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I’ve Become A Great Guy. Now What Do I Do?

May 17, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hello Doc, long time reader here. I think I have an unusual problem. I’m a cis, straight, white guy who during my teenage years (I’m 22 now!) used to be a Nice GuyTM, didn’t care about presentation and didn’t have many (if any) female friends. I want to make emphasis on how much some of your advice has helped me to grow as an individual.

Nowadays, I pass the Grimes Test with flying colors. I dress properly and regularly go to the barber. I joined a D&D group with strangers who turned out to be some of my best friends. I have deep, intimate friendships with both men and women. I don’t panic anymore when talking to women. I’ve read a lot of feminist literature that literally changed the way I saw a lot of things for the better. You could say that I’m peaking, and the best part is that I’m constantly growing and developing myself.

The one thing that I don’t really know how to solve is, what’s next? I would really like to find a meaningful relationship, but I don’t have a clue about how to go about it. I tried Tinder, meeting friends of friends, and most of the times people just ghost me. I also don’t know how to flirt, I’m scared of saying or doing something that might be wrongly interpreted. Also there’s the fact that we are living through a pandemic, which doesn’t help. I know dating is sometimes a numbers game, so if anything, I wanted you to know that I owe some of my growth to your column.

Thank you for all these years, you’ve been killing it-

Completed the Tutorial

[Read more…]

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

[Read more…]

What Men Need to Know About Flirting

April 14, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

As more and more people get vaccinated against COVID, we’re all starting to step back into the world again. Just as importantly, people are ready to try to jumpstart their love lives again after a long, frustrating and lonely year of enforced solitude. And while there’s going to be an adjustment period as we all try to come back from having gone fully feral, one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for social skills. And while “hey, Pfizer, Moderna or J&J” may work for an opening line, a lot of people fumble at what comes next.

Bearded,Handsome,Man,Smiling,Thoughtfully,Listening,To,His,Beautiful,Woman
“So, want to come back to my place and meet my sourdough starter?”

We may all be desperate for human contact, but understanding how to connect with people is still vital. And if you’re looking to break out of a pandemic-induced dry spell, then you need to understand how to flirt.

Flirting is one of the most important — and paradoxically, one of the most misunderstood — skills when it comes to dating. A lot of men assume that flirting is an incredibly specific process; you have to act and speak a certain way, demonstrate your value or worth and show that you’re the best possible choice out of everyone else at the bar. By doing so, you generate powerful attraction — even in the most obstinate of women — and get her number or a shared Uber back to your place.

Except… that’s not how flirting works. That’s not how flirting works at all.

Flirting isn’t about generating attraction and interest where there isn’t any; in fact, if someone isn’t interested in you, trying to flirt is likely going to make them roll their eyes so hard that they can see their own brain. Flirting, at its most basic, is about signaling your interest, gauging potential attraction and — most importantly — engaging someone on an emotional level.

In fact, the emotional engagement is the most important part of flirting. It’s what captures somebody’s attention, what draws them to you and what encourages them to want to spend more time with you. Flirting is about having fun, not trying to get laid. You are showing your interest in someone in a fun and engaging way, while inviting them to join you in that fun. In a very real way, flirting is the art of giving people permission to do something that they already want to do: enjoy themselves with someone who’s warm and charming. People often enjoy flirting for its own sake — not because they want to hook up but because they enjoy how it feels. Flirting can be a game. Done properly, flirting is about the fun you have together, not what the end results may or may not be.

Once you understand this fundamental aspect of flirting, the rest comes much more easily.

So let’s clear up some misunderstandings and talk about how to get better at flirting.

[Read more…]

How Do I Become More Attractive to Women?

March 29, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hi Doc,

For the last month and a half or so, I went on some dates with a girl (who we’ll call L, for the purposes of this letter) who I met through Bumble. I really liked her, as we have similar tastes in music (which is uncommon among people my age), and it was really easy for me to be myself and remain laid back, light-hearted, and relatively jokey around her. However, earlier today, L let me know that while she liked me as a person, she thought that we should just be friends, as she didn’t she us as being more than friends. I’m open to that, though we both agreed that it would be best to take some time apart, so I can fully process my emotions and come to grips with this. Of course, this is partially because it just happened, but it really hit me hard, as I felt a strong connection with her, mostly in relation to our similar interests. (I tend to become a lot more interested in someone if they have one or more of the same obscure interests that I do.) I also got the “let’s just be friends” speech with a girl (who we’ll call K) who I went on a few dates with a few months ago, though looking back, I didn’t have as strong of a connection with her as I felt I did with L.

It should be noted that I really have only started dating in the past year or so, despite being 29 years old (I’ll turn 30 next month) and I’ve never been in an officially defined “relationship.” My longest time spent dating a girl has been for a few months. I never asked girls out before that, partially because of a fear of rejection, unrealistic expectations about what I wanted in a romantic partner, and having the idea that if a girl liked me, she would automatically ask me out. I also didn’t use touch with girls I was interested in, in part because I didn’t want to be seen as a creeper. After reading your website, I now know the error of my previous ways. However, I sensed a lack of experience with L as well. She never mentioned any previous boyfriends, she mentioned how her parents are very protective of her (compared with other girls, from what I’ve noticed), and she explicitly mentioned that I’m the first person who she went on a date with through a dating app. (She’s in her mid-late 20s) I didn’t ask about her prior dating history, though. Since I don’t have much of a prior dating history, either, I’m thinking that maybe she noticed some hesitation in my actions, as opposed to being confident and truly certain of myself. Obviously, I can’t confirm that this played a role, but I do want to display certain things that will make women romantically attracted to me, like being more confident.

In your articles, you often mention the importance of touch. Before the pandemic, I was able to incorporate touch with some of the girls I went on dates with, though not really since then. With L, we would hug each other when meeting and saying good bye, and occasionally holding hands when we walked together. I made sure to ask her beforehand, but again, I didn’t want to do anything she was uncomfortable with, and when we walked outdoors, for example, we both wore masks. I would have liked to use touch to convey interest with her more, but with us being in a pandemic, I was hesitant towards some things, like kissing her. With K before that, however, I didn’t touch her, as she was much more cautious towards the pandemic, as to name one example, she wasn’t comfortable with eating in restaurants.

Obviously, this makes it harder for a girl to see me as more than a friend, though. While I plan on moving on to messaging other girls online, it stands to reason that there are more than a few women who have a cautious attitude towards the pandemic, and with that, I would have to find other ways to create romantic attraction. I do plan on getting the vaccine as soon as humanly possible, though it’s uncertain as to when that’ll actually be able to take place.

Additionally, in those articles, you mention the idea of bringing up your past sex life to girls in order to create attraction. The problem with that is, that I’m a virgin, so I obviously have nothing to go with that doesn’t involve my right hand. Along with the fact that I’m relatively inexperienced with things like sexual flirting, how can I make up for this? (This created complications with L, as while I did my best to be a little more flirty with her compared to how I was with K, and playfully bantered with her as well, it may not have been enough, and because I sensed some inexperience with her, along with the fact that she generally didn’t talk about more risqué things, made me more hesitant to bring up more sexual-themed flirting with her.)

So, in summary, my main questions are, what are some of the main ways to create romantic attraction with a girl without touch, and how can I create sexual attraction despite my inexperience when it comes to sex?

Always a Friend, Never a Lover

[Read more…]

My Crush Sends Me Flirty Texts When She’s Drunk. What Do I Do?

January 20, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Greetings, Doc. I’ve never done this before, so I don’t know what to expect or truly ask for.

I’ve known this girl since high-school, which was 5 or 6 years ago. We were pretty close for some time, before I joined the Army in 2015 and she joined the Air Force in 2016. She’s known that I “loved” her — or at least thought I loved her — since the 2nd year in our friendship. She’s politely declined and told me where she stands and her thoughts. 
Cut to the middle of 2020, she was in New Orleans and snapchatted me very cute pictures and some of them were a serious lust look and she had clearly been drinking. Our conversations carried on for a week or two before I asked her if she remembered Snapchatting at  me first on such and such date, and she said she didn’t remember. That kinda hurt but I wasn’t really surprised since I had the feeling since that night. 
(She the kind of girl that I would let her rip my heart out, stomp on it and leave me left for dead basically.) 

She snapchatted me last night saying someone at the bar looked like me and she was a little tipsy for sure. And then she went on for a couple minutes kind of complimenting me saying how much I’ve matured, and grown, and seem better than I was when I was in high school. She went home and she didn’t reply to my last snap, so I sent her a good night message and she opened it this morning and hasn’t responded to me sense. 

We’ve never dated, kissed, or anything before. She sent me letters with her perfume on them, her senior pictures when I was in Basic Training. And we currently live 1,000 miles away from each other and we haven’t seen each other since 2018.
What should I think and or do about this situation? 

Thank you for your time!

Where Do I Go From Here?

[Read more…]

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About Dr. NerdLove:

Harris O'Malley (AKA Dr. NerdLove) is an internationally recognized blogger and dating coach who gives dating advice to geeks of all stripes. Making nerds sexier since 20011

Remember: Dr. NerdLove is not really a doctor. [Read More …]

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