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Ask Dr. NerdLove: Is It Time To Leave

November 30, 2018 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

I’m a long time reader and I’ve never needed personalised advice before (happy enough to read your advice to others), but here we are.

I have been dating Alpha for three years and a half now. We started having the best sex of our lives and then discovered we were meant for each other. He is intellectually stimulating in a way my former partners weren’t, he is caring (puts up pretty well with my ups and downs), he makes me laugh and he loves me unconditionally. These things have been there from the start and still are.

However, he’s also got pretty big family issues, he was depressed and addicted to drugs in the past and he probably has some kind of mental health problem – a mood disorder, I’d say. He refuses to seek help because of bad past experiences with psychiatrists and psychologists.

I’m 28 and he’s 26. I’ve got a degree, a nice job, plans for the future, lots of hobbies and tons of friends. He finished high school, dropped out of college, has no work experience, has isolated himself from his friends and, since we’re together, spends his time smoking joints, playing video games/instruments, reading and working on a crazy startup project (already for 2 years) which doesn’t look profitable at all.

I’m the caretaker type and I’ve reeeally tried. I’ve paid for a psychologist, but he stopped going. I’ve offered him love and all the space he needs (he’s a bit antisocial). About a year ago, I started feeling deeply unhappy: we spent almost no time together, no time with my friends ever and he talked all the time about moving together but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with job/studies. I tried to talk to him many times, even sent him a letter. Nothing worked.

I recently moved out of my parents’ place, sick of waiting for him to get a job.

And then it happened. I went to a music festival and reconnected with a great friend, Bravo. I kind of liked him at university, but he was so difficult, and still is. Amazing, creative, fun to party with, a music connoisseur… but at 31 he’s still trying to finish his degree, has almost no work experience and is a bit of a mess. See a pattern there?

We started talking a lot, dancing and ended up making out while drunk. I felt so guilty. And Bravo doesn’t even remember!

The thing is Bravo and I have been having this weird story for 10 years. All we have had are drunken hookups because he was always so weird and I’ve always thought he found me hot, but he wasn’t interested. Sex has never been great cause he was always so drunk, too. I recently asked Bravo if he was interested in me at university and he was, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask if it was love or lust.

I was the first person with whom he cheated on his only girlfriend. I once kissed him while in a relationship crisis and broke up with the guy the next day. And now this: I’m in a crisis, and here he comes again.

After making out with Bravo and with another random guy, I told Alpha I needed a break. He didn’t think it was a good idea, suddenly realised how unfair he had been to me and surprise! the miracle happened. He got a job, he moved in with me and he started hanging out with my friends. He more or less forgave my infidelity, although he doesn’t know who it was with.

Fast forward two months and Alpha been having problems with getting paid. The little he’s got goes to the startup. I pay for everything. And he refuses to look for another job till they pay him, giving himself excuses. He tries to be tidy and clean around our home, but it’s not his nature. He tries to hang out with my friends, but I can tell he doesn’t enjoy it.

And last weekend I went partying. Bravo was there. My best friend and him are starting something long distance, and I’m happy for them – they’re a bit of a mess, but it might work. They’re two of my favourite people.

While drinking some shots, Bravo told me he’s starting to really like my best friend, and he doesn’t want to, he’s scared, since he always fucks up these things. I told him he should really try this time, and also that I wish my boyfriend was partying with us, that things were better and that I loved him very much. We were happy for each other.

One hour later we were unspeakably drunk, kissing each other like teenagers and having to restraint ourselves not to go home together. We were even caressing and all fluffy.

And now I can’t stop thinking about Bravo, about our conversations and about having sex with him. He hasn’t texted me, but has replied to a text I couldn’t help sending. I don’t think Bravo feels the same way, he likes my best friend and it’s so difficult for him to like a girl.

So here I am. Alpha loves me deeply and has started to change (the job!!!), but it seems it’s not enough, and that he’s just doing it for me, not because he really wants to. I don’t want to leave him just when he’s trying so hard and make him move back with his family. I also don’t want to be unfaithful and I’m getting close to that every day.

And Bravo is starting something with my best friend. I don’t think I can compete with her, she’s great at charming guys. And I also don’t want to, since Bravo is basically like Alpha, the same red flags. Just a bit more of a party animal and more social, that’s it. And with a story of infidelity and fear of commitment, which makes him way worse than Alpha. Even if my body and feelings tell me so, I don’t want a relationship with him.
But what’s wrong with us? Why can’t we seem to move on after 10 years and still come back to each other even when it’s the worst idea ever?

What can I do, Doctor? I’m a bit desperate.

Attracted to Peter Pans

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Ask Dr. NerdLove: Is This An Affair?

November 2, 2018 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hello Doc!

I know you normally do dating advice, but I’ve seen you do marriage advice too.

I have been married to my husband for 9 years. We have three kids together.

Back when he and I were dating, I went to visit him out of town (same town where my parents lived) where he had an internship. He wanted to fool around and we really didn’t have a place to go (he was living with my parents for free during his internship) and so he wanted to fool around in the car. When we finally found an empty dark parking lot, he said he wanted to get in the backseat and I told him specifically that I didn’t want to. My ex had sexually assaulted me in a car, and although I didn’t understand that’s what happened at the time, I told my (then) boyfriend that my ex had been “gross” with me in a car and it made me gross out to mess around. This made my boyfriend snap and he started yelling at me “we better not have come out all this way for nothing!” For various reasons I complied. I was scared of losing him, I didn’t know anything about consent, so I just laid there looking at the ceiling while he helped himself to a hand job from me. I wanted to break up with him, but coming from a very abusive home, I quickly blocked what happened and moved on. And we got married. And our marriage sucked but I got pregnant right away.

Fast forward to 2016 during Trump’s election and I finally have the words for what he did to me and I confront him. We fight for weeks but he owns up to it and apologizes sincerely. On New Years Eve we have sex for probably one out of three times that year and I get pregnant. Things are still rough but my hope is that with everything in the open, a new baby on the way, we can turn over a new leaf. We don’t. Once, when we were going to go see a movie with a couple that he knew (he worked with the girl) we got into a fight and he asked what I wanted to do. Crying, I said, “Please, let’s just go home” Well, he pulls up to the movie theatre, gets out and tells me that the couple will drive him home.

Then I find out that the girl he is working with is moving away. He and I were always very comfortable with each other having opposite sex friends, and he goes to three different going away parties for this girl. I am exhausted and pregnant, plus I am also childcare for our other kids so I stay home. He tells me he’s a social person and when I come home from work and lie in bed, it’s hard on him. So he goes out. Once, while we were watching a movie on his phone, the girl who left his work is lighting up his phone and it’s almost 10pm. She’s sending text after text. I don’t know what they say. But the next day, I look at the texts. Husband and I have always felt fine with having the password for each other’s phones. Once or twice a week, we’d lose a phone and use the other’s phone to call the missing phone. I’d grab his phone if it was close to look stuff up etc.

I see texts that talk about them having lunch together. Daily. She’s talking about crying because she doesn’t want to leave. He tells her he hopes our daughters grow up to be like her. He talks about feminist theory with her. Etc. Nothing sexual. But he did lie. He told me they rarely spent time together. I pressed him on several details about the time they spent together. He lied. And after I asked a few questions about her (he didn’t know I looked through his phone) the next day, he changed his password of two years.

Once I saw that he changed his phone I told him I had seen their conversations. I told him that he had been lying about how much time they were spending together. I told him to stop texting her.

He didn’t. I caught him replying to a text she sent him about something innocuous. And then magically, she didn’t text him anymore. There were other text convos in his phone with other women. One where he told her he likes having deep conversations and low key flirting, but I can tell that she was trying to keep things friendly so I wasn’t as worried about that.

Here’s the thing. He says he didn’t sleep with the woman who he became glued to while I was pregnant. He says he didn’t have feelings for her but when I press, he doesn’t say she didn’t have feelings for him. But he lied and lied and lied to me about how much time they spent together until I told him I read his texts, and his face turned white. “Believe what you want but nothing happened.” And he was trying to making me feel like I was crazy until I had black and white proof. So I have no idea if he really took it too far with this girl.

There are very, very complicated reasons why I haven’t left, but I need to know, from a guy’s perspective, am I making this too much of a big deal?

-Doubting

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Ask Dr. NerdLove: Help, I’m Afraid To Date

October 12, 2018 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Doc,

I’m going to start with a quick rundown of my dating history for context. I never bothered dating in high school, thinking that those sorts of relationships wouldn’t last and weren’t worth it. Once I got to college though, I…didn’t get much further. I saw relationships everywhere that looked miserable and seemed to end over very petty things. It was all very dramatic. I saw demanding women and inattentive selfish guys getting together constantly and I envied them. I kept thinking that if I had the chance, I would definitely be a better boyfriend and also would probably be wiser at choosing a girlfriend than some of these guys. Instead, regrettably, I became a Nice Guy; a strategy that as you can imagine, didn’t work at all.

When I eventually started dating during my first year of grad school, I decided that the best way to avoid getting trapped in the kind of miserable relationships I’d seen was to design a sort of committed friends with benefits model that in practice ended up with me getting sex and armchair psychotherapy and with her getting….to be quite honest, bad sex and not much else. I got my heart smashed 4 months into this bad experiment and yeah, I royally fucked this up because I didn’t even know what a relationship was much less how to hack them to avoid the problems I saw.

Still I was optimistic that I could do better. I’m 28 now and over the past years I’ve dated a bit in short bursts which never ended up developing into anything you could call a relationship. It just became really clear early on that these arrangements wouldn’t work out which I honestly didn’t take too hard.

The thing that has put new terror into me around the prospect of a serious long term relationship is something that happened to my best friend. He’s a transguy which obviously comes with its own snags, but he is one of the strongest, most resilient, most emotionally intelligent people I know. He spent 3 years in what ended up being a very verbally abusive relationship with his girlfriend and spent the following 3 years depressed and trying to mend himself from the aftermath. He’s doing great now, but if I were unlucky enough to end up in that kind of situation, I think I would be a lot worse at handling it. I don’t think I would have the insight to see it for what it is or the boundaries to stand up for myself/leave the way he did. He did everything right and still had to piece himself together after. This terrifies me.

Relationships on the whole seem dangerous for me to get into at my skill level even though I’m kinda old. I really would like to be in a healthy committed relationship but I don’t have enough faith in myself or humanity to risk getting hurt or hurting someone else because I don’t know what I’m doing.

How do I gain the skills I need when the world is this scary?

Signed
Courage the Cowardly Man

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Ask Dr. NerdLove: How Do I Become Emotionally Stronger?

July 30, 2018 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hey Doc,

So, of my many neuroses, two of them are general anxiety and depression. And… they can get pretty bad.

See, sometimes I fuck up. Everybody does. But because of how my mind works, oftentimes the line of thought following my mistake escalates into what my family calls a “pity party;” I hide in my room, crying because I’m overwhelmed by my emotions, and there’s nothing I can do but wait for the episode to pass.

Here is my concern: I worry that, even if I am handsome and friendly and good-hearted (which people have told me I am), I can’t imagine any woman being willing to deal with my depressive episodes. Maybe they’d tolerate it ONCE, but when it happened again they’d get sick of it and piss off.

I freely admit that I’m a crybaby, and once I get stressed and upset, there’s nothing to do except wait for that mood to end. Because I can’t exactly cure my mental problems, there is nothing I can do to change it.

My friends have told me that any woman worth dating would be understanding and try to help me, but… somehow, I doubt it. I literally can’t imagine a potential girlfriend wanting to stay with my after two of my breakdowns. Humans have limits on the amount of BS they’re willing to tolerate. It’s not realistic.

What do I do about this?

Cry Baby Cry

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Ask Dr. NerdLove: Once A Cheater, Always A Cheater

July 23, 2018 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hi Dr. NerdLove,

I have been a loyal reader of your column for a long time now and always think you give great advice and really get to the heart of things. My question isn’t really asking for advice so much as asking what your thoughts are on something I’ve noticed a lot in comment sections and online discussions, both on this site and lots of other places (and in offline life too)!

Backstory: Ten years ago, I cheated on my husband, which resulted in us getting a divorce. I had lots of reasons for cheating (my husband was emotionally distant, the thrill of something new, the fact that the other person was moving away and there was a heightened sense of “now or never” to it), but the bottom line is that I cheated, and it was a horrible dick move, and although I’m happier now that I’m out of that marriage, that was definitely not the right way to go about self-destructing it. I was entirely in the wrong and I feel bad about it, but at this point there’s nothing I can do to change what happened.

My question is that there’s this culture of unforgiveness when it comes to cheaters, and it bothers me. I know what I did back then was wrong, but so many people act like cheaters are irredeemable assholes who should never be trusted in a relationship again no matter what. Even outside of the dating world, infidelity is talked about like it’s something that is just a permanent moral failure that can’t ever be forgiven. I’ve had friends who pretty much dumped me when they found out why my marriage failed. I’ve had co-workers make snide remarks about me being untrustworthy. I haven’t really gone back out into the dating world (I’ve been happy to be single), but if/when I do decide to get back out there, I’m afraid I’ll be outright rejected because of it. I try not to really advertise what happened, but I live in a small community, so people tend to find out even if I don’t say anything.

Again, I take responsibility for what I did. I would never claim that it was a good thing or that it was justified, and if I could go back in time and change things, I definitely would. So I’m not asking you or your readers to say that cheating is A-OK and I didn’t do anything wrong, because it’s not and I did. It’s just kind of discouraging to think that I’m always going to be seen as untrustworthy and unforgivable for something that happened one time a decade ago that I realize was a mistake.

Is there any forgiveness in society for a cheater? Should there be? How can I address this when people find out about my past?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts. You rock.

Once a Cheater

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