Ask Dr. NerdLove Archives

Am I Supposed To Be Angry At My Husband Over Our Sex Life?

July 26, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

So, I have a husband that I recently married and I love him dearly. We both have autism and have dated eight years before we got married and he wanted to wait until marriage which I was totally fine with. As a demisexual, it took me three years to even want to have sex with him and I can kind of take it or leave it and my antipsychotics I take for my bipolar don’t really help my libido either. I feel like people are going to say “I told you so” because it turns out he has ED which we found out is most likely due to sleep apnea which we are working on fixing though due to COVID the sleep clinic is backed up so it has been a slow process. He also can’t give oral sex due to speech issues which makes moving his tongue and licking difficult so we haven’t really had any sort of sex even since marrying.

For some reason, I just feel like I am supposed to resent him when I do not. We are happier than ever and he doesn’t seem to really care either about sex either. We very much love each other and are happy, but I see a lot of what you saying about how waiting until marriage is a bad idea because stuff like this would happen but neither of us really found sex important to begin with so we didn’t really have any problems waiting which wasn’t due to any religious reason either because he is not religious, it was more that is just what his parents expected of him and he rebelled against his parents so much as a teen that he felt it was the least he could do for them. With me, sex is nice, but I could just sort of take it or leave it. I only really wanted to have sex just to say I had it.

But yeah, I just don’t know what to do because I feel like what I am feeling about this situation isn’t really how I am supposed to feel seeing how everyone else from what I have read on places like Reddit would resent their partner if such a thing would happen and I have heard people saying being fine in a sexless relationship is just a “cope” if you feel like this, but it isn’t just a “cope” we are legitimately happy and I am not lying to myself. With me, I am more concerned about his sleep apnea than I am fixing his ED which is merely just a symptom of a bigger problem because he has been so sleep deprived and it is affecting his life in other ways.

Am I wrong for not resenting him when everyone else I read about in a similar situation does?

Tell Me Now How Do I Feel

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Am I Too Aggressive When I’m Looking For Dates?

July 23, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hey Doc,

Thanks as always for your tireless service! You are definitely still the best purveyor of dating advice on the internet. I think I have an issue that I haven’t seen you talk about before…

I (30, cis, straight, F) have been single for a *long* time, and in general I find that when I meet someone cool whom I’m interested in, I tend to be the one who does most of the heavy lifting (i.e. suggesting meetups, initiating contact, etc). That may or may not be a sign that I’m just setting my sights on people who aren’t actually interested – definitely a topic for my therapist but that’s not really what I’m writing to you about. The point is that I’m not shy to make the first move as a woman but am having zero success so far.

The issue is that I’m living in an area where people in general are quite restrained and well-behaved; everyone is friendly and kind and welcoming, but it rarely goes beyond that. People don’t really flirt or open up to you unless you really make an effort to get to know them properly, and even then it is borderline impossible to tell if someone likes you or *likes you’-likes you. There also isn’t really much of a vocabulary surrounding dating (the people here don’t speak English); there are no phrases for saying “Want to go out sometime?” or “I’d love to invite you on a date if you’re free next week” and so on. I asked a friend what they might think if someone up-front asked them on a date, and they said that sounded “way too direct”.

Generally this therefore means that I am in a pattern of inviting cool people for ‘drinks’ or ‘dinner’, only for them to interpret that as a literal invitation to go and consume food or liquid as acquaintances and then go home. I can’t think of an elegant way to make clear that I mean ‘drinks’ like ‘romantic flirty drinks’ rather than ‘two people ingesting beer in the same general area’. And because men here are very respectful of women’s boundaries, they sit politely on the other side of the table and keep their hands to themselves regardless of what kind of signals I try to send over. I think they are often quite nervous about potentially offending women by overstepping. I don’t want to violate their boundaries either so I don’t push it. We have a nice drink or dinner, go home, and nothing *ever* happens. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I guess I am wondering how I can make it clearer in my communication and body language that I am interested in these people so that things don’t just end up stuck in neutral like this. If anything, it would be good to get to a point where I can get an honest rejection from them so I at least know that I can move on and stop wondering. As it is, because I never get the up-front rejection, these things tend to stretch on for months and it can be quite emotionally draining.

Some people say that part of the problem is that guys don’t pick up on subtle signals like hair-touching and all that other stuff that women are told to do to show someone that they are interested. Is this true or is this just part of the usual ‘lol men are so oblivious’ genre of crap dating advice?

Ultimately the questions are:
– how do I make it crystal clear to someone that my invitation to meet up is a romantic move and that therefore they should say no if they’re not romantically interested?
– what are some things I can do as a female human to signal my interest, clearly enough that someone would get the message, without coming across as creepy or desperate? Or – worst of all – *intimidating*?
– what are some things I can do on these meetups to loosen up the vibe and encourage the other person to sit closer/reciprocate a touch/relax a bit and possibly even engage in some light flirting?

Thanks so much!

Why Don’t They Get It

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How Do I Get Over My Partner’s Infidelity?

July 19, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hi Dr. NerdLove,

My partner (he/him) of five years violated the boundaries/understandings of our monogamous relationship by receiving a one-way sex act from a friend of his. While I’ve agreed to stay and try to move past it, I haven’t decided the long term and taken off the engagement ring. I’m having a having a really fucking hard time moving past the intrusive thoughts and the wanting to really understand why. Please help me?

Some context: my partner and I (she/they) are both queer, but ended up in a hetero relationship with each other. I am very sex positive but struggle with polyamory as a choice for myself because of certain past traumas. I actually see the benefits and could maybe come to an agreement after some targeted therapy and lots of communication. But for now, monogamy is what feels safe for me. My partner, at the beginning of our relationship and throughout, has said he feels the same. And consent-based relationships are incredibly important to me. My partner had a friendly acquaintance who is a professional barber who has cut his hair for about 7 years, the barber (he/him) is gay and very openly sexual with everyone. When we’ve run into out in public like at a restaurant, he’s treated me the same as he treats my partner (on the surface), which is to talk openly about his sex life and ask questions if they’re welcomed. I had no issues with their friendship until earlier this year but thought my partner respected my wish for him to not to put himself in situations that would be weird/inappropriate with the barber or accept his sexual advances (which came pretty frequently but I never felt much jealousy because I thought my partner wasn’t interested or at least wouldn’t agree to any of it).

The infidelity and messy aftermath: First the timeline that I know now, then how I found out. We moved from our apartment to a house in August last year, and some problems both old and new surfaced, but I thought we were working through them. Back in late September/October, the barber started asking about my partner’s plantar fasciitis that he mentioned during his last hair cut and saying that he had some sort of massage/reflexology training (the barber is just a barber, not a massage therapist) and thought he could help and offered a foot massage. My partner took him up on it, and they me. Sometime between that initial “let me help you” kind of offer and his next haircut in October, the barber offered him a happy ending along with the foot massage. My partner went over to his apartment after that haircut, stripped down to nothing (including underwear) and got in the barber’s bed. The barber then gave him a foot massage and then a hand job. My partner was supposed to be picking up groceries that time, and I called/texted asking where he was at some point (he’s not the type to stay somewhere longer than he has to). He said he got caught up at the store but was on his way home, and was home 45 minutes later. Didn’t think anything more until late March. We share a car, and he dropped me off to get a beer with a friend while he went to his hair cut appointment. He got his hair cut then, went to the barber’s apartment for a repeat of last time, stripped down and got on top of the covers, except this time it was a full body massage and a hand job. In between these two incidents, there was some flirtatious texting and an exchange of homemade porn (not featuring any of them, but some of the barber’s acquaintances) and a text discussion about the porn a month or two after the first incident.

He was supposed to meet me somewhere after his hair cut after the last incident in March, and we ended up fighting because he blew me off and didn’t answer his phone for an hour when I left where he was supposed to meet me and walked to the barber shop (I was taking up a whole table at the bar by myself and I didn’t know where else to go because he was my ride). He said at first that it took longer than he thought it would and that he had been looking for parking. I told him I walked past too many open parking spots for that to be true. He then admitted he went to the barber’s apartment after his hair cut but said it was just to fix his bike. He said he lied because he thought I wouldn’t have been comfortable with him going to the barber’s apartment alone. He said it was just to fix his bike and he was sorry for blowing me off. I told him the whole thing made me uncomfortable and I’d prefer if he found a different barber. He said he wouldn’t and that I needed to trust him to set boundaries.

After our fight, he turned down the barber’s next request for a naked happy ending massage and then later told him outright that he would just be getting hair cuts. But then I found out after seeing messages on our shared iPad that were incriminating that a massage had been involved and that the barber had seen my partner naked (I didn’t snoop. I was trying to add recipes to an app, the messages came up all at once when I turned the iPad on and I saw weird stuff on the display before reading the whole exchange to confirm I wasn’t crazy). Then, he told me it was just a massage, he was covered the whole time, only happened once, and he didn’t do it again. Then the barber sent me a DM that was apologetic to me but made it clear more had gone on. I told him to tell me everything, or that I would leave. Only then did I find out all of the above.

The lying is obviously an issue, and even if he’s done the “right things” since it all finally came out, I told him that’s the hardest part to get past and the part that is going to be the biggest obstacle for whatever decision I make in the long run. But that at least seems to make sense to me. He lied, I don’t necessarily trust him the way I did before. If he avoids lying to me in the future, I could learn to retrust.

But I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the why, even after several very open and honest conversations in the last couple weeks. He said he’s finally seeking therapy for self esteem issues and said he never initiated, but followed through because the attention made him feel good when things weren’t going well with us and the massages were genuinely fun, felt good and helped his feet (I asked him to be completely honest). Specifically what I’m having trouble getting past is the fact that he blew me off and took that risk of getting caught (why was it worth the risk, especially when he hates being late?), that he seemed proactive in enabling himself to do this by doing things like telling me he mixed up his appointment time so it would take longer (if you’re just passively accepting the attention, why be so proactive in deceiving me and setting things up so he could?), why he wanted to keep seeing the barber for hair cuts (if my partner says he’s just someone who pushes boundaries and cuts his hair, why can’t he just cut contact?) and that he knew on some level that it was wrong but let it go on for almost a year (started talking about the first massage in September, maintained sexual interactions a couple times in person and several times over text between October and the end of March, drunkenly called the barber at the beginning of June and then decided to cut it back to completely platonic.

I don’t know. I can acknowledge he’s genuinely been trying to fix it for the last few weeks, and it was honestly pretty seriously out of character for him. And if I haven’t reflected that in the paragraphs above, I am always deferential and want to believe people. And I want my partner to have meaningful, deep, affectionate connections with people that aren’t me. But that feels like a minefield of anxiety now. And how do I get past this deep wanting ache to really understand why, when he’s already answered for that for the most part?

Cuts Like A Knife

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Help, My Friends Are Sabotaging My Relationships

July 16, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Doc,

I’m 34, single and looking for someone to settle down with. In my younger days however, I saw a lot of sex workers—I lost my virginity to one (at 24) and used them to build my confidence up until I felt ready for a relationship. My best friend “Sam” is well aware of this, and because he has literally no secrets from her, so is Sam’s wife “Amy.” For the most part I get along fine with Amy—I was the best man at her and Sam’s wedding—but she is a rather extreme feminist who believes that sex work, while maybe okay in theory, is in our current reality exploitative of women and therefore evil. She wouldn’t even let me take Sam to a strip club for his bachelor party—I ended up not doing it because Sam genuinely didn’t want to, but I’m afraid this gave Amy a sense of triumph and power she doesn’t deserve.

I had been seeing a woman for almost four months who I was starting to think was the one, when she abruptly confronted me about my past with sex workers. When I admitted it was true, she dumped me and bad-mouthed me all over social media. Turns out she heard it from Amy, who “thought she had a right to know.” I ended up getting into a huge verbal altercation with Amy when she refused to either apologize for sabotaging my relationship or promise not to sabotage future ones, that ended with Sam ordering me out of their house with the threat of physical violence.

That was about two weeks ago. Sam and I finally just talked again, and we both really want to reconcile, but when I asked him to talk to Amy and ensure that she won’t tell any future girlfriends of mine about this part of my past, he said he can’t control what Amy says or does, and seemed to imply that I was some kind of Neanderthal for thinking a husband should have that kind of control over his wife. I don’t see it as control, just common courtesy and regard for others’ privacy. I have no intention of continuing to patronize sex workers once I’m in a long-term relationship, and don’t think any good could come of my future girlfriend/wife knowing about this.

But I don’t see how I can keep it a secret if I continue to be friends with Sam and Amy. And I really don’t want to drop them, especially Sam. I don’t have a lot of close friends—in fact he’s pretty much it. I love their two little boys to death, and I think their family has been incredibly valuable to me in terms of modeling healthy parent-child relationships, since my own family of origin was anything but. Now though, I keep thinking about how every time I’ve ever asked one of Amy’s friends out, I’ve been rejected, even when we seemed to have great chemistry. I’m paranoid she’s been telling everyone and that her and Sam’s whole social circle sees me as some kind of scum.

So what do I do? Do I need to find a woman who is cool with the fact that I used to see sex workers? That would narrow down an already narrow playing field even further, since I’m no longer looking for a casual fling or a party girl, but a woman with good values who wants a faithful monogamous relationship and motherhood. When and how would you suggest I tell a potential girlfriend this, to keep her from dumping me in disgust like the last one? Or do you have any other suggestions?

Dear Ex-John

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What Do I Do About My Sexless Relationship?

July 14, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

I’ve been with my boyfriend for a year and a half. He is so caring and thoughtful. He is affectionate and always finding ways to show me he loves me. He splits household responsibilities with me 50/50 and is in many ways my ideal partner, with one exception.

My boyfriend has ED.

I’m ok with. In fact, when we first started dating and he told me, I was willing to work on finding other ways to be together and feel intimacy and it seemed like he was too. I could tell he needed to take it slow and I was ok with that, but at some point progress completely halted. Now I’m at the point where I feel he refuses to do anything about it. For example he says he doesn’t like the way, “vaginas smell or taste” (he’s never even attempted to go down on me, this is based on his past experiences). He also had never touched me down there for more than a few seconds at a time. The most we do together is making out and mastrubating and even this has gotten fewer and farther between.

I’ve asked him if he’s attracted to me and he insists that he is (he also gets erections no problem when we start fooling around), but it’s so hard to not feel like I’m doing something wrong. He says this is all stemming from a botched circumcision that led to decreased sensitivity but there is definitely another element at play here. I say this because once we managed to have sex and he came but it has never been attempted nor has it happened again. In fact, just a few days ago, he said the most hurtful thing he has said to me throughout all of this. He described the moment (which I felt was special because we were able to connect) as, “I barely felt anything and then I came.”

I’m honestly at the point where I’m thinking about breaking up with him. I love him but it feels like a constant blow to my sexual confidence and it hurts so much to not be able to physically connect with him.

I know that I will be heartbroken if things don’t work out between us, but I also know I can’t force him to do anything he’s not ready to do. Please help!

Sexless In Seattle

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