DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I (M28) am writing because I have a lot of trouble about moving on from my last (and only) relationship with a girl I’ll call Leila (F28). We were together for about five years, and after that we got back together for a few months. We have a child together.

I have always been the very quiet, recluse kid at school. Not many friends, but I didn’t care as I spent all my free time playing video games. In college, I did my best to get out of my shell, and I mostly succeeded: I got into partying, meeting people, and I met a lot of people whom I’m still friends with today.

Now, I was not really getting there with romantic and sexual relationships. While I did get some interest from other women from time to time, I never found them to my liking. Of course, I never approached girls I thought were cute.

It was the same when I met Leila: she was interested in me, but I wasn’t at first. But see, I knew she was attractive, just not my particular flavor. She made heads turn at the bar. She was very experienced sexually. And she was hitting on me really hard. She quickly grew on me and we quickly started hooking up. She was my first sexual partner (not counting a hookup I once had with a girl I didn’t want).

Now you can’t imagine what effect this had on my ego. The “unattractive loser” was having sex with a hot girl, and everyone knew it. I felt like a million bucks, and that had never happened to me before. Actually, the well-being of my ego entirely depended on the fact that Leila wanted to hook up with ME specifically — and more than that even: she was in love with me. I liked her a lot but I can’t say I was “in love”.

I was fine with being sexfriends, and I told her so, but eventually I gave in and we started “dating”, and we quickly moved in together. We got on very well, had lots of shared interests, we had good sex. Her libido was lower than mine, which frustrated me a bit but it was still okay.

Through the years, things dwindled. She made a lot of effort to maintain the relationship, and did a lot for me. But her libido lowered a lot. I was increasingly distant and frustrated with her. I didn’t feel attached to her at all anymore. I wanted to go out there and get my own relationships, go see “hot girls” and hook up with them, meet a girl I “really love” to date her. So I ended things one year ago and moved out.

Leila was devastated, but I was finally free. Free to pursue whatever I wanted in terms of relationships. I was fine being alone, and was not looking for another relationship for the moment. Only, what I didn’t know is that my whole sense of self-worth still rested on Leila’s love for me, so when I learned that she had hooked up with multiple people since we split (and I — zero), I literally felt my soul leaving my body.

Enter anxiety and depression. I had never felt so bad in my life. If she forgot me, I thought, I would have nothing for me anymore. I was ferociously jealous that she could get anyone she wanted, because she was that good, and I… just couldn’t. I was jealous of her partners too – obviously. And she really did almost everything I could have ever hoped to do or discover in my sexual life during our breakup, including things she didn’t do with me, which killed me a little more.

Yet, I tried the apps. I ended up getting some dates (no sex), multiple dates with the same girls even, including one I met during a night out. This was all a first for me and I’m still surprised I pulled it off. But really, I was only thinking about Leila. I felt like these girls I met just didn’t measure up to her. So when Leila and I met later that year, and she told me she still loved me, we ended up having sex and got back together shortly after. And the old feelings came back: I was frustrated, distant, dismissive of her needs because I had seen no progress whatsoever in my own relationship goals during the breakup. We split up again.

Now, she found someone else very quickly, again. I fear that she found a more serious prospect than the previous people she saw. I tell myself every day that I could get her back, and end the constant anxiety, loneliness and frustration. It’s just a phone call away. Only, I don’t know how much time is left before she won’t take me back. And I’m scared to see this day come.

Of course, this is not healthy. I believe I need to put an end to this relationship, for good, but we cannot go no-contact because of our child. We have both sent messages that we shouldn’t have, still recently.

Doc, how the hell am I supposed to build my self-worth on my own? How do I know I’m not letting the best girl I’ll ever meet go, while she would spend the rest of her life with me?

What if I’m only leaving her for the frustration of not having had any other sexual experiences, only to understand after a few years that our life together was actually nice enough and our problems were all (well, mostly) in my head? I do fear I am making a huge mistake here.

Sorry for the long one, and thanks a lot for reading. Love your blog, your energy and your outlook: you’re one of the good ones. Keep up the good work.

Hollow Night

DEAR HOLLOW NIGHT: This is a s--tty situation to be in and you have my sympathy. Which is why I hate to say this HN, because it’s going to sound like I’m giving you s--t when I’m not, but… this is precisely why I talk about external vs. internal validation and why it’s important to love yourself. It’s also why confidence and self-esteem isn’t inherent to achievements or other people – because that means your sense of self and self-worth is something that can be taken away from you.

Without the foundation of feeling your own value, believing in your own worth, independent of who you’re seeing or sleeping with… well, you end up with situations like this. And it absolutely sucks. It hurts, and it makes it hard to move forward, simply because you’re more focused on what someone else is doing rather than working on your own healing and making your own closure.

This is something that a lot of guys go through, especially guys who define themselves as hopeless or losers or otherwise have made being “bad with girls” part of their identity and self-concept. They find the “perfect” person, someone who they can point to and say “Look, she finds me hot! She’s someone other people want, now she’s with me! Look what that says about me!” And for a brief period, it feels like you’re the center of the universe. You’ve gone from being the guy that folks pitied, if they didn’t sneer at you, to being the guy that everyone envies. You go outside and it feels like you’re starring in a musical full of song and dance numbers about how great you are while God smiles down directly on you.

And then your “perfect” partner turns out to be human, the same as everyone else. The little imperfections and flaws that everyone has become more prominent in your view, the little annoyances that you could overlook early on stop being so little. And, just as importantly… well, you start thinking that “ok, well, maybe I could do a little better than this. Maybe I could find someone who’s even better, someone who can make me feel like I did when we first started, but without the things that are bugging me.”

Maybe you end things, maybe the relationship has reached the point where she does; either way, you are now single – like you wanted to be! The world is your oyster! You’re ready to move on to the next level with the next, even better partner…

Except you don’t. You struggle. You have a hard time meeting people, especially folks who are on the same theoretical “level” as your ex. The confidence you had has vanished, and all those obstacles and challenges you thought had been erased by being with her never actually went away, and you’re exactly where you were before.

Meanwhile, she’s not had the same problem. She’s seeing other people, while Friday night is the loneliest night for you. And you can’t help but feel like maybe the answer is to get her back, so you can feel the way you did before.

Now, to be clear: being frustrated about a mismatched libido is understandable, especially if sex and sexual intimacy is a priority for you in a relationship. Sexual compatibility is vitally important for a relationship’s long-term success. But it also sounds like there wasn’t as much there besides the sex. You say it yourself: you weren’t dating her because you loved her, you were moving from being f--kbuddies to dating because she wanted something more serious and you “gave in”. Which was, honestly, a mistake. An understandable one, but a mistake none the less. Because when the sex went from being new and novel to not just what you were accustomed to, but not as frequent or regular as at the start, there was less in the relationship to help bridge the gap.

So, you basically ended up doubly screwed. You were in a relationship that didn’t meet your needs, with someone who you liked, but didn’t have that vital connection to, and you didn’t have the foundation of self-worth and value and esteem that would make it easier to move on, give yourself closure, take what you learned and apply it to a new relationship. You had the illusion of confidence, not the reality of it, and it vanished because it was based entirely on someone else.

So, I’m going to say this as gently as I can: this happened because at the end of the day, this relationship was all about you and how being with her meant that you were special. It’s a little like the scene in 500 Days of Summer, where Summer is saying something significant and vulnerable to Tom, something that she has never said to anyone else, and Tom misses it entirely. He knows she’s talking, but he’s not paying attention; he’s thinking about what her opening up to him this way says about him.

And, to be frank, it’s still happening. You haven’t moved on because you haven’t learned the lesson here. Even your despair at how many guys she’s been with in comparison to your none is due to having not fully understood why this relationship hasn’t and won’t work. I hate to tell you this but if you get back with her again, you’re going to have the same frustrations, feel the same lack of affection and care and you’re going to break up a third time, because nothing has changed. You haven’t learned the lesson you need to learn, so you’re stuck in the same patterns, which will just repeat itself again. And then, all that’s going to happen is that you will have broken the heart of someone who seems to genuinely care for you three separate times.

You miss Leila because of what she represents, not because of her. You miss how she made you feel about yourself. You miss being the guy that could get someone this hot, this sexual, someone who made you the envy of others. But that’s all about you, using her as the base for your sense of self-worth and confidence.

You have to let go of that and learn to find it in yourself. This is why confidence is built by believing in your own ability to improve and grow and accomplish, not by “success” and not by who you’re with. It’s built around knowing that you may not succeed this time, but failure isn’t going to stop you, either. And it’s built around knowing that, even when nobody else believes in you, your faith in yourself is strong.

This is why I say that loving yourself is so important. Why your sense of self-worth has to be inherent to you, not reliant on external validation. Otherwise, you end up in situations just like this, feeling lost and confused and often causing pain in others without meaning to or even understanding why or how you’re doing so.

Leila isn’t the best woman you will ever meet, HN. She’s the one that made you feel a particular way. That relationship was mostly about you and it still is. You have only ever felt this need for her after you leave her, not while you’re with her. It’s about filling the vacuum in your sense of self that you notice when she’s gone. And until you do fill it for yourself, you’re going to have the same problems – chasing after someone you don’t actually want for her own sake, while not being able to move on and meet someone who you might actually care about and build a relationship with.

I know this sounds harsh, but this is the way forward for you. You have to recon with the truth of your connection to her, even though it makes you look bad and makes you feel bad about yourself. It’s the lesson you have been needing to learn before now, but made all the more bitter because this is the second go-round, second verse same as the first, a little bit louder and a whole lot worse.

You’re going to have to build your confidence and self-worth without her, find the things that make you feel good about yourself by yourself. You’re going to have to teach yourself to do the things that not only feed your soul but nourish your sense of self, instead of relying on someone else that you can point to and say “see? SEE? THIS PROVES I’M COOL!”

And when you finally do, you’ll be able to put your previous relationship with Leila behind you and move on to the one you’ll need to have going forward. Which, I hate to say it, won’t be and shouldn’t be as a couple. Co-parents, yes, but not partners. You didn’t have that connection when you first started this, and at this point, I think you’ve salted that ground far too thoroughly.

Find yourself, learn to recognize your inherent value and worth that is entirely because you are you, and then find someone who you can connect with as a partner, not as an accessory. It’s going to sting while you do it, but that’s the pain of growth put off for too long.

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 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