DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: This is a platonic letter, so I don’t know how into this you’ll be.

So the new girl started up at work. She was doing a similar job to me, and her desk was right next to mine, and I offered to walk her through everything she needed to know, and I asked her out to coffee — not as a date, but so she could ask questions in a non-office setting. She enthusiastically agreed, and that began a relationship where once a week, we’d do coffee. We exchanged phone numbers and texted like crazy, as well as IMing each other in the office. Mostly, she used me as a sounding board, and was a shoulder to cry on while she was dealing with an abusive boss, who was fired at the beginning of last month. During this, I found out she was literally twenty years younger than me, but this didn’t affect our relationship at all.

My cat of twenty years died late February, and I took some time off work to grieve. Between subsequent illnesses and her honeymoon, we didn’t see each other for most of March. When things settled down, she cancelled our usual coffee date so she could have lunch with women her own age. I get it. I’m pushing fifty, she’s not yet thirty, and we don’t really have a lot in common. With her boss gone, she probably doesn’t need me anymore. She’s the first close friend I’d made in years, and now we’re back to work acquaintances.

The specifics are different, but the rest of it is a pattern to me. I don’t make friends easily because I’m awkward. But I make the effort, and occasionally, I make a new friend. We experience friendly limerence, and in no time at all, the magic is gone. Even among my old friends, who all live far away, I text them, we have a chat, and then my texts go unanswered without warning. They probably have life things, like work or making dinner, to deal with, but they don’t get back to me until I poke them again. I’ve tried figuring out if I come across as desperate or creepy, and I can’t find evidence of that. If two texts go unanswered, I don’t send a third unless some time has passed (then the chat and chat-interruptus cycle begins anew). In the case of the new girl, she had a perfectly legitimate reason for wanting to hang out with other people, but so does everybody. The result is the same—a friendship dissolves, and I’m on my own.

I know that men in their thirties and forties have a difficult time making friends, but this is bananas.

It’s hard enough to meet people. I have a few interests that I can maybe find clubs for, such as writing and drawing. However, the only groups I can find in the city that cater to my interests are of the shut-up-and-write and drink-and-draw variety. These groups mostly exist for accountability, but I have no trouble writing and drawing on my own, and I’d rather do it in a café or at home than surrounded by people who aren’t even acknowledging me.

I’m single and plan to stay that way. And I’m not lonely. I wish I had more people to talk to, but aside from missing my cat, I’m not lonely at all. All my hobbies are solitary, and I don’t want to have to have a long discussion about what movies to watch. And yet, I went to an orphan’s Easter Party, and I got along with everyone there, even though they were all twenty years older or younger than me. I can function in social settings, but none of these relationships have any heft to them.

I don’t know what you can do to help, but I’m baffled and frustrated. Either people aren’t interested in being my friend at all, or they forget me when they can’t see me anymore. I’m really starting to relate to certain villains in Doctor Who.

Sincerely,

The Casually Dressed Silence

DEAR CASUALLY DRESSED SILENCE: First of, my sincerest condolences on the loss of your cat. 20 years is an astounding lifespan for a cat (Mr. Senior Kitty, who passed in 2021, was also 20 years old when I had to say goodbye) but it’s never enough time.

So let’s talk friendships for a moment. One of the things that leapt out at me from your letter is how quickly you seem to assume these friendships are deader than the dodo. Now, maybe this is just due to trying to keep the letter succinct and there’re periods of trying to reach out that get nothing, but it certainly reads like you are calling time of death the instant that the texting patterns shift.

This makes me wonder if there’re one of two things going on. The first is that you may have very different ideas of what you expect from friendship – especially from a new one – than your friends. The other is that maybe that, like a lot of folks who’re lonely or having a hard time making friends, you’re coming on stronger than you realize.

Based on your letter and some of the other details you share, I think it might be the former. I think there may be an expectation problem and you’re reacting to what is in your head rather than what’s actually happening in real world.

Here’s what I mean: friendships take time to develop and they take time for people to get close. One of the things that I’ve been hammering at in recent letters is that the key to building friendships is time and consistency. Both are important, but the former tends to be what trips people up. Folks who have a hard time making new friends or who are particularly lonely often tend to underestimate or misunderstand where they are on the friendship timeline. While there’s a little wiggle room on the exact numbers, it’s generally accepted that it takes around 50 or so hours to go from acquaintances to casual friends and around 200 hours or so to become close.

It also requires a certain amount of regular contact to maintain those friendships at that level – managing the “relationship degradation mechanic” as some folks will put it.

Considering the timeline for when you two met and started hanging out, I’m guessing that you were only starting to get close to the point where you were moving into being casual friends with a lead off towards being closer. That, compared with what you said about falling into friend-limerence makes me think that perhaps you’re overestimating the level of closeness you have. You feel excited as hell about everything with this friendship equivalent of NRE, and that may lead to your thinking that perhaps you’re closer or more connected than you actually are.

Similarly, a month off – for very understandable reasons on both sides  – with no meaningful contact means that things may have backslid a bit. That’s hardly a crisis; it just means that things may feel a bit stiff at first before you get back into the swing of things. It also means that it’s not surprising that she’s made other plans that got in the way of your regular lunch together. You weren’t necessarily at the place where this slot was held in reserve with the same level of importance as, say, family traditions. If you two weren’t in a place to see each other for a month, it’s not unreasonable that she would’ve made plans that happened to fall on that particular day and time.

But if that’s literally all it took for you to decide that she was ditching you? That’s an overreaction on your part. Especially if you didn’t reach out again some other time to chat or hang out.

That same level of assumption goes with your other friends. Most conversations taper off at some point or another, especially over text or direct messages. Very, very few people have some sort of official sign-off; more often than not the conversation just reaches a stopping point and someone doesn’t reply. That’s pretty common and accepted as just part of texting etiquette.

What does it mean when this happens? Well, most of the time, it means that either the person who stops responding doesn’t have anything to add or that something else came up – work, a phone call, going to dinner, etc. What it doesn’t mean that your friends are ghosting you or that they decided they don’t want to talk to you anymore.

As I said, based on what you’ve written, I suspect this is much more about how you’re interpreting things and what you’re expecting. I think part of the problem is that you’re seeing signs of rejection where most people would see normal behavior.

Some folks are prolific texters who think that rules about “double texting” are for fools. Others aren’t as wed to their phones or the messaging apps and will step away for hours or even days at a time, checking in sporadically.

Similarly, some folks just don’t think to reach out first or feel weird about doing so. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just it’s not a thing they think of doing. Some others feel weird because they want to reach out, but they get anxious about the idea that they may be bothering the other person.

I mean, s--t, I have friends who I know like hearing from me when I reach out first – and who have the same anxiety about bothering people or presuming too much – and yet it’s still a struggle to be the one to make the first text to say “what’s up?”

As a general rule, it’s better to adjust your expectations to match who people are than to be upset when they don’t necessarily have the same communication habits you do. I think it would help immensely you immensely, especially when paired with not making automatic negative assumptions – like someone got all they needed from you and so you’re surplus to requirements. That’s the sort of belief that should also require a pretty significant level of proof before you accept it as “what obviously happened”.  

I also think that you would do well to dial your presumptions of behavior from your friendships back a little. It sounds like you get a little carried away and a little more reserve would do you some good. This doesn’t mean that you need to be counting out every word or trying to make sure you have a perfect 1-to-1 bubble ratio, nor does it mean you need to have a certificate that declares that you are now Officially Close Friends with all the privileges and rights therein. It just means recognizing that while you may be excited – and new friends are good reasons to be excited! – that you should make sure you’re not letting that excitement overwhelm things. As I’ve said elsewhere: sometimes you’re at a 10 and your buds would really prefer you to be at a 2.

And don’t write people off so quickly. If it is the case that you haven’t reached back out since she made other plans… well, that was more about you assuming the friendship was off, not her. I’d say reach out again, say “Hey, we haven’t hung out in a while. Want to grab coffee and catch up?” and see what happens. I suspect you’d be pleasantly surprised.

Good luck.

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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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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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