DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I hope you’ll forgive me if I ramble a bit, I don’t have anyone else I feel safe saying this to.

I’m deeply in love with my girlfriend. She’s amazing, beautiful, kind, passionate, and she genuinely adores me. I know this she tells me, she shows me, and her eyes light up when we’re together. Her family loves me too. In fact, I literally saved her father’s life I pulled him out of a car right before it was crushed in a pile-up. Since then, her family has treated me like a hero, like I’m already one of them.

And still, I’m terrified.

I’m scared that one day she’ll wake up and realize I’m not good enough. I know I’m not the most attractive guy. I’m average at best, maybe less. I know what Tinder is. I know there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of guys who are better-looking, more confident, richer, and smoother. And what if she realizes that too?

She once cried tears of joy while holding me — it should have reassured me. But all I could think was that I didn’t deserve her. That maybe I had tricked her into thinking I’m better than I am.

I don’t show her any of this fear. I’m scared to. I’ve been vulnerable before, and it never ended well. I grew up in a home where showing weakness meant getting hurt. Literally. My parents beat me often. I left home as soon as I could, and I’ve never gone back.

So now, even though I’m loved truly loved I still feel like I’m holding my breath, waiting for it to end. For her to see through me. For her to leave. I know it’s irrational. But how do I stop this voice in my head?

How do I let myself believe I’m enough?

Sincerely,

Scared to Lose Everything

DEAR SCARED TO LOSE EVERYTHING: SLE, I’m going to do something that seems a bit counter-intuitive, so I’m going to ask you to stick with me for a second. Just trust me, ok?

Here’s the thing: your fear isn’t entirely irrational. Your girlfriend could up and leave you today. Right now. With no warning. 

That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It’s just a possibility that exists and will always exist, regardless of whether you’re “enough” or not. This is true of everyone in a relationship. Everyone who is in a relationship with another person is at risk of their sweetie deciding it’s time to call it quits and move on.

(And the folks who are in relationships with AI “girlfriends” are at risk of the company just killing their sweeties when they decide it’s time to pivot to a new revenue stream…) 

It’s the nature of being a sentient species with free will; we can make decisions at any time that may end up causing pain or heartache or distress to other people, including people close to us. There’s not really a way to prevent that without abrogating the freedoms of others.

We’re all aware that relationships can end. We hope and assume it won’t happen to us, but we know it’s a possibility. That’s part of the human condition: the awareness of the impermanence of things. But we also choose – consciously and unconsciously – to ignore that fact. It’s like how we know that loving a cat or a dog or a bunny or any other pet is an invitation to tragedy, yet we ignore the inevitability of having to say goodbye and the tears that come with it. Why? Because the preoccupation with how it may end does us no good; if we let those fears rage without restraint, we end up paralyzed, afraid to do anything or take any chances lest we get a critical fail on a random saving throw. At that point, we spend most of our time on this Earth preoccupied with the end of the thing that brings us joy, instead of savoring it now.

That’s part of the problem you’re having right now: you’re letting those fears �– and they’re understandable fears, don’t get me wrong – steal the joy from your life. You have more of your brain’s bandwidth dedicated to the fear of losing your relationship than you do to delighting in and appreciating all the little things that make relationships wonderful. You can’t, for example, notice how your pillow smells like your sweetie’s hair when you’re too busy worried that she may wake up and realize that there’re other hot guys out there. You can’t relax into the warmth and comfort of her embrace on the couch watching your favorite show together if you’re too busy thinking about the day you may not have it any more.

And the thing is, that worry is utterly useless. It serves no benefit, brings no comfort, nor any measure of protection. The act of worrying doesn’t magically make the threat go away. It just increases the anticipation of what could happen to the point that it occupies all the space in your mind. So, all you’re doing is borrowing trouble from the future – a future that may never come to pass – and reducing the amount of joy in your life.

But here’s the other side of the equation: some of what you fear has already happened. I promise you: your girlfriend isn’t unaware that there are other men in the world. She’s not dating you because you’re the only other man she has met outside of her family. She isn’t with you out of ignorance of the wider world.  There isn’t some day where she’ll wake up and suddenly realize that there’re other men out there; that day happened long, long ago, before you ever met her or even had the slightest inkling of her existence.

She knows perfectly well that there are other men out there who have more money or a more prestigious job or who are more conventionally attractive than you. Your girlfriend isn’t some babe in the woods (or EL James protagonist) who has never seen a computer before and doesn’t know what email is. She knows that dating apps exist. She knows hot and rich people walk the Earth with two arms like Donald Sutherland, and there are services that will be thrilled to introduce her to them. The thing is: she knows this – it’s impossible to exist in this interconnected world and not to know this – and she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care because she’s not interested in those people. She has chosen you.

You know what else may well happen? She may develop a crush on someone. And what happens when it does? Well… if she’s like most people, nothing. It’s a crush. They happen without reason or warning and they go away just as easily without making so much as a ripple in the water of the relationship, simply because finding another person attractive isn’t the same as “well, there is no choice for me but to throw this person aside.” Because not only is attraction not a zero-sum game, but it’s not a commandment either.

And let’s be honest here: you know this as well as she does, because you know there are other women in the world – many of whom are just as hot as your girlfriend, if not more so. You could just as easily toss her aside to pursue someone else, get yourself a nice relationship upgrade. And you don’t. Why? Well, it’s not because you don’t think you could score with one of those other women, not really. It’s because you don’t want them, not more than you want your girlfriend. You want your girlfriend, specifically, because she’s uniquely her. You didn’t choose her because she had the most points on a spreadsheet, any more than she chose you off a list simply because you were the best of a limited selection. You have chosen one another because of the qualities that make each of you special and unrepeatable, combinations you won’t find in literally anyone else.

If you can love your girlfriend despite living in a world where Sydney Sweeny or Zoe Kravitz or anyone else exists, your girlfriend can love you despite the fact that Glenn Powell is out there… watching. Waiting…

I promise: you haven’t tricked her into believing anything. The only person who’s been tricked is you, and you’ve tricked yourself into thinking that love is something that you earn or that is given to “the worthy”, instead of given freely by people who choose to give it.

The cause of your fear is fairly obvious. You call it out yourself in your letter. You grew up in circumstances where love was a commodity to be doled out at the whims of the people who were supposed to love you and care for you and protect you and who hurt you instead. You were taught that love was, at best, the carrot being dangled that told you the stick was coming. And that’s left you in a place where you feel like love is something that is conditional and can be taken away without warning. Small wonder you worry about losing this good thing in your life.

But if you know that, then you also know that the answer is to deal with the cause, not the symptom. You need to hie thyself to the therapist’s office, ideally to someone who understands attachment styles and familial abuse. You need to heal the wound your family inflicted, if only so you can stop letting them hurt you long after you got away from them. That can only happen if you take action.

So let your girlfriend love you. Let yourself recognize that while your fears are real, they’re not justified; they’re just a reaction to harm that was done by someone else. It’s time to debride that wound, to cleanse and disinfect it and finally let it heal. And in doing so, you’ll stop stealing joy from your life for no reason.

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 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