DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve dealt with this pretty odd issue for years. Every time a woman shows that they’re attracted to me it always makes me feel uncomfortable, creeped out, or angry. My brain automatically finds some annoying feature or trait they have and makes me turned off by them.

Just recently I met a girl who I honestly found pretty attractive, but I didn’t really talk to her. I guess she found me attractive too because she was actively trying to sit next to me and inserting herself into my conversations with other people. Sounds nice, but the moment she started talking to me I realized she had a really nasty, grating vocal fry that made me hate listening to her. Just the most obscenely hammed up Valley Girl accent that was so fake sounding I thought she was doing an impression, but no, that’s how she really talks. She would ask me questions trying to get to know me and her voice was making me visibly ticked off (obviously I would NEVER confront her or lash out at her about something she can’t control). I just half-assed any interaction I had with her until she realized I wasn’t into her anymore and she stopped. I honestly feel like a dick doing that because she was a perfectly nice person.

There have been other cases where women I don’t know come onto me and I immediately get creeped out or disgusted at them even though they’re perfectly fine people.

On the other hand, I find myself becoming somehow more attracted to people who ignore me specifically. Like this woman at one of my clubs who talks to everyone but me enthusiastically, and I’m still attracted to her. Most of the time when I talk to her, she acts and sounds like I was inconveniencing her and sometimes just ignores me outright. Part of me is hurt when she does that for sure, but it also gets me thinking of her more and getting more attracted.

And yet I feel like there’s something else to it, because I get a bunch of odd mixed signals from her. It’s quite confusing because if she were just ignoring me, I would just leave her alone and forget about her. It feels so wrong that I still have more of a soft spot for her than any of the attractive, compatible single women that hit on me.

I guess my question is, what exactly am I experiencing and how do I stop? This absolutely can’t be healthy for me.

Sincerely, Lovers To Enemies

DEAR LOVERS TO ENEMIES: I’ve seen a lot of people get upset when someone they find unattractive is into them; they take it almost as a personal insult that this person thought they had a chance with them. It stabs them in their incredibly fragile ego, as though someone else’s interest was a marker of “this is the best you can do”, and so they take their inner insecurity and turn it outward, projecting their frustrations and fears and lashing out at someone who’s only “crime” was to think they were cute.

It’s not often that this happens when the person committing the heinous sin of “hey, I think you’re interesting” is someone they find physically attractive. But the reason for it is not exactly a mystery. But hey, let me ask you something: is this reaction only to women who show interest in you, first? Does it happen if they’re neutral or casually friendly, or do you only find that they turn creepy or develop these anger-inducing flaws if their behavior starts to seem flirty?  

For that matter, is this a permanent state? If any of the people who provoke this reaction in you remain in your social orbit, do you find that they become less aggravating or off-putting once they lose interest or start actively avoiding you?

I ask because, honestly, what you’re describing sounds a lot like bargain basement self-sabotage. As absurd as it sounds, a lot of people snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with the sort of glee that you’d expect from someone finding a limited-edition Magic card in a store’s “ten for a buck” remainder box.  People will find reasons to blow up even the vaguest possibility that someone might find them attractive or that they might actually be happy. Why? Because F--K YOU, THAT’S WHY. 

This manifests itself in a number of ways. The most common example tends to be getting crushes or finding yourself attracted to people who you know to be uninterested, unavailable or wildly inappropriate for some reason. Queer people may find themselves getting crushes on folks who are a solid 0 on the Kinsey scale, straight folks find they’re only attracted to people who are either happily coupled up or who are in a position where they can’t or won’t date and so on.

Your case – getting angry at people who seem to be attracted to you – is rather… let’s just say dramatic. Counterproductive, sure, falling in line with a lot of other self-sabotaging behaviors, sure… but angry? That’s a moment where things start falling into the “this isn’t just about other people anymore, is it?” territory.

It sounds to me like your issue is one of feeling like you don’t deserve to be happy or to find love. Maybe you feel like there’s some failing that you need to atone for. Maybe you simply feel like you have some irredeemable flaw or quality that you think makes you undateable. Or maybe it’s as mundane and as common as “I should have someone who’s ‘flawless’ and anything less makes me a failure” because you’re trying to prove something to the jerk voices in your head.

Regardless, the way you go about looking for flaws in the other person and then use that flaw to gin up pointless anger so that you can’t possibly consider them as a potential date is telling. So is the fact that you are drawn to the people who seem to, if not actively dislike you, don’t seem to regard you at all. There is a part of you that actively does not want to be happy or to have a relationship with someone who may actually like you back.

If this seems bizarre, that’s because it is. But it’s bizarre in a way that makes sense if you understand two important things. The first is that our brains evolved to keep us safe, not to make us happy. We have weird, seemingly Pavlovian reactions to things precisely because our brain has detected a threat and is trying to prevent us from being harmed by it, even if that means suffering from discomfort or even opening ourselves up to a different sort of harm.

The second is that our brains are incapable of telling the difference between what’s real and what’s made up. You’ve undoubtedly had dreams where someone in your life wronged you and you spent the day angry at them, even though you know, intellectually, that they didn’t actually do anything wrong. You have also unquestionably responded more to things you assumed to be true, despite having no evidence that it was, and often in the face of evidence to the contrary. That’s because we’re not objective observers of reality, nor are we aware of why we feel the way we do. Our brains take what evidence it can find – your heart rate and respiration, amount of adrenaline in your system, even how warm or cold you are in that moment – makes hasty conclusions based on assumptions and presumptions and filling in blanks with things that seem to fit the circumstances, and then decides to apply a reason to it.

As a result, what you’re often doing is responding to phantom fears and anxieties and self-limiting beliefs and treating them as if they’re actual factual dangers. And that includes the danger of allowing yourself to actually let someone get close enough to you… dangerously close, one might say.

This is the issue you have to address: figuring out what, precisely, is your major malfunction. Why do you feel the need to not just reject someone or decide you aren’t interested in them, but turn their mere existence into something that upsets you by zeroing on their supposed “flaws”? Why is this desire to push people away so strong that you have to preemptively salt the earth while you do it?

I think you’ve got some serious self-exploration to do, and the intensity of your reaction suggests to me that you should probably enlist professional help to do it. Finding a therapist for some dialectical behavioral therapy is going to be important for understanding yourself better and why you’re reacting to these experiences. Once you understand the underlying issues, you can start to change your responses, adjusting your behaviors and finding more productive means of settling these internal disconnects.

So hie thyself to the therapist’s couch and start digging in. This is almost certainly about how you feel about yourself and turning it outward. Find where that particular core wound is and you’ll be able to start the healing process. Then, when you do… well, you may have burned some bridges beyond repair, but at least you can stop burning new ones when you find them.

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 had met a guy and we exchanged phone numbers. We are both around the age of 40. I probably texted him first and then he and I hung out at his place. But then he started texting me later and later at night, and only randomly and wanted me to come over to his place. So I said no, that I wanted to see him more during the day and have a relationship. He said he was not interested in that, so I had to move on from that and try to forget him.

So obviously, I am sad about it and I thought he and I had a lot in common and would be a good relationship for long term. I am a few years older than him and now I wonder if he lied of his age a bit since nothing he said was emphatic. He sort of mumbled everything now I remember and he was not that conversational. I guess picture two people in casual sweat clothing watching tv for 2 hours and then saying a few words here and there like Did you go skiing? “And Have you Traveled?” and I guess he did not answer all of my questions when I asked.

So being that is so difficult to meet men, and I hardly get out of my house, well of course I value that I finally met a man who. like me, wears suits and skis’ and grew up here and likes golf and has family here. So, ya, I want to scream “What” and Why Not?” I guess he has options is that why? Is he “playing the field?”

I have begun to get upset in thinking that in general men seem to have more options so that is why they only offer 1 night a week to me? Currently, I have not met anyone.

I am alone each night watching tv for the past 10 years. So this guy offering me a night here and there randomly is a really? So he does not want to watch tv every night? Why?

I am wondering a lot obviously. I wonder why he bothered in the first place at this point. And he texted me recently so I am upset so should I tell him I met someone else?

I Said Hey Whats Going On?

DEAR I SAID HEY WHATS GOING ON: I would like to pause for a moment here and highlight this part of your letter for some members of my male readership:

“I have begun to get upset in thinking that in general men seem to have more options so that is why they only offer 1 night a week to me? Currently, I have not met anyone.”  

Remember this, the next time y’all talk about how women have more options and have it so much easier on the dating scene. The idea that “X has it easier because they have all the options” is universal. It knows no gender or sexuality; it’s all down to whose perspective you’re looking through.

Now with that out of the way, let’s get to your issue. And honestly, this one’s dead easy, ISHWGO: he didn’t want to date you, even casually. He’s not playing the field, he’s playing the odds, and the odds in this case are “will ISHWGO come when I call?”  He wanted sex, period, the end. This is why he wasn’t interested in seeing you during the day. It’s why he was texting you at night, seemingly randomly and always asking you to come to his place. This is all classic booty-call behavior; I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if half of his texts started with “u up?” or “wyd?”.

Actually, no, I take that back: I’d be a little surprised, but only because of his age. The rest is bog-standard late-night horny texting, trying to find anyone who’ll take his calls and might come deal with the emergency in his pants. You showed signs that you might be the type he was looking for – texting first, willing to go to his place for a first date – and so you went into the list of numbers he’d shotgun his late-night invites to.

This is why everything else you talk about – his not seeming enthusiastic about things, his lack of interest in conversation – is ultimately irrelevant. There was never any interest in a relationship, not with you and likely not with anyone else he’s been seeing. He’s not looking for a TV buddy or someone to hang out in comfy sweats, he’s looking for someone who’s down to clown when he’s had a couple drinks and thinks that maybe a blowjob would be nice tonight.

Now to be clear: his behavior isn’t a you issue, it’s a him issue. This isn’t something that happened because you didn’t do X, Y or Z properly or because you gave him the wrong idea. I don’t subscribe to the idea that you never go to a guy’s place for a first date or that you have to make them wait an arbitrary number of days before you get physical. This wasn’t down to your going to his place on a first date, it’s simply him going “ok, she did this, so what if I do X?”, like a raptor testing the fences. If all a guy is after is sex, making them wait or having hard limits on what you’ll do on which date isn’t going to change their minds. They’re going to look for signs that suggest that you might be receptive, and they’ll shoot their shot if they think they see any.

Hell, sometimes they’ll do it anyway, because when you fire off enough Hail Mary’s, one may eventually work out.

However, having said that: having some personal limits on what you will or won’t do in the early days of meeting someone can be a useful filter for weeding out guys who simply aren’t right for you. This is especially true if you’re having issues finding people who want the same things you want. If you’re looking for something long-term, with someone who has similar goals and interests, then prioritizing dates that highlight those goals and interests is useful. The folks who want the same things as you are more likely to leap at those, while someone who’s not interested in, say, getting together for coffee, brunch and a lazy hang-out in your Sunday comfies is likely someone who’s not a good match for you. Guys who only want evening dates, only a couple times a week max, and ones that may lead to your ending up testing the structural integrity of his mattress will filter themselves out of your dating pool in short order.

But part of finding someone who’s right for you is going to require actually, y’know, going out and finding someone. One of the reasons why women in particular are getting fed up with dating apps is because a lot of guys are using it in hopes to find Ms. Right Now, not Ms. Right. It’s easy enough to just keep swiping right on as many people as possible, shotgunning the bare minimum to be considered an actual message and see what comes back. Going out and meeting people may not be as convenient as running your thumb left and right on your phone in your pajamas, but you’ll have a much easier time filtering out the timewasters and dead enders before you invest your energy in them.

I’d suggest that if you’re looking for someone who’s enthusiastic, communicative, likes skiing and long satisfying binge-views… well, you’re probably going to need to start spending time where people like that hang out. And they’re not hanging out in your house. Many of them are going to be out and about – hitting the slopes or at the local après ski spots. If you especially want people with strong ties to the area, then you’ll want to prioritize places where the locals hang out, rather than the tourist destinations.

Just as importantly: you may want to take your time in getting to know some of these folks, instead of leaping first and hoping that there’ll be a relationship by the time you hit bottom.

But for now: I don’t think you need to respond to this guy. You weren’t dating, you barely had a connection, and his only interest is whether you want to bang at his convenience. None of this necessitates a response or even a formal break-up. I think you’re fully entitled to just block his number and forget he exists. Let him waste his time trying to get with someone else instead of wasting yours for even the length of a “FOAD” response.

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 want to start by thanking you for your column and podcast that have really helpful and insightful. I really believe if I hadn’t found you 7 years ago, I might have become more bitter and resentful person.

This past year I came to terms with my own mortality after a death in the family, Dad’s serious neck injury and others near me getting sick or being confined to hospital. After taking stock of things, I realized that at 33, I’m not totally happy with my romantic /sex life and want to change it like f--king five years ago.

I didn’t have the sexual experience or partners I’ve craved since I was in my twenties. Porn and frequent masturbation, lack of confidence, unwillingness to fail and learn and beating myself up for this have taken its toll. It made me miserable when travelling overseas, when others were getting some and I wasn’t (*Pauses for awareness that comparison is the thief of joy*). 

Currently single, I’ve only had two real girlfriends during my late 20s and early 30s were short term and long distance (one here, the other when I was living in Europe before COVID). I didn’t enjoy the sex as much (couldn’t climax during penetration). I’ve consistently felt like a total failure being behind others with the skills to successfully [and seemingly naturally] seduce women or find a relationship. Tough as it may be to swallow, it’s on me to take responsibility and be practice better self-compassion.

My main dating challenges are taking action to go out and fail, learn and try and try again until I inch my way up to [Achievement Unlocked]. I’m a classic overthinking and over planner (a way of coping with uncertainty from anxiety) by studying more about dating and mindsets through articles, books, podcasts and videos than actually taking action and taking the risks and making approaches. Yet the last couple of times I went to a bar / brewery / event on my own to try and meet people and possibly women, I came home upset in my car self-flagellating and feeling hopeless (so no more doing that).

Let me insert the “insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results” quote here, for you. I don’t want to be cerebral when learning to DO THE WORK so I need to take a break from anything theory (despite barely cracking your book I bought). I want to trust myself that I have grown as a person, that I don’t need to “study” copious amounts and can bounce back and level up. I’m certain this perfectionist trait is playing out in other areas of my life.

How do I actually get back on the horse differently this time and take risks without letting the thoughts I’m incompetent stop me?

Sincerely,

Feeling Frustrated, Needing Breakthrough

DEAR FEELING FRUSTRATED NEEDING BREAKTHROUGH: What you need is a shift in your mindset, FFNB, and the first step of doing that requires that you recognize what’s actually going on.

You’re not a perfectionist, you’re trying to avoid risk and rejection without admitting it to yourself. The behavior you describe is classic cat-hoovering; you’ve got things that you know you need to do but you don’t want to, so you’re suddenly finding other things that need doing. You’ve cleaned your apartment, washed the windows until they sparkled, folded the laundry, prepped your meals and run the dishwasher and now you’re seriously considering vacuuming the cat. You feel like you’ve been incredibly productive… but you’ve done everything but what you know you need to do.

That’s why you keep studying, keep watching videos and listening to podcasts; it feels like you’re making progress and learning, but it’s just a delaying action. The feeling is that if you just absorb a little more theory, you’ll finally know how to get out there and handle everything life can throw your way and never have to fear rejection again. So clearly, you’re not procrastinating, you’re not avoiding anything, you’re laying the groundwork! And oh there’s a new theory or a new technique or this other idea about where you could talk to women or how and now another month has gone by and you’ve got nothing to show for it.

Here’s a truth: theory is useless. Theory means nothing. You can study all the books, listen to all the podcasts, watch all the videos and none of it will help you. Because theory is just that: it’s theoretical. It’s how things should work in perfectly controlled settings, where every variable and possibility has been accounted for and managed. And you will never, ever find circumstances like that in the real world.

As the saying goes: everyone’s got a plan until they get hit in the mouth. You can study all the theory you want, but all the theory in the world won’t prepare you for the unexpected and often absurd s--t you’ll encounter that nobody could ever prepare you for.

One example I’ll never forget from back in my pick-up days was when one of my regular wings and I were flirting with a woman at a local bar – a woman who, let’s be honest, was less than enchanted by us. While we were talking, another guy muscled into the conversation. Now, at this point, my wing and I were well-versed in theory of how to handle dudes who tried to get in on our action. We “knew” top to bottom how to disarm wanna-be toughs who were going to try to intimidate us, how to de-escalate hostile or angry boyfriends, how to dunk on guys trying to snake the women away from us so that people would think they were weirdos or losers. Hell, I’d even had experience with dealing with guys who tried to s--t-talk me while I was talking to a woman they were interested in and making them go away.

What neither of us were ready for was a very loud, very camp gay man coming over and yelling “OH MY GOD! YOU LOOK LIKE CAMERON DIAZ!” and gushing all over her, to the point that neither of us could even hear ourselves, never mind get a word in edgewise. Of all the ways we’d been ready to deal with someone getting in on our action, we weren’t prepared for someone (presumably a friend, if not a concerned bystander, who got the ‘please get me out of this’ signal) yelling about how she looked like a celebrity.

(The right way to handle this would be to recognize the “not interested” signs much earlier and move on to find someone who did want to talk to us, but that was a lesson for another time.)

Nor, for that matter will theory teach you how to use it, because up until now it’s all been, well, theoretical. When you’re there in person, with all the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to, suddenly theory doesn’t matter much. It’s nice that you memorized all those lines and what-ifs and have them ready to go like a series of flowcharts, and then it all goes out the window because you’re standing in front of a sexy somebody and suddenly you’ve lost the ability to speak coherent English. Now you’re trying to give a suave opening line, but somehow, you’ve managed to shove both feet into your mouth and turned yourself into a human Klein bottle.

No amount of reading or podcast listening prepares you for how things feel in the moment. Only experience does. This is why experience is a part of confidence; it’s not that you believe that you can’t fail, it’s that you know you can deal with this. You’ve been there before, you’ve made mistakes before and they didn’t kill you, so now you have the chance to do things differently… and hopefully better.

Think of it like going up against Radagon of the Golden Order in Elden Ring for the first time; you may have watched the playthroughs on YouTube and read all the strategies on Reddit, but that’s still not the same as when you’re facing him yourself, controller in your increasingly sweaty hands. But after a couple of deaths, you start understanding the timing, you’re better able to judge when to dodge and when to block, which attacks will hit you at what distance and so on. You’re still failing… but with each attempt you learn a little more and your confidence grows.

So it is with meeting and flirting with women, when you have little experience under your belt. At first, it’s intimidating and scary, simply because it’s unfamiliar and you’re staking so much of your ego and self-worth on the outcome. The stakes feel apocalyptic, and when things don’t work – as they so often won’t – then you leave feeling lower than a snake’s ass in a drainage ditch. But then you try again… and it’s less scary. It’s less intimidating. You can see where you f--ked up before. Maybe you strike out again… but honestly, was it really that bad? Then you try again, with greater understanding and less fear and, wait, is she laughing at your cheesy joke? Is she smiling with you? Do you dare to dream that maybe, just maybe this is going well?

These are the things that you can only learn through doing, not through studying. Experience is how you learn when, where and how to put theory into action, and when to toss theory out the window and just freestyle it. Some of my strongest relationships came about when I was doing everything “wrong” according to how many gurus and coaches would define it. But like I always say: it’s not stupid if it works. Because no amount of theory can teach you what to do when none of the theory applies or would be counterproductive… but experience can. Even if you’re running into a situation that you’ve never encountered before, experience can give you the insight on how to handle it. Theory can’t.

Now, here’s the thing about the mindset shift you need: you’re too focused on the outcome. This is the issue that comes up the most often for people who are “trying to make up for lost time”; they’re trying to prove something – to themselves, to the universe, to the negative voices in their heads – and so they focus like a laser on results. It becomes a binary situation: you succeed or you fail and if you fail, then you’ve just reaffirmed the very thing you were trying to disprove. This is why you left that bar feeling like ten pounds of ass in a five-pound sack: your ego and self-worth were wrapped up in the outcome. You left without getting a date or a number and hey presto: you feel like s--t about yourself. This is why you need to embrace your inner James T. Kirk and change the parameters of the engagement. You don’t want to go out trying to “win” – i.e. get a date. You want to go out to have an experience.

Part of what made the difference for me, especially after I left the pick-up scene, was to change my goal when I would go out. I wasn’t going to go out to pick up women. I was going out to have an adventure. Somewhere out in the night was my adventure, and it could be anything. Maybe I’d find a cool bar with a great drink menu. Maybe I would talk to a fascinating stranger and discover that they were a travel facilitator for the rich and famous or they used to be an actor on a soap opera in Australia. Maybe I’ll get hammered with Russian expats in an Irish bar or make friends for the evening and we’ll end up in a random speakeasy in Koreatown or I’ll be talking to a couple well into the night and having to dodge invites for a threesome back at their place as the bar is closing. Or maybe I’ll meet a lovely someone who I vibe with and get her number because we had compatible taste in books or make out with someone as we were skinny-dipping in the ocean before having to grab our clothes back from a wandering heroin addict.

(And for the record, these are all things have happened to me.)

Any of these, from the mundane to the ridiculous, could be my adventure that night and that would be fine. And because I was open to anything and wasn’t focused on a particular outcome, it meant that I was free to just… talk. I wasn’t doing approaches; I was just striking up conversations and seeing if someone was interesting or not. I didn’t have to feel intimidated, because I wasn’t trying to impress them or score points. If they didn’t dig me or I didn’t dig them, I could roll on, no harm, no foul, no 1d4 psychic damage to my ego. It was the lowest risk way to practice my skills and work on connecting to people.

That didn’t mean I didn’t get rejected or that I was completely fearless, nor does it mean that I didn’t make mistakes or feel stung if I did meet a sexy somebody who didn’t dig me. But while it might not feel great, it also didn’t wreck me… and I was in a better position to dust myself off and try again.

Even if nothing extreme or exciting happened, it was still a good night because hey, I was out and about and having a good time regardless. But because I was open to any possibility that life threw at me, I was putting myself in fortune’s path and that meant it was more likely for incredible things to happen.

This is the mindset you need to start adopting: that if you go out, you’re going out to have an experience and that experience could be anything. Maybe you’ll meet someone special, maybe you won’t… but it doesn’t matter because that’s not the point. The point is just to have that experience and enjoy yourself. If you’re open to anything being a successful outcome to the evening, even if it’s just “had a really good beer I never had before”, then it’s win-win. And when you’re open to any experience that comes your way, you’re far less worried about how many approaches you do, how many women shoot you down right away vs. how many you walk away from, how many shots you take that miss vs. ones that hit and so on.

Stop trying to “prove” that you’ve grown and changed and just grow. Stop traying to avoid mistakes and rejection and just put yourself in positions where rejection doesn’t matter. Go have experiences instead of going out to pick up women, have conversations with people instead of doing approaches. Take away the need for a particular outcome and just enjoy the ride. Let go of the past, of the concern about how “others” are doing and just go with the flow of it all.

I promise you: you’ll have a much better time, and you’ll develop your social skills far more effectively and efficiently.  

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com