DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I met a guy on Bumble. Really great guy, he’s decent, soft spoken, loving and caring. We are dating for almost a month now. He lives in another city so we are not able to meet much and he is an introvert as well. 

When we started chatting, he said that he was looking for something casual but is open for long term relationship as well. Me on the other hand, feel like I am already in love with him because he ticks on all of my checklist points. Now, we flirt a lot and chat sometimes but he is a doctor so he is really busy. 

I am confused about how should I proceed with this, I feel like marrying this guy, but it is too soon to even say I love you to him. Please guide me.

Rumble In The Bumble

DEAR RUMBLE IN THE BUMBLE: OK, RITB, I’m going to lay this one out bluntly: you’re not in love with him, you certainly aren’t anywhere near a point where you should be thinking about a long weekend in a cozy B&B never mind marriage and you really need to take a long deep breath and just chill out.

Right now you’re setting yourself up for some serious disappointment. What you’re feeling and expecting is going to be very out of line with not just where he’s at but what he’s offering. When these two aspects start to clash – and they will, soon – you’re not going to like how it turns out.

Let’s start with the most obvious: when someone says they’re “open” to long term, that doesn’t mean that they’re looking for one necessarily or are even interested in one should the opportunity arise. They’re saying that if the right person comes along, if circumstances are right and if they’re feeling it, then they’re not going to say “no” to a long-term relationship. That is very different from someone saying “Yes, I’m looking to settle down and meet my forever person”.

When someone says that they’re looking for something casual but are open to long term, what they’re saying is “I don’t want strings or commitment and that’s not going to change any time before I’ve decided I’m done being casual, on my schedule, not anyone else’s’. I might accept a long-term relationship if I meet my dream partner, but don’t expect more from me until I explicitly say so.”  

And despite how that sounds… that’s not bad. Most folks who say that almost certainly should drop the “open to” part (because at the end of the day, they’re really not; not in any reasonable definition, anyway) but they at least know what they’re looking for and are open about it. It’s an opt-in situation. The problem is that some folks focus too much on the “long term” and don’t parse what “open to” is really saying.

(Some guys are actively deceptive about this, but that’s a different can of wax entirely.)

It’d be one thing if you, too, were cool with something casual without the expectation of commitment, but were willing to consider something long term if it all worked out. But you’re not. You’re already looking for something he isn’t ready, willing or able to give. So right off the bat: you and he want radically different things.

That difference between what you want from him and what he wants in general are going to be in conflict. When that conflict happens, he’s not going to decide he’s done being casual, he’s going to decide he’s done being casual with you.  And no, you can’t count on riding this out and hoping that you’re going to be the one he settles on when he decides to settle down. Leaving aside that I don’t think you’re going to be able to hold those feelings in for long, I think the process of trying to wait it out is going to be incredibly corrosive to you.

Then there’s the fact that a) you’ve been seeing each other for just a month and b) it’s long-distance. So I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’ve seen each other… what, three times max? That’s no time at all, even with all the texting and flirting. You know next to nothing about this guy, you don’t spend much time together and you think you’re on a different relationship track than him. Your attraction to him seems to be far more predicated on how he is on paper than your actual relationship and you’re letting that fill in a whole lot of blank spaces. 

I understand being excited about someone. I understand the thrill of the new getting people carried away. But there’s enjoying the thrill of the new and there’s mistaking it not just for love but for long-term compatibility when you aren’t even at the level of knowing what breakfast cereal he prefers. I can all but promise you: this is a very different relationship for him than it is for you.

I get the feeling that this is, if not a first relationship, definitely one of your first ones. You sound very young and a little inexperienced, so I’m not surprised that the excitement of it all is getting ahead of you. But I will say that right now, with the way you’re feeling, this is going to end in tears. Yours, specifically.

I’m not saying you should break up with this guy or expect to be broken up with. What I am saying is that either you need to radically temper your expectations or decide to go looking for someone who’s on the same page as you. There really is no in-between here. if you want to keep seeing where things go with this guy, then you have to do so knowing that there’s no expectation of commitment or exclusivity. Holding on in hopes that he’ll change his mind or that you’ll change it is both unrealistic and the invitation to unnecessary and avoidable heart break. If you want a person who’s actively looking for the same things you are… you need to find someone else.

I promise you: as nice as this guy is on paper, there’re just as many who are just as nice – possibly even moreso. And, more importantly: those people are looking for the same sort of relationship you are. If you’re looking to settle down, rather than thinking you might, someday, if the stars align… you should be looking elsewhere. And the time you’d be spending waiting for him to change his mind is time that you could’ve been spending with someone else who’s already on the same page as you.

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

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: This isn’t a question about dating, so much as about mastering basic social interactions.

As a 30M, I’m embarrassed I’ve never learned how to do this, but I don’t know how to make friends. I seem to be especially bad at making friends of the opposite sex.

For context: I lived in the same town growing up and had a solid group of friends. I left for college and lived in several places for work but never made friends in these situations. Eventually, I moved to where my old high school friends were. It felt good to have a support network around me again – but also dispiriting that I had made such little progress as an adult.

Then, I had to move away again to attend grad school.

It has been exhausting – our first year is wrapping up and it has been really difficult to form friendships, regardless of gender. I try to invite guys in my class to hangout but I am always told everyone is too busy, even though I know they are going to parties or on weekend trips. It’s like I skipped out on a lot of exclusionary high school BS, but it is circling back now in my 30s.

And then there’s the other end of the gender binary.

Last week, I was blocked by two female acquaintances – up until that point, I thought I was getting along really well with both of them. Something similar happened with another classmate back in January, so there is clearly a pattern here.

I find it frustrating that I think I have made a (friendly/platonic) connection and am suddenly cut off. I understand part of the problem is that women are socialized to be friendly and not just tell guys to ‘f--k off’ when they get annoyed/bored/upset/uncomfortable with their interlocutor. I want to be respectful and supportive but am apparently being off-putting.

I didn’t notice any telltale signs of discomfort when interacting with them – I tried to ensure I wasn’t physically blocking their exit, steered towards appropriate conversation topics about class, hobbies, and work, as well as tried to pay attention to signs of boredom or agitation.

As much as possible, I try to let women initiate conversations. Only when these conversations end on a seeming high note (“Let’s get lunch some time!”) do I try and follow up with them over text. This is where everything seems to fall apart and I get blocked. Now I’m worried that I’m on some “Creepy Guy” list – and I honestly have no clue what I’m doing wrong.

This entire process has left me feeling lonely and miserable. Since I’m in this program for the next few years, I want to make friends or at least have some people with whom I feel comfortable hanging out. At some point, I’d even like to date. However, all of this appears to be a long, long, long way off. I literally cried myself to sleep last night.

I’m not sure how to even begin to improve my social calibration since it seems so misaligned at the moment. Any tips to find out what I’m doing wrong? Is there any hope of repairing any of these relationships and getting a second chance? When do I just take the ‘L’ and move on?

Not Even In The Friend Zone

DEAR NOT EVEN IN THE FRIEND ZONE: Hoo boy.

OK, NETFZ, I think we need to take the friends issue and women blocking you issues separately. I suspect that there’s some overlap going on that’s leading to this, but these are going to require different approaches to help address things.

Let’s start with just trying to make friends as an adult, especially when everyone’s busy. The first thing I would point out is that having your high-school friends back as part of your social circle isn’t a bad thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why it might feel like a failure at your part – that jerkbrain voice saying “look, you haven’t managed to grow past high-school…” – but they’re still your friends. The fact that they’re friends from a long time ago, when you felt like maybe you left things behind doesn’t make their friendship less valuable or less significant, especially if they are serving as a network of social support for you.

I would also suggest that maybe you should change how you’re looking at these relationships, especially considering the time that’s elapsed between when you were in town vs. now. It may be good for you to look back and see just how much those friendships and relationships have changed in those intervening years. If they’re exactly the same as they were back in high-school, then that would be an issue. That would suggest that people have been stuck in place and have resisted any sort of personal growth or discovery in the intervening years. But that’s really different from “we have a lot of shared history together that made it easier for us to reconnect and get to know each other as we are now.” There’s nothing wrong with having new friendships with old friends after all.

Now, meeting new people is going to be an exercise in patience and measured steps. The estimated amount of time it takes to go from strangers to acquaintances, acquaintances to friends and friends to close friends is pretty steep and significant. Even if it’s not 100% accurate, it at least works as a rule of thumb and a reminder that friendships are built over time.

Unfortunately, time becomes an increasingly precious and rare resource as we get older. Part of the reason why it’s harder to make friends as an adult – leaving aside the cultural issues that make it harder for men to make and maintain friendships – is that life gets in the way. When we’re kids or in college, we’re in a place that’s almost custom built for making friends – we’re around people more or less all in the same stage of life for eight+ hours a day, five days a week.

Once we get older, suddenly we have obligations and responsibilities, we have work and overtime and chores and errands, relationships and children and so on. Finding the time to hang out gets harder and harder, especially if you already have social obligations to maintain.

Grad school is its own level of hell when it comes to time management. A number of my friends who’ve gotten post-grad degrees have all agreed: grad school isn’t something you finish, it’s something you survive. For most, trying to maintain anything but the most important connections in your life is a nigh-impossibility between trying to juggle things like course work, TA workloads, research, dissertations and oh, yeah, things like sleep and meals. Things that aren’t of screaming importance tend to fall by the wayside, if only because there’s only so many hours in the day.

This is why I don’t think people are lying to you or being clique-ish when they say they’re too busy. It’s that they already had those trips or parties on the schedule and – don’t take this the wrong way – you’re not at the level of friendship with them where they’re going to fight to find more flexibility in their social calendar. It’s not a measure of your worth as a person, just that you’re not there yet.

This is also why embracing weak ties becomes key and finding the areas where you can start putting in the time that helps bring you closer with folks. You may have to adjust your expectations at first, in part because some asks are just going to be too much. For a grad student, hanging out with someone new on the weekend may be just too hard to fit into one’s schedule, even if they really, really want to. It’s a lot easier to, say, start by making small talk before or after classes, or grab coffee and walk together to your next lecture or before office hours for the undergrads.

Yeah, it means that it takes longer to get to the point where you and they are able to start making weekend hangout plans, but forward progress is still progress. 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there… before too long you’re talking about real time spent together. It may not be as fast as you wish it were, but those smaller asks on their time are a lot easier to fulfill and help build to larger ones.

Now for the women… look, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action a pattern, and that’s the point where you have to really consider that you’re doing something wrong here. Figuring out precisely what is going to require a fair amount of self-examination of your behavior in as dispassionate and rational a means as possible.

This is, admittedly, going to be hard. Part of it is going to be because – as you said – you’re lacking a certain level of social calibration. But another reason why it’s going to be hard is that it can be hard to look at your own behavior without either drawing conclusions based on your own assumptions or turning it into a shame spiral that ends with your declaring that clearly you’re the worst creeper to ever creep and nothing will ever change.

This would be much easier if you have a third party – ideally a woman – whose judgement you can trust and who can be completely (if tactfully) honest with you. Having someone that you can turn to and say “hey, this keeps happening; have you noticed something I’ve been doing/saying that would be a problem” can be invaluable. At the very least, it gives you a starting point to work from, even if they can’t pinpoint the exact issue.

That having been said, I suspect that at least part of the issue is that you’re coming on strong with everyone. I think a lot of this comes from the fact that yes, you’re lonely and you’re trying to fix that… but I think that loneliness is pushing you to act in ways that are out of keeping with the level of connection you have with folks.

You want to have those connections with people very badly and it’s entirely understandable, but if you’re letting that desire have too much influence over your actions, you may be coming off as needy, intense or both. Asking for a level of friendship or connection when you’re not quite there can feel uncomfortable or awkward under the best of circumstances. Remember what I said about making asks on people’s time when you’re not quite there yet? I think that’s in play here.

Yeah, it’s frustrating when it feels as though being honest about what you want gets read as excess neediness, but this is really as much about that social calibration and emotional intelligence as anything else. It’s a little like what I told Overthinking and Overwhelmed about trauma dumping; it’s behavior that suggests that you either can’t or won’t read the room and aren’t paying attention or valuing the other person’s time, feelings or boundaries.

It’s important to note, however, that this plays very differently based on the genders of people involved. Between men that behavior can feel annoying, but not necessarily threatening. But a man who may be coming on excessively strong or seems needy – especially beyond the current level of their social connection – to a woman? It may not feel like a threat to one’s safety, but certainly like someone who’s going to be making unreasonable demands on their time and attention.

A lot of women find themselves in the position of male friends and acquaintances treating them like a combination of friend, therapist and social secretary. It’s exhausting under the best of circumstances, and even more so when it’s someone they don’t know that well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the amount you were messaging them was getting to a level that felt excessive to them. I would wonder, for example, how much you’re following up with them, especially if you have those nebulous plans of “get lunch some time” and the like. If you’re texting them constantly and trying to set up times, getting the brush off or non-committal answers and continuing to message them? You may be overwhelming them and making them feel pressured to a level that makes them feel uncomfortable.

You know that you’re doing this in good faith and don’t want to push… but that doesn’t mean you’re not still doing it without intending to. Unfortunately, intent doesn’t really change effect, and you aren’t close enough that they feel that they can say something.

Or it may be possible that they did and you didn’t realize that this is what they were saying.

I think in this case, dialing things back a lot is going to be helpful. It sounds like you may not be at a ten but you may well be somewhere between a seven to a nine and you need to be at a two; you want to be less golden retriever puppy and more friendly-but-wary older cat.

This is a time when the green/blue to white ratio can be a good rule of thumb while you work on your calibration. That is: pay attention to how much you’re texting vs. how much the other people are replying. If you’re seeing that the blue or green bubbles (i.e. your texts to them) are out of proportion to the white bubbles (their replies to you), then you may be over-texting them and you need to dial it back a bit.

I would also suggest that you go back through those texts and see if you can identify places where they may have been giving you the wave-off. If there’s a lot of non-committal replies to invitations or comments about how busy they are, especially shortly before you got blocked, that will tell you that there’ve been signals that you were missing.

Now this doesn’t mean that you need to be doing word-count checks for the rest of time. These are guidelines to help you while you work on developing your social calibration. As the saying goes: if you want to break the rules, first you have to understand the rules. Getting better at social calibration means that you’ll be better at understanding which relationships are getting a little out of balance and which aren’t… even if they don’t conform to the “rules”.

But this takes time – often more time than it feels like you would want to spend. But unfortunately, there really isn’t a way to speed-run the process, not the way that we could as kids. So, as much as I know you wish it were different, you need to be willing to be patient and start a little smaller. Spending time with your old friends can help with those feelings of loneliness while you work on calibrating yourself.

You may also want to take a similar tack and find a local hangout that you enjoy and just go there regularly. Becoming a regular at your favorite coffeeshop or hang-out bar means that over time you get to know the other regulars and slowly start to build relationships with them by making small talk and working up to bigger topics as you get to know each other.

Similarly, focusing more on connecting with folks while on campus for short amounts of time on a regular basis will help a lot more than trying to jump up a level before you’ve put in the time. A little restraint – even when it feels like you’re trying to dam a river in full flood – goes a long way. “Slow and steady wins the race” may be a cliché, but it it’s a cliché for a reason and it applies as much to making friends as it does to other areas of life.

Slow your roll a lot. Be at a two, rather than a nine and focus on small, regular interactions instead of trying to move to bigger ones that require more time commitment from others. It’ll do you a world of good and ultimately mean you make friends faster than you will if you continue as you are now.

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DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I recently hit 30, and am in the middle of trying to turn my life around after a pretty rough decade. While going into the details wouldn’t be appropriate (or time efficient), the SparkNotes is something like this: I went through college without making any real friends or career prospects, finishing in 2015. My college social life got off to a rough start caused in part by a rocky breakup the year prior and subsequent estrangement from some of my closest friends, and it felt like I was never quite able to fully recover. I spent several years after school with pretty significant depression, trying to keep my life moving forward and get across the hump, but it never really ended, just stretching endlessly on, regardless of what I tried to do.

This came to a head in 2020, when the pandemic hit, and amidst all the world’s talking about what an unprecedented effect it had on their lives, I came to the stark realization that the struggle and social isolation that was suddenly thrust onto so many others was how I’d already been living my life for years, with no end in sight. I hit my limit, and with the help of family and some therapy, made the decision to pack up and move across the country to go back to school for what I really wanted to do. I’m now several years in, and things have really been looking up, both in terms of my career prospects and having people in my life who share my interests and passions.

HOWEVER, despite all the great success I’ve had in the past few years, I still feel just as stuck as I ever was when it comes to my love life, and it feels just as hopeless now as it did back when I was miserable and working a job I hated. I haven’t had a relationship since I was 17, and I haven’t been able to get so much as a single date in all the time since. There are certainly some extenuating circumstances, such as the fact that I’m going into a very male-dominated field, the vast majority of my social circle is 7 to 10 years younger than me, and I don’t have the time or vehicular freedom to go out freely; but I have trouble shaking the feeling that even if those barriers were removed, I still wouldn’t be able to find success with my love life. I can’t help but feel that there are things that kept me from deeper social connection during the last 10 years that are still present in my life, despite having found a much healthier place in other areas.

One of the consistent things I feel stuck on that prevents me from offering myself more opportunities is that I really don’t feel free to share my feelings (and thereby my unhappiness) with the people in my life, and letting them know that I struggle with loneliness. The aftermath of my previous relationships involved a lot of trauma-dumping, and the subsequent inability to return to any state of normalcy in our friendship, and whether it’s true or not, I feel that my wanting to talk about these feelings led to the loss of those friendships. I have a tendency to see the sharing of my sadness and struggles as an unhealthy habit that pushes people away from me. In the years since, however, it sometimes feels like my reluctance to be open with my feelings leads to a lack of deeper social connection, having friends that I get along with, but who don’t necessarily even know that I’m single, much less that I care about it, and MUCH, much less the extent to which I find it extremely painful and lonely.

At risk of over-simplifying (which I have a tendency to do in writing), this leaves me with two opposing forces: One tells me that I need to just stop worrying about the whole thing, and that indulging in the desire to continually re-tread the same feelings and share that sadness is unhealthy and puts me in a bad place. The other is feeling that I really struggle finding satisfaction with the relationships I do have, and finding it impossible to make myself open to possible connection when it feels so taboo to be honest about how lonely and upset I am. I’ve turned this whole dilemma over and over so many times for the past decade that I just don’t know what to think anymore, which leaves me in the spot I’ve always been in: Safe, but unsatisfied, and unsure if the current road has any end in sight.

In summary, Dr. NerdLove, How do I Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, when I’ve dropped them in the past and experienced the fallout? As I’ve begun rebuilding my life, how can I make sure I leave room for the emotional closeness I’ve denied myself for so long?

Regards,

-Overthinking and Overwhelmed

DEAR OVERTHINKING AND OVERWHELMED: Let’s start with something simple, OaO: you’re not alone in the intense loneliness. It’s hard to read the news or browse social media without seeing a steady stream of pieces about the loneliness epidemic that people – men, especially – are experiencing. It had been on the rise since before the pandemic and the lockdowns exacerbated things. So I suspect more people than you realize could relate to that feeling.

But there’s asking someone to relate and then there’s trauma-dumping all over someone.

Before we get to that, though, let’s focus on a different aspect of the issue: you’re putting up barriers between yourself and solving the problem of your loneliness and love life before you even attempt to solve it. Like a lot of folks who’ve written in, you’ve decided that you’ve failed before you’ve so much as set foot out the door. 

For example: there’s a difference between “extenuating circumstances” and listing a bunch of reasons why you shouldn’t even bother to try. And honestly, “extenuating circumstances” isn’t even the term you should be using. Extenuating circumstances implies that these are reasons why you shouldn’t be held fully responsible or that the context of the situation means that your actions should be seen in a different light. That, in turn, implies that you’re somehow being blamed for not having a relationship – as though not having dated for a long time is a sin or a crime as opposed to just “a thing I haven’t done in a while”. That suggests that you’ve decided that you’ve failed before you’ve so much as set foot out the door, and a not helpful one at that.

When you’re treating not having been on dates or not having had a relationship in a while as a moral failing, you end up putting excessive and unnecessary pressure on yourself. When you’ve framed situations like this as some sort of failure as a person, you’ve created a scenario where you have to be “perfect” or get unreasonable results in order to overcome the supposed deficits that’ve kept you single. You have set things up so that in your head, you aren’t just trying to connect with someone, you’re coming to any interaction with a negative balance that you have to compensate for just to get to a neutral reception, never mind a date. So now, instead of being in the moment and focusing on connecting with someone and getting to know them, you’re going to be focused on needing to do everything perfectly or else you won’t even get to the point where your presence isn’t an active insult to them. So you’re not going to actually be paying attention to them, getting to know them or even determining if they’re the right person for you, you’re going to be thinking about what to say next, how to say it and watching every micro-expression to determine how you’re doing.

And since you’ll be expecting a negative response – after all, they can surely detect that decades-long gap – you’ll see them all over the place. Will they actually be there? Probably not. But our attitudes and expectations are the filter through which we see the world, and so you will interpret things in the worst possible way and dismiss anything that suggests you’re doing better than you thought.

This ends up creating a self-reinforcing cycle. You go in expecting failure, you start looking for signs of failure and you’ll most likely end up rejecting yourself or presenting yourself in such a way that all that ensure you get rejected, thus confirming that failure is all you can expect.

If you want to actually start having success, you have to break this cycle and the first step is to stop assuming that you’ve failed before you even began. 

This is why that list of “extenuating circumstances” sound a lot more like “reasons to not bother trying”. You’ve rejected yourself before you even talked to someone because you won’t accept the possibility of success, just varying degrees of failure.

Breaking this cycle is going to depend on an important factor: assuming that maybe, just maybe you’re wrong. You’re wrong about not being able to meet people, that you’re wrong about not being able to get around as freely as others, that you’re wrong about the limitations you have. Work and your friends’ ages aren’t the hard boundaries of your life, nor are they the only ways you can meet people. They’re frequently the most convenient, but not the only way.

If you want to start having more success at meeting people, you have to start looking at these supposed limitations as challenges at worst, not impossibilities. And that’s assuming that you’re even correct in the first place. People can and do date while also having to rely on public transport after all – not just in Chicago or New York or San Francisco and the like. If you want to find love, you have to be willing to face challenges and work to overcome them, not look at them and say “welp, no point in even trying I guess”.  

But let’s zero back onto the whole “trauma dumping” thing, the vulnerability and the feeling that you’re still stuck in the same place, mentally.

We’ll start with what trauma dumping is. Trauma dumping isn’t venting or going on an occasional rant because something’s been bugging you and you need to let it out. Venting is opening up and expressing yourself in a one-sided manner in a way that respects the time, feelings and boundaries of the listener. Trauma dumping, on the other hand, is dropping all of those feelings and traumatic events on another person with no consideration for their feelings or needs or even whether they were ready to hear all of that.

That sort of behavior is inconsiderate to others and it runs the risk of causing its own problems for the other person, especially if they weren’t ready or expecting all of that. Being on the receiving end of the Firehose of Feelings can be a lot. And if it’s a regular occurrence with someone… well, there comes a point where folks are going to cut ties, if only for their own emotional security.

You say that you’re afraid to open up and be vulnerable about your loneliness because of the way things went with your friends post break-up  Part of the issue here is that you seem to be self-aware enough to know that you had been trauma dumping… but somehow that doesn’t translate to knowing or being able to not do that. That’s something I think you need to dig into.

It’s entirely possible to open up to people and express that it’s frustrating being single and that dating can be a nightmare without backing up The Trauma Truck and pouring everything out on them. You don’t have to shotgun every single feeling and thought and disappointment when you discuss the topic. You can just say “this s--t sucks and I hate it” without then giving a blow by blow, play by play of every single feel and anxiety. If that requires a superhuman level of control form you, then that’s the bigger issue at hand.  

There’s also the desire to want to keep chewing over these feelings over and over again. That, to me, sounds like things aren’t feeling resolved in some way, shape or form and you’re looking for an answer or a way to at least deal with them.  Either they’re unresolved, or there’s something you’re getting out of this psychic self-harm you keep doing to yourself. 

That actually leads me to my next point and an important question for you to answer: what, precisely, are you hoping to gain from opening up about your loneliness? Are you hoping for understanding? Acknowledgement? For commiseration and solidarity? Or are you hoping for someone to have an answer for you? There’s a difference between needing to express some feelings you’ve been repressing or holding back and turning on the fire hose in hopes that someone will solve the problem for you or – at the very least – provide you with a turn-key, no fail solution. And even if what you’re ultimately trying to do is just express those feeling so that they’re not bottled in, the extent and the depth to which you’re going into can come across that way. It may even be subconscious; you may not intend this but there’s a part of your mind that’s hoping that by expressing those feelings, the other person will be moved by compassion and/or pity to help solve it for you.

I think one of the biggest things you need to do is get back to therapy. It sounds to me like “some” therapy wasn’t enough, especially if you’re still feeling like you have to talk about these emotions to such an extreme degree. Like Luke running off to confront Vader before he finished his training with Yoda, it sounds like you may have stopped therapy before you were ready. If you’re not in a place where you’ve got enough emotional self-regulation to be able to talk about being lonely without going full-tilt boogie, then that’s definitely something that you need to work on with a therapist.

Your friends may want to lend a sympathetic ear and shoulder, but they’re not a trained professional, not equipped to handle it and – importantly – have their own traumas and issues to manage. There’s limits to what they can do. The therapist’s couch, on the other hand, is exactly the place to be having those in-depth, no-holds barred conversations about your loneliness and how much it sucks; they’ve not just opted in, they are there specifically to work on it with you.

I’ve talked before about being in good working order in order to date and it sounds to me like you’ve still got some work to do. Either you’re still struggling with not trauma dumping, or else you’ve pulled back so hard that you can’t express yourself at all. In either case, working with a therapist is precisely how you start making progress – both in terms of how to express yourself to others, but also to resolve the feeling that expressing yourself is taboo because of having done it badly before. Think of it as both healing the wound but also cultivating a skillset that will improve your emotional intelligence and your ability to connect with others.

It’s good that you’ve made progress, but it’s important to not working because of it. I understand wanting to get to it, but like a football player who’s been sidelined by an injury: if you get back on the field before you’re ready, you’re just going to cause more damage. As impatient as you may feel – 13 years is a long goddamn time! – not doing the work is going to mean taking even longer and having to do a lot more work in the process.

Be good to yourself and give yourself permission to heal. Then you’ll be in a place to challenge those self-limiting beliefs and start making a concerted effort to find love.

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