Has Being Single Made Me Crazy?

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m 20, and I’ve never been in a relationship. I feel like I’m wasting time, though I never really interacted with women outside of my family, thus I don’t know how a relationship/love feels like.

My father keeps pushing me to do it, sometimes even making fun of me, besides the fact I’m in college and also applying for an internship program. Never had any problems in school either, besides my overall distancing from others.

All of the friends I had during middle school were already dating and/or working while I was just a nerd, spending most of my time at home, alone. And that still hits me, to this day.

I’m not gonna lie; I didn’t make any friends until I was, like, 8 years old? (Some psychologist said that making friends during childhood is highly important for a healthy mental development). And plus my parents started arguing (and eventually the divorce process) when I was in my early teens, so maybe this contributed to my problem with (the desire for) relationships and talking, sharing with people in general.

I have done therapy before, which also involved my parents, but it really didn’t solve anything – except that the doc suggested that I would develop attachment issues due to my parents’ divorce and my chronical loneliness, which makes me dangerously depressed from time to time since then.

What could I possibly do to fix this? Sometimes I just won’t sleep, will feel physical pain in my chest, have a breakdown, cry a lot, smash my head on the walls or beat it with my hands…

Did I really became the person the therapist suggested I would?

Attachment Failure?

Holy hopping sheep shit, AF, it’s not very often I feel like I need to tell someone you deserve better parents and a better therapist but… Jesus, you deserve better parents and a much better therapist. Like, it’s really unprofessional for your therapist to say you would get some form of insecure attachment, especially if they weren’t doing anything to, y’know, mitigate or prevent it. I don’t know if that’s something they said directly to you or just in your presence but either way that’s the sort of thing that doesn’t make me raise an eyebrow so much as watch them shoot off into orbit and clip the ISS on the way to attempt landings on Europa.

OK, let’s back up a moment and roll it from the top. First and foremost: you’re not “wasting time” just because you’ve not had a relationship at 20. You’re not on any particular timeline, you’re not expected nor are you “supposed” to have dated by a specific age outside of other people’s bullshit expectations. The idea that you’re “supposed” to have had X number of girlfriends or lost your virginity by Y year is entirely made up. It’s fake, it’s bullshit, it’s complete trash and you can and should discard it completely. You’re on your own journey, with your own goals, challenges, ambitions and priorities and milestones, none of which require that you either have sex or date by a particular age. The pressure you’re feeling is real, don’t get me wrong… but that pressure isn’t based on anything other than what other people insist is “right”.

And while we’re on the topic, your father is not only not helping, what he’s doing is the opposite of help. The pressure he’s putting on you is bad enough, but mocking you for it just makes it worse. Shame is a demotivator; it makes you less likely to succeed, even less likely to try again after you fail and only serves to discourage you from ever making the attempt in the first place.

(I’m going to be honest here: this shit gets my hackles up and there’s a part of me that feels like the best response to his mockery would be to verbally slap their lips off. And I’m very good at that.

It would be the opposite of helpful and it would only escalate things in the worst possible ways but Jesus tapdancing Frog…)

So here’s the thing: your tendency towards isolation and not even attempting to date are the least surprising things based on what you’ve said. Quite frankly, I don’t think this is a bad thing. You’ve got a lot of pain that you’re carrying around right now and I think that needs to be addressed before you worry about dates or girlfriends. It’s a hell of a lot easier to make that journey when you’re not dealing with a sprained back and two broken ankles, after all.

Let’s start with the most important thing for you to take onboard: you are not broken, you are not sick, nor are you irrevocably socially handicapped because you didn’t “make enough friends” as a child. I think that your previous therapist was, at the very least, profoundly irresponsible by talking about attachment issues with you or within earshot of you. I think you’ve allowed that and the bit you’ve read about early mental development to take root in your brain and it’s fucked you up. And I want to be clear: those aren’t signs that there’s something wrong with you, those are things that you’ve latched on to that confirm what you already believe. It’s not that they’re right and true and correct and you’ve missed some important milestone, it’s that those are the tools that you use to smack yourself in the balls and then you blame yourself for feeling pain. But that’s why we say that feels aren’t reals; what you feel is absolutely real, but the fact that you feel it doesn’t make it true.

So no: I don’t think you’ve become the person your previous therapist said you would, nor do I think you’re hopelessly behind or wasting time. I think you’ve taken other people’s bullshit onboard, and the fact that it hurts makes you afraid that it’s true. And it’s not. What is true is that you’re dealing with a lot of pain and big, complicated feelings that I don’t think you fully grasp and you certainly don’t have any good outlets for.

So I know that right now your life is very busy, between college and trying to get into an internship, but I think you really need to talk to a different and better therapist – by yourself. Right now, you’re in luck; being a college student means that you’ve got access to your college’s health services department and they should have counselors and therapists available. If they don’t, they almost certainly have contacts and people they can refer you to. I would highly recommend you take advantage of those resources while you can; this is a time in your life when access to mental health care is going to be a lot easier and cheaper than it will after you graduate.

You’re carrying around a lot of pain and a lot of self-recrimination for things that honestly aren’t things you should be blaming yourself for. It’s ok that you didn’t socialize much in high-school. It’s ok that you haven’t had a relationship. It’s a shame that things happened like that, but that doesn’t mean that you’re bad, deficient or broken; it just means that you went through a lot of shit and you did what you felt was necessary to get through it as best that you could at the time.

So I think the first thing you need to do is simply forgive yourself for the way that you lived your life up until now. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong, but that forgiveness isn’t for some nebulous “sin”, it’s for the blame you’re carrying around. Forgiving yourself for it and acknowledging that you made the best decisions you could at the time is part of how you stop carrying the burden of that needless blame around. You know better now, and so you’ll make different decisions going forward. You can acknowledge that you wish things had been different without beating yourself up over the fact that they weren’t.

The next thing is – as I said – to hie thyself to the therapist’s couch and to make that a priority. That crushing pain, that tendency to lash out physically to hurt yourself? Those are things that need to be dealt with. They’re not going to get better on their own, and they’re not going to be constrained to the long dark nights of the soul, to those times when it’s the hour of the wolf and you’re stuck in a maelstrom of remorse and self-recrimination. It’s going to start bleeding into other parts of your life and fuck up the things that go welltoo, because that’s how pain works. So getting to a therapist, unpicking those knots, easing those scars, debriding and cleaning those wounds, setting those bones are how you’re going to heal – an important part of making your overall life better.

Once you’ve started progressing on your healing – not “when you’re finished”, but on your way to being in good working order – then I think you’ll find that you’re in a much better place to start socializing, breaking out of the old ruts and routines that you’ve been in and start working towards dating and romance. You don’t need to rush; trying to get to it before your ready is the emotional equivalent of Luke rushing off to confront Vader before he finished his training. It may feel like the right thing to do at the time, but it’s only going to make things harder and slow things down even further.

But more importantly, you don’t need to rush because nothing is going anywhere. Friends will be waiting for you once you’re able to join them. Love will be there when you’re ready. So for the moment, love yourself enough to heal your wounds. Everything will be much easier and much better once you’re not in so much pain.

You’ve got this.

All will be well.

***

Hi, 6 months ago I broke up with my bf of 5 years I’m 32 and thought we would have a life together. We lived together and had a dog together. Going into the relationship I had trust issues but he always said he wanted to be with me have a future etc. However throughout the entire relationship he never posted a single photo of me on his social media and would hide his phone and lie about messaging girls. Girls names would pop up once even a new account on his Netflix. When I questioned him he deleted it. When I questioned him about it he would shut me down say I had nothing to worry about that his social media was just for his car or that my concerns were my anxiety.

 The break up was bad when I moved out he had agreed for us to share our dog then he just changed his mind and told me I would never see the dog again and got abusive. My question is how can I move on or trust even myself now ? I see a therapist but losing our dog broke my heart. I’ve started to question my reality like was I wrong to question him messaging other people. Or was I valid. I don’t understand the situation it has made me feel like I was wrong to react to his behaviour. Could it be possible I was wrong or are these valid concerns and behaviours to expect a partner not to do.

My head and heart hurt so much. I believed he cheated but he never admitted anything he always swore he did nothing. I’m worried I ruined my life by leaving the relationship I’d like to know if you think they were valid concerns. I loved him a lot I feel as though I put up with bad treatment but it’s so hard to put to rest when I’ll never get answers from him.

Shattered and Alone

Let’s put this right at the top: your ex was a deeply shitty, toxic and outright abusive radioactive waste of the two minutes that it took to conceive him. I think you should’ve dumped him so hard his grandparents got divorced retroactively. Leaving your fuckhead ex is probably the best thing you’ve done and it’s only a shame that you didn’t do so sooner so that it would never occur to you to ask if you somehow ruined your life by doing so.

Here’s what you need to understand: what your ex was doing is what’s known as “gaslighting”. Now I know that this is a word that gets tossed around and misused a lot, so I want to be clear: I don’t mean he was lying to you or trying to deceive you – which he absolutely was. When I say he was gaslighting you, I mean that he was trying to get you to question your very sense of what was real and true and making it so that you didn’t or couldn’t trust your own eyes and judgement. That is precisely why you feel so uprooted and confused; he was going out of his way to damage your grasp on reality.

Here is another thing you need to understand: whether he cheated on you or not is irrelevant. It is a distraction. If he cheated, then that is just the rancid cherry on a sundae of abuse; whether he did or he didn’t doesn’t change the fundamental fact that his behavior is that the way that he treated you was beyond the pale. Even if all of his weird behavior – having other women’s names on his Netflix account where you would see it?? – was above board, the way he went about everything and would turn it all back on you is enough to warrant getting the fuck out of this relationship.

You didn’t (and don’t, nor will you in the future) need some causus belli in order to break up with someone. You can break up with someone for any reason, including “the way he behaves makes me feel unsecure and uncertain, even if he’s technically not doing anything wrong”. If he cheated, then yes, that’s one more check mark in the “he’s horrible” list. But even if he didn’t, the rest of his behavior more than validates your decision to get the fuck out. Up to and especially taking the dog.

(That’s the sort of thing that makes me go “John Wick had the right idea.”)

And here’s the important thing: it’s possible that there were innocent and understandable reasons for at least some of his behavior. It is possible, for example, that not posting pictures of you on his social media wasn’t him trying to hide that he’s in a relationship; not everyone posts about who they’re dating or keeps things strictly about them. But even if individual actions and behaviors are on the up and up, that doesn’t change the sum totality of his behavior or the way that he treated you. Under the most generous – and I mean “needing to be The Buddha” levels of generosity – interpretation of things would be “he handled things incredibly badly. But I’m not the Buddha and he sounds like a shitbird that you’re well rid of.

Here is the final thing that you need to understand: you don’t need answers from him. He’s already proven through his actions, that he’s never going to admit to wrong-doing, never going to give you the truth and certainly not going to give you closure. But that’s ok because you don’t need it from him. Closure is a gift that you give yourself. The closure you ultimately need is to acknowledge that this was a bad relationship and it’s good that you left it.

Here’s what to tell yourself about those unanswered questions: the answers don’t matter because they’re the wrong questions. The question isn’t “was he cheating” and “did I ruin my life by leaving him”, it’s “what can I take from this so that I don’t end up in a relationship with someone like him going forward?” It’s “How do I love myself in a way that makes it possible to heal these wounds, so I can trust someone who’s deserving of my trust in the future?” Those are the questions you need to answer, because those are the questions that matter.

The best thing you can do right now isn’t to get a confession from him, it’s to forget him so that he never occupies another nanosecond of your time. I know that this hurts, but that will fade as you let him go and give yourself the closure you’re looking for. Your ex is in the past, and that’s where he should be left. Your focus should be on the future – your future – and how you’re going to make it a good one for yourself.

You’ll be ok. I promise.

All will be well.

—

This post was previously published on Doctornerdlove.com and is republished on Medium.

***

You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project

Compliments Men Want to Hear More Often

Relationships Aren’t Easy, But They’re Worth It

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

..A Man’s Kiss Tells You Everything

—

Photo credit: iStock