Help, I Don’t Know Why I’m Single!

Dear Dr. NerdLove: I’m a late 20s university dropout in the UK, and I’ve fucked up my life. See what happens is, when a relationship goes well, I get scared and run.

As well as that, I don’t even realise I’m attracted to someone until about a month after I met them, at which point they’ve met someone.

I’m a fantastic friend but a rubbish relationship or fuckbuddy/FWB option as I don’t pick up when people are interested!

I’m in good shape but my friends are all nerds in varying states of lumpiness so that’s kind of a low bar. Lovely people though.

Before you say anything, I know about fucking charity work and volunteering.

That is for the dregs of society, the lowest forms of life. The losers who can’t do anything else but blindly give their time and money serving those who were unlucky or unwise enough to be in a position where you need charity.

I mean, to even be near a homeless person sickens me. I understand how they got there, but they’re a danger to themselves and everyone around them.

So how the fuck do I find people when I’m out of uni, no skills, bad self-esteem, crappy job working from home, and I still live with my parents?

Maybe I should start doing drugs as junkies can find people. (That was a joke, I don’t want to do that)

I refuse to help people, that’s the path of being taken for everything you have. The only thing that matters in this world is survival, being good or evil is an illusion.

If I wanted to or tried to help people, they’d drag me down.

I’m active in the nerd scenes and con scenes but to be honest life kind of sucks in general. Life stalled years ago and I’ve been going through the motions. Maybe it’s a self esteem or paranoia problem.

I used to be a Christian but God has been very quiet recently.

Maybe I should just join a cult or force myself to join another group to get me out of the house.

I am NOT helping people in any capacity, though, therein lies the path to ruin.

Thanks doc, just wanted to know your advice.

Totally Scrooged

You know, I was tempted to just answer this with “I’m not getting paid to engage with your humiliation fetish”, but you’ve caught me in a generous mood, TS, so I’ll treat this with considerably more seriousness than it honestly deserves. Which means that it’s time to introduce you to the Chair Leg of Truth.

I can tell you precisely what the problem is, TS: you are coming across like a deeply unpleasant individual and you either don’t realize it or you think that the way you’re acting is some weird badge of honor. Which, all things considered, wouldn’t be too surprising; a lot of people seem to think “I’m the only person who matters” and “got mine, fuck you” makes them iconoclastic and “the only people who really understand”. Of course, then they wonder why they’re chronically single and nobody wants to spend time with them.

Quite frankly, your tone and your words make me question a lot of the other statements in your letter – like claiming to be a great friend in one breath and shit-talking your friends as “nerds in varying shapes of lumpiness” in the next, followed by “lovely people though” as though that either made things better or you’re surprised that fat people can be good people. I’m sure you think you’re a fantastic friend, but I’m kinda wondering if your friends would agree.

And then there’s the rant you go into completely unprompted that throws pretty much everything out the window. I mean, I’m not entirely sure why you decided to bring up how much you think charity and volunteering is for suckers and fools when nobody had said anything about it. You apparently felt so strongly about this that you decided that this needed to be the subject in your email, which, again, is an odd choice. Congratulations on having read Atlas Shrugged, I guess, but you probably would’ve gotten further with your issues if you had read Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People” instead.

Can’t imagine why God won’t talk to you anymore.

All of this does, however, add some much needed – if unintentional – comedy to follow up shitting on both people who volunteer their time, money and effort helping others and unhoused people by complaining that you have no skills, no self-esteem and a shitty job while living with your parents. So maybe that little rant from out of the blue is more about how you feel about yourself. Which, if true, would sound like you were having the beginnings of self-awareness that you then had to snuff out before you realized that taking a massive steaming shit on both people with kindness and generosity of spirit and the people they helped was just so you could feel slightly better about being a worse person any of them.

But yes, by all means, continue to insist that people who devote their energy to caring for others; that’s absolutely going to be something that will attract women to you like mice to cheese. It absolutely won’t come across like someone who tries to troll artists by telling them that LLM plagiarism machines will put them out of work because you’re jealous of having neither artistic skill nor vision, nor will it make you sound any less like someday your shitcoin investment will eventually pay off and then won’t people be sorry.

Continue to hell about the unhoused too, that’s something that’s absolute catnip to the ladies. There’s nothing sexier than a guy talking about how just the mere existence of people who’re down on their luck makes him violently ill and profoundly uncomfortable. Would you like to throw in some comments about queer people while you’re at it? Maybe something about undeserving minorities?

Honestly, I can’t for the life of me understand why you’re not so deep in ass that you have either the free time or free hands to write this letter.

There’s nothing that I can tell you that you’re going to take seriously, seeing as what you really need is a personality transplant even more than you would need to get out of the house. I can tell you that pretty much all of your problems stem from your attitude before anything else, and unless and until you start addressing that, any other advice would be like sticking a Hello Kitty bandage on a severed and hemorrhaging limb.

Now I’m going to be generous and assume that there’s some actual pain talking underneath all of this and all of this bullshit is a malignant form of self-protection that you toss out in order to not confront the depth of self-loathing you feel. But even then, that doesn’t make any of it better; you’re still coming off like a prolapsed anus and in the unlikely event that someone doesn’t find it more repellant than sex advice from Andrew Tate, you should probably run screaming from them in the other direction.

Now, if you want actual advice, then I would strongly suggest getting some intensive therapy and actually listen to the therapist so you can deal with the self-esteem and chronic depression you describe towards the end.

Failing that, the best advice I would have for you is to take some MDMA until you realize that other people actually exist and develop more than a vestigial sense of empathy and compassion for others. Because, I hate to tell you this, but women are actually drawn to personal warmth, kindness and emotional intelligence and you’re showing a profound lack of any of these.

Those are your choices: fix your heart or get used to this being the rest of your life until you do.

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Dear Dr. NerdLove:

So my question is that I really, really like a girl. She 2 year older than me and currently in a 3 year old relationship. I have known her for a few months now and we’ve been talking everyday, like all day, she seems interested. I know she considers me a good friend or her maybe one of the best male friends that she has and even a quasi-boyfriend. She is in an actual relationship, but I don’t feel like it’s a happy relationship; it’s kind of toxic.

She tells me about the guy and tells me almost everything that they’ve been going through, and mostly it’s bad and I know that I like her, I don’t want her to leave her bf if she’s happy but it’s that I think she is really, really attached. She told me that her boyfriend told her after 3-4 months of relationship that he wants a breakup, but she convinced him that it’s going to work and it’s been going for 3 years. Like the guy doesn’t pay much attention to her and she is just waiting for him to even reply. They haven’t met for like 15 months, it’s not like the guy can’t come, it’s just that he is too lazy to do so or so she tells me.

Recently I told her that I like her, I mean I told her that I had a crush on her and I don’t crush for her right now and she took it in a positive way saying that crushes happen it’s ok. Since then, she’s been comparing me with her boyfriend, her behaviour towards me has changed in a good way. She is friendlier and I like that, but she compares me with her boyfriend; she has been teasing me a lot and just acting differently.

I don’t know what to do.

Emergency Holographic Backup Boyfriend?

Before I get into the meat of your letter, EHBB, I feel like I should point out that I had to do some serious editing to get this letter to the point of being readable. I get the distinct feeling that English isn’t your first language, so I’ve had to do some interpreting in a couple cases; I hope I got everything more or less as you intended it to mean.

Even then, it sounds like important points got left out of your letter. For example, you drop that your crush and her boyfriend haven’t met for nearly a year and a half and that “he’s too lazy to come.” This brings up a lot of questions – is this a long-distance relationship? Is this an entirely online relationship? Have they ever even met in person? As it is, you’re describing someone who apparently hasn’t seen the person she’s presumably dating for nearly half the length of their relationship, which is… unusual, to say the least.

If we combine this with the way that he seems to just reply to her when he feels like it and the fact that that he tried to break up with her at the 3-month mark, then I just have even more questions. Questions like “is she sure that he changed his mind?” If this isn’t a long-distance relationship, then I would seriously question if they’re even dating at all. Because, if she isn’t refusing to accept a break-up, then under the best of circumstances, this sounds like a relationship that’s so one-sided that I’m not sure you could even call it a relationship. A slightly less generous reading sounds like she thinks they’re dating and he doesn’t. Which… isn’t great, and honestly makes me question her choices and maturity.

This is why I really wish you’d told me how old you all are, because damn, you sound very young. It’s one thing if you are all middle or high-school students; irrationality, poor decisions and frankly baffling relationship choices are all hallmarks of being young and having far more exuberance and energy than experience or common sense. It wouldn’t necessarily make things better, but it sure as hell would make them more explicable. If you all are grown-ass adults… well, I’d take that as a sign that maybe this isn’t a person you should be pursuing. At least not right now.

And if I’m going to be honest, I don’t think that would be the worst course of action as it is. If I’m understanding you – which, as I said, I may not be – and this is a long-distance relationship, then I think the best course of action is to let this be. Some of the choices your crush has made – like trying to talk her presumptive boyfriend out of a break up and then continuing a relationship that doesn’t seem to be a priority to him – suggest that she has some growing and maturing to do. I know the movies love a “jump out of a bad relationship and straight into a better one with the hero” narrative, but in real life, sometimes folks need a little time to actually process the lessons they learned from that experience. Otherwise, they run the risk of bouncing from failed relationship to failed relationship, even if their next partner (maybe you, maybe someone else) is a far better option for them.

While I understand that you really like her and want something more with her, I don’t think that a relationship with her is advisable for either of you right now. I think her time would be better spent unpacking why she’s been trying to stay in a relationship with someone who clearly doesn’t want to be in one with her and to fully grasp that a dead plant isn’t going to grow, no matter how much she waters it.

My suggestion is that you keep the status-quo as it stands: be her friend. It sounds like she needs someone who’s unquestionably in her corner to say “I dunno, this sounds really fucked up to me” and “you deserve better than this.” But even under the best circumstances, I’m not entirely sure she’s going to be in a place to start dating someone else, even if she were suddenly single tomorrow.

You sound like a decent guy, and she could use a decent guy in her life. But not as her next boyfriend. Not yet, and not for a while yet.

Good luck.

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

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