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5 Mistakes That Keep You From Finding A Relationship

April 20, 2022 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

We talk a lot about what it takes to become someone that women want to date – working from the internal to the external, from attitude to presentation. But there’re times when it feels like you’re in a classic Red Queen’s Race: running as fast as you can and getting nowhere.

Man in sportswear walking on a treadmill and looking at his smartwatch at home
“I don’t get it, I’ve been on this for an hour and I haven’t gotten anywhere…”

Sure, you’re putting in a lot of effort to get your presentation down and you’re trying to put yourself out there… so why isn’t it working?

Well the answer is that while you’ve made great strides in some areas, you’ve been neglecting others. In fact, many times, the problem is that you’ve been making mistakes that have actively hindered your ability to meet and date amazing women. What often confuses folks is that these aren’t mistakes that drive women away. Instead, these are mistakes that have hindered your personal development or your ability to connect with people in the way you need to forge a connection. These are foundational problems, ones that undermine both your self-image and your ability to meet and connect with people. You can tweak your style and grooming all you want, hit the gym until your joints give out or chat up as many sexy singles as you can… but if you haven’t fixed these common foundational mistakes, whatever you build is going to come tumbling down around you.

Let’s talk about how to fix some of the most common mistakes that are keeping you from meeting that special someone or someones.

[Read more…]

Why Shouldn’t I Just Hit On Random Women?

February 11, 2022 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hello Doc,

One thing that’s very common is telling men they should warm approach, by meeting women through activity groups and hobby groups. But there’s so many caveats to that, like men can’t go to them just to meet women. Also, they can’t make a move on a woman too early into doing the activity, or on too many women too quickly. What’s too early or too quickly is undefined. Also, if a woman doesn’t like being approached at that place, a guy is just supposed to know it. If you do any of this stuff, you’re definitely creepy, probably predatory, and you’re the kind of guy that makes women feel unsafe everywhere. But also, “creepy” cannot be defined by any specific actions, ultimately, it’s just how she feels, and you’re supposed to just know if something you’d do would creep her out.

If all my actions when I want to date are going to be dictated so much, why shouldn’t I just cold approach everywhere? Sure, my chances of success would be low, but even if my chances of success from a cold approach are 1%, and my chances of doing “what I’m supposed to do” with a warm approach are 20%, and I do about 10 cold approaches in one week, and I wait for weeks/months for all the conditions to be right, and for me to not overstep any boundaries with the warm approach, I’ll still have more success with the cold approach.

Sure, if I cold approach, I’d creep women out, but in that case, it would be women I don’t know. The worst thing is that I’d just be some nameless, faceless creepy guy she complains about on social media or texting to her friends, and then she just forgets about me the next day. But if I forget one of the 10,000 things I’m not supposed to do when warm approaching and I botch the approach, I’d face harsh consequences for it. I’d be driven out of the hobby or activity group I enjoy, either consciously or subconsciously by others. Women would be more cautious around me, I might gain a reputation for being creepy, and any time someone new comes to the group, people would have to warn them about the missing stair. Since I’d be so disliked, I’d enjoy the hobby much less.

I’ve asked this question to other people before, and I’ve yet to get any satisfactory answer. So, given everything I just mentioned, why shouldn’t I just cold approach women?

The Math Checks Out

[Read more…]

Ask Dr. NerdLove: I’m Worried Women Will Think I’m Creepy

August 23, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Hi Doc, whenever I’m out and see someone that I like, the three man things that come to my head are:

1. “She probably been asked out by many guys, better not bother her like the others”
2. “She is just being nice and I’ll just make it weird, better not bother her”.
3. “I read that it’s unacceptable to ask someone out in this location, better not bother her”

I unfortunately have Aspergers Syndrome and never been in a relationship or had sex. Not that it makes me less of a person but I often feel undesirable which would be understandable due to my ASD. It never bothered until last year, I don’t know why. To be honest if there was a pill or a procedure that would get rid of my desire to be in a relationship/have sex I would take it instantly (unless they had a cure for autism of course).

I often read experiences as well as hear the women in my life say that they often get a lot of unwanted attention when in public which is understandable. I’m not scared of rejection, I’m scared of creeping someone out because people have called me that a lot when I was younger with my weird quirks. I tried online dating and made an effort with the profile, even showed my male and female friends but have little success. I would stop but I feel like it’s the only ethical way to date because at least most people are there with the purpose of hooking up or to get to a long term relationship.

I don’t want to date my friends because whenever I become friends with a woman, I immediately lose attraction and see them more as a sister and it seems weird and desperate to ask if they have single friends.
Work is off the table since I will be working in management and would be unethical and wrong to date coworkers. On top of that all my hobbies are solo/male dominated and wouldn’t feel right asking a woman out in those environments because they likely had many annoying guys approach them.

Fortunately I have improved and can talk to anyone platonically, over the years I managed to completely change my personality through a trial and error process so can (for lack of a better term) appear normal and act like a functional human being. I am doing well professionally and academically so I’m not completely defective.

I know that this sounds like one of those asking for permission to give up posts but I looked statistics that showed that ASD men are more likely to remain single and never be in a relationship (can’t remember source but it was from an official autism organization). Worst case scenario it’s not the end of the world if I never experience a relationship or have sex, I’ll keep trying but if I can change my personality then surely I can find ways to cope with this. I acknowledge that I am not entitled nor deserve a relationship/sex and it’s not on women to alleviate my insecurities that are insignificant in comparison to their daily experiences of harassment.

Thanks in advance,
Defective Homo Sapiens.

[Read more…]

The Trouble With Defending Jeffrey Toobin

October 23, 2020 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Every once in a while, the universe throws a curveball at us. We think that — even allowing for the stress of a global pandemic, a presidential election that seems to be the last stand between democracy and fascism, right-wing and white supremacist terrorist groups threatening violence on election night and politicians openly embracing gonzo conspiracy theories — that we’ve seen it all.

And then we get a week of dudes not knowing when to keep their dicks in their pants and their hands out of them.

It says something about the week when this is the *least* disturbing story in the news.

But while some of these events are more salaciously comedic, some are more disturbing.

We talk a lot about what makes somebody creepy, where the lines are and how to avoid crossing them. After all, understanding what behaviors make women uncomfortable is an important part of creating a culture where women feel empowered to pursue the sex and relationships they want. However, whenever we talk about men behaving badly, we inevitably get the folks who want to defend them. The men — and it’s almost always men — who want to give cover to other dudes who crossed lines. Whether it’s writing it off as “locker room talk” or down-playing the seriousness of what happened, there always seem to be people who think that boundaries and limits are things that happen to other people.

So let’s talk a little about what it means when folks rush to defend other men from the consequences of their own actions.

[Read more…]

GUEST POST — Flirting and Forgiveness

July 6, 2020 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Doctor’s Note: today’s column is by Dr. Timaree Schmitt, host of Sex With Timaree and co-host of DTF: Darryl and Timaree Fun Hour. Also updated to add commentary on apologies and making amends.

There have been precious few upsides to the pandemic for me. But one highlight was discovering the You’re Wrong About podcast.

It’s hosted by a pair of journalists obsessed with exposing the way we collectively misremember history- or failed to understand it at the time. They have covered the Kitty Genovese murder (origin of the myth of “bystander apathy”), inner city gangs in the 90s (more a media narrative than a real phenomenon), and even the life of Marie Antoinette (she never said that thing we all think she said).

There is no shortage of topics for the You’re Wrong About podcast to explore, because, let’s be frank: we’ve been wrong about nearly everything, at least initially. As a species we’ve struggled to understand the world, making best guesses and learning bits and pieces over time, through a horrible process of trial and error.

Take the idea of germ theory of disease. It’s the concept that microorganisms and bacteria are responsible for many human illnesses. It was proposed a thousand years ago, but it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that researchers came to accept that objects too tiny to be perceived by our eyes could be causing so much trouble.

Nowadays we can read about physicians of the 1850s going from performing an autopsy straight to delivering a baby without washing their hands and laugh riotously at the stupidity. How silly of them! How could they not know?

But we’re not smarter for having been born later. We simply don’t know what we don’t know. And until someone discovers something and effectively shares that knowledge, we will continue to not know.

And that’s how I feel about the way I learned about gender, consent and flirting. As a kid, I didn’t find it particularly confusing, because the narratives were actually very simple.

The idea was that women don’t really want to have sex; they just seek love and a partner who can take care of them. Men, on the other hand, want sex and validation and use love as a way to get that from women. Women are responsible for saying no to sex or providing it to those who are entitled to it. A man’s goal is to get access to women’s bodies. If he does, he is revered as capable and masculine, and it kind of didn’t matter so much whether he got that access through seduction, emotional manipulation, wealth, or even force.

This narrative was presented to me from every angle: romantic movies, jokes, the sexuality education I received. It was implicit in the articles in Cosmo and Maxim, song lyrics, and even the academic writings of evolutionary psychologists.

I don’t believe the sources of that narrative meant to harm. I don’t think the writers at FHM were actively thinking, “let’s completely remove all sexual agency from women and actively contribute to a culture that normalizes and excuses sexual assault.” I don’t think that a bunch of ad execs were sitting around a table saying, “I want women to feel preoccupied with being assessed as sexual objects and for men to be completely disengaged from their own emotions and unable to have healthy, intimate relationships.”

I think they were, like all of us, steeped in a culture that is ignorant. We had not yet realized that we need to wash the metaphorical germs off our metaphorical hands.

I was mad about all of this for a very, very long time. But that anger didn’t actually make me feel better and sometimes it was a barrier in being able to educate others. To move forward in my own life, I now embrace forgiveness: for all my favorite movies that told me it was ok to ignore boundaries and be emotionally manipulative for the sake of “love.” I forgive popular songs for normalizing treating people as objects. I forgive my school for assuming we were all straight, cisgender and wanted to get married and work in finance or whatever.

And I try to forgive myself for the ways I was a real douchebag too, hurting people’s feelings and making choices that today fill me with disgust. As a bisexual girl, I internalized both the messages about what to expect of men but also how to treat the women I dated. There weren’t many models of how I, a femme, should approach and romance another femme. So I took a page from the book of the straight dudes whom I thought -at the time- were cool. I was aloof, played games, was inconsiderate of boundaries, and ghosted on perfectly lovely humans. I’m filled with embarrassment at the thought of it now.

Forgiveness doesn’t make any of those actions OK. It’s just saying that no one benefits from carrying around icky anger and shame forever, hauling around baggage like it’s a trove of treasures.  We have all been harmed and we’ve all harmed, but we have to keep going. This requires acknowledging that we were wrong and committing to doing better.

A lot of Men’s Rights Activists (and conservatives in general) have a hard time with this. We may have been reared in a similar environment: same country, maybe the same religion or time frame. But instead of grasping that perhaps the culture’s framework around gender was wrong, they double down. Effectively it’s like saying: “if I start being concerned about germs getting me sick now, all the times I didn’t wash my hands: I was being stupid. And it means the sources of information I’ve trusted all my life might be wrong, which makes me feel uncertain and anxious. And we can’t have that.”

When we realize we’ve messed up, the next stop on the train is owning up and making amends. This is critical if we are going to continue to be connected to the person harmed, but a good idea regardless. Apologizing isn’t just about clearing the slate, but about rebuilding trust and establishing myself as a person who is worthy of their time and capable of learning and growing. Doing the work of being vulnerable in this way and attempting to repair damage not only demonstrates to others that we’re serious, but the act is a commitment to our future metaphorically hand-washing selves.

So what should my apology look like?

  • It requires a display remorse for having harmed the other person- which is categorically different than being regretful that they’re upset with me.
  • Admit responsibility- acknowledging that harm came from my action, regardless of what I intended or why I didn’t think it would be harmful at the time. Explain that I understand what was wrong about the action from their perspective, validating their experience. Skip excuses, minimizing or derailments about how I too have been harmed.
  • Attempt to make amends, thinking carefully about what I can do to set the situation right. Let them offer a solution to fixing what was damaged.
  • Offer assurance that it won’t happen again and then make an actual plan to avoid a recurrence. 

All of this should be offered directly and privately to the harmed person and we have to be ready to hear that they don’t accept the apology. And then we go from there, rededicated to the gameplan.

So what does this mean for flirting, seduction, and managing boundaries now?

First, we can make sure we are clear on the basics of consent, regardless of gender. Most of us get the idea that “no” means “no,” but we’re still working on affirming a “yes,” even in the small ways: offering touch before doing it, even ensuring that people feel free to leave a conversation.

Planned Parenthood has a great acronym for explaining consent: the FRIES model. They explain consent is:

  • Freely given
  • Reversible
  • Informed
  • Enthusiastic
  • Specific

All our choices must be made freely: without fear of repercussions for saying no, without coercion or the influence of drugs or alcohol. We can revoke consent at any time, even if we have said yes already or engaged in an act before. We communicate and agree on things like condom usage or how we’re going to navigate a risky act and ensure everyone is genuinely on board with what’s happening, not just going along.

This requires that we be truly attentive to the other person, staying present and looking for signs of their enjoyment or annoyance, anxiety, even zoning out. Basically: stay engaged in the conversation (or sexual act) and adjust according to their feedback.

It sounds like a lot of thinking and work. And to be real: it is. But rather than making sexuality more serious or stressful, this model of ongoing communication can make flirting and sex a lot more pleasurable: treating it as a creative, exploratory act, not a competition with a goal. We can derive pleasure from our partners’ pleasure, and collaborate together on flirting or sexual acts, approaching it less like a hunter and prey and more like musicians in a jam session.

And we’re not alone in this endeavor. Not only are there plenty of workshops available (shout out to my friend Vonka who teaches femme flirting), but lots of websites (including this one!) and articles and people you can hire to talk you through this process! 

And yes, we’re going to mess up and make awkward missteps. Knowing that it’s part of the process: we’ll apologize, try to set things right and do better going forward. We will also be rejected at some points. But when we approach with a different framework: the idea that sexuality and flirting are ways in which adults can have fun -not as inescapable fates of biology or the source of our validation- we’re liberated. And when we acknowledge that we have much more to learn -and always will- we’re preparing ourselves to adapt more easily.

Going forward, I’m going to be less interested in being “good at flirting” and more interested in being good at listening and showing interest in others. It seems like a good start.

 

Dr Timaree Schmit has been a sex educator for more of her life than not and is on this planet to bring rational, sex-positive, empirically-based knowledge about sexuality to audiences everywhere. She works as an adjunct professor, guest lecturer, writer, consultant, and host of the Sex with Timaree podcast and co host of DTF: Darryl and Timaree Fun Hour podcast. She is the LGBTQ and Sexuality affairs contributing writer for Philly Weekly and a long-time community organizer in the queer performance scene, and advocate for sex workers rights.

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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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