All posts in Health

The 5 Most Common Insecurities In Men (And How To Overcome Them)

by Dr. NerdLove on April 16, 2012 in Be A Better Person, Health, Lifestyle with 55 Comments

It should come as no surprise that confidence is a big deal when it comes to success at dating. Confidence, after all, is sexy.

The problem of course, is that confidence can be hard to come by. Confidence boosting is a big-money industry these days. Even the Pick-Up Artist community is flooded with products designed to help men with what they call “inner game” issues. But for all for all of the times we wrestle with issues of deservedness or a scarcity mentality, there are certain areas where men are just especially vulnerable.

Men are more sensitive than culture gives them credit for. For all of the proclamations of manliness and machismo and how men just don’t worry about the same things that women do, the male ego is surprisingly fragile. We may be able to endure the jocular insults and shit-talking that are often part and parcel of male friendship but there are certain areas that are just off-limits. They’re little emotional Van Der Graaf generators of anxiety that serve to wreck a man’s self-esteem, prompting him to throw hundreds or thousands of dollars towards any snake-oil or hokum that promises to fix the issue.

"Now with 100% more bullshit!"

 

The problem is, of course, in your head rather than on it… or in your shorts, for that matter. But let’s look at the top 5 most common insecurities in men… and talk about how you can overcome them.

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Ask Dr. NerdLove: Night and Day

by Dr. NerdLove on January 11, 2012 in Ask Dr. NerdLove, Communication, Health with 9 Comments

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

I’m a geek gamer girl.  I’m dating a geek gamer boy.  I use the terms girl and boy loosely since we are in our thirties.  We have been seeing each other for  about 6 months.   This particular relationship is kind of an experiment, since neither of us were looking to be trapped in a conventional relationship.  We are both very laid back and easy going.  I’m about a year out of a divorce, he’s been scalded by women repeatedly over the years.  So, neither of us are looking to control or change the other person.  We live separately, and have no short term plans to change that. 

His job requires him to wake up around 5am every morning.  Because of this, he tends to get his sleep schedule wonky, and the fact that both of us prefer to be night owls isn’t helping that.  So, he tends to take naps when he can get them.  I totally understand this.  

My problem is that he will ask me if I want to do something the next day, and then, with increasing frequency, he has been falling asleep before we are supposed to meet, and basically standing me up.  Most of the time when I call, he will not hear his phone and wake up.  I am welcome at his home, but I feel a little like a nag, or a mom if I am forced to drive to his house to knock on his door and wait for him to hear the doorbell and hopefully wake up.  

This puts me in a position where I am unsure of what to do.  Should I:

A) suck it up, drive over there, and make him wake up?

B) decide he has blown his plans for that night for us, so go do something else?

C) sit at home and mope about how I used to be an interesting person?  

Lol.  I’m not really losing my mind, but I don’t know how to bring this up, I.e. ask for change without coming across as either a liar, or a crazy bitch.  I really like the guy, and I’m fairly certain he isn’t doing this on purpose, but it seems like a discourtesy to me.

Night Owls

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5 Common Sexual Mishaps (And How To Recover From Them)

by Dr. NerdLove on December 5, 2011 in Health, Sex, Skills with 38 Comments
"Oh Dear God, what did you EAT??"

There’s nothing quite like sex to set every man’s anxieties on overdrive.

Men are competitive about everything. If a guy is into a subject or a hobby, he wants to believe that he is the master of it – if not of the world, than at least amongst his friends. Whether it’s cooking, grilling, video games or random geek trivia, every guy out there wants to be seen as the definitive expert, the number one guy.

When you throw sex into the equation however, it goes from a matter of competition and braggadocio to one of desperation and ego. It’s one thing when you have the highest kill/death ratio of your Call of Duty clan and you’re competing with anonymous drones who are nothing but meat for your cannons.

When it comes to sleeping with beautiful women, it’s no longer about getting your name at the top of the high scores list in the hopes of impressing your friends. It’s about making your mark. It’s about impressing her and all of her friends. You’re not competing with faceless nobodies: you’re now competing with every guy she’s ever slept with. Every guy she has ever gushed about to her girlfriends the next day. Every guy she’s Facebook friends with. You want to be the acknowledged master of her pleasure, the one that nobody will ever be able to surpass.

But just as no plan survives contact with the enemy, no fantasy survives contact with actual flesh. You may think that it’s going to be all candlelight and soft lens filters1 but when it’s time to bang, sometimes things go wrong. Maybe you say something wrong or maybe it’s just a case of you can’t quite perform the way you were hoping to.

Don’t panic. Just because things don’t go as planned doesn’t mean that you can’t recover from them… and even make sex better than ever.
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  1. or shaky hand-cams, Astroglide and passionate screams [↩]

Build Your Confidence

by Dr. NerdLove on October 10, 2011 in Advice, Health, Lifestyle with 3 Comments
He could steal your girlfriend and *you would be ok with this*.

Everyone will tell you: “Confidence is sexy.” This is all well and good, but that murky self-help language doesn’t really do anything to tell you how to build confidence, does it? Sure, it’s fine to just tell someone “hey, be more confident and the women will just start flocking to you”, but as many of you know, just saying the words doesn’t actually progress towards undoing years of reinforcing your own negative beliefs about yourself.

Everybody will tell you “Just be more confident!”, as though confidence was something you could just acquire, rather than something that you develop over time. They’re wrong. Confidence takes time and effort. If it were as simple as the self-help gurus would have you believe, nobody out there would have low self-esteem, therapists would lose half their clientele base and I would be out of a job.

So if you’re finding that your self-worth is lower than a snake’s ass in a drainage ditch, it’s time to start making progress down the path that will help you develop the confidence and self-assurance you need in order to make yourself more attractive to women.
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Ask Dr. NerdLove: Love Hurts

by Dr. NerdLove on September 8, 2011 in Ask Dr. NerdLove, FAQ, Health with 1 Comment

Doc:

I’m the nice guy, and I managed to score an amazing girlfriend. Just a few quick notes about me: I don’t watch porn, I don’t enjoy it. I’m about as monogamous as you can get, and when I’m in a relationship, thats who I focus on. To put it in perspective, I’m about as much of a chick as you can get from a guy on relationships.

Anyways, I’ve been with this girl for a year and a few months. We’re both super geeky together, and it is fantastic. About 95% of the time.

The question is, how much maintenance is too much maintenance?

Basically when it’s good, it’s amazing. We have everything in common, we share the same interests, we can do everything together, and sex is super fun.

However every other week she goes through a mood swing. It is irregular, and almost anything can trigger it. We could be watching a movie, and if an actress gets naked, there’s a good chance she will sulk about it. This is usually followed by questioning me on whether I find the actress more attractive than her.

Everything we do is like walking through a mine field. If It looks like I’m checking someone out, she is miserable about it. A girl adds me to facebook, or messages me on my wall, I hear about it.

So I ask this after a big fight where she has reached over a year back to accuse me of shit, and to complain I’m hiding stuff from her. From over a year ago. What the hell do I do? Keeping in mind she admits to having been diagnosed with and suffering from clinical depression.

I know the obvious answer, which is to break up. Is there a better answer than just “find someone less complicated”?

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