Archives for April 2021

We Haven’t Had Sex in Months. Is My Husband Cheating On Me?

April 30, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

My husband and I (he’s a straight man and I’m a bi woman) have been together for 25 years, and most of the time I see him as the best partner possible. Loving, kind, thoughtful, funny, and a wonderful father. Where things aren’t so great is our sex life.

Up until last year my sex drive was at an all time low. I was dealing with a misdiagnosed mental health disorder, and the medication I was taking meant my desire completely tanked. So having sex once every month or even less was fine by me. I wasn’t even masturbating, which I’ve always enjoyed, so it wasn’t like my lack of interest had anything to do with him. But things have changed and it’s becoming a big problem.

Now that I have a proper diagnosis and am taking the right medication, my sex drive has skyrocketed. Sex once a month isn’t enough. I masturbate every day, sometimes more than once, but I miss having sex with my husband. And it’s not just the physical act, but also the closeness and emotional connection that I’m looking for. But he doesn’t seem interested. At all.

I’ve tried everything I can think of. I initiate sex regularly, but the majority of the time he says he’s too tired. I’ve bought sexy lingerie, suggested we watch porn together (what kind is his choice), bought books, offered to do a strip tease, role play etc etc and nothing seems to work. At this point I’m not sure if it’s that he’s no longer attracted to me, that he really is too tired, that he’s getting it somewhere else, or that he’s unable to keep an erection (more on that shortly).

We’ve talked about this outside the bedroom when we’re both calm and he swears it isn’t a lack of desire or attraction to me. He says he’s especially tired at night, which makes sense because he works a physically demanding job. But I’ve tried initiating sex in the morning or on the weekend and that doesn’t work either. So I’m left with the last two possibilities …cheating or ED.

The last few times we’ve had sex he’s had trouble staying hard. I’ve given him oral, tried manual, stimulated everywhere I could think of, dirty talk, dirty movies, and no dice. The last time it happened I asked if everything was OK and he said that having trouble staying hard is just what happens to 50 year old men. But from everything I’ve read that just isn’t true.

He doesn’t want to see a doctor, which I find frustrating. I know that vaginal penetration isn’t the be all and end all of good sex, but not being able to get him off at all is driving me crazy. And yes, I miss good old fashioned screwing. But most importantly of all, there’s no cuddling, no physical connection, and now he’s sleeping on the couch.

I’m starting to think it really is me, or that he’s getting it elsewhere. He’s been working in a woman’s house over the last month and he’s been talking about her a lot…how nice she is, how smart, how much he admires that she’s raising her daughter alone after being widowed. Ok, so he also said he thought I’d like her, but the repetition of her virtues made me uncomfortable. When I flat out asked if there was anything going on he snapped and said just asking him that was insulting. When I pushed for an answer he said there was nothing going on, that he wasn’t cheating, nor would he ever. I’m almost sure that’s true, but there is a small part of me that wonders.

So what do I do? No matter why this is happening, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a sexless marriage. Leaving or cheating are not options…I love and respect him too much for that. Please help, because I’m –

Hot, Bothered and Missing my Husband

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The 5 Steps To Upgrading Your Life

April 28, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of talk about how this was an opportunity to do things differently. Now that everyone was in lockdown, they had absolutely nothing else to do but work on themselves.

Screenshot of a tweet that reads: "If you don’t come out of this quarantine with either: 1.) a new skill 2.) starting what you’ve been putting off like a new business 3.) more knowledge You didn’t ever lack the time, you lacked the discipline" — Sure chief, nothing like trying to develop a side-hustle when you’re busy trying to, y’know, not die…

Sure they had to balance work, relationships, trying to meet basic needs without catching the plague of the 21st century, possibly dealing with child-care or elder care, home-schooling and the crippling stress that came with living through one of the most psychologically and emotionally taxing periods in living memory… but they were going to make it happen, damn it!

Needless to say: trying to maintain your sanity — with or without the help of your robot friends — during a global crisis is going to take up most of your emotional bandwidth. The fact that you survived to this point is a victory worth celebrating, no matter what else you did or didn’t do during lockdown.

Now that more and more people are getting vaccinated and the tide of the pandemic is slowly starting to recede, we’re all starting to take those first, tentative, trembling steps back out into the world. We’re all in the same boat of trying to dust off those unused social skills and remember how to act like people instead of the feral beasts we’ve all become.

Image of Gollum with a perplexed expression on his face — Wait, this is how people smile, right? It’s been so long…

For a lot of folks, that time in isolation means that they’ve had time to take stock, look at their lives and decide that it’s time to do things differently. Plenty of people, after a year in semi- or complete isolation are ready to make significant — even life-altering — changes to their lives.

But the question becomes: how do you radically transform yourself? How can you become a new, better person? Just as importantly: how do you make those changes stick? Following these 5 steps will help you build your best life ever.

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Am I An Asshole If I Don’t Want to Settle for Someone In My “League”?

April 26, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

My entire family is dead, and I’ve been living with my only close and reasonably well-off friend and her husband since losing my job and housing in the summer of 2020. I have severe anxiety and a number of physical health issues that all together mean I am not capable of working more than part-time for the foreseeable future. (Yes, I’ve applied for disability; apparently I’m not disabled enough.)

For the last couple months my friend and her husband have been increasingly hinting that I need to move out — they want to have a baby before she’s too old, but my stuff and I are taking up both their spare bedrooms. For my part, I can’t stand babies, and my anxiety is exacerbated by being around anyone under 18 (from 0-9, it’s the loud noises and sudden movements; from 10-18 it’s the triggered memories of bullying). But if they accept that I’m unable to work enough to support myself, then my only other option is to find an SO to support me.

My friend thinks the only reason I’m reluctant to do this is that I’m a 38-year-old virgin, I grew up in a conservative Christian home and town (where I continued to live with my parents until their deaths), and while I came out as pansexual several years ago, I still have hang ups about actually expressing it. So she’s been trying to talk me through that. And while those are factors, I’m ashamed to talk about the most major factor. Which is simply that I don’t think I could stand to kiss or have sex with anyone as ugly as I am.

This is not just low self-esteem: I’m morbidly obese, with about the least attractive weight distribution possible; I have a gigantic double chin; adult acne; short, thinning head hair; gnarly body hair; and between my face fat and the thickness of my glasses, my eyes are so minuscule you can’t even tell that they’re blue. The only person I can imagine going for me is someone equally fat and/or ugly who is desperate for sex, but can’t get anyone better — and I feel like I’d rather die than touch someone like that, no matter how smart or nice or rich they are. I seriously don’t think I’m the kind of person who could ever become attracted to someone I wasn’t attracted to before just because of their personality. (And that’s only fair — I’m really smart, funny, kind, loyal, progressive, etc., but no one has ever been attracted by that, even people who liked me as a friend.)

But is it right to choose to continue to be supported by my friend instead? My part-time job covers my groceries, meds, car expenses, etc., so all she really has to do is provide a roof. We’ve been close since grade school and I’m confident she would never throw me out in the street, even if she couldn’t have a baby and her husband (who I can tell pretty much hates me) left her. But I’d really hate for it to come to that.

So please tell me: is there any possibility of someone like me getting an at least average-looking, non-overweight partner? Would I be better off focusing on women, since women (as a whole, I know I’m an anomaly) seem more open to dating people less attractive than themselves? (E.g., you see attractive women with unattractive men a lot more than vice versa.) The problem there is that I’m more attracted to men, so I’m not sure even that would be good enough — I’ve had crushes on fairly average men, but only on really beautiful women.

Finally, there’s no escaping the fact that if I could just get paid what I make now plus the cost of a one-bedroom apartment, utilities, TV, and internet, without working any more hours, I would never even consider trying to date, but continue to satisfy myself with crushes and fantasies of people light-years out of my league. Is this unhealthy, and might my friend be right, and dating actually be good for me? How can I get over feeling like a whore if I go into dating primarily because I need support? Is it morally better to be a leech, because at least you’re not selling yourself, or a whore, because at least you’re providing something in return?

Sincerely,
Leech Or Whore? (she/her)

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Ask Dr. NerdLove: What Does Confidence Look Like in Dating?

April 23, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hi Doc!

I see a lot of advice about what confidence looks like in men (body language, especially), but I don’t know what confidence looks like for me as a woman. Most flirting behavior for women seems to be based on submission cues, but everyone says to be “confident” while flirting.

While I know submissive confidence is possible from BDSM experience, I think things might be different outside of that specific context. I’m very used to and comfortable with employing masculine confidence in my professional life as an engineer, but I have no idea how feminine confidence would work.

How is masculine vs feminine confidence the same or different, especially for flirting and dating?

— Show, Don’t Tell

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My Brother’s An Incel and I Don’t Know What To Do…

April 21, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hi Doc, I’m hoping you can help.

Recently my brother and I got into an argument. I was talking about the new Zack Snyder’s Netflix film Army of the Dead and my brother mentioned he did not like said director. When I asked why he brought up that the YouTube channel Geeks and Gamers had done a stream where Zack had denounced them as “nazis” — those were my brothers words.

I stated as long as they had nothing to do with GamerGate then fair enough, whereupon my brother stated all the fallacies involved with it, basically blaming the women who got threatened and doxxed. I was trying to just avoid an argument when he then mentioned he did not like the term “incel” as that was what some of the people in GamerGate were being called.

The thing is that my brother is basically one.

To go back a ways, he has always not had any friends, even when he was young. In fact, after leaving school, I can’t think of a time he spent time with other people, and he’s had barely any female company. We live in the UK, and since he doesn’t work, he’s drawing benefits. He spends all day on his laptop watching YouTube videos. Has always been socially awkward, given that he is on the autism spectrum and he can’t regulate his emotions.

He was what I’d call a social hand grenade; I’ve had him come out with me and my friends a few times, and it ended up him throwing a tantrum over something, making me look bad then having to get him out of the situation.

It doesn’t end there as any conversation I have with him — usually films or tv programs — ends up with him saying he doesn’t like the people involved with said films or tv shows due to their ” liberal lefty” politics. Now I just try not to talk to him anymore, which is a problem as, due to the pandemic, he lives with me .

I know it sounds awful, but he is my brother and I love him… though I am getting to the end of my tether with him. How do I talk to him or change his mind? I’d just like to look on life more positively.

Thanks
A Brother at the End of His Tether

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