DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: Before I being this long paragraph of ranting like George Carlin, there are a couple things I’d like to bring up. One is that I’m on a path in pursuing a career through college and finding hobbies to keep myself occupied. Second is that I’ve been on Prozac to treat my anxiety for 3 weeks now. However, occasionally I get these thoughts sometimes, they also pop up when I’m taking walks. I also decided to take a monthly break from dating apps and put my focus into school, but I feel like I might go through some withdrawal symptoms.
My birthday is 2 months away and I’ll be 31 but sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something random, serendipitous to happen to the point that it drives me crazy. But of course they all say “just be yourself and something will come along”, as if you don’t have to do anything. It just seems like everyone meets someone or experiences a hookup or whatever all because of seren-f
*ing-dipity/random chance. Even when I try not to think about finding friends/partners and distracting myself, the thoughts still pop up. These months/years just go by quick. And how can one focus on themselves? If you focus on yourself, you’re still blocking out the rest of the world, in your own head. That’s bulls--t.
How come in movies/TV series something spontaneous always happens? What happens in Perks of Being a Wallflower? 2 people find each other and all they had to do was “just be themselves” and something RANDOM happened. The Way Way Back? 2 people also find each other. Again, RANDOM. Twilight? Same s--t. Maybe in 5-10 years from now I’ll still be by myself without those things, and you know what? Fine by me. Beethoven was a complete loner and he never married. Erik Satie also never married and plenty other famous philosophers/scientists went their whole lives without anyone. I’ll continue “just being myself” or in other “just be the guy who stares at walls listening to Morrissey and Radiohead” and then something RANDOM will happen”.
Being Myself Now What?
DEAR BEING MYSELF NOW WHAT: The problem here is that you’re missing the forest for the trees, here. “Just be yourself” doesn’t mean “do nothing”, nor does it mean “don’t change and everything will happen for you.” This is in the same vein of people who misunderstand the famous quote attributed to Marylin Monroe: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best”. The (mistaken) idea, again, is that this excuses you from responsibility; you don’t need to work on things or take an active hand in being a better person, people just need to accept you no matter what if they want access to you.
What the “handle me at my worst” quote actually means is “there is no such thing as the ‘good parts’ version of a person or relationship where you only get the happy/sexy/glamorous stuff and none of the bad; if you aren’t willing to be part of my life when it’s not the manufactured ideal, then you don’t get the rest of me either.”
So it is with “just be yourself”. When people say “just be yourself”, what they mean is “don’t try to be someone or something you’re not in order to appeal to others”. This is inherently good advice on multiple levels.
For one thing, people aren’t stupid. They can tell when someone’s being fake or inauthentic and it turns people off. Think of the times when you’ve seen politicians trying to pretend that they’re “men of the people”, grimacing their way through state fairs and town halls and quietly counting down the seconds until they can get away from the hoi polloi whose votes they need.
Another level is how this advice applies to trying to force yourself into someone else’s idea of being “attractive” or “desirable”. The recent discourse online about whether Jack Black is attractive or not is a great example of this. While many, many women will go on about how they find him desirable and why, a horde of men will vociferously insist that those women are lying because… reasons, I guess.
The obsession some men have with needing a Marvel superhero body or having a particular career, income level or social clout is part and parcel of this. Not only is it not true, but all it ever achieves is teaching them to hate themselves and increase feelings of alienation from their own bodies and lives. It ignores the fact that women aren’t a hive mind, that attractiveness is personal and falls on a very large multi-axis graph and tries to force men to exist in a very small, very narrow and confining box.
But, possibly most importantly: people are bad at lying. Very few people are capable of being completely fake, all the time. The stress of trying to keep up the façade and the incongruity of working against who you are at your core comes with a price and that price is frequently your mental health and well-being. A lot of the folks I knew back in my PUA days ended up hitting the wall and having mental health crises of varying degrees of seriousness – up to and including a couple who had to check themselves into treatment centers.
Being yourself doesn’t mean “do nothing” any more than it means “don’t try to improve; that would be fake and inauthentic”. It just means be authentic to who you are. The idea that you just sit and wait for things to happen isn’t part of it. That, it seems, is your own little addition to the mix.
But speaking about luck and serendipity and things “just happening”…
Here’s the fun thing about serendipity and luck: the people who are the luckiest aren’t the ones sitting around doing nothing. They’re the ones who actually lay a lot of groundwork that makes it more likely that they get “lucky”. They aren’t sitting on a chair in their apartment under the assumption that someone is going to kick in their door and hand them a dream job, a dream relationship or a check for ten million dollars; they’re out creating the circumstances that make it possible for fortune to find them. As I’ve said before, the key to getting lucky is to be prepared so that when an opportunity comes along, you’re in a position to maximize it.
Let’s apply that to dating, for example and how someone might “get lucky” and meet their partner through seeming serendipity, rather than through dating apps or making cold approaches. The people who tend to “get lucky” in those circumstances aren’t dividing their time between going to work and staying home or complaining on the Internet. What they’re doing is going out and being social. They’re hanging out with friends, taking in the sights, planning activities and being out interacting with the world. This puts them more firmly in fortune’s path. After all, the odds that your ideal woman is going to come crashing through your window is the fodder of bad sex comedies.
But in addition to putting themselves in the way of opportunity, they have other factors that increase their capability of taking advantage of the moment when those opportunities come around. Because they’re active and social, they lead more interesting lives. They have more to talk about, more things going on in their lives than work and playing Fortnite and Destiny or watching YouTube videos that demand they get angry at strangers. They develop their social skills, learning how to talk to people, how to communicate effectively and – importantly – how to make people feel good when they’re around. They tend to be more social, talking to more people and creating social networks that not only make it easier to talk to new folks but increase the likelihood of new people coming into their lives organically. And so when they happen to encounter that sexy somebody, whether at the park, Starbucks, the book store, a party or what have you, they are ready, willing and able to strike up a conversation and connect with that person on a meaningful level.
What they aren’t doing is sitting around staring at the wall with their headphones on, putting out every possible “do not disturb” signal known to man and hoping that some Manic Pixie Dream Girl is going to pull their headphones off and forcibly drag them into a whirlwind adventure of self-discovery and also blowjobs.
A singer once said it takes years of work to be an overnight success. Well, it takes a lot of preparation and active planning for things to happen spontaneously. The social equivalent of “being discovered at the soda fountain” is as much of a myth as that old canard is. At best, it’s like winning a billion dollars at Powerball; it may happen to someone, some time, but it’s going to just be that ONE person. It’s not something to go all-in on unless you like wasting time and losing money.
So why does it happen in all those movies you mention? Well… because the scriptwriter said so. That’s why. Why does Bella meet Edward seemingly at random? Because that was a literally fantastical story that Stephanie Meyers dreamed up; a “plain, ordinary” young girl (who just happens to resemble the author in every way) meets a guy who realizes that she’s actually Very Special in the same way someone removes the glasses from the mousey nerd and says “good heavens, you’re beautiful!”
I would note, however, that “everything just falls into place for Bella” is one of the most common and recurring criticisms of the book and movie. People like Princess Weekes have long been pointing out that she literally does nothing to advance the plot in any way. She’s an example of what Kelly-Sue DeConnick calls the Sexy Lamp test; you could replace her with a lamp and nothing about the story would change.
But I might point out that you’re also missing the point of many of the examples you bring up. Leaving aside that The Perks of Being a Wallflower is semi-autobiographical, Charlie’s entire character arc is that he stops being a passive figure in his own life and learns to become an active participant. His meeting Sam isn’t something that “just happens”, it occurs because he becomes friends with Patrick, who introduces them… which, I might point out, is one of the ways most people meet their future partners in the real world.
The reason why you’re struggling is that you’ve created a scenario for yourself where the only options are failure – where “working on yourself” somehow blocks out the rest of the world (it doesn’t) but also where you don’t have agency and have to rely on dumb luck and you’re expected to just cross your fingers and hope real hard.
(I would also point out that Beethoven wasn’t “a complete loner” and in fact had some rather tempestuous affairs, including with his “Immortal Beloved”. You might want to actually look into that before just tossing s--t around; there was a movie about it and everything.)
If you want things to be different, you have to do things differently. If you want serendipity to work for you, you have to do the work to make it possible. Want to increase the odds that you meet someone special? You gotta go where the people are and interact with them. You gotta be willing to interact, to connect and to make sure that you’re the best version of yourself that you can be. That means investing time and effort in yourself, not passively waiting.
If you want to wait around and hope someone will grab you by the hair and drag you kicking and screaming into a relationship, that’s certainly your choice. But before you decide that’s what you’re resigned to, you might want to ask yourself precisely what about your attitude and behavior is going to entice people to want to interact with you in the first place, never mind invest that level of effort in a complete stranger.
It’s understandable that you’re frustrated. But there’s being frustrated because s--t’s complex and people are complicated and frequently contradictory and there’s being frustrated because you’ve done nothing and now you’re all out of ideas. Change requires action and action requires agency. If you’ve decided you’re helpless and hopeless, that’s where you’re right. Not because the universe has foretold it, but because that’s what you’ve decided. Want different outcomes? Gotta do different things. So if you want to get lucky and have SEREN-F--KIN-DIPPITY on your side, you have to put in the work to make it so.
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