Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
When I started college, I started trying to put myself out there to try to meet, date, and hookup with women. I had the attitude of “just be yourself and the right women would come along” and it just never did.
I would go to parties and I would see guys talking to girls, and I could pick up on the cues the girl was interested in them, attentive body language, curling the hair, engaged in conversation, eagerness to meet up at another location, bringing up dating or sexual topics, etc. I can pick up when a girl is interested in a guy, it just never seemed to happen in my direction. Some of the guys that would regularly hook up with women treated those women horribly. One would openly brag about cheating on his girlfriends. Another would refer to women as walking fleshlights. Both of these people had no trouble finding women to hook up with, either at frat parties or on Tinder. I tried to remain optimistic though, that if I just kept meeting people eventually I’d find someone I had chemistry with. Until my senior year I learned that a group of people were calling me incel behind my back. That comment broke me because I am a virgin.
Talking to women felt pointless. What’s the point of trying to meet people if the only result is that I’m going to get viscously mocked? I got very bad body image issues, to the point where I didn’t even want to go outside for fear people can tell I’m a virgin just by the way I look. I spent my last semester living with my parents taking online classes because I didn’t see the point of interacting with any of my classmates. I didn’t want to interact with any of them.
Now college came and went and I haven’t even gotten a single date, let alone a kiss or even sex. I read reports about how hookup culture is so common with college students, and I want to engage in this because it sounds fun, but my time came and went and I simply wasn’t good enough, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I feel like any sort of relationship, whether a one night stand or a long term girlfriend that results in marriage, doesn’t feel possible for me. And after how fruitless and humiliating my college experience was, it feels pointless to even try.
Never Going To Get It
I get a variation on questions like this fairly frequently, NGTGT. One thing that I’ve noticed over the years are a few commonalities that crop up among people who’ve had experiences like yours – something I think is important to pay attention to, because it directly affects how you (and other people in your shoes) feel.
Let’s start with an obvious one: the college “hookup culture” is vastly exaggerated. It’s the sort of story that’s “too good not to be true”, something that plays into all sorts of cultural taboos and fears and ideas about young people and gets spread without actual substance. Far fewer people are “hooking up” the way that “hook up culture” implies; it’s just “well, my college experience is I dated a couple people” isn’t nearly as sexy nor does it sell as many papers or clicks. More people – especially men – are likely to exaggerate to fit in, round up experiences to “hook up” or just straight lie. And while there are some folks who may try to live “hook up culture”, that’s more because they think it’s expected of them rather than something that’s actually happening.
And – quite frankly – the things that most folks might define as “hook up culture” isn’t widely or evenly spread; it’s primarily a white, upper-middle and upper class, hetero, cis thing, and primarily an even smaller subset within that group. Queer students and students of color are far less likely to be part of “hook up culture”, for a number of reasons – not the least of which because their having lots of wild, crazy sex is seen as a bad thing.
Here’s another obvious one: the guys who don’t seem to struggle with getting dates or girlfriends, despite being objectively horrible. This is a variation on the whole “women love bad boys” myth – women, especially women that you (both the general “you” and you, specifically, NGTGT) are into falling for guys who are awful for them and to them. Meanwhile, here you are, a guy who’s trying to do everything right, trying to be respectful and kind and Saturday night is still the loneliest night of the week. What the fuck is up with that?
A couple of things. First, it’s worth remembering that these guys – like the guy who brags about cheating on his girlfriends or who refers to women as “fleshlights” – aren’t saying those things to the women they meet. Creeps and assholes aren’t wearing signs that say “Hi, I’m going to cheat on you and make you feel awful about yourself”, nor are they wearing hats that are conveniently color coded so that you know who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. Similarly, the fact that they’re assholes isn’t what’s attracting women to them.
The assholes – and that’s assuming that we mean actual shitheads, not just “guy as what is dating the woman I want to date” – don’t lead with how awful they are. They’re charming. They’re frequently witty, polite and make a good show of being considerate. The asshole behavior doesn’t come until later, after the relationship is more established. Sometimes this is deliberate. Often it isn’t; it’s more just that folks learned “you act like this at the start and then you can relax later on” works for them.
The other thing is that this is a classic case of the “just world fallacy” – the idea that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. That’s not how the universe works and never has been. The good and bad people succeed and fail regardless of their morality; expecting inherent goodness or badness to change the balance of your life ends up being a reason for passivity.
I know this seems depressing and unfair. But to quote one Marcus Cole from Babylon 5: “Wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”
Life isn’t going to reward or punish someone for being good or evil. If you want the rewards, you have to work for them.
This, incidentally, includes the idea that you have to be “good enough” to “earn” a relationship or a kiss or a date. It’s the same mindset, just without the inherent morality meter. It’s not about being “good enough” or being “deserving” or “undeserving”. It’s about meeting people, connecting with them, discovering and kindling chemistry and actually taking advantage of opportunities when they come up.
Which actually leads to a lot of the next thing I notice: a lot of passivity, hesitation and waiting. There’s a lot of hanging around and hoping people notice, a lot of waiting for others to see and then either make the first move or give unmistakable signs of “yes, you should do this”.
Part of the reason why those assholes you mention don’t have issues is in part because they are active. They aren’t waiting. They’re actively seeking people to date or hook up with, rather than waiting for it to happen. This means, amongst other things, that they’re actively courting rejection. You can’t avoid rejection when it comes to meeting people that you want to date; it’s baked into the process. Not everyone is going to like you, no matter who you are or what you do. That doesn’t mean that there’s something inherently wrong with you, it just means that you’re not going to be someone’s particular flavor.
The Dita Von Teese quote I’m so fond of is relevant here: “You can be the biggest, juiciest peach on the tree, but some people just don’t like peaches”.
Understanding that rejection is part of the process, that it can’t be avoided, only accepted, is part of why those assholes succeed where seemingly nice guys (as opposed to Nice Guys) fail. It’s a matter of putting yourself into the path of opportunity, recognizing those opportunities when they arrive and going all-in when they do. They aren’t waiting for the perfect moment to present itself, they’re making those moments happen.
And part of why this works for them, but why you (and others) struggle is that they start from a position that they’re already desired.
This right here from your letter is another one of those commonalities that I see all the time: “I can pick up when a girl is interested in a guy, it just never seemed to happen in my direction.”
There’re two reasons why you aren’t seeing this happen to you. First: it’s a lot easier to see it from an outside perspective, when you aren’t invested in what the other person is saying or doing. It’s part of why it’s much easier to give people advice for a complicated situation, but not be able to deal with something similar in your own life.
(Ask me how I know. Go on…)
You have the distance and objectivity to pay attention to things that you wouldn’t have the bandwidth to actually notice if you were the one having that conversation. Not, at least, if you were actually engaging with them and having an actual conversation, rather than being somewhat detached and more focused on paying attention to other things.
But that’s only part of the answer. The other part – and it plays into the first part of this – is that you aren’t going to see it if you don’t believe it’s possible. Confirmation bias is something everybody deals with. It’s part of the human experience. But it means that your brain is primed to zero in on the things that will reinforce what you already believe and dismiss the things that go against it.
So if you are going to these parties or meeting people with mindset that you’re working from zero or from a negative score and have to work your way towards “earning” being desired, you’re never going to see when people are into you. You may dismiss it as not real, a mistake on your part, or just simply not see the cues or signs of interest at all. It’ll just be all noise with no signal.
Those jerks, on the other hand, believe in their desirability to an almost absurd degree. After all, if you’re going to find evidence of what you already believe, you may as well believe in the things that will help you. And while there is some degree of the “chicken/egg” question, the fact is that they start from the position that they’re desired and then see the evidence everywhere. If they’re rejected – which happens to them, too – then it’s clearly something wrong with her or a glitch in the Matrix or any other excuse that makes sense to them in the moment. But because they believe in their own desirability, it’s going to be reinforced, over and over again.
And it’s important to note: they’re not being passive about waiting for signs of interest. They’re testing for interest, actively seeking it out by showing interest first. If you pay attention you might notice that, more often than not, they’re the ones who initiated the flirting and the signs of attraction you note follow that initiation, rather than their waiting for permission to start. Instead of hoping someone will give them the green light to talk to them, they’re saying “Ok, I think this person’s hot, let’s see if they’re ready to get with me”, and get the ball rolling. So, they’re not just waiting and hoping; they’re making it happen and rolling on if the other person isn’t feeling it.
Which actually brings us to the last commonality that we need to discuss. Part of the problem that you and many others run into, that leads to feeling this way, is that you’ve been following bad advice. And that advice actively makes things harder for yourself.
The “Just be yourself” attitude is a great example of this, especially when folks get it wrong. OK, “just be yourself”… but what if you suck? What if you’re an asshole who treats people badly?
What if “being yourself” means being someone you dislike?
We tend to treat “just be yourself” as “don’t change, don’t do anything different” when what it really means is “don’t try to be something you’re not just for the approval of others”. This is important, in no small part because if you’re trying to be someone you aren’t and you do meet someone amazing… they’re not going to be into you. They’re going to be attracted to who you’re pretending to be; that is, they’re attracted to the parts of you that aren’t part of who you authentically are.
But when we treat this as “don’t change”, it often becomes “don’t do anything that might improve your situation”. If we want someone who desires us for who we are, then we want to be our authentic selves, yes. But we want to be our best authentic selves. We want to be all we can be. And sometimes, that means examining who we are and what we do or feel or believe and asking “is this really me?” or “is this the best version of me?”
Sometimes our sense of self isn’t our true self so much as things we’ve accumulated that we mistake for our true selves. This is especially true about the worst things we believe about ourselves – from body image to being unloveable or undesirable because reasons. Our attitudes and beliefs aren’t so much who we are but things we’ve taken on board from other people that we assume must be true because other people said it or pushed it on us. Such as, for example, the idea that you’re a virgin and being a virgin says something bad about you.
Ok, you heard someone call you an incel and it hurt because you were a virgin. But there’s a difference between being a virgin – who’s simply someone who hasn’t had a particular experience – and an incel. While incel started out as being a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate” – which, I might point out, doesn’t mean ‘virgin’, it means they’re currently struggling to find sex – it’s since come to mean a very specific toxic mindset and attitude.
You can be a virgin, even an older virgin, without being an incel. You can have had sex and still be an incel. But the label isn’t going to stick or have meaning if you don’t take it on board. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when someone uses it to label you; they’re insulting you after all, and this is an insult that was very clearly aimed at a sensitive spot. But the idea that your being a virgin is something to be ashamed of is something that you have to agree to… and that’s precisely what you did.
It became part of your “self”. But that doesn’t mean it’s authentic. It’s someone else’s label, not who you are. Only you get to decide that.
Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: if you decided to take it on board and make it part of your sense of self? You can also decide to throw it away. You are fully empowered, right now, to discard everything you experienced in college. You can make the decision to say “fuck all of that, none of that was me. I made the choices I did based on the information I had at the time, which was incorrect; now I know better and I can make new, better decisions.”
Your college experience wasn’t what you hoped it would be. That’s a shame, and I’m sorry it turned out the way that it did. But that doesn’t mean that you’re doomed. Not unless you allow it to. You can take that experience and learn from it. You’ve seen how passively ceding control to others has lead you to where you are now. Now that you know better, you are in a position to change that, to take an active hand and say “OK, this sucked, I’m going to change things” and start doing things differently.
To be clear: that doesn’t mean that this is a quick or easy thing. You’re trying to break the patterns of years, especially after isolating yourself to such an extent that you took online courses instead of going to in-person classes. When you’ve walked a particular path over and over enough times, it becomes much harder for things to grow there again. That’s going to take a lot of deliberate, conscious effort to undo. You’re going to be having to break the habits and thought patterns of years, possibly a lifetime.
You’re also carrying around a not-inconsiderable amount of pain, for very understandable reasons. You’re going to have to deal with that – ideally with the help of a counselor or therapist – in order to learn to let it go and let it be the past instead of your present and future.
But growth is frequently hard and birth is always painful; rebirth even more so. But the good news is that in choosing rebirth, you are able to choose what is reborn. You have the opportunity to examine your self and your life and say “what is authentically me, what is the detritus that I accumulated from others and what needs to change?” You have the opportunity to decide to slough away the false self like a snake shedding its skin and live with both intent and direction to polish and improve the parts that are you, that are authentic and lead to your best self.
And this means that you can improve, too. You can say “I want this aspect to be different” and work towards it, rather than limiting yourself because you or others said this was how it had to be.
Is it easy? Absolutely not. It’s a hell of a lot of work. And it’s work that isn’t ever finished, because nothing ever truly ends. There’s always more you can learn, always more you can discover, and order will descend into chaos if it isn’t supported and maintained. But that’s not a drawback; it means that you aren’t limited by mistakes or misinformation, and there are always new and wonderful things to learn about yourself – sides of yourself you may never have even dared dream existed.
I’m going to leave you with the words of Henry Rollins: It’s time for you to shine. Hero time starts now.
Good luck.