toxic relationships Archives

How Do I Stop Being Angry About My Relationships?

October 29, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hi Doc,

So long story short I am a single guy approaching 30, never been in a relationship and only went out like 2 dates in my entire life. This all boils down to this major issue.

Basically my brother has been in a toxic relationship for as long as I can remember and this relationship has left scars on my self esteem. He is 35 years old, he has been with her since he was 18 years old and she was 14 years old at the time {they are married now with a daughter of 6 months). His wife is a gold digging materialistic manipulator, has never worked a job for more than a couple of months and constantly picks arguments with my parents over bullshit issues. She always requests either myself or my parents to do favours for her and then she literally kicks our asses to the curb afterwards (and my brother does not utter a word of protest that his family members are being treated like dog shit). My brother spent Euro 80,000 on their wedding without her paying a single fucking dime and she only found a job recently so that ” my brother will shut the fuck up about their depleted finances already”.

The issue here is that all my life I have been struggling to try and find a partner and settle down because this always keeps cropping up in my mind… I don’t want to end up like my brother. Mind you my parents constantly keep reminding me to not let this situation effect my opinions on relationships and women because there are awesome women out there who are career oriented and just want a loving partner to come home to.

And also another thing I have been getting into the habit where whenever I start thinking about relationships and women, I start to get really pissed off, angry and frustrated and that having a relationship will set me back in my life. Part of me says its all in my head and that I am overthinking this however I still fall back in the cycle of negativity and bad thoughts.

Any ideas on how to fix this please? I am going to admit, I might be wrong and the above scenario has nothing to do with me however I appreciate a second pair of eyes on this.

Thanks for your help.

Anger Issues

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Help, I Just Discovered My Fiancé Is Already Married!

October 8, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

I met my fiancé, we’ll call him A, in 2019 on a dating site. He was sweet, funny, educated, and driven. He told me he had never been married and didn’t have children. I have one boy from a previous relationship. A was a travel nurse and I was a staff nurse at the time. We went on our first date the day after my 30th birthday. We hit it off immediately and the relationship moved pretty fast.

After a few months, I introduced him to my son and after a year, we decided to travel together. We get time off between our assignments, usually a couple weeks which we use to spend time with our families.

Last October, A proposed to me and I said yes. He met my entire family and everyone loves him, I told them we are getting married, etc. I’ve always found it strange that he had never taken me to meet his family though. I tried not to push the subject, because he said he had a strained relationship with everyone.

When he returned from his family this time, however, I found another woman’s underwear in his laundry. I panicked and did a background check on him. As it turns out, he has been married for 13 years and has 4 children. I’m so shocked and angry. I told his wife, who he has since left to be with me. I don’t know what to do. I love him, but he has lied to me everyday of our relationship and has been unfaithful as well. It’s hard not to curl into a ball and give up. I feel so stupid, I told whole family we are getting married.

What do I do?

Unintentional Homewrecker

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Can She Ever Trust The Men She Wants to Date?

October 6, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

Last year, I got into a FWB situation that got really messy, and I’m having a hard time moving on. I met this guy through an app, we hit it off, and hooked up. The sex was surprisingly good, because even for just a hookup: he was really interested in my pleasure, and it was the kind of sex where you really feel connected with your partner. Since that was the vibe I got just with a hookup, I was very interested in finding out how that got better with time, so I pursued him. We talked about what we were looking for, etc, he said he wasn’t ready for a commitment yet, but was definitely looking for something more casual. I was coming off a divorce, so I was in the same spot, and we agreed to friends with benefits. Simple enough, right? Well, turns out…not so much.

Shortly after this, our area upped the pandemic lockdown measures as case rates rose. Since we both wanted to be cautious, we agreed to be “COVID monogamous”: there wasn’t an expectation of monogamy, but if we were going to do anything (romantic or otherwise) that would up our risk level, we’d let the other know so they could make informed decisions with their health. All very adult and reasonable. But…turns out having amazing, highly connected sex with one person exclusively, on top of great hang-outs and conversation…it’s not easy to keep things casual. I was vulnerable with him about my needs and how I was feeling. And, eventually, I told him I was falling in love with him. He was pretty obviously shocked by this admission, but didn’t say much of anything. We had sex again, but that’s when things started to feel off. During the act, amongst other sexy-talk, I whispered “I love you” and he didn’t say anything back, just…went at it with more ardor. When we finished, he kind of shuffled me out the door with an “I’ll call you later” because he had therapy. Admittedly, I’d decided to tell him on a day he had therapy because I thought it would be a good chance for him to unpack his feelings. When I had previously been vulnerable about my feelings, he said he “wasn’t ready for a relationship yet” so I wanted to give him a chance to dive into what exactly it was he wasn’t ready for, talk that through with his therapist before responding to my admission. Based on the connection we shared, I thought he was falling in love with me too, and the problem was that we were both scared of some aspect of defining a “serious relationship” between us.

Apparently I was way fucking wrong, because he told me the next day that he wasn’t falling in love with me. At all. He wasn’t holding himself back, he’d just straight-up never even felt butterflies for me in the 5+ months of sex.

Fucking ouch.

It turns out, I’d been reading him all wrong. The connection I was feeling wasn’t mutually falling in love, it was because, basically, he liked to roleplay being in love during sex. He just never told me it was a sexy game for him, and I thought it was the real deal. So all this time, when I was getting mixed signals out of the bedroom, I was blithely ignoring the pink flags while figuratively singing “It’s In His Kiss”: Sure, he didn’t seem as excited to see me as I was to see him, but he always seemed so reluctant to leave! Sure, he wasn’t returning my vulnerability in kind, but he’s just scared! Sure, he said he wasn’t ready for a relationship, but there was always a “yet” tacked on the end! There weren’t any completely red flags, he always was honest (seemingly) and sung my praises and treated me well, even if it wasn’t with the same enthusiasm as how I treated him.

In the conversation that finally ended it all, he admitted that he knew he’d been treating me unfairly. That trying to pass what we shared off as “just FWB” was dishonest of him. That having me act in a loving, adoring way was actively a turn-on for him: when I confessed I was falling in love, it made him hard even though he knew he didn’t feel the same way. He intentionally withheld his true feelings with the excuse of “I don’t want to hurt her” but really because he was having fun, hot sex and was adored by a wonderful woman and he liked it all enough that he didn’t want it to end (these are his words, paraphrased). Ultimately, I let him know how hurt I was, broke things off with him, and haven’t talked to him since.

Now for the issue itself: this situation combined with good old-fashioned ADD rejection-sensitive dysphoria is making it feel impossible to move on. I can’t get it out of my head, the ADD just wants to dwell on it. And I feel like I can’t trust myself. I used to think I was a great judge of character. Hell, my job relies on it. But I thought a guy was falling in love with me when I never even gave him butterflies. How could I miss that?

I tried to move on, date other guys (yay vaccine!). But hooking up has been a mistake because instead of mediocre-to-fun decent sex to help me forget, I’ve had disappointing-to-“he tried to stealth me” bad encounters (for readers: stealthing is taking off the condom without getting consent from or even telling your partner, and it’s rape). Not trusting myself has led to either being over-accepting or over-paranoid, and I feel like I have no ability to accurately figure out if a guy is genuinely interested in *me* or just wanting to take literally any woman who will put out. It makes me scared to pursue guys I’m really interested in, because I know if they’re not the one chasing me from the start, I’m going to want an impossible level of proof of their interest. And, in the process of falling in love with him, I did a lot of work to figure out what scared me about relationships, what was holding me back, so intellectually I felt better prepared to approach figuring out the definitions of a relationship. But now that’s putting the cart in front of the horse, because I’m too spun-up about the butterflies thing.

My therapist and social support circle don’t really understand the ADD/RSD part of it, so they try to point me in the direction of “these are irrational thoughts”/”he’s an asshole” respectively. I know both of these things, but it’s not stopping the RSD. Sitting with my feelings doesn’t really help, because my brain is happy to turn that into ADD spinning out of control and hyper-focusing on the bad feelings/upsetting parts/parts I can’t control. And I don’t want to keep trying to date like some shitty romance movie character who’s just waiting for The Right Guy to come along and See Just How Special She Is. I’m not a teenager in a vampire romance, I’m a successful, smart, fun, funny, full-grown thirtysomething woman: I know I’m special, and I know I deserve better. I deserve mutual butterflies. But how do I get past this all enough to trust myself to find something better?

-Friends Without Butterflies

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Can This Broken Friendship Still Be Fixed?

September 3, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hello Doc,

Longtime reader here, first time writer and not a native English speaker so please excuse any mistakes. You sometimes tackle the topic of friendships instead of romantic love so I wanted to get an outsider’s perspective on my situation.

For context, I (29/f) attended private schools throughout my childhood thanks to different scholarship, but that meant I was smart, nerdy, of lower economic status than my peers, extremely shy and, to top it all off, my body started to develop early (which lead to insecurities about my body that I haven’t quite managed to overcome). Needless to say, I was bullied mercilessly. I have no experience with male bullying but female bullying is… I guess I’d call it insidious. I had instances when sometimes other girls pretended to be my friends only to gossip behind my back and I was isolated and lonely. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t care what others think about me but, at the time, I was naïve and trusting. So, tl;dr: I didn’t have any friends at all for several of my formative years.

When I was about 12 years old, a new girl joined my school and we hit it off right away. We developed an extremely close friendship and she became my first true friend. All the way until I moved to college we stayed in constant contact and I considered her my sister. I moved to a city not too far away, (about 3 hours) and I went back to our city 2 or 3 times a month to visit my parents so I absolutely tried my best to keep in touch. I sent her e-mails weekly talking about my experiences and asked her to respond, I scheduled lunches and tried my best to keep her in my life. Even with all of my efforts, we started to grow apart and, when she married, she invited me to the wedding but I was not included in any part of the planning. I didn’t demand anything and was always open to help in whatever capacity I could, but it hurt me deeply that she just wasn’t working at all in our friendship.

I was so emotionally involved with her as my friend that some people though I was in love with her or that we were in a romantic relationship, however that wasn’t the case at all. For the longest time, I even thought I was asexual and aromantic (I’m married myself now to a wonderful guy). She is an active poster on social media but I don’t like social media sites and I’m of the idea that if someone wants me to know something, they should tell me directly, otherwise relationships lose that personal touch. So, over the years we lost contact. She stopped responding to my messages and I couldn’t bear the idea of stalking her on Facebook or Twitter. It is very difficult for me to form close attachments, so to this friendship I gave it my all, tried to be supportive of her even if sometimes I disagreed with her (example: even though I believe her husband was not the best option for her I kept most of my opinions to myself after ). In the end, I let if fade away and moved on with my life.

There was a few years ago a situation in my city that made it to the news and she sent me a message through FB to check on me but I didn’t respond, first because I didn’t see it right away and then, because I was hurt by the radio silence and wanted to get back at her (petty, I know). Some more years pass until last year she sent me a message again asking if we could talk. I answered her and we started discussing the usual, how was I, how was my family, her family and such. I learned that a close family relative of hers passed away (maybe that was the reason she contacted me again in the first place) and eventually, we started to talk about our friendship and the reasons behind our distancing. She told me that when I moved to college, she became jealous of me and my new opportunities and that that was the primary reason behind her closing off and excluding me from her life. The comment cut deeply and opened wounds that I thought had closed. I started crying and trying to understand where we went wrong and in the end she promised to keep in touch because she wanted to rekindle our friendship, she told me that she missed me and that she didn’t have any other friend that knew her as well as me.

She didn’t keep her promise to contact me again at the time. She sent me a message again a few months ago so petty me decided to not answer in a futile attempt to hurt her back because obviously she doesn’t care as much about me if she can’t keep her promises. So, after the novella-length letter, my question is: Is it worth it to try and rekindle the friendship? Should I try to contact her again? Should I open myself to further heartbreak if this doesn’t work? I miss her a lot and she knows things about me that very few do. And, apparently I haven’t gotten over this issue as much as I thought if months pass and I still think about what to do. She lives in a different country now so meeting in person would be difficult, it would be a long-distance friendship.

Thank you for your time reading my rambling letter.

Best regards,

Broken Friends Forever

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How Do I Trust a Boyfriend Who Still Talks to His Ex?

June 2, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

My first two marriages ended badly, with my first being abusive and the second him being unfaithful. I’ve been with my current partner a few years now, but we got off to a rough start – long story short when we got together he had a drug issue that I wasn’t aware of. I found out when he tried to quit cold turkey and nearly died. I chose to give him an opportunity to enter a treatment program, and have no reason to believe he hasn’t been 100% compliant, but I still struggle with trust.

He has also remained close with many of his exes, which in general I think is a positive. There are times where it makes me a little insecure (like him keeping a pic of him and an ex on his nightstand, or him making slightly over the top comments on his exes Facebook posts) but haven’t considered it a big deal, and I don’t want to ask him to change if that’s just who he is.

A few weeks ago, something happened that made me nervous about his past drug issue. I was freaking out a little and I looked at his phone for the first time in over a year (he provided me the passcode towards the start of his recovery as a sign of trust, but did not give me explicit permission to look at that moment). Good news was no sign of a relapse, the bad was that a message caught my eye while scrolling through that contained graphic sexual content. I opened the convo – it was between him and an ex and was along the lines of them hashing out a sexual issue they had while they were together years earlier.

I then opened a couple of other convos between him and exes (I know, I know). While I found nothing that indicated there was any current activity or plans in that direction, there were things that made me uncomfortable. Examples include references to things he and an ex did sexually while they were together, comments about how beautiful and sexy they were/are, and in one case a description to the ex of a sex dream that he’d recently had about her.

I tried to bring the issue up in vague terms and he acted confused. I don’t know if I can trust my own judgement here – I am prone to making excuses for others and deciding that if something bothers me it’s my fault. Also, I don’t think a little flirting is necessarily a problem in an otherwise healthy relationship, I just think some of what I saw crosses a line. I don’t even know if confronting him would make me feel better, I don’t want to constantly police his phone, but at the same time I don’t know if I can 100% trust him and with my past, I don’t want to go back to a situation where there are gut feelings I’m ignoring. On the other hand, though, I am generally happy in this relationship and part of me thinks this is just something he doesn’t see the same way I do as I am definitely more sexual conservative.

Another note is that he referenced me frequently (and in positive terms) with all of these same exes, so I know he’s not being dishonest about our status together, and many of them are in committed and seemingly happy relationships as well. Do you think there is a possibility that this is just a difference in boundaries and comfort levels? Is there a possibility that he would find it genuinely surprising that something like this would bother me and if I brought it up as an issue he’d just be more careful? Am I making too much of this or am I, once again, ignoring a huge red flag?

Lines Lines Everywhere A Line

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