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If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then the odds are you aren’t satisfied with your dating life as it currently stands.
Maybe you keep ending up in the Friend Zone. Or perhaps you have never had a date in your life and you’re afraid that you’re going to die a virgin. The specifics don’t matter; what ultimately matters is that you know that things could be different, but you’re not quite sure how.
Now going through the blog, maybe some of the advice makes sense to you. It agrees with your pre-suppositions about what you should and shouldn’t be doing in your quest to improve your dating life.
Some of it though… some of it may leave you scratching your head. “Really, this doesn’t apply to me. I’d need to be at a higher level than I am to try this. This couldn’t possibly work. This isn’t me.”
So no, maybe it isn’t you. Maybe it conflicts with how you think dating and relationships work. Maybe this makes you uncomfortable. Maybe you want to dismiss it out of hand.
And that’s fair.
Y’see, as much as this may sound like it, this isn’t about my trying to justify my advice to people who don’t agree with me. It’s about change. Sometimes it’s about making a lot of changes, some of them at a fundamental level. One of the things I hear often, especially from guys with low levels of social experience is that I’m either asking too much of them or insisting that they have to change or hide aspects of themselves. As far as they’re concerned, some things are impossible. Others feel that that they shouldn’t have to give up so much of themselves.
So let me ask you – with total sincerity: Being yourself. How’s that working out for you so far?
Geek Vs. Nerd: How Labels Affect Our Destiny
Let’s talk about words. This may seem like a digression but stick with me for a second.
It’s actually rather astounding the level of power words have over us. One of the biggest lies that parents teach their children is the classic “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Sounds lovely until you’ve spent any time in junior high. Or on the Internet for that matter. Words can harm. Words can heal.
And words can utterly affect your life in ways you never anticipated.
Names, for example. Names have power. Names are our label, our identity. They define us.
A few of you will scoff at this idea, I’m sure. I mean, sure, we’ve all heard “A Boy Named Sue”, and anyone who names their child “Sheldon” is ensuring that they’ll be getting atomic wedgies and Big Bang Theory jokes from birth until they get their PhD, but really, names don’t have that much of an affect on us, do they?
Here’s the thing: your name is part of your self-concept. No man is an island, nor do we develop in a background. Your self-concept – how you see and define yourself – is a composite, defined in no small part by how others interact with and react to you. As we grow and mature, we can control more of how others see us, but that is still defined by how we see ourselves. How we label ourselves, in fact.
Now before anyone asks, no, I’m not saying that you need to change your name. What I am saying is that you need to think about your label.
To give a personal example: when I was growing up, I had a tight group of friends. As is often the case in such groups, we all had our roles. One of us was “The Good One”. Another was “The Troublemaker”. My twin brother was “The Athletic One”, while our friend – we’ll call him Miles – was “The Natural”. Girls were attracted to Miles the way that mice are attracted to cheese.
I wanted to be like Miles in the worst way, but I was continually edged out, overshadowed by Miles’ natural easy charm and my brother’s athleticism and looks. As much as I wanted to be a lady’s man – in as much as one could at 15 – I found myself continually ill at ease with them. I was bookish and unathletic. I had little sense of style or how to relate to girls. I was into comics and anime; everybody else was into sports, the high-school social scene, who was hooking up with who… I had no points of commonality. I didn’t know how to convey my passions in an interesting manner and I was ill at ease around people I was attracted to. My idea of “flirting” involved following around the girl I liked like a lost puppy. Because of my clumsiness and various relationship disasters, I was labeled “The One Who Wasn’t Good With Girls”.
This was a label that followed me through high-school and even well into college – a place where nobody knew who the hell I was, a place where I was free to completely re-invent myself. Why?
Because I had passively accepted that label as part of my self-concept. I had allowed myself to be defined as “The One Who Was Not Good With Girls”. It became part of who I was; even when I had dates or a girlfriend, that identity remained a core part of me and I lived in dread anticipation of when it would come to the forefront of my life again.
It wasn’t until years later – ironically, after I went head to head with Miles, both of us trying to hook up with the same girl – that I realized what I had done. I had taken a label, someone else’s idea of who I was, and absorbed it into my self-concept.
We know instinctively the power of labels, which is why we fight over their definitions. Look at the ongoing attempts to define “Geek” and “Nerd”, for example. Call a self-professed geek a nerd and you’ll be corrected immediately. Geeks are into genre fiction while nerds are into hard sciences and engineering. Nerds will call geeks dilettantes, geeks will insist that nerds are borderline Aspie cases who can’t handle relationships with non-nerds, blog will be written and infographics drafted defining which attributes apply to which name, and everybody will agree that they’re not dorks because who wants to be a dork?
Meanwhile the general populace will continue to use “geek” and “nerd” interchangeably, usually with geek being slightly less derogatory.
So why all the fuss about the definitions?
Because those are the labels that people are using to define their self-concept. These labels become part of “who I am”… including their facility in getting dates and relationships.
Identity and Resistance To Change
One of the insidious things about accepting others’ definitions of who we are into our self-concept is how difficult it can be to get rid of them.
After passively accepting certain labels into our identity, we begin to define ourselves by them and – by extension – accept them as part of our limitations, often without bothering to explore or examine them.
To continue with the personal example from above, for nearly a decade, I accepted that I was The Geek and The One Who Was Bad With Girls. I allowed it to not only define me, but to limit what I was willing to do or try. I wouldn’t approach girls I liked because, frankly, I was The One Who Was Bad With Girls – my destiny was to be rejected and humiliated. The few times I did make an approach, I was timid and almost apologetic; as far as I was concerned, my approaching someone was a hideous inconvenience to them that would only serve to give them reason to reject me. I decided early on that I would just have to let them come to me… or else try to back-door my way in via the Platonic Friend Gambit.
Needless to say, I spent more time in the Friend Zone than Tim Tebow spends in the end-zone1 .
After a while, I had so internalized things that they became a point of perverse pride. I would adamantly refuse to see how my attitudes towards women (alternately obsequiously worshipful and jealously dismissive) were unattractive or how my style – whether in clothes or decorating my dorm room – could be a turn-off. I was A Geek and by God I would not budge from this – any woman out there would have to accept me for who and what I was or else they were simply unworthy of me. Now I wasn’t being rejected; I was preemptively rejecting them.
Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
Now as fine as that sounded in principle, it’s only in hindsight that I could see that what I was really doing is insulating myself against things that I found uncomfortable. I was uneasy approaching women, therefore I wouldn’t. I knew with absolute certainty that I didn’t like singles bars or clubs and looked disdainfully at all of the people who attended them… despite having spent next to no time in them or having talked to anyone in them. They were just not part of Who I Was, therefore they were bad. And if I would just repeat that to myself enough times, I might actually stop being jealous of the ease that others had with women…
Similarly, I didn’t like dancing – despite having studied and enjoyed ballet when I was younger. I knew this to the core of my being. I was a Geek and Geeks didn’t dance… until the girl I was dating in college dragged me to a swing class and I learned I had a knack for it.2 So, ok, maybe dancing. Swing dancing could be suitably Geeky to be included in my identity. This far but no further.
Knowing what I do now, it’s not hard to see why it was so hard to make the changes I needed in order to get better with women; I had allowed being The Geek and The One Who Was Bad With Women to become so deeply ingrained into who I was that I couldn’t imagine who I would be without that. I made my resistance to change who I was a virtue, despite the fact that there were many aspects of myself that I knew were holding me back from what I wanted.
This is something I see often in my geeky and nerdy brothers and sisters: the attitude of “I am just fine as I am and the rest of the world can either accept me or fuck off.” And to be sure, there is something to be admired in being willing and able to be steadfast in your identity against societal pressure to conform and change. But at the same time, that stubbornness that you so admire can also be your reaction to fear and uncertainty, just dressed up in more appealing clothes.
Think about it: if you knew that aspects of who you are at this moment that were keeping you from achieving what you want, if they were negatively affecting your life, would you be willing to change them and reach your dreams or would you choose to keep them because you refuse to change who you are for the expectation of others?
“…it’s the world that’s evil and selfish.”
It took years for me to come to grips with the fact that my attitude was holding me back. It wasn’t until I went head to head with Miles over the same woman, that I had what I refer to as “my Batman moment”3 , the moment when I realized that in order to get what I wanted, I was going to have to turn my life around and take responsibility for my life.
I had to realize that I, as do many nerds and geeks, that I was allowing the locus of control in my life to be external. It was reassuring to believe that I was powerless to change my fate and I was beset on all sides by a cold and uncaring world that conspired against me. It made me the hero of my own little drama, a bastion of purity in a corrupt and cynical world.
However, in reality, all this did was provide cover for the fact that I didn’t want to admit that, ultimately, my state was my own fault. It was the cumulative result of choices I had made over the years and if I wanted to improve, I would have to man up and accept responsibility for my life.
And then came the hard part – dismantling every pre-conceived notion I had about who I was and what I was capable of.
At first, I, like many others before me, went looking for the magic bullet. That one single, simple thing that would do all of the work for me, whether it was pick-up, hypnosis, or any other form of snake-oil out there that promised to turn a loser into a lady’s man.
They don’t exist. Once I understood and accepted that, the hard work began… and with it, genuine change, and genuine improvement.
If you want to change your life and get better with women, you have to accept that it just isn’t going to be that easy. If you want to fix your dating life, you may well have to do things that you found uncomfortable, even painful. “It’s too much trouble,” “it’s too hard,” and “I don’t have the time” are excuses, aspects of an old identity holding on for dear life. If you want something badly enough, you will make time. You can and will find the internal strength to power through your doubts and insecurities.
I had to willingly subject myself to things I dreaded; I had to make myself emotionally vulnerable and submit myself for rejection from women I was attracted to. I had to face up to having what others call “approach anxiety” and muscle my way through it even as my heart was pounding and my head began to swim. I had to be willing to approach and be rejected hundreds of times in order to pinpoint what I was doing wrong and fine tune what actually worked.
Change is hard. Change is scary. Change can be painful. But to quote a wise man: “Without pain, without sacrifice, we have nothing. What you’re feeling isn’t pain, it’s premature enlightenment.”
Don’t worry about what some infographic says about who you are as a nerd or a geek; define it for your own damn self. You can be a nerd or a geek and still be popular. You can be a geek or a nerd and still have an rich and incredible love-life. It’s only when we quit ceding our identity, our self-concept to the definitions of others, when we take back our locus of control and internalize it, that we can progress.
I made it. So can you. I have faith in you.
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