DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m from the UK. I’m almost 30, and a virgin. I’m terrified of commitment, sex and have tanked every potential relationship I’ve ever had.

This is because I figured out I wasn’t attracted to the other person, but mostly because I self-sabotage a LOT as partially I don’t think I’m worthy of a relationship.

I also have no frame of reference for how a relationship is meant to work. I’ve never had a relationship, so how am I meant to do and say what may work?

Being all cutesy and inexperienced may fly when you’re young and attractive, but I’m at the age where it’s becoming a problem now.

I’ve got good friends, but they’re not really the type who could introduce me to women, classical nerds even though they’re partnered up.

I work from home and barely leave the house.

I wasted my university years in my room on the Internet, and with other sexless male nerds like myself.

I was of the opinion that computer science students didn’t socialise with people on other courses/degrees, I was playing to the nerd stereotype as it was all I knew.

So I enforced bad hygiene, poor personal grooming, limited diet, limited social graces, insular interests, feeble physical fitness and not branching out and talking to women. That was a mistake.

That was many years ago, and the lessons that I picked up took years to even partially outgrow.

Truthfully, it’s all my fault. Nobody made me live like a glorified hermit.

I used many scapegoats to go and blame for my low station in life, but I didn’t want to see the man in the mirror. University dropouts find love and success and sex, the jobless and homeless and underemployed the same.

My job is barely above entry level, I had to fight like hell for it and I am going to lose it soon, part restructuring, part my own failings.

I worked a string of crappy jobs after dropping out of university, which killed my self-confidence.

There’s been an emptiness inside of me since I was about 23 that I haven’t been able to fill. I used to self-medicate by labelling myself a failure and a dropout and using that to limit my options.

That at least gave me an identity. I have no identity now; I haven’t had one for a few years.

Where do I even go from here? I have very little idea, personally.

Thanks,

Nerd Archetype

DEAR NERD ARCHETYPE: I think we could sum up this entire email and my reply into two sentences:

“Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I do this!” 

“Well, stop doing that.”  

I mean, I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking me for, because the answer is literally in your message: all the things you’ve been doing for years? Stop doing that and – in most cases – do the exact opposite. Stop hermiting up in your room and avoiding all social contact. Stop inventing scapegoats and bulls--t reasons to not do things and actually go out and do them. Start practicing good hygiene, improve your diet, clean your apartment, go outside and touch grass and get a little sunshine while you’re at it. Quit waiting for your job to vanish like a fart in the wind and start the quest for the next one – or even pick up a part-time job that can help provide some cushion for when your current one goes poof. Hell, you could even go back to university and complete your degree, so you won’t be a dropout any more.

These are all pretty self-evident choices, but it seems like you’re struggling to actually make them because you’ve been so invested in being a loser that you’re afraid to stop. What you’re doing right now – asking me what to do next, for example – is an attempt to give yourself the illusion of progress while not actually making any changes. You’re telling yourself that you can’t move on to the next steps without having a plan in place and so you need to make plans. And then you’ll need to do more research into how to make those plans. Except then you’ll want to be sure that those are the right plans, so you’ll need to check and double check and triple check and do more research and ask more questions and you know what isn’t happening? 

Anything else. 

You’re spinning your wheels as fast as you can and saying that you’re going to get somewhere eventually, but not moving in the slightest and asking why things aren’t changing. They’re not changing because you know what you need to do, you’re just not doing it. It may be helpful to ask why you’re not, but I think we can both agree that it’s coming down to “change is scary”. And hey, it absolutely can be. But while change may be scary, you already know with certainty that your current situation is making you miserable. So unless you’re determined to stick with certain misery instead of being willing to take the chances you need to make things better, you need to actually do it.

You can make all the plans you want, but at a certain point you have to just hold your nose and jump. And you’re well past that point, because now you’re making plans for the sake of making plans, as though those plans are going to change things. It’s just a security blanket that gives you permission to not do anything until you can do it “right”, and it will never be “right”. There will always be something you don’t know or haven’t accounted for or couldn’t possibly expect. You’re going to make mistakes and screw up, because a lot of what you want to do, you’ll be doing for the first time and you won’t know what you’re doing. You can watch every episode Forged in Fire and Great British Bake Off and still not know how to be a blacksmith or make a Victoria sponge. All the study in the world doesn’t translate to competency if you haven’t actually done the thing.

Are you going to do it badly? Yeah, probably. You’re not used to talking to women, but you’re not going to get better until you actually go out and talk to them. The same goes for relationships: nobody knows how to have a relationship until they have them. We can look to others – parents, peers, friends, family – for clues or role models, but at the end of the day, we all come to our first relationship ignorant and learn through experience. We do everything badly the first time, precisely because we’ve never done it before. Even prodigies have to practice and gain experience.

But doing something badly is still better than not doing it at all; after all, as the sage says: sucking at something is the first step at being kinda good at it. You just have to be willing to embrace the suck, to learn from your inevitable mistakes and keep at it. That’s how learning and improving is done!

But none of that can happen until you do it. You need to stop delaying and just do. You already know what needs to be done. If you’re looking for permission to start, well here it is: you’ve done all the planning, now get started. Your new and better life is out there waiting… but you need to go embrace it. You can’t do that when you’re locking yourself in your room and avoiding contact with anyone.

You don’t “need” an identity. You just need to start. You’ll find your identity while you’re doing. But as I said: you have to do.

So, stop planning and start doing.

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 don’t even know where to start.

I’m just an average guy. I don’t stand out physically. I’m not tall, I’m not ripped, and I don’t have a jawline that can cut glass. I used to think personality mattered — that if I was kind, interesting, and genuinely cared about a woman, that would mean something. But then came Tinder. And TikTok. And now I honestly don’t know what to believe anymore.

Tinder destroyed my confidence.

It’s like playing a game where you’re never allowed to win. I’ve swiped for years, gotten barely any matches, and when I did, they rarely led anywhere. I started to notice the kind of men who did get matches. They weren’t like me. They were all cut from the same mold — tall, lean or jacked, model-tier looks. It didn’t seem like women were looking for variety at all. The same faces, the same bodies, over and over again. If women really had diverse preferences, wouldn’t we see more average guys succeeding on these platforms?

But that’s not what happens.

I keep seeing these videos on TikTok — some shredded guy walking shirtless and women just stare. They can’t help themselves. These guys don’t need to speak. They just exist and get validated for it. Meanwhile, I’m invisible. I have to open, impress, prove my value, and hope I’m not just another guy in her DMs she’s entertaining until Chad texts her back.

Is this just how evolution wired things? Did nature design women to only be attracted to a handful of “genetically superior” males? Is being hyper-muscular or even using steroids the only way to matter now? Is that the price we pay to even be seen?

Being a man feels like losing. Like no one gives a damn how I feel. Like if I complain, I’m just whining. If I talk about this stuff, people tell me to “man up” or accuse me of hating women. But I don’t. I just feel forgotten. Unseen. Unwanted.

I want to believe love exists. I want to believe there’s someone who could love me — not some idealized version of me. But I’m tired. I’m tired of pretending I don’t care. I’m tired of competing just to be noticed. I’m tired of having to be more while it feels like others get to be enough just by showing up.

Does any of this even make sense? Or am I just broken?

Sincerely,

Tired and Invisible

DEAR TIRED AND INVISIBLE: My guy, this one is easy. This is a case of you assuming a whole lot of facts that aren’t in evidence and drawing conclusions based on what you already believe. What you’re seeing isn’t a preponderance of evidence that you’re just f--ked by evolution, it’s you saying “Well, I think X about myself, so this MUST prove that I’m correct,” without bothering to actually think about things.

And look, I get it. When you’re at a low point – especially when you’ve been in that low point for so long you could apply for voting rights and a new driver’s license – it’s easy to assume that the worst that you believe is true. But that’s just confirmation bias and continuing to seek out s--t that “proves” what you think as a form of emotional self-harm. It’s just – say it with me now – masochistic epistemology: truth hurts, so if it hurts, it must be true.

It’s not true though. It’s just you punching yourself in the dick and saying the universe did it.

Let’s start with the most obvious: you’re acting like being “average” is bad, as opposed to your being dead bang in the middle of the bell curve with the majority of the population. Being average is the state of being in the largest group of people. You are, by definition normal and mainstream! If “average” people couldn’t fall in love or be loved, couldn’t date or get laid, the human race would have died out long before we ever left the savannahs. You don’t need to be “exceptional” to date and not everyone who dates is exceptional. They can’t be, again, by definition. The root word “exception” is right there in the word.

The things that you list that supposedly make you undesirable are the qualities that other men think make men attractive and what they respond to. It’s dudes projecting their own feelings onto women instead of actually paying attention to what women say or think because they don’t think women have enough awareness or agency to know themselves.

The next thing is that you’re looking for “proof” without understanding what you’re looking at and what it supposedly proves. Not succeeding on dating apps doesn’t actually tell you anything except that you’re not succeeding on dating apps. You aren’t getting anything that says why and instead you’re relying on your prior beliefs to explain it. You could, for example, just not be good at writing a dating profile. Your pictures – and let’s be real here, this is true of most cis straight men – could suck. The way you behave on the apps can affect whether you’re promoted or downgraded in the algorithm; the tactic of swiping right on everyone, for example, suppresses your profile.

And that’s before we get into the mechanics of the apps themselves – from the algorithms that control who sees you and when to the fact that the apps are designed to frustrate you so that you’ll pay more money to be (theoretically) less frustrated. And that is before we get into things like the way that Tinder has a massive gender imbalance, where there are 3 men for every 1 woman – and that’s even assuming that all the female-run accounts are either active or have a human behind them at all. It gets even lower if you factor in bots, sex workers, pig-butchering scams and bait-and-switch ads. You are, under the best of circumstances, looking at a very small pool of potential matches, many of whom never see your profile in the first place and even more which get overwhelmed by the firehose of s--tty attention that drains their interest in even participating on the apps.

None of that has anything to do with your being undatable or undesirable.

I would also note that you’re making a whole lot of bad assumptions about the people who are getting matches on there. Tinder is rather famously tight lipped on these, and I’m willing to bet cash money that your data on “the kind of men who get matches” are from dubious “experiments” and unverifiable, citation-needed claims made on subreddits and random videos. But they hit your despair just right, so it feels like it should be true. The line “we should be seeing average guys succeeding on these platforms” is kind of telling: how do you know average guys aren’t succeeding? Do you have secret insider data direct from Tinder or is it – as with most things – a case of “well, I’m not succeeding and other people are complaining about it, so it must be true”? Because if you’re honest, I’m willing to bet it’s the latter. It’s all biased thinking and confirmation bias and frustration, not fact. “Surely if this were true…” is not a reliable base for comparison, especially when you’re not accounting for a whole host of other issues.  

Which also brings me to the TikTok videos you’re talking about, involving people gawking at hot people. Which… yes, folks gawk at people they think are hot. This isn’t unique to anyone of any gender and sexuality. If you’re going to tell me that if you saw Sabrina Carpenter and Dua Lipa walking down the street in low-rise jeans and a bikini top, you aren’t gonna stop and stare, I’m going to call you a lying liar who lies. But, weirdly, the fact that absurdly conventionally attractive people exist and walk among us with two arms like Donald Sutherland, doesn’t preclude folks who aren’t supermodels from getting laid or finding dates. The fact that people behave like that in videos isn’t a sign of what women ‘actually” want, any more than Playboy magazine meant that “average” women can’t find husbands.

But once again, you are drawing a whole lot of ‘facts’ from minute long videos, videos that depict a very brief and specific moment in time. You know literally nothing else except what’s in that video – nothing about the person, what they do, what their lives are like. You are making assumptions and deciding they “must” be true based on reinforcement from other guys who also want to believe it. I mean, we can even start with the idea that these dudes “just exist”, as though they came out of the womb looking like Jack Ransom, as opposed to putting in absurd amounts of effort to look a particular way for years before they went strutting around the video. We know people don’t look like that normally because even the most jacked celebrities you can think of don’t look like that when they’re not on camera. So many people, from Jason Momoa to Stephen Amell to Channing Tatum and Zac Effron have talked about the amount of work it takes to be ‘camera ready’, the misery of it all and how briefly they stay like that. S--t, tabloids mock these guys when they show up at the beach looking like dudes who are decently fit but not dehydrated and starved to single digit percentage body fat.

And seeing as you’re not actually, y’know, accessing their inboxes, you have no idea what kinds of messages they’re getting and from whom, nor the experiences they’re having when it comes to dating, the work they put in, any of it. All of it – all of it – is in your head. It’s just you and your jerk brain inventing s--t to make you feel bad while you listen to other dudes telling you the same thing because they need you to feel as bad as they do.

But I’d also be interested in knowing where you’re experiencing people telling you to shut up or that you hate women, what they’re saying specifically and what you’re saying first. I’d also want to know whether they’re saying it to you specifically or you’re just extrapolating based on random people’s posts or videos. Because, to be perfectly blunt: I’ve seen a lot of dudes taking videos and posts made by strangers that aren’t about them in the slightest and making it about them just because it fit their personal narratives.

But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you’re getting these responses directed at you, specifically, in those words, online.

Cool. So you’re dealing with assholes. Maybe – just maybe – venting to strangers on social media isn’t going to be the best way to get validation on a topic, especially when context gets flattened and nuanced gets lost on every social media platform. The whole “I like waffles”/”so you’re saying you hate pancakes” meme is a meme because how inevitably it happens. S--t, do you remember when a woman got blasted to hell because she had the temerity to talk about enjoying coffee in the morning with her husband?

If you’re looking for a place to vent your feelings and get reassurance, might I suggest that it would be better to talk to your friends or – better yet – find a counselor to talk to? There may even be group therapy, where you can talk with other folks who have similar issues, but in a structured and supportive environment, instead of hoping that random strangers on the Internet are going to tell you that you’re right instead of reading whatever the f--k they want into what you say. Or, for that matter, your not reading what you want into what other people are saying.

The solution to your problem is pretty simple: you stop doing the thing that keeps making you miserable. If it hurts every time you punch yourself in the dick, the solution isn’t to complain about all the people who don’t feel pain, it’s to stop punching yourself in the dick. So delete your TikTok and YouTube accounts and quit going to the subreddits, Discord servers and other s--tty communities that keep telling you that women only want Studly Goodnight and if you don’t look like one of the Saja Boys, you may as well just top yourself now. Not spending all your time online in places telling you that you suck and not seeking out things that tell you that you suck is going to go a long, long way towards not feeling like s--t all the time.

I’d also suggest deleting Tinder, Hinge and all the other apps while we’re at it, because right now it’s pretty clear that all that any of them do is make you miserable. If you’re not getting dates anyway, not getting dates and getting dick-punched isn’t exactly a value-add.

I’d also suggest that you find people who actually love and support you – in person – rather than looking for validation from strangers online. That includes people who’re willing to say “that’s rough, bud” on occasion, but who will also call you on your bulls--t when you’re just wallowing for no reason but to wallow.

The last thing I would suggest is that you start working on yourself. I don’t mean “hit the gym and get on Tren, flabb-o”, I mean that it’s time to start picking up some hobbies and interests that feed your soul and make you feel great. These should be hobbies that you actually like, not ones that you think are going to make you popular or that women want. Just as importantly, you want to look for opportunities to participate in those hobbies with other people; that will bring you in contact with people who also love those hobbies, which is an immediate point of commonality – something that will help you start making new friends.

And if you want to feel like you stand out, then start cultivating things that will actually help you stand out. Learning to cook and cooking for your friends, volunteering and organizing for worthy causes… all of these will go a lot further for helping you meet people who you would want to date and who would want to date you than shaking your fist at the Chad in your head.

Feed your soul and pay attention to what you feed your brain. Quit trying to “prove” your worst fears and focus on building a life for yourself that you love. That’ll change things for the better and make you happier in the process.

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’ve been reading your recent columns about flirting, but I don’t think I’ve seen an answer to my question so here goes: why can’t I talk or flirt with people I’m attracted to? 

I have a ton of friends who are women who are shocked that I’m still single because they all think I’m a ladies’ man who’s always flirting with people around me, but I’m just being normal with them. Meanwhile, when I try to chat up someone on Hinge or Tinder or I take your advice and try to talk to someone when I get coffee, it feels like pulling teeth. I know I can be funny because my friends laugh at my jokes all the time, but if it’s a stranger that I want to ask out to a movie, I strike out hard.

My brain goes blank, I slip up and use the wrong words or get stuck trying to remember basic facts like place names or actors, my jokes fall flat and I get blank looks if I try to tell them I think they’re cool. Why do people think I’m flirting when I’m not, but don’t think I’m flirting or respond when I am? Why am I funny and apparently cool 90% of the time, but never when it matters? 

Michigan J. Frog

DEAR MICHIGAN J. FROG: This one’s easy, and you nailed it in the last line of your letter. The issue isn’t that you can’t flirt or don’t know how to talk to women. It’s not that you can’t flirt. Your problem is that you behave differently when it feels like it matters.

That’s the entire thing. You are flirting. You do it all the time, and it seems that you’re pretty damn good at it. After all, you’ve got your coterie of friends who are legitimately shocked that you’re single and struggling to mingle.

The reason why they’re shocked is that they don’t have 24/7 access to your unfiltered thoughts the way you do, so they’re not seeing the divide between what you think is normal behavior and what you think of as flirting. And that’s the issue: you’ve created this artificial distinction between “normal behavior” and “flirting”, without realizing that the behavior is exactly the same. The only difference is context – in this case, the context of “well, these are my friends” vs. “this is someone I’d like to maybe possibly get naked with”.

When you’re with your friends, you’re relaxed. You don’t feel pressure to perform or that you have to do things to “earn” their approval or affection. You know they love you and you love them and you feel comfortable and secure. There’s no sense of risk, because you know that if you make a joke that just drops like a rock, the worst that’s going to happen is that you’re going to get some groans and eye-rolls. You’re not worried that you’re going to alienate them or lose their affection, and so you can relax, take chances and generally just be your most authentic self.

But when you’re talking to someone you might like to date… suddenly there’re stakes. Suddenly you’re invested in this interaction and need it to play out perfectly. You’re motivated to play it safe because you’re afraid of losing this potential match, and so you don’t have the same edge or confidence you would with your friends. And that’s the problem. You’re trying to be likeable, but you’re not sure you can show your true self, so you end up aiming for “blandly acceptable”. It’s a little like going to Applebee’s: it’s inoffensive and broadly adequate, but you’re not going to find folks who are excited to go to Applebee’s, instead of saying “yeah, I guess that works”.

But “Yeah, I guess that works” isn’t what someone is looking for in a date. They’re looking for something that they want to be excited for. You’re dulling your spice and watering down your flavor and focusing far more on earning their approval instead of letting them know who you are and trusting that either they’ll be into that, or show that they’re just not a good match for you.

You’re not trusting that people will like you for your authentic self, and so you are coming to these conversations with an eye towards avoiding rejection instead of finding a connection. It’s so much easier with your friends or when you don’t care because you’re not invested in the outcome. When you’re focused on not getting rejected, you get stuck in your head – you alternate between playing it so safe as to be bland and overthinking things, so that you aren’t nearly as relaxed or jokey as you would be with your friends.

So there are a couple things you need to do. First, you need to start trusting in your own appeal and desirability. If you can’t believe that women will like you for who you are, you’re never going to feel secure in showing them who you are. You’ll be too hung up on trying to present them with something you think will be acceptable, when you need to be willing to risk – even invite – rejection. Rejection in these cases is protection; you want to be rejected by the people who aren’t right for you. You have to have a mindset of “I want them to like me for me; if I’m not what they want, then we’ll never work anyway.”

The second thing is that you need to treat these conversations like they don’t matter. Instead of thinking of it as you trying to convince these women to like you, think of it as “well, this doesn’t ‘count’” and let yourself behave as though you know that there aren’t consequences for failing or f--king up. You know… like when you’re comfortable and hanging out with your female friends.

This always sounds like woo-woo-manifesting but it’s honestly a little closer to the Jedi mind-trick. When you’re focused on the outcome, you’re coming from a place where you think you can fail. It’s a lack of trust in yourself, in the people you’re talking to, and in the possibility that they might like you. But if you assume that they like you and thus you can’t fail – the way you can’t fail with your friends, not really – then your entire demeanor changes. You give yourself permission to joke and tease and banter and flirt and to express yourself honestly. Your body language is open and more confident, your eye contact is stronger and your smile is warmer. You relax, you take bigger swings and show more of your true self without worrying about being judged harshly. You show your true personality and let the little things that make you uniquely you shine through.

And because you’re behaving in a more confident, more authentic and friendlier manner… people respond to it positively.

Just as importantly, though, is that you’re giving yourself permission to use the power you’ve always had inside. It’s always been there; you just never realized that this what you needed to do. You’re not showing them your Dating Self, you’re showing them your authentic self. That person is who your friends think is so awesome. That person is why your friends are surprised you’re still single. That person needs to be allowed to shine, because that’s the person people will be dating.

Now, it does take effort to unclench and to train yourself to think of strangers as old friends that you’ve just met. But that’s a matter of practice and reinforcement; the only way to get better at it is to do it, frequently and consistently. But the more you get in the habit of detaching yourself from the outcome, getting a case of the ‘f--k its’ and behaving with these special, sexy somebodies the same as you do your friends? You’ll find that your jokes hit like a truck, your bon mots get a better reaction and your Saturday nights will start being a lot busier.

Good luck

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