DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I wrote to you over a year ago about my less-than-stellar college experience (“I’m Afraid I Wasted My College Experience” 3/20/24). Well, since graduating from college, not much has gotten better or worse in my life. If anything, my life has just gotten more boring. I try to do new things, but I don’t have many friends (besides two friends from high school).

What makes socializing hard for me is how much I can’t relate to or even like my generation. Gen Z does nothing. They don’t party, drink, smoke, or date. The men in my generation are a bunch of Trump supporters, and the women couldn’t care less about men my height (5ft 4in). If my generation is hiding indoors, what am I supposed to do? My generation, Gen Z is a boring generation. No drive, no skills, no risk taking, nothing.��I know people will argue that it’s due to outside factors like the economy, but honestly, I think it’s mostly phone addiction. Literal medieval peasants partied harder during the Black Death than my generation does right now. It just angers me all of the fun partying that previous generations got, and I won’t. Partly due to older generations, but also from my generation selling us all out by voting for Trump. It infuriates me. This is probably how the hippies who stuck to their values felt watching the rest of their generation become coke-addled yuppies in the 80s. No parties, no fun adventures, nothing.

Here’s the thing, though. I know that most of what I’ve just written sounds immature and childish, but I don’t know how to break out of this mindset or longing for the partying experiences I didn’t get to have.

What should I do? I wish I could just have the youth experience found in movies like American Pie.

Stiffler’s Mom Had It Going On

DEAR STIFFLER’S MOM HAD IT GOING ON: OK, it’s Chair Leg of Truth time, SMHIGO: your problem is you and your expectations. If you’re telling yourself that your life isn’t as meaningful or fulfilling because it doesn’t look like the movies… well you’re going to live a very disappointing life because nothing is going to resemble the movies, especially teen boner jams like American Pie. The whole point of movies is that they’re fantasy, exaggerations, heightened reality where the implausible happens regularly and the impractical doesn’t exist.

Basing your expectations of how life should be based on movies is kind of like thinking that the only reason you’re not out single-handedly stopping crime is because your parents didn’t get gunned down in front of you by a mugger in an alley. And the sadder thing is that encountering those things in real life will just disappoint you at best. I mean, I hate to tell you this but high levels of gamma ray exposure just gives you cancer and getting bit by a radioactive spider is only going to cause lesions and organ failure.

You’re creating expectations that you are never going to meet, a life that will never live up to what you think it should, and then you’re going to vacillate between being angry at yourself and angry at everyone else for not providing you with the fantasy.

Kinda like you’re doing here. I hate to tell you this, but you’ve just shifted focus over who’s to blame. Previously, you were upset at yourself for f--king up in college and how it was going to leave you behind. You were worried about being too old for things like drinking and trying drugs for the first time and how everyone was going to think you were a loser for it.

Now you’ve changed to “my generation and their addiction to their phones, argle bargle” like you aged 40 years, moved to the suburbs and your only joy in life is a manicured lawn and those kids need to stay off it. But let’s be real here: your complaint about your generation isn’t that they don’t party enough or date enough, it’s that they’re not providing you with the service and experiences you think you should have. And that emphasis is on provided. This is, in no small part, a self-inflicted problem and one that you don’t like looking at too closely.

It’s easier to blame your fellow Gen Z for staying indoors and not providing you the experience you think you should have. It’s far simpler to say that it’s all “phone addiction” instead of, say, the fact that the economy is in freefall and a night out with a friend, singular, on the weekend can easily cost over a hundred bucks before you even get done with dinner.

Nor could it be the case that there are fewer and fewer third spaces for people to hang out in, especially for free, and the ones that do exist are constantly either under threat of being shut down or have Karens and Kens running to complain to the cops when young people choose to use the space.

Hell, it couldn’t even be that y’all started coming of age right when a world-changing pandemic hit, forcing everybody indoors while hundreds of thousands died and countless more deal with the lingering effects of COVID – never mind the PTSD that basically all of us are living with and there’s a coordinated effort to gaslight us all into thinking it didn’t happen the way it did.

(And, incidentally, the peasants during the Black Plague weren’t partying at all, never mind partying like rockstars. They were doing back-breaking, body-shattering physical labor to stay alive while hoping that the plague would pass them by because, y’know, there was no DoorDash or Instacart or work-from-home. Kinda like the farmworkers and “essential workers” who had to do all the work that made it possible for everyone else to get by in 2020. You weren’t one of the peasantry, my guy, you were one of the people in The Decameron)  

I’m not surprised you can’t relate to them, seeing as your idea of cultural and sociological touchstones are fantasies dreamed up for people ten years older than you, written and filmed by people twenty years older and produced and sold to you by people thirty and forty years older.

And honestly, the complaint that your peers aren’t drinking or smoking or doing enough drugs just leaves me scratching my head. I realize I am The Ancient One, seeing I am “My Knees Make Noises When I Stand Up Too Fast” years old, but the allure of wild drinking and drugs ain’t all that. I have been there and done that with the hangovers and very stupid mistakes and dumbf--k decisions to prove it and I am here to tell you that getting f--ked up for the sake of getting f--ked up is overrated.

I love me a good whiskey and I make cocktails as a hobby, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a lot more to be said about not waking up the next day with a blinding headache and feeling like the cat used your mouth for a litter box while wondering about which things that you don’t remember doing are what you’re going to be apologizing for later.

But hey, it’s hardly as though partying doesn’t exist and you’re locked out from it. The bars are still open after all, the clubs are still there and it’s not like weed, MDMA, acid, shrooms and meth have evaporated into the ether. You don’t have to work that hard to find a party. Hell, you could take matters into your own hands and throw your own. Trust me, the allure of cheap or free beer and snacks trumps “wait, I thought YOU knew the host.”

That would, however, require work. It would require that you brush that chip off your shoulder – you know, the one that’s grown so dense that it collapsed into a singularity and sucked your brain out through your ear – and go out to meet people where they are. You’re going to have to take the initiative, as most people do in life, and create the opportunities to make friends, build relationships and otherwise create your own social life instead of hoping that it will be provided to you by others, or that there will be some pre-existing circle you can snap into like a Playmobil set. And it’s going to require being willing to do a little abstract thinking instead of a binary “well I went to karaoke night once and nobody talked to me first so this doesn’t work” attitude.

It’s also going to require that you do the work I told you to do in your last letter. Remember, you were complaining that you didn’t know how to read social cues and you were melting down over your anxieties and frustrations; I told you that you needed to talk to someone about those. Have you? Have you worked on the social skills and being better at reading the room – things you said you lagged behind in? Because if you haven’t, and you’re still going to collapse into a ball if you make a mistake, you’re just going to repeat the same cycle of despair and breast-beating and complaining that you are so far behind in the experiences that you just got done complaining your generation doesn’t do enough of.

But that’s not the biggest problem here. The biggest problem is a refusal to see that life ain’t the movies. Movies are the reflection of the world through a funhouse mirror. Even documentaries are distorted through the lens of the camera and editing suite. If you’re going to be upset that life doesn’t resemble the movies, you’re going to spend the rest of your life being angry for no good reason.

And I hate to tell you this but… not every dream you have will be fulfilled and not every goal is going to come to fruition. Some ambitions will remain unmet. This is true of everyone. Part of being a grown-ass adult is understanding and accepting this, while also being able to not let it wreck your s--t. So too is finding new dreams and ambitions. As you grow and change, so too should your dreams and goals change with you. They’re reflections of who you are now, after all. Being stuck in the past just means you either end up in a museum or buried in a landfill.

Another part is learning when to accept that some goals, dreams and expectations were not realistic or even what you actually wanted or needed. I spent a lot of time and money trying to be the hard-partying club guy who went to bars and came home with a different woman every night – except came to realize that I disliked the bars where I was spending time, the people I was trying to hook up with and I really didn’t like the guy I was trying to turn myself into to achieve it. Letting go of that and learning to not just connect with the most authentic version of myself but to really interrogate what I was trying to do and why made a huge difference. I didn’t actually want to be that guy, I just wanted to prove that I wasn’t the hopeless loser I thought I was… and I couldn’t even tell you who I was “proving” it to.

A third part is learning to stop blaming everyone around you and complaining about your generation and to take control of your own life. You have agency. You have control. You are going to have to be willing to do work to create a social life – and that work includes both learning how to socialize with others and how to find the people you want to socialize with. You can complain all you like about Gen Z staying indoors, but how much has that helped you? What will complaining accomplish? If you want things to be different, you’re going to have to be the person who starts making it be different. If it’s harder than you think it should be and require more prep work than you think it should… well, you either have to accept it as the price of making those things be, or shift your priorities to something that’s more within what you’re willing to do.

But most of all, you need to get in touch with who you are, not who you think you’re “supposed” to be, especially when those people are a 40-year old’s idea of an 18-year-old. You’re not Stiffler, you’re not Oz, Jim or Kevin. You’re not Harold nor Kumar, any member of Delta House, the Tri-Lams or any other movie character you care to name. Letting the movies shape your expectations about what life is “supposed” to be like is a recipe for disappointment at best.

You’re you. Learn how to be the best you possible, and you’ll be far happier.

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’m a 23-year-old man with autism, and perhaps needless to say, it’s made my social life challenging – not to mention that I’ve struggled a lot with social anxiety, depression, the works. I’m very fortunate in that I have a supportive family, and over the course of – what, a decade of therapy? – I’ve reached a point where I can recognize that I’ve got a pretty big bundle of self-loathing, a lot of it related to being autistic, to unravel. So far, so good.

Over the past couple of years in particular, I’ve put in a lot of work to overcome depression and work on bettering myself – eating better, getting more exercise, mindfulness, you get the picture. Again, so far so good!

But something I’m stuck on is my social life. I have a handful of friends in real life, but due to distance we only get to see each other a couple of times per year – time that I cherish, but desperately want more of. I’m more socially active online, but while I would call them friends without reservation, it’s just different from being with someone in person, especially since I’ve never met any of them in real life – again, distance.

So, make more friends. Easy. I’m in college still, simple enough – who can’t make friends in college? Yet… I just can’t. Make no mistake, I’m fully aware that this is a me problem and not the people around me, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t feel ready enough, good enough, worthy enough. I’m still too fat, I’ll just look like a creep, why would they want to talk to a complete stranger anyways? The list of BS excuses that make complete sense in the moment goes on. This is the new form that my social anxiety takes as opposed to flight-or-fight, which is an improvement, but I still can’t say I’m pleased with it. This, of course, goes double for dating – I’d certainly like a relationship with someone, but all of those reasons I don’t feel good enough just to talk to people means that I’m certainly not opening myself up to dating.

Even when the situation is reversed – someone talks to me every once in a while – these assumptions still take place despite the fact that they’re showing explicit interest in speaking to me. I’m so caught off-guard by it that I’m barely able to hold a coherent conversation, and after the fact I’ll never follow up on it. I ruined my shot at a first impression, what’s the point?

It’s like I’m always on the outside looking in, and I just can’t figure out how I’m supposed to *just do it*. I’ve spent entirely too much time reading self-help stuff online (this blog included), and no matter how much I read the best-written, most sound advice, I just can’t internalize it for the life of me. I can’t shake the implicit assumption that I fundamentally can’t achieve it, and even if I did, I wouldn’t deserve it. No matter how much rationalization (or rumination) I do, it’s a feeling that I cannot overcome. It’s the world’s most self-inflicted rock and hard place situation: caught between my earnest desire to put myself out there and the “knowledge” that I can’t.

All of that preamble to ask: what would you say to someone who does not feel worthy of having friends or dating? How do they overcome that mental block? If this is a case where the Chair Leg of Truth is needed, then bring it on – I’m ready to hear it. Thanks just for reading this.

– Unconfident Man

DEAR UNCONFIDENT MAN: Ok, I think I see the problem here, UM, and it comes down to something very simple: do or do not. There is no try.

Allow me to explain: you’re thinking too much about all of this. You’re thinking that there’s some way of doing things that’s “the right way” and if you don’t do it correctly, then you’re doing something wrong. That’s not how it works, but it’s the thought pattern that’s got you stuck.

Much of this comes down to the idea that you have to “deserve” a social life or that you have to be someone who’s “worth” talking to. You’re thinking that having friends is something that you earn by being a “good” person or the “right kind” of person. And that’s all bulls--t.  

All the worries and excuses – being “too fat” or “why would they want to talk to me” and so on – are just that, worries and excuses. You feel like you need to overcome these things and that you aren’t “worthy” because you have these supposed faults and flaws; if you were worthy, you wouldn’t have them, because you would’ve overcome them. Except you don’t. Because that’s part of “trying” and there is no “try”. There’s just either doing it or not doing it.

Doing it and failing – or rather, not succeeding – is fine, because you’re still doing it. Not doing it… well, that’s what you’re doing now. And “trying” is, at its core, justifying not doing it in the first place. It’s making a half-assed attempt, under the assumption that you’re going to not succeed anyway so why commit to it in the first place? It’s giving yourself reasons why you’ve failed before you’ve even made the attempt, so you end up not doing it. And so we come to the crux of the problem and the solution: there is no “try”.

It has nothing to do with being deserving or worthy; we see the ‘unworthy’ succeed all the time. It just comes down to “you do it or you don’t”. Everything else is just you talking yourself out of it. Overthinking it is the “try” of “there is no try”.

So, if the problem is that you’re overthinking it, let’s eliminate the problem: stop thinking. Just do.

No, seriously. Stop thinking about what-ifs or talking yourself down, and instead just say “I’m ready, they’re going to love me, let’s do this.” If you think about it, you end up creating reasons to not give your all, to start off from a place of apologizing for your mere existence and thus setting yourself up to not succeed. So instead, you choose to not think about it, to not give yourself the chance to overthink it and convince yourself not to or to half-ass it instead of giving it your full ass.

You stop waiting to be “ready”, you stop trying to be “deserving” and you just do. You go out there like you have already crossed whatever milestone your anxiety says you need to it and you did it years ago.

Think of it as role-playing a character, except this character is the person you think you need to be in order to be “worthy” or “deserving”; you’ve got a 16 Charisma and proficiency in persuasion and performance checks so you’ll get advantage on those rolls. When the nagging little voice in your head tells you that you’re not good enough or that you’re being delusional for even trying, you remind yourself that this isn’t “you”, this is your character and you are inhabiting the role and play it out to the fullest.

You will be astounded at how well this works. Well, for a moment you’ll be astounded, and then you’ll feel like you’re an imposter somehow, like you’re tricking people into thinking that you’re this other person, this person who is “good enough” to have friends or to talk to strangers and to get dates. Except the only person you’re actually tricking is you. And what you’re doing is conning yourself into letting go of the bulls--t that’s holding you back.��Because here’s the thing: if you can go out, pretending that you’re the person you think you need to be in order to be social, and actually talk to people and make friends? Then what you’ve done is demonstrate to yourself that you are already this person. You don’t need to be thinner or have some excuse or reason to talk to people or to have accomplished this thing or passed that milestone. You’ve had these capabilities within you all this time and you’ve just given yourself permission to access it.

Now I want to be clear: this isn’t the same as not being nervous. Nor is it the same as not experiencing a sort of social stage-fright. You’re not trying to eliminate feeling. What you’re doing is eliminating the idea that you can’t do this or that you’re not “allowed” to or that you’re doing something wrong. It can still be uncomfortable or make you nervous, but that’s because it’s unfamiliar to you, which is very different from not being capable and even more different from not being “allowed to”. But that’s fine! The important thing is that you’re getting out of your own way. You’re not “trying”; you’re doing. You may do it and not succeed, but you’re still doing. And not succeeding doesn’t mean that you’re unworthy, any more than it means you’re a failure. It just means things didn’t work out the way you’d hoped, this time. If you cannot succeed in other areas of your life without it being “proof” that you’re flawed or deficient, then you can apply that same feeling here.

But no amount of reading, no amount of how-to videos or prep work is going to make you ready. There’s no amount of research that you can do that will substitute for actually opening your mouth and making the words go. And there’s no amount of self-improvement that you can do that’s going to get you “ready” simply because you’re already there. You just have to do.

So like I said: stop thinking. Play the role, inhabit it and get out on stage and realize that you’re already exactly who you need to be in order to go out, make friends and find new people to become part of your life.

You’ve got this.

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: Thanks in part to your advice (plus a lot of self-care, presenting a more authentic self, and just putting myself out there), I’m now in a relationship. Yay! Thank you!

… But while there are definitely differences, I’m also getting a bit of a sense of deja-vu from my last relationship, which did not end well.

I’m a bit of a classical, hopeless romantic. What I think of as just normal affirmation of my partner, other men might see as overly saccharine. And, for the most part, f--k ’em. That’s just how I show I care, and it brings a smile to her face, which is worth more than all the sneers of all the cynics.

But my last relationship… I could pick a few different reasons it ended and dates when the end could have started, but the reason that really stands out is that she had a really hard time loving herself, and it’s hard to love people who don’t think themselves worthy of it.

And the moment that really stands out for when that took a turn for the worst is “when the love poetry stopped” (note from my past self: love poetry is a lot easier to write when deep in the throes of NRE, and it can be a little jarring when the NRE runs out and the poetry disappears with it). My impression, which may have been tainted by the time that’s passed since then, is that that’s when her self-love stopped waxing and started waning.

In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I unintentionally love bombed that poor woman, so I’m toning things down a bit to — I hope — a more long-term, sustainable level. Less “Prince Charming,” more “sweet, caring partner.” And no love poetry, for now, at least.

But the new relationship still feels like it might be going down that same path. The specific, worrying thing I’m seeing repeated is that my partner is often asserting that she’s not good enough for me. That I’m this wonderful person she doesn’t deserve.

And while I try to assure her that she’s great and tell her why she is, I often feel like that gets filed under “Aw, you’re sweet and a good boyfriend” and not “This is something that he actually believes and I should believe, too.” Which is the wrong side of the balance sheet, if I want to fix “She doesn’t feel like she’s good enough for me.”

She IS good enough, or even better than. And maybe it’s the NRE talking, but I want this relationship to last a long, long time, and I’m afraid that won’t happen unless she starts believing it. So, what can I do to help that along?

I’m pretty sure she’s already going to therapy; I’m being specific and varied with my praise to make it more obvious that it’s genuine; I’m trying to demonstrate, however I can, that however happy I make her, she’s making me just as happy.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Thank you,

Reformed Love Bomber Is Trying To Be A Love Crop Duster

Being really romantic and demonstrative with someone you care about isn’t love bombing, in no small part because you’re not trying to control them, manipulate them or otherwise coerce them into something they might otherwise not choose on their own. It may be a bit much for some, and it may be cringe or a turn-off to others, but that’s emphatically not the same thing. 

I think it’s important to correct you on this, partially because using the term incorrectly diminishes it, especially as a potential warning sign, but also because it’s affecting how you’ve framed your situation to yourself.  

See, I think you’re asking the wrong question here… but not in the way that you might think. You seem to be coming to this from the position of “how do I fix my partner’s insecurity” and, well, you can’t. Or rather, you can’t. The change in emphasis is important because at the end of the day, self-esteem has to come from within. If someone doesn’t believe in themselves, no amount of believing in them for them is going to matter; that dark little voice in the back of their mind (that’s speaking in their voice) is going to have any number of reasons why that other person is lying at worst and deluded at best.

As much as it sucks, as much as we don’t want it to be true, you can’t love another person out of their own insecurities or mental health issues. That’s not how love works, nor is it how self-esteem or self-confidence works. At best, it’s a source of external validation, which can be great, don’t get me wrong… but external validation can’t fill the void that a lack of internal validation leaves. No amount of external validation will ever actually fill the hole, and if that supply of validation gets interrupted – like, say, when you pass out of the NRE phase of the relationship and you aren’t as effusive as you were at the start – the hole is still there, demanding to be fed.

You’ve already seen this with your previous relationship. You may even have experienced it yourself in some form or another. This isn’t to say that being your partner’s hype man and gassing them up is bad; it’s just that it’s not going to fix an internal problem. Internal problems require internal solutions.

Now, there’s a difference between trying to fix someone’s feeling that they’re not good enough for you and loving and supporting them and being their biggest fan and cheerleader. Part of the appeal of Gomez Addams is that he’s an unabashed Wife Guy, who thinks his lady is the reason the moon blocks out the cursed day star that waits to burn us with its hate. And that, I think, is far more helpful and useful for your purposes than trying to essentially ‘rescue’ your lady friend from herself.

Part of what I think you should do is work on recognizing where these feelings of “I don’t deserve you” are coming from. Someone who, for example, is coming from a history of toxic or abusive relationships may find being treated well by a partner to be uncomfortable, simply because it’s not what they’re used to. Someone who has an anxious, insecure attachment style, on the other hand, may feel like they have to “earn” someone’s love and affection, especially if they had neglectful parents or caregivers or their parents made affection contingent on “good” behavior.  If she’s had a string of partners who start all lovey-dovey but then the romance falls away when the other person got bored or never took it as seriously as she did, then she may be expecting the trend to continue, even as she blames herself for getting her hopes up again. It could well be, as the poet says, a matter of “After a while you’ll forget everything/ It was a brief interlude and a midsummer night’s fling/ And you’ll see that it’s time to move on…” and she’s trying to get out ahead of what she sees as the inevitable conclusion.

If you can zero in on the why of it, you may be better able to express your feelings for her in a way that she can accept and receive.

But a mistake that you’re making is that you accept the premise in the first place. When she says “I don’t deserve this” or “I’m not good enough”, telling her that she is good enough or does deserve you won’t necessarily make a difference, because it plays into the idea that love is earned, not given. As you say: it’s very easy to file that under “Well, he has to say that,” which makes it easier to disbelieve. But by focusing on the “I don’t deserve this” or “I’m not good enough”, you’re subtly – if inadvertently – reinforcing the idea that it is about being deserving or being ‘good enough’. Even though you think you’re refuting her, what you’re doing is saying that love is conditional on someone being “worthy”, which isn’t how love works.

So, what I would suggest is to instead say “see, I don’t care whether you’re ‘good enough’, that’s not a consideration. It wouldn’t stop me even if you weren’t. You’re you and that’s all I’m concerned with. I’m just gonna be good to you anyway, because you’re you.” If she says “I don’t deserve someone like you,” then you tell her   “Well, you’ve got me anyway, so you may as well get used to the idea.”

You don’t tell her that she’s worthy or deserving, you tell her that it’s not up to her; she’s not earning your love, you’re giving it to her.  If she thinks you’re wasting it on her, well it’s your love to waste, even though you reject the idea that it is a waste.��Can you give her reasons why you’re crazy about her? Absolutely. But don’t frame it as being worthy or deserving; frame it as “this is part of why I think you’re amazing” or “this is part of what makes you you”, so it’s not about her earning or deserving your attention but rather about her existing and being. 

And to be clear: this isn’t going to “fix” or change her, but that’s also not your job, nor is it within your skillset. You aren’t here to love her out of her low self-esteem. That is ultimately going to be her job. But you can be the guy who’s there to be keeping faith in her and supporting her, even when s--t falls apart, so that she has someone to help her back up to her feet and dust her off and get back to it when she struggles and stumbles. You’re not fighting this for her, you’re her cornerman.

So, focus less on changing her mind about what she “deserves” and instead reject the premise of being deserving entirely. Support her, hype her up, help pull her back on her feet when she needs it… but your giving her your time, love and attention are your choice to do so, not something that only happens when she’s “worthy”.

Good luck.

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