DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m a woman who has never been a relationship before. I just discovered your blog yesterday and I wanted to ask a question. There’s this cute guy I’ve been seeing for the past year every time I go to church during Sundays. He’s a serves the church as a sacristan. I wanted to get to know him and if possible, ask for his number and maybe ask him out on a date.��I had thought about trying passing him a note introducing myself after mass but I don’t want him to think I’m weird for approaching him out of the blue. I worry I might make him feel awkward whenever he sees me at church.��I’ve caught him glancing at me a few times and I think he also caught me glancing at him as well. I’ve also noticed he makes an effort to serve at the line I’m at during communion (Perhaps I’m imagining things?) Last month, I caught him staring at me and we held our gaze for 5 seconds longer than necessary. I deeply regretted not giving him a warm shy smile to let him know I’m interested during that time.��I know this isn’t the most ideal circumstance to fall for someone but I was hoping you could give me a few tips.��Thank you and I hope to hear from you soon,�The Shy Rabbit

DEAR THE SHY RABBIT: Honestly, you’re overthinking things, TSR. I get why you’re doing it – you’re afraid of messing things up and being rejected. This is something a lot of people do; they want to meet someone, but deep down, they know that this requires that they make themselves vulnerable and they’re afraid of what might happen if they do. Being vulnerable, after all, means you’re opening yourself up to the possibility of being hurt, and being rejected hurts. It feels like it’s a judgement on your entire being – that someone sees the totality of you, has weighed and measured you and you have been found wanting.

Except that’s not true. Oh, rejection hurts, sure… but it’s a bug bite at worst, not the shattering of worlds. It’s the fear of that pain and the attempts to avoid it that make it worse, because you’re not focused on the outcome, you’re focused on the anticipation of pain. The anticipation makes everything worse, and trying to avoid it only serves to intensify it.

The truth of the matter is that when you’re more focused on avoiding the possibility of rejection, you just make more barriers for yourself. Each barrier and complication not only distances you from any possible outcome, but it also just creates more anticipation of rejection and hurt, which makes the hurt that much scarier. Nobody likes feeling scared, any more than they like being hurt, so they try to find ways to avoid feeling scared. But the more you try to create ways to avoid feeling scared of feeling hurt so that you don’t feel hurt, the more you create things that you’re scared of. You become scared of the possibility of being scared and find new and different ways to avoid it… and with every layer, the world you allow yourself to occupy becomes smaller and smaller and more confining.

The more time you spend trying to anticipate and account for all the variables or ways things could go wrong, the less time you’re actually giving to, y’know, talking to this person. This is important because just as trying to avoid that fear of rejection makes it worse, the more time you spend planning and less time you spend doing just invests the eventual act with awesome and terrible significance. You build up the importance of getting things right and how much this guy means, to the point where you’re sure you have an all-consuming passion for him, despite the fact that you don’t even know his name.

To be perfectly honest, trying to be coy by doing things like slipping him a note is going to be weirder than just going over and saying “hi”, especially since there’s really nothing weird about just going up and introducing yourself. Church is a social space. The point of going to services is to be among others who share your beliefs and values, to be part of the community and to connect with like-minded individuals. You’re supposed to get to know your fellow church-goers, just like you’re supposed to get to know people in class or at a party.

So here’s my advice. Next Sunday, when services end, stand up, give yourself to the count of three to gather your courage and go directly over to this guy. Say “hey, I’ve just realized I’ve been going here for over a year now and I don’t think I’ve met you yet. Hi, my name is The Shy Rabbit…” and then just let things flow from there.

Now here’s the important part: don’t worry about getting a date or his number just yet. Just focus on getting to know him as a person. Right now, you know literally nothing about him other than he’s cute and he’s a sacrist at your church. That’s it. You don’t know if you and he share the same sense of humor, if you can stand each other’s taste in music or even if he likes coffee, tea or energy drinks in the morning. Physical attraction’s great and all, but if you want something more, find out if he’s even worth your time first.

And don’t worry; you see him every Sunday. There’s no rush. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to get his number or say “hey, want to go get ice cream after this?” as you learn more about him.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: First, the exposition. The backdrop is not extraordinary these days; I’m facing down a really rough job market and the stress of big transitions in my life that really serves to complicate my perception of how much stress I SHOULD be feeling, all the while trying to work to turn my mental health around. I’ve made a lot of big steps forward, building up my social and professional network, but I still feel very stuck romantically, for reasons I deeply struggle to articulate. Practically, I feel like I find precious few opportunities in my day-to-day to find a partner, and apps like Bumble or Hinge net me a few conversations per year, and if I’m lucky, I’ll get a date that goes fine, but never more than that. There’s the concern about finishing my degree in a month or so and having to deal with a huge logistical shift with uncertain financial and social prospects, and all that feels like it’s to be expected, and I can account for it, more or less.��However, there’s a deeper pit of something I feel is really causing me a lot of pain, and very likely gets in my way when it comes to searching for a romantic partner, and has for 15 years. As I stated before, it’s really hard to articulate, and encompasses a lot of past trauma, self-esteem issues, and a whole bunch more that I haven’t been able to work out. I feel that I have plenty of great qualities that should make me attractive to a potential partner, and even one that I would be mutually attracted to. I’ve been out of the game so long I can’t be very articulate about what specifically I’m looking for, or what kind of person I want to be with, but it’s a “know it when I see it” sort of thing. Despite that, I have immense difficulty in truly believing that other people are or might be attracted to me. It’s something I haven’t felt (or maybe haven’t let myself feel) for just about half of my life now, and, to put it simply, I really get in my head about it.��As a recent point, I have a female friend I’ve had for a while, and the other day I sent her a message briefly explaining that while I’m not sure about anything, I have some type of feelings for her, and wanted to be up front about it, since we’ve been getting closer than I’ve been with a female friend in a long time: talking frequently, hanging out with just the two of us, etc. I figured it was an opportunity to ask for some sort of clarity regarding just how she sees me as a friend, since I’m very insecure about my own judgment on that sort of thing. While I’m fairly certain I brought it up in a reasonably appropriate, non-threatening sort of way, and I don’t really think I’ve done anything inappropriate or crossed a line, ever since I sent her that message, I’ve had this underlying feeling that hearkens back to my first breakup, 15 years ago, when I feel like I went completely overboard in seeking clarification as to my relationship with this person who I still wanted to at least consider a friend, and long story short, led to a few years of severe late teenage angst and depression that ultimately ended any hope of friendship, and left me feeling deeply guilty about not only the way I acted, but even how I felt.��To answer the question that I’m sure you’ve already formulated, I’m currently seeing a therapist, and have been for almost a year now, and this is what I really wanted to get a vibe check on. (yes, all the previous has been preamble, I apologize) I’ve tried to do therapy a number of times over the years, and while it has been very helpful in certain ways, there are things that I feel I’ve never really been able to dig to the bottom of, and I’m unsure if it’s a problem with me not doing my part, or not finding the right therapist. To be specific, I saw my first therapist weekly for about a year, I saw one every other week for a few months, one weekly through last summer, and I’ve been working with my current therapist weekly since October or so. It’s not in my nature to blame external factors when I can blame myself, which is easy to do when every week my appointment rolls around, and I find myself unable to articulate the things I’m really deeply struggling with, either not being able to find the words, or self-censoring out of a habitual suppression of emotions I’ve deemed to be harmful, and I’m not sure which. I also understand that healing is a slow process, but feel that between thinking on it and working myself, and the work I’ve done with therapists, I’m still feeling the same things now at 31 that I felt when I was 16 and f--king things up for myself.��To put it into a distinct question that’s appropriate to ask someone who’s NOT my therapist, how can I tell if I need to push through my hesitancy and be more honest with my therapist, or if that hesitancy is something I need to find a better therapist to help me push through? As I said, my predisposition is to always blame myself first before blaming others, but I find it hard to know if I’m not getting where I want to be because I’m not getting the help I need from my therapist, or if I need to do more work to allow them to give me the help I need. There’s also the tendency I have to downplay the things I’m struggling with, and feel like they’re somehow petty concerns that I shouldn’t still be dwelling on, or that focusing on how lonely I’ve been for 15 years and continue to feel is harmful and I need to avoid thinking like that. It’s as though no matter how many times I’m told “this is a safe space”, I’m still unable to voice some feelings, not just because I’m used to suppressing them, but also because I’m deeply resistant to letting myself share these feelings that hurt me and my first relationship all those years ago, because it feels like undoing progress I’ve made (or convinced myself I’ve made).��It is, of course, not a fast process, and after struggling for a decade and a half, I’m certainly eager to see more results, but I also don’t want to let my rather high capacity for patience leave me unhealed and loveless for another 15-20 years. I already lost the opportunity for love during my 20s, and am still processing that. I really don’t want this to be a major pastime for me throughout my life.��Regards,�-It’s Not You, It’s Me

DEAR IT’S NOT YOU IT’S ME: Can I ask you an honest question, INYIM: are you sure the problem isn’t that you don’t know how to express what you’re feeling but that you’re so worried about actually saying it that you dump endless qualifiers and context into everything, turning every sentence into a marathon?

I’m not dunking on you for s--ts and giggles, especially as I am the king of “why use one word when you can use six instead?” I think you’re trying way too hard to avoid any possibility of conflict or someone getting upset at you that it gets int the way of actually communicating. You’re filling up space with so much that it stops being information and starts being noise. There’s wanting to make sure you have sufficient context and information and then there’s the point where the actual information is lost in a slurry of “please don’t be mad at me”.

Your asking your friend for clarity is a prime example. You drop nearly 300 words to describe a situation without actually conveying any meaningful information, when you could’ve just said “I told a friend I think I may have a crush on her and wanted to find out if she was on the same page. Now I’m worried I f--ked up, somehow”. 99% of what you threw into that very long sentence could’ve been cut and made things far clearer. Instead, it’s a long and ramble-y journey that ultimately goes nowhere.  

If I’m being perfectly honest, I think this is as much about you as it is about whomever you’re trying to communicate with.

This isn’t the first letter I’ve gotten this year from someone who’s been unwilling – not unable, unwilling– to actually open up to their therapist about how they’re feeling and what they’re dealing with, and they tend to fall in very similar patterns. Lots of explaining, lots of qualifiers, but it’s all ultimately the verbal equivalent of flack, trying to keep people from actually seeing or reaching the target. It’s the same sort of emotional self-defense, but also self-flagellation, trying to intellectualize away the fear of just being honest and vulnerable. 

I’m wondering if part of the problem isn’t that you don’t know what you want or aren’t sure how to articulate the issue so much as you don’t let yourself actually answer the question. Reading through this – which I had to do multiple times, by the way – I get the distinct impression that you’re ultimately trying to hide how you really feel from yourself, and I think you need to dig into that.

And to be fair: I get that. I’ve had break ups where I wanted to “be the bigger person” and “be mature and reasonable about this” and tried to pretend that I wasn’t angry about the break up or that I felt it wasn’t fair or handled badly. But because I wanted to maintain this idea that I was handling things “the right way”, I tried my damnedest to convince myself I wasn’t feeling those things, even though I absolutely was. Needless to say, that meant that I was carrying around a lot of feelings that I refused to acknowledge, never mind deal with, and that kept me from moving on the way I should have.

But making matters worse is that this all seems to stem from s--t that happened when you were 16. I get that high-school relationships have more drama than the Royal Shakespeare Society but there comes a point where you have to recognize that it was high-school. Everyone’s a goddamn mess in high-school and anyone who says that they had it all figured out is either lying or deluding themselves.

You need to be willing to say “yeah, I did some stupid s--t because I was a teenager and didn’t know wat the hell I was doing,” and let it go. Was it embarrassing? Of course. Was it cringe? Naturally; our teenage years are made of cringe. Cringe is what happens when you’re stuck in a space where you’re expected to be an adult without the rights or privileges or even brain development of one, but still treated as a child regardless. But part of growing up is being able to look back and go “Damn that was awkward but I see how I ended up there”, not “this is going to define me for the rest of my life”.

You’re clearly trying very hard to intellectualize things that shouldn’t be intellectualized, as though that’s going to change the feelings themselves. So maybe you need to stop trying to change things or pretend that you’re not feeling them and just let yourself feel them. And I mean just feel them – no qualifiers, no context-clarification, no “ok but…”. Just finally lower the shield, open the flood gates and let that s--t out. You’ve let this emotional wound get infected and now you need to drain the pus before you can disinfect it and close it back up.

So yes, you’re not making progress with your therapist precisely because you’re not actually participating in your therapy. The whole point of therapy is that you’re talking to someone who is there to listen to you without judgment, secure in the knowledge that nothing you say leaves that room. It is the place for emotional vomit, to just open your mouth and let the firehose go, giving voice to those feelings that you’ve been trying to tamp down. Yes, even the petty s--t, the inconsequential s--t, the s--t that you think is so banal that you don’t think it’s worth the bother to bring up. Because, let’s be real here: we’ve long established that maybe you’re not the best judge about whether this is inconsequential, petty s--t after all.

Instead, all you’ve done is try to push them away and pretend they don’t exist. This just serves to pressurize the entire mess, compacting them into something denser, more intense and more likely to break containment.

So here’s what you need to do: you need to get a pen and a notebook and just start writing. No thinking, no editing, no intellectualizing, no trying to make it coherent or sensible or to minimize it. Just open the valve in your brain and let it spill out through your pen onto paper in its rawest form. No agenda, no “today I’m going to write about my feelings on Z”, just dumping every single thought you have out exactly as you have it in that moment.

And yes, I mean write, by hand, on physical media, not typing or dictating. You want this to be as pure brain-vomit as possible, with no stops or pauses or barriers. Writing it out long-hand is as direct a connection between brain and output as you can get without literally wiring your brain up to a recording device that can turn theta waves into language.

Do this daily from now until your next appointment with your therapist. Then take your journal with you to your therapy appointment and say “ok, I’ve been having problems opening up and saying what I really feel”, then show them this.

If you still have an issue with expressing how you feel or figuring it out, write it down with as few words as possible. You want to be Hemmingway, not Faulkner. You’re not trying to paint a picture, you’re trying to communicate, and you’ve been using verbal noise as a barrier. Now it’s time to distill everything down to its essence and deal with the actual issue, not all the mental equivalent of artificial colors and flavoring to make it more “palatable”. Bring those with you and read them, out loud, to your therapist. Then actually listen to what they say and try taking it on board. It’s going to be hard because, up until now, you’ve been trying your best to never let anyone know what you’re feeling and now you’re going to feel ashamed and judged. You need to be willing to let that all go and just be raw and vulnerable because, quite frankly, you’ve put this off for far too long and that hasn’t helped at all.

I’m always saying: if you want things to be different, you have to do things differently. You’ve been doing the same thing for over a decade now and it has only made things worse. It’s time to shift gears, stop running from the fear of what’s going to happen if you actually face these feelings and get ready to embrace the suck. Because it will suck. But it’s the same sort of pain that comes from draining an abscess, disinfecting it and stitching it closed. Until you’re willing to do that, it’s just going to continue to fester and rot and expand until the infection takes the rest of you.

You’ve been living with this for long enough. It’s time to let it out and let it go.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE:  In light of the articles you wrote on not needing to be perfect to date, this leads me to an important question: how do I carry myself with confidence when I’m a work in progress? I’ll be honest, due to early life abuse and autism I haven’t really developed the confidence and life I want to have at 28 years old. I only just realized I WAS a survivor of abuse a few years ago. It’s been a game of playing catch-up ever since. And while I understand nobody is looking for perfection, how do I feel confident when I feel so behind everyone else?

I don’t want to give off “goofy side-character” energy. Like the incompetent guy in a piece of media that is clearly a bumbling fool who still needs to find himself but everyone still likes him (though nobody would date or have a relationship with him).

The only way I could ever frame this is through self-deprecating jokes-though-not-really-jokes about how I don’t have my life together. I feel this is not the best way to present myself as a potential date. I also don’t want to come across as some faux-inspirational TED talker like “My life is a journey of beauty and curiosity, I can’t wait for the destination!TM.” That whole spiel just feels super unnatural to say.

I’m trying to let go of the “not good enough” swamp I find myself stuck in and I think learning how to like and be confident in myself as I am NOW would be helpful.

Watch This Space

DEAR WATCH THIS SPACE: You’re right, WTS: that “joking-but-not-really” approach of “no, really, I suck” is far less than attractive. People are looking for partners, not weekend projects or fixer-uppers; they don’t expect perfection, but they also don’t want to end up with the dating equivalent of a money pit. This is why self-deprecating jokes don’t work when it’s pretty clear that you’re not actually joking; it comes across as you saying “no, seriously, I’m a f--king mess, please help me,” and that’s just not appealing to anyone.

Self-deprecating jokey-jokes work best when it’s clear that you’re not being serious. Craig Ferguson is a king of these; when he talks about having low standards because he’s Scottish, it’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t mean it. He’s using those jokes when paired with the compliments or flirting signals he sends to attractive women. The compliment followed by the “and here’s why you shouldn’t take the compliment seriously” is part of the bait-hook-reel-release school of flirting; it’s building up tension, then releasing tension. When there’s no tension being built up, then it’s just deflating everything.

The thing about being a work in progress is that everyone is a work in progress. One of the most important lessons I learned from martial arts came after I received my black belt: this wasn’t the end of my study, it was the end of the beginning. Nobody is at the finish line; there’s always something to improve on, something to build on or something new to learn. That’s just life; we’re all imperfect, we all have things we’d like to be different or better and really, a man’s ambition should exceed his reach or what’s Heaven for?  

You’re not “behind” everyone else because there’s no race here. You’re not in competition with anyone, there’s no universal schedule or list of milestones that says “you should be HERE by X date”, there’s just life and everyone muddles through it at their own pace and their own time. The only way you could be behind someone else is if you were living their exact same life, at the exact same time and being presented with the exact same choices, opportunities, drawbacks and obstacles. But you’re not. So quit paying attention to where the folks who are supposedly “ahead of you” are, except as inspiration and motivation. They’re not outpacing you, they’re showing you some of the potential that awaits you as you grow and improve.

This is, say it with me now, why confidence doesn’t come from success, it comes from effort. This is why so-called gifted kids spin out so often and so early; the first time they run into something that they can’t do or overcome easily, they lose their goddamn minds. Why? Because they thought that everything was supposed to be this easy; they’re unused to the friction that comes with not being immediately good at something and having to overcome it.

Confidence isn’t about “I’m guaranteed to win”, it’s “I know what I’m capable of, I know what I can achieve when I put my mind to it, I know failure can’t stop me, and I know I’ve got the capacity in me for greatness”. It’s about looking around and saying “Yup, I can figure this out.” Confidence isn’t a lack of struggle, it’s being comfortable with the struggle, even loving it. It’s about being willing to meet the challenge over and over again until you overcome it.

In your case, carrying yourself with confidence means looking at how far you’ve made it and looking at what you’ve overcome to get here. It means realizing that, even with odds stacked against you, you’ve improved and progressed and letting that inform your desire to keep moving forward. Yeah, it sucks at times, and it’s easy to envious of folks who haven’t had to struggle the way you have. But their journey is not your journey and their trials are not your trials.

It also means understanding and embracing the zen Buddhist belief of “I’m perfect, and there’s plenty of room to improve.” Where you are is great, and there’s lots more to do, and isn’t that awesome? You don’t need to apologize for yourself, nor should you; you take it as a mark of pride that you’ve come this far and you still have the capacity to keep at it. You don’t have to be super-upbeat or toxically positive about it; you can acknowledge how much it sucked to get to this point, just like how celebrities will acknowledge what a f--king nightmare it is to get into Marvel superhero shape (which, like perfection, is also unnecessary and often a distraction from the real needs at hand). But you should be proud that you’re there, proud of what it took to get there and proud of knowing that you’ve got it in you to keep going.

It’s great to look to the future, but sometimes you need to stop and look at the past and say “damn, that was a long f--king slog, go me!”

Everyone’s a work in progress. It’s the confident people that say “damn right I am, look at what I’ve done so far!”

That could be you, WTS, if you let it. So let it.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com