DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve been lurking around your website for years now. And I love your articles. It really helped me.

I’m a 23 years old sexually inexperienced male. I don’t know if this is the right place for my question. Because I’m not looking for a dating advice. I just want an advice related to romantic relationships.

The thing is that I’m deeply afraid of intimacy. And I have low self-esteem and I feel ashamed for living with my parents. Even though I’m aware of the fact that my two older uncles still live with their parents and brought their wives home. And I do contribute to my family. Despite knowing all this, I still have trouble believing that I’m a suitable partner. But I’m currently working on those problems.

But there’s also the other side of the problem. I’m afraid of becoming an old virgin, even though abstaining is widely respected in my religious and cultural community. But when I see people online sharing their stories and how they are older, lonely and unhappy with their lives. I panic and get anxious. Not because I’m overweight or old. I’m actually tall. Mildly handsome and slim. And I have a 6-inch penis. And I’m deeply sorry If I sounded like I’m bragging.

“Why do you feel anxious then?” You might ask. Because I feel like I’m wasting those traits. I mean God gave me all those traits. Yet I choose to hide behind fear instead of being grateful and just use them.

Those are the questions I’m asking:

How can I stop obsessing about the label “virgin”? Especially when it’s irrelevant and foreign in my community?

And how can I work on my personal issues without feeling guilty about “wasting my youth?

And how can I learn to embrace uncertainty about relationships instead of obsessing about a specific outcome?

Thank you for your time and the work you do.

Best regards,

QuietObserver

DEAR QUIETOBSERVER: This isn’t a terribly difficult question to answer, QO, because most of the answers are actually pretty damn obvious. However, I pulled your question out of the question bucket precisely because of its obviousness… and how it relates to your circumstances.    

The reason why you feel anxious about your situation – whether the fact that you live at home or your still being a virgin – is pretty simple, QO: it’s because people are telling you to feel bad about it. You say it yourself: it’s because you go online and read posts from people complaining about being older virgins and how that means that they’re lesser. The same thing applies to your living situation – you’re taking in messages from folks who insist that living with their parents or in multi-generational households make them being a loser.

I want to really underline just how much this is distorting your thinking. You’re giving the opinions of random strangers – people you don’t know and who don’t know you – greater influence over your self-esteem than your own lived experience. These strangers, people so separated from you that you’ve never seen their legs and feet, never mind know their real names, have greater say over how you feel than the fact that you have immediate family members who are married, productive members of society and also live with their parents.

You are soaking yourself in these messages and deciding that they have greater validity than even the people around you, who not only think you’re perfectly normal but who respect those qualities.

Hell, not only are you not an outlier in your community, but in your generation. A full third of Gen-Z in the United States alone live with their parents, not because they’re losers or failsons and daughters or overdeveloped children but because the economy has been hit with constant earthquakes and disasters since 2008. The Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis, the Great Recession and a global pandemic alone have made things like “steady employment”, “a living wage” and “affordable housing” take on qualities of stories told around campfires or written about like they all happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far away.

The same applies to your being a virgin – half of Gen-Z have never had sex. You aren’t an outlier or even particularly uncommon. Being a virgin at the ripe old age of 23 puts you very firmly in the median for your generation. And again, much of this comes down, not to anything being wrong with you but circumstance. I hate to sound like a broken record, but things coming of age just in time to be hit by a global pandemic that killed millions and left all of us physically isolated and distanced from our peers tends to have significant social and psychological effects on people.

However, none of that “counts” as much as when strangers online are telling you, directly and indirectly, that this means that there’s something wrong with you. And these stories are coming to you, in no small part, because algorithmic-driven social media is designed to serve you stories that make you upset. You interact with them, and so the algorithm shows you more of them, which makes you more upset, which then prompts you to keep seeking them out.

Worse, many of the complainers are just crabs in a bucket. They want you to think that they’re right and that all of this is hopeless. They want you to believe you’re stuck, just like them, and they will actively try to pull you back down if you try to leave. After all, if you climb out, that would mean that they could too… and doing so would mean that they’re stuck by choice.

This is why the first step to dealing with all of this is simple. It’s the age-old joke of “Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “Well, stop doing that, then.” Quit engaging with the people who tell you that there’s something wrong with you. And I don’t mean “cut it down”, I mean cut it out entirely. Go cold turkey on all of it. Unsubscribe from all the subreddits, delete your YouTube and TikTok accounts, unfollow all the doomers on Twitter, Bluesky, Snapchat – anywhere that you’re drowning yourself in these stories.

(Actually, it’s probably best that you get off Twitter, period, but that’s a separate matter entirely.)

Even just two weeks without reinforcing these narratives will do wonders for your self-esteem and sense of well-being. If you absolutely need to be on TikTok or YouTube or the socials, start with a clean slate and then take an active hand in shaping your experience. Don’t just passively allow the algorithm to throw things in your feed – make a point of only following accounts and creators who aren’t selling you misery, anger and despair. Don’t just mindlessly consume the grievance slop that people call content; pay attention to what you’re paying attention to and what you’re feeding your brain. If it’s stuff only serves to make you feel small, isolated and helpless, then actively reject it. 

But you want to do more than just cut out the negativity; you want to, as the song goes, accentuate the positive. Find the content and creators and influencers who give you hope, who bring joy and a sense of empowerment. You don’t want or need to swing to toxic positivity; you just want to find things that make you feel like good things are not just possible, but achievable. It doesn’t even need to be specifically about your circumstances, just that life can be good and can be better… and without s--tting on other people in the process.

The next step is to actually think about what it is that you want to be doing. You say that you don’t want to waste your youth, and that you have these God-given traits that you’re squandering. OK, great… what does that look like to you? What sort of life do you want to be living? What would a meaningful and fulfilling youth look like to you, specifically? Not what other people think you should be doing, not what pop culture says an ideal youth looks like, you.

What is it that you’re not doing, and what steps can you take to change that? Once you have an idea of what you want, even if it’s just a collection of “well, it’d be cool to try this thing…”, then actually go do them. If you’re not sure, then just try things because it seems like it might be interesting, lead to a cool experience or a fun story to tell later on. Learn Japanese because you feel like it might be fun to watch anime without subtitles. Take a blacksmithing class because beating hot metal seems like it could be cool as hell and you get a knife out of it afterwards. Start learning how to play guitar and write music and go play at open mic nights at your local coffee shops because why not?

Do anything that strikes your fancy, but especially the things that bring you in contact with other people. Those people are your peers, the potential spokes of your social network, folks who are potential friends, mentors, role-models, rivals and even lovers. Going out and connecting with people in the physical world is going to serve you far more than sitting at home, only ever connecting through screens and keyboards. It will remind you that the world looks very different when you actually live in it, rather than just taking the word of strangers who actively avoid doing so.

All of this will give you a sense of meaning and purpose. You will have greater self-worth and a sense of your own ability to make things happen. You’ll be less afraid of uncertainty, simply because you will remember that you aren’t at the mercy of the currents and tides of fate. If one door closes, you can blow a hole in the wall instead.

The antidote to that creeping anxiety is action, genuine action, not just the sort of wheel-spinning that feels like action but doesn’t actually lead anywhere. You know… like reading all those stories about people complaining without actually taking steps to do anything about those complaints. You want to remind yourself that you have agency, that you are the ultimate arbiter of your fate. Yeah, the world will throw curveballs your way. You will live through things that are bigger than you, things that will overwhelm you simply because it’s so immense that it swamps everyone. But that doesn’t mean that you’re powerless; it just means you have to react to changing circumstances, which is still a reminder that you have agency and influence. You may not be able to control the world, but you sure as hell can control how you live in it.

Being active in shaping and directing your life in ways that you choose, rather than just waiting or reacting makes all the difference. Everything comes from reminding yourself that you aren’t helpless and powerless, no matter how much the doomsayers say you are and the crabs try to drag you back into the bucket. You have choices and options, as long as you choose to take them. It’s all up to you.

You’ve got this, GO.

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 you two times (once in October 2020 – “Was This Sexual Abuse” – and I can’t find the second letter), so let’s make a trilogy out of it.

Current situation:

– 36 years old, employed, overweight.

– Suffering from moderate depressions, which get worse over the winter.

– Trauma from being sexually taken advantage of by another person, mommy issues (violent alcoholic), bad relationships (they tried to control me).

– Lonely.

Solutions:

– Get more exercise to lose weight. I know that, I plan to do that, but I don’t do it. It doesn’t help that I work in shifts and my sleep schedule is kaputt. So, changing the job is part of the plan.

– Depressions: got medicated and therapy. I can live with it and do my job in a good and reliable manner. For the first time in my life, I earn real money. I can’t handle it, but I get help for that from my father now.

– I got two cats for the loneliness and I love then very much. I even let it happen, that they love me back and I can feel how it changes my brain chemistry. Literally, I can feel the process in my head, when I cuddle with them.

The point is, what I learned is that you need to be active and relationships are something you find in the outside world and something that happen. I was very lonely and desperate but with the cats I feel loved and I genuinely love them back, without being afraid that I may not be enough or that something is wrong with me. Back then, it was all about desperately making the loneliness go away and I’ve even broke the hearts of three women. Not proud of that, but it showed me how this goes two ways.

On the other hand, without the desperate want for love I kinda lost my drive to pursue a relationship. I mostly tried online dating, since I live in a little town in the middle of nowhere, where there is no active party scene (not my scene) and the hobby community is very small (Tabletop gaming in my case). To be honest I’m used to being overlooked, getting a pass and one time a woman told me to my face would be boring without the beard. She didn’t mean it in a mean way, but it still haunts me.

I believe it’s stories like this and age that makes it harder for me to motivate myself. At university everyone was young and poor and I was afraid of being a loser that still lives with his parents. Now I’m a loser that still lives with his parents and I give less f--ks, but I still feel that want to connect, while knowing that age and working is everybody wearing down. Online dating isn’t an option anymore, because most profiles are fake or they live on the other side of the world, so we probably won’t meet anyway. The only solution is getting out there, meet actual women, get my heart broken and break a few till it sticks. Because I have my problems (see above), but I know people that are worse and they find partners.

So here is the question: how can I hype myself up that a relationship is something worthwhile? How may I lie to myself, that it is something that makes yourself feel good and isn’t only something that gives you tax cuts and makes sure that you’re not alone in your old age, because you’re both too tired to change? How can I think of it something good and not just another unpaid s--tty job, were you do all the work and she doesn’t even like you?

I have to admit, I’m a pessimist at heart and the future looks grim, with the environment being as good as death and humanity just running towards its doom. But I know suicide isn’t an option and I love my cats very much. I can change my medication and do sport and change my job, but where can I start with finding at least some literature to make me think, that I can build something that … I don’t even know what it could be. Maybe just being loved and desired by somebody and actually believing it. Or just coming home and somebody is glad to see me.

Just something.

Thanks

Grim Future Guy

DEAR GRIM FUTURE GUY: There’s a lot here, GFG, especially when we combine it with your previous history of sexual assault and all the rest. I’m not surprised at how much of a number that will have done to you. Nor am I particularly surprised that the current state of, well, everything can put you off, well… almost anything, really. I promise you: you are not the only person looking at what’s going on right now and is literally too depressed to f--k.��No, seriously, it’s a major problem for a lot of folks right now. A lot of people are having hardcore mental health issues because of the accumulated stress and pressure of just trying to survive in these unfortunately increasingly precedented times. 

But depression is quite literally part of your problem. As in, it’s the second thing you list as part of your situation. Speaking from experience, a lot of what you’re describing – that sense of pointlessness, the lack of motivation and interest in things that you would normally be interested in – are classic symptoms of clinical, chronic depression. Depression, after all, isn’t just “the blues”; it’s often more like grey numbness and apathy, where everything feels pointless if it feels like anything, and it’s hard to work up the effort to care even slightly. Hell, it’s even difficult to muster up the energy to actively s--t on yourself, as opposed to just waving a hand in the general direction of your supposed flaws and say “yeah, that stuff.”  

I think this should be your first priority, more than anything else. There’s a lot in your letter that I’m not going to address, in part because so much of it is being exacerbated by the fact that you’re dealing with depression. Trying to talk you through not feeling like a loser because you live at home is the dating equivalent of putting a bandage on a sucking chest wound – it’s trying to treat a symptom rather than the most likely underlying cause.

(You’re not, and multi-generational families are incredibly common, and getting more common with Gen-Z and Alpha; trust me, there’re more folks living like you than not…) 

But even if these problems exist independently of your depression, your depression is still the higher priority. Depression makes everything harder and bleeds into almost every aspect of your life. Once you start getting that under control, I think you’ll find that the rest of it starts looking significantly different than it does now. And even if those problems are still in play after your depression is managed, they’ll be much easier to fix.

Dealing with depression requires a multi-pronged approach. Depression – as in the chronic condition – is often chemical as much as it is psychological, and the best treatment modalities tend to approach it from different angles simultaneously. I highly recommend that you take that approach yourself – working on both the physical/chemical side of things and from the psychological side.

The most obvious starting point is medication. While I know antidepressants have a reputation for unpleasant side-effects, the latest medications are far, far better and more broadly tolerated. Wellbutrin, among others, doesn’t have many of the sexual side effects that a lot of SSRIs have, for example.

Exercise should be another prong in how you treat your depression. Multiple studies, including a meta-analyses published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and another published by the Chochrane Library respectively have found that moderate exercise is helpful in managing symptoms of depression. While both studies point out that this shouldn’t be taken as an indication that exercise alone is an effective treatment, it does suggest that regular vigorous exercise in addition to other forms of treatment is helpful. Since you already want to up the amount of exercise you get, it sounds like a good way to motivate yourself to get started.

Your sleep schedule is another thing that needs to change. You mention that you’re doing shift-work. Shift Work Sleep Disorder is a real condition, and it is known to exacerbate depression and mental health disorders. I’ve linked to a piece that talks about ways of managing SWSD, which will hopefully, help, but I think one of the bigger changes you might want to make is to look for work with more consistent hours if at all possible.

It’s not just about getting seven or eight hours, it’s getting seven or eight hours regularly, consistently and around the same time. If you’re having to change your sleep schedule constantly – a few weeks working the graveyard shift, a few working the standard 8-5, a few working evening – then I’m absolutely not surprised your mental health is taking a nosedive.

The last thing I would suggest on the physical side of things is to look into getting yourself a (suitably named) SAD lamp for the winter months. Not only will this help with the side-effects of your disrupted sleep patterns, but if you have seasonal affective disorder and the gloom of winter is messing with your head, 30 minutes or so of 10,000 lux light first thing in the morning (within an hour of waking up) makes a huge difference. There’re quite a few people on Reddit and elsewhere who have recommendations for ones that’ve worked for them; the Yale School of Medicine has a few they recommend as well.  

On the mental side of the equation, it’s time to talk to a counselor. I recommended this to you when you wrote in during the aftermath of your abusive relationship, and I stand by it. You really should be talking with someone who is familiar with depression and abusive relationships – emotional as well as sexual. You mentioned that your mother was a violent alcoholic; that’s almost certainly lingering in the background and tangled up with the sexual abuse from your previous relationship. Talking with someone who can walk you through the ways that you’ve been hurt and how to heal is going to be massively important.

Now, notice that I’m not telling you how to get hyped up and eager to get back out on the dating scene. That’s because you don’t need motivation, so much as you need to not feel like s--t. Again, speaking from experience, I can tell you that trying to force yourself to do damn near anything when you’re also dealing with depression is a nightmare. Even with all the motivation in the world, it feels like you’re trying to push your way through something thick and viscous. Trying to force yourself to go out, and to be social is already going to be hard. Combining that with the way depression screws with your head and lies to you isn’t just trying to play on Nightmare difficulty, it’s like you downloaded mods to make it an even bigger challenge.

Getting your depression under control will make all the rest much, much easier. You won’t have to fight to muster the energy to care, nor will you have to constantly push back against the voice in the back of your head telling you that there’s no point to it.

But just as importantly, you don’t want motivation. Not really. Motivation in and of itself is poor fuel for improvement and change. While motivation is great for getting started on a project or inspiring you to make a change, it doesn’t last.��If motivation is all that’s getting you out of bed and to the gym or the therapist’s couch, then you’re going to fall off the metaphorical wagon as soon as it runs out. And it will run out. Much like why folks abandon and forget their New Years resolutions, motivation doesn’t last long even when everything is going well. When you’re using it to fuel something that takes a lot of time, discipline and sustained effort, it burns out even faster. And if you’re dealing with depression on top of all of that?

Yeah, nah. That’s a bad idea all around. You’re more or less guaranteeing that you’ll bail on all of it at once.

So, I wouldn’t rely on trying to find “motivation” to go out and meet people. What I’d suggest right now is that you take the motivation to improve your general quality of life and treat your depression, and use it to start building routines that will help keep you going. Going to the gym sucks, but making it a routine – going every three days at 3:30 PM, for example – turns it into just part of your schedule; it’s a lot easier to maintain when it’s just something you do, instead of waiting for the burning desire to lift heavy s--t repeatedly.

Personally, I find it’s helpful to have things that I reserve for whatever routine I’m trying to build. For example, I love my TTRPG actual play shows, but I make a point of only watching or listening to them when I’m working out. If I want to find out what’s currently happening in Araman or Exandria, the Aguefort Adventuring Academy, or The Court of Fey and Flowers, I need to be exercising. If I can’t make it to the gym, t’s easy enough to put in my headphones and head out for a walk or do some body weight exercise routines at home. I may not want to get on the elliptical or do my Romanian deadlifts and goblet squats, but it’s that or get further and further behind in my stories.

Going to therapy is also helpful in this regard; it gives you someone you’re being accountable to, and paying for services is a pretty hefty motivator to ensure you’re actually getting your money’s worth.

Once you start getting your depression managed and you’ve been working with your therapist about the pain you’ve been living with… well, that’s when you’ll be better positioned to go out and build more of a social life. Not, mind you “go out and get a date”, but “build a social life that can lead to dates”. As I’ve been saying for years now: the best way to meet people who are right for you is to be out in the world around other people – people you would want to hang out with, whether you wanted to date them or not. Having people you care about and who care about you, who are on Team You, is a hell of a lot better for helping you be on the lookout for love than hoping to brute-force it through inspirational quotes and philosophical texts.

But that’s for the future. For now, the best thing you can do for yourself is to love yourself enough to recover and improve. Do that first, and the rest will come much, much more easily.

All will be well. 

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

Doctor’s Note: Around the start of a new year, I like to look back and re-answer some older questions as I would if I had received them today. Whenever possible, I answer them without having read my previous response, to see and how my advice has changed in the intervening years.

Welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove: Revisited for 2026…

Today’s letter was originally published on December 17, 2018

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I am a 35-year-old single guy who keeps attracting the wrong kind of girls. Don’t get me wrong, they are not bad, just not my kind. They’re usually not into the same things I am or able to keep up a conversation.

I’m 6’2″ and bald and I used to be chubby but since I started working out, I have become quite broad. Since then, I seem to interest girls that love dominant manly men while I’m just a nerd; I went to university, play chess and love video games. Some girls even compared me with Vin Diesel. For now, I’m trying numerous things: starting conversations about university or video games, wearing nerd-shirts, wearing caps, growing a beard… but I can’t seem to find a good strategy yet to keep the wrong women at bay and get liked by the women I like, an intelligent witty girl.

Help?

Nerd In Jock’s Clothing

DEAR NERD IN JOCK’S CLOTHING: Hey NIJC, haaaaaaave you met Henry Cavill? Cavill is, unquestionably a nerd. He’s the kind of person who hotrods his PC to play games at the highest possible specs, who paints Warhammer miniatures for fun and who ultimately left his role as Geralt of Rivia because he thought that the showrunners didn’t keep true to how Geralt was depicted in the Witcher novels.

He’s also a six-foot something slab of beef with abs like phwoar and piercing blue eyes.

(This is possibly the first time in a long time that Cavill has been a point of positive comparison, instead of the yardstick guys are measuring themselves against. The irony, she is palpable.)

Caville may be among the pantheon of actors who play superheroes and absurdly jacked figures from myth, but he’s a diehard geek.

The same goes for Vin Diesel, for that matter. Among his many accomplishments in life, he not only has gotten Dame Judi Dench to play Dungeons and Dragons, but produced a vanity project based on his own D&D character.

The point is that geeks and nerds come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and body composition, because being a geek is in how you act, more than in how you look. Not every nerdboy or girl are going to look like Finn Wolfhard or Shannon Purser, after all, as attractive as they are. Some are gonna look like Joe Manganiello, Chris Jericho, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Aabria Iyengar, Erika Ishii and Deborah Anne Wohl.

But how we present ourselves does affect how people perceive us, and those assumptions are often going to be based on stereotypes. A tall, jacked bald guy with a beard isn’t necessarily going to scream “big ol’ nerd” at first glance. If anything, it’s going to say “this person watches a lot of MMA had has very strong thoughts about the NFL draft and knives in his every-day carry.”

If you look like a Joe Rogan fanboy, people are going to be quick to make assumptions about who you are, especially if you’re in places that aren’t as popular with your fellow geeks. You can certainly soften your appearance with, say, thick-rimmed glasses, or dress up your look in geek shibboleths (…says the man who wears a Green Lantern ring and rocks the mark of the Arashikage clan) to help set first impressions, but your demeanor and overall behavior will be even more effective in changing the way that they see you.

Consider Critical Role’s Travis Willingham as an example. He is a huge dude, and he looks like your typical jockbro… and he’s also exuberant, expressive, playful and even goofy. His physical presence suggests one thing, but his behavior suggests another entirely. Anyone who hangs out around him will figure out in nanoseconds that he’s as much of a dork as you might ever expect to find. So the way you carry yourself will help too – not just personal warmth, but a willingness to be a little sillier and playful will help give folks a better idea of who you are, especially if paired with a geeky tee or visible nerd signifiers.

Just as importantly though: if you want to find nerdy and geeky women, you’re going to have a lot more success if you go where they hang out. It’s one thing to try to find someone who knows the difference between a tiefling and a genasi, or an Asari from an aasimar, at a sports bar; it’s another entirely at GenCon or Emerald City Comic Con. If you’re looking to meet your people, you want to go where your people are. You may well find geek curious folks at bars or clubs, but the odds will be a hell of a lot higher at the coffeehouse in a college town that’s near the local comic store.

In fact, the best advice I have for meeting amazing women who are right for you is simply to engage in your hobbies and passions in ways that bring you in contact with other people who share those interests and passions. This can mean going to boardgame nights at your local gaming store, participating in public D&D events, going to makerspaces, renfaires, or other places where your fellow geeks and nerds also hang out. Become a regular in those spaces and at those events, network and make friends and become part of the community. This will help you meet the geeks of your dreams… many of whom will also be interested in a dude who looks like a jock but also understand why the Crisis on Infinite Earths was a more significant event than Secret Wars.

Good luck.

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