DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m knee-deep in a complex situation with my current relationship and could really use your perspective on it.

I’ve recently started dating this amazing girl, E, and things are going really well between us. It’s early days, I know, but so far and I understand about NRE, but I feel pretty confident in saying this is a relationship with legs. We are on the same page about all the important things, we’re cool with the areas where we disagree and we’re both pretty committed to seeing where things are going but not rushing things. The catch is that she’s actually the ex-girlfriend of one of my buddies, J.

At the beginning, we tried to keep it on the down-low, you know, to avoid any unnecessary drama. But as feelings deepened and we couldn’t resist spending more time together, it became pretty obvious to our friend group that something was going on. And now, things are getting a bit, well, complicated.

Our friends aren’t thrilled about it. At first I thought it was my imagination, but as time has gone by it’s become pretty clear that they disapprove of my dating E. Their opinion is that I’ve violated ‘bro code’ because I’m dating J’s ex and that’s just not allowed. When a couple of them confronted me about this, I even asked them: what makes this a problem? Why does J get to have a say in who she dates? They always just tell me that I should know this isn’t cool and I shouldn’t have done this.

I’m really feeling frustrated about this. J hasn’t said anything directly to me, but it sounds like he’s been complaining to our other friends about it. And while I respect their loyalty to our friend, I can’t deny the connection E and I have, and we both believe there’s something real here.

I’m stuck in a tough spot. I don’t want to cause more drama with my friends, but I really resent other people sticking their nose into my relationship when it’s none of their business. I also don’t want to give up on a relationship that feels this meaningful. Love isn’t exactly something you can control, right?

How can I navigate this situation with our friends and minimize the drama? Is it even possible to make this work without wrecking our friendships? I want to be respectful of everyone’s feelings, but I also want to follow my heart.

Cheers,

Drama Cluster Bomb

DEAR DRAMA CLUSTER BOMB: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: nobody gets to call “dibs” on another person, nor do they get to gatekeep who someone dates.

I’ve seen the whole “bro code” and “you can’t date the ex of your friend/family member/ co-worker/ whatever” discourse more times than I care to count and honestly, I’m kinda sick of it. It’s almost entirely down to toxic ideas around sex and relationships that really only affect straight people. In queer communities, you’re much more likely to find friends dating other friends’ exes and everyone being cool about it and not having blow ups about whether it’s “allowed” or not. That’s a pretty good indication of what this is actually about among straights – control dressed up as concern. When your friends tell you that it’s not cool of you to date E, they’re completely ignoring the fact that everyone in this equation has agency. I can’t help but notice that it seems like they’re not saying the same thing to E. That, to my mind, is pretty significant.

In fact, I think the next time one of them comes to you with this, you should ask them “so… have you told E this, too?” Because I’m betting that either they won’t have, or they’ll insist that’s different, somehow. And that will tell you exactly what this is about: J somehow still having a claim to E and the “right” to control her relationships.

Now, maybe J doesn’t know that his friends are doing this on his behalf. Maybe they’ve taken it upon themselves to gatekeep things. Or maybe J doesn’t want to be obvious about it and so is letting others do the lifting for him. Regardless of who is the prime motivator in this fracas, it still comes down to the same thing: J’s relationship with E is over, E is an independent person with agency and can decide to date whomever she pleases and while other people can have an opinion, they don’t get a vote or veto. Relationships are not democracies and they’re not open to public comment.

(And this, guys, gals and non-binary pals, is why Doc takes another shot every time he sees more discourse about Taylor Swift’s love life…)

I do think that you might have prevented some of this drama by telling J that it was happening before you and E became more public about things. Not, I must point out, asking permission, but giving him advance notice so that he could prepare emotionally for the inevitability of seeing the two of you together. While circumstances might make this less feasible (if E asked you not to, for example), it would at least be a polite and kind thing to do.

But while it doesn’t seem like you did that, not doing it doesn’t excuse how his friends are acting. Even if this is down to “it hurts J to see E dating someone else”, well, that’s a shame and I empathize with J… but that hurt doesn’t give him the right to say “…and that’s why she’s not allowed to date someone I know”. It’s up to J to handle his own emotions, not you and not E. As his friends, you owe him politeness and possibly discretion, but you don’t owe him a veto over who you date or who his ex dates.

And hell, even if you and E were maliciously rubbing his nose in your newfound happiness, that still wouldn’t give J or his proxies the right to say “this isn’t allowed”. It would just make the two of you a pair of colossal assholes, and I would be entirely sympathetic to J and his friends icing you out of the group.  

I know some would say that it comes down to whose feelings matter more, or respecting your friend in his time of loss… that’s still ignoring that E is her own person and that feelings don’t override agency. If you’d “stolen” E away (for suitably sarcastic definitions of “stolen”; E isn’t property), that would be intensely s--tty of you and that would be a violation of the friendship you and J have. But I don’t think you two forming a relationship organically and in its own time is an insult or disrespect to J.

I think there might be some value to talk to J directly. Having third parties in the mix is only going to make things worse, especially if J’s not the one who’s actually directing this. It may be helpful for the two of you to get together and clear the air (while not conceding that he has a right to say who you or E is allowed to date). If, for example, J tells you that “I would’ve appreciated if you’d at least given me a heads up that you and E were starting to see each other”, you would at least be able to see that the issue is more his being blindsided by this rather than his having authority to dictate terms.

But if you two can clear the air, I think that might help immensely. Assuming, of course, that J is reasonable about this. You know him; I don’t. You’ll have to be the one to decide.

In the end, however, this is going to come down to two things: you establishing some boundaries with your social circle and ultimately deciding which is going to be more important. If J’s feelings on this – or those of the others in the group – are going to be more important than what’s happening with E, then yeah, this relationship might have to end. But, in the spirit of honesty, I think that would be short-sighted.

If J’s a reasonable person, I think he’ll get over it. If he’s not… well, honestly that’s more of a J issue than a you issue. And while it might suck to lose that friend group, if they’re going to act like this, I don’t know if I could say that’s necessarily a bad thing.

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 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