who you should be or to try to make yourself give up things that you don’t need to give up. I’m not going to dive into the “porn addiction” aspect of things – I ranted about that enough last time – but you don’t need to try to force yourself into celibacy or give up masturbation, and there’re very good reasons not to.

What you need to do is take an active role in your own life again. You said it yourself: you spend your days doing the same things and hoping serendipity will find you or that random chance will do the work for you. Well… how’s that working out for you?

If you want things to be different – including being a better version of yourself – then you have to do things differently. And please notice that I very carefully put emphasis on “do”; you have to make the conscious decision to not stick to the rut you’re in. The reason you’re in a rut is because you’ve ultimately chosen to stay there. To quote the sages – in choosing not to choose, you still have made a choice.

Do you want to break the monotony? Cool… you can start today. You can start right now. You can make even one different choice – maybe you’ll decide to go eat dinner at a restaurant you’ve never been to before. Or maybe after you get off work, you’ll go to a museum and look at art.

The same goes for all other aspects of your life. Instead of treating masturbation as a problem, you could improve other aspects of your life and work on understanding what need you’re trying to fill or mask via masturbating. You could take concrete steps towards becoming the kind of man you want to be, instead of hoping that fate will intercede, somehow. Because here’s the thing: serendipity does happen… but it happens a lot more often when you put yourself in its path, rather than holing up in your apartment.

And as I said: it’s not about being someone else’s idea of who you should be, it’s being the version of you that’s authentic to who you are. Making changes to who you are or your concept of self isn’t a betrayal or being inauthentic. If you uncover sides of yourself you never knew were there or parts that you let atrophy from neglect, that’s not being inauthentic, that’s discovering new aspects of yourself.

Are there areas where change is hard? Of course there are; there are plenty of aspects of one’s life that can be constrained or restricted because of various circumstances – both inherent and external. Changing yourself sometimes means learning how to overcome or work around or work with your limitations or restrictions. If you’re introverted, that may mean learning how best to budget your social energy so that you don’t exhaust yourself needlessly, for example. But as I’m often saying: there’s a difference between “difficult” and “impossible”.

Will you make mistakes or make the wrong choices? Yeah, the odds are good that you will. But if you’re making those choices as part of a genuine exploration of who you are, then ultimately you’re learning important things about yourself in the process. And then you can apply that knowledge and make better choices and better changes.

But all of it comes down to recognizing that you have choices. You have agency. You are ultimately in control of your life and how you choose to respond or react to your circumstances. So if you want a better life than what you have now? You have to be willing to make it happen. Until then, you’re just going to be at the mercy of others – living the same day over and over again until someone else makes the choices that change it for you… and likely in ways you won’t appreciate.

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 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