DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I feel at a loss now. Back in December, I had my longest relationship – well, not exactly relationship since we only went on 3 dates, but the longest romantic endeavor of my life. However, I tried to go in for a kiss on the third date which she rejected saying she needed to know me better and I decided to end things, in a knee-jerk reaction. Well, I realized that was a mistake and I spent the past couple months begging her to come back, and she eventually asked me to stop contacting her in January, but I still sent her some poems and letters, weekly, which she never responded to (I stopped this last week, however).
To say I feel empty is an understatement, I feel at a loss of purpose in life, I feel like I was before I met her, like a void and I don’t know how much longer I can go on. Well, I figured the only way to make me feel better was to sleep with other woman, that maybe if I slept with enough escorts I’d forget about her, but I was wrong. I remember the first time I did, and immediately after I finished I was just begging God to just end my life in this instant. I feel emptier now, and I’ve withdrawn from my friends, and family. Deep down, I want her back. I’ve seen stories of dudes who’ve never dated for decades because they want some girl back, but that couldn’t be me – I’d never live that long if I knew she’d never come back.
Dr. NerdLove, I don’t know, I don’t know at all what to do. I don’t even know if getting her back would make anything better? But I know if there were just some clear-cut steps to getting her back I’d do it in a heartbeat – if there was some rulebook to follow, I’d follow it to the tee, but it just doesn’t feel like there is, and I’m just grasping in the dark, hoping to grab something. And I’ve started sleeping with escorts weekly now, just for some sexual relief, and I feel horrible, any advice, or wisdoms, or words, please tell me, thanks.
All The Wrong Places
DEAR ALL THE WRONG PLACES: Ok so there’s a lot to unpack here, ATWP, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s all coming from the same place. The problem is that you don’t understand what you’re looking for or why, and it’s messing you up.
Here’s what I mean: you went on a grand total of three dates with someone and now you’ve given yourself a nasty case of Oneitis. Why? Well because you realized that you made a bad call by cutting things off because… she didn’t want to kiss you at the end of date number three. Here’s the thing though: while I know a lot of folks might disagree with your choice, that is a legitimate reason to decide you don’t want to see someone. If you are someone for whom physical intimacy is a priority and you want at least some indication that it’s on the table, it’s not unreasonable to say “hey, this isn’t working for me” when the other person may require more time. That doesn’t mean that they’re doing anything wrong by wanting to wait, any more than you’re doing anything wrong by making it a priority. This is just an indicator that the two of you aren’t compatible in this way. No harm, no foul.
Or at least it would be under different circumstances – circumstances where you’re a little more self-aware and in better emotional working order. But to be perfectly blunt, you’re not. You’re far from it, and honestly, you’re making things worse for yourself.
You aren’t in love with this person; at most you’re stuck in limerence with what she represents – a mistake, a missed opportunity and validation about your worth as an individual. Just as folks will “make up a guy to get mad at”, you’ve made up a person to be the embodiment of your hopes and dreams and, most of all, your sense of worth as a person. The way you’re behaving is so wildly over the top and inappropriate for having ended things after – and I can’t stress this enough – three dates is kind of a tell. After all, one of the key signs of limerence is an almost obsessive attachment and desire for the other person to return your feelings.
You aren’t seeing a person when you picture her, nor are you treating her like a person. She’s a symbol, a representation. She’s the stand-in for your lack of validation and self-worth. The way you’ve been acting isn’t about her, it was about you; she, the specific individual, is irrelevant. If the person you’d stopped seeing had been literally anyone else, you would be having the same reaction because this is ultimately about you dealing with your feelings about yourself.
Here’s what I mean about self-awareness: look at how you’ve been behaving and compare that to what you say you’re feeling for this woman. For someone who claims to care so much about her and regrets ending things so powerfully that you’re compelled to write letters and poems, you only barely seem to give a thought to how she feels about things. This is evidenced by the fact that you kept writing her for months after she asked you to stop. That’s not love, that’s compulsion. That’s about you trying to fill in the holes in your sense of self, not about a relationship with another person.
The same goes with visiting sex workers. In and of itself, there’s really nothing wrong with visiting a sex worker. But what you’re doing isn’t about “getting over” someone, especially since there’s nothing to “get over” in this case. Nor is it about sexual relief, forgetting about her or even just the convenience of paying for sex instead of trying to seek out a casual encounter. What you’re doing is trying to get the validation you didn’t get from her when she didn’t want to kiss you.
To be sure: this isn’t uncommon. A lot of men, especially men with little romantic or social experience have gone through this. Hell, half the time I’ve ended up with a nasty case of Oneitis, it was for precisely these reasons. It wasn’t about love or that person so much as it was about how I felt about myself and my own sense of self-worth. If I could get $_PERSON to love me back, then surely that would prove I was worthy of being loved. I’d be whole and valued and worthy as a man.
I’ll give you three guesses how that worked out for me in those cases.
You’ve conflated sex with your sense of self-worth. The more sex you have, the more of a man you are according to restrictive and poisonous ideas of manhood. A woman turning you down is a strike against your value as a man. And since you were denied this validation in one place, you’re seeking it out elsewhere.
This is precisely why sleeping with sex workers not only isn’t helping; you’re looking for something entirely different from what they provide. The reason why it’s actively making things worse is because what you’re looking for is validation. The fact that you are paying for sex cuts against that desire. If you have to pay or coerce it, then clearly it’s not “real” and thus not valid. You’re cheating the system, or so the feeling goes. By trying to get results without actually having the goods to “earn” it the “right way”, you are just perpetuating a fraud.
That’s not actually how things work, but when you’re caught up in this mindset, it sure as s--t feels that way and you’ll find no end of people who’ll happily confirm it for you.
Hence the feelings of emptiness and loss as soon as you get off. At some level you see sex with an escort as inauthentic, a cheat at best and further confirmation about your worthlessness at worst. “Look at you,” your jerkbrain whispers in your ear, “you can’t even get a girl to kiss you. You have to pay women to pretend to want to sleep with you. You worm, you loser, you pathetic little f--kup”.
Small wonder you come away feeling worse than you did before. You’re getting what you think you want, but doing so in a way that actually confirms your worst thoughts about yourself. This creates a shame spiral that you can’t break out of precisely because you are looking for the wrong things in the wrong way. You’re going to Home Depot trying to buy a hamburger and then getting mad at yourself because you left hungrier than when you arrived. This is a great way to get yourself stuck in a shame spiral that just keeps dragging you further and further down.
This is why the problem isn’t that you’re going to sex workers. Sex – no matter how you achieve it – isn’t the answer, because that’s not what you’re actually looking for. It wouldn’t matter if you were to go out tomorrow, meet someone at a bar, wined her, dined her and spent the rest of the week banging out on every flat surface of your house through the sheer force of your charm and charisma because all you would be doing is throwing more and more attempts at validation into a bottomless pit. You would, at best, get a temporary fix that would last exactly as long as it would take for your jerkbrain to invent an excuse as to why this didn’t count or for something else to inevitably come along and kick the supports out from under this rickety house of cards.
When that happens – not if, when – then you’d be right back where you started, obsessing over the latest “The One” and convinced that you can’t live without her and feeling lower than an earthworm’s taint.
Now normally I would say that “validation has to come from within, first”, but honestly, you’re not in a place where you’re ready to hear that. You’re still in a place where you haven’t fully processed what you’re doing, what you’re feeling or why. The depths of your depression and compulsive behavior are indicators of that. Anything that doesn’t address the core wound is just going to be the emotional equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
You really need to get out of the dating pool (and the escorts’ beds) onto a therapist’s couch and start unpacking all of this. This is emotional triage; you need to deal with the sucking chest wound before you worry about your sprained ankle. Until you deal with that underlying need and sense of self-worth, you’re not going to get better. You’re just going to dig yourself into deeper and worse pits that’ll be that much harder to get out of. You need to break that cycle first and then start addressing the other issues. Then and only then will you be even vaguely ready to try dating again.
Hopefully at that point, you’ll be in a better position to understand what you want, what you’re looking for and how to recognize it when you find it. Hopefully, you’ll also have much better emotional intelligence and judgement so that if you do decide to stop seeing someone, it’ll be for the right reasons and without the self-inflicted consequences.
But you can’t do that in the shape that you’re in now. Delete the numbers, block the websites and email addresses and get yourself into therapy, now. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll begin to recover. And you can recover from this as long as you do the work.
It will get better, I promise. But you have to actually break the pattern instead of digging yourself deeper.
Good luck.
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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com