DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I need your help with a very stupid problem. 

I (M/27) am dating an incredible woman, “Susan” (F/27) for a couple years now. I can’t believe how lucky I am to be with her because quite frankly, she’s way out of my league. She makes me laugh, she’s the sweetest and most genuine person I’ve ever known and I’ve never been with someone who’s been such a perfect mix of supportive and independent. And for whatever reason, she loves me too and thinks she’s lucky to have ME. We’ve been talking about getting married and the main reason I haven’t popped the question is that I’ve been saving up for the ring I want to have made for her.

The problem is that I am irrationally jealous, and it’s making me go insane. If she’s talking to other guys, I feel a knife twisting in my guts. When she’s having a night out with her girlfriends, I have all sorts of worries that some guy’s going to try to flirt with her or pick her up. It happens enough that I even have nightmares about coming home and finding her in bed with someone else. It flares up and I feel almost nauseous for a while. 

I need to be clear here: I know my jealousy is completely irrational and baseless and I’m trying my hardest to keep it out of our relationship. Susan has never once given me even the slightest reason to question how she feels about me, even if I don’t get it, and I trust her absolutely and completely. She’s never made me feel unimportant or unloved, I never feel like I have to fight for her attention and I have no doubt that I’m her priority as much as she is mine. There’s no actual basis for these dark thoughts.

I do my best not to act on these feelings. I don’t tell her who she can or can’t talk to, I don’t try to keep track of her at all times, even if some part of me really wants to and the rest of me thinks that would only make things worse. The only sort of information I ask of her when she’s going out without me is a general idea of what her plans are and when I should expect her back and when I should start worrying that I haven’t heard from her, and I do the same for her when I go out without her. I don’t text her when she’s out with friends outside of letting her know I might not be home when she gets back or if something important comes up and she does the same for me. Occasionally we might send a funny text or say “hey, I’m going to bed, let me know if you’re staying out longer.” You know, basic couple stuff.

I’ve never had a reason to worry about her with other people – men, women, friends, strangers, anyone. Her guy friends are nice enough, and I think the sun would literally fall out of the sky before she ever cheated on anyone. I have no doubt that the hottest celebrity could hit on her and the first words out of her mouth would be “thanks but I have a boyfriend.” I don’t think it could even be that my subconscious is picking up on signals the way some of the people I see on TikTok say. I think it’s just me.

That’s precisely why this bothers me so much. I trust her, I have no reason to ever doubt her, but some part of my brain doesn’t or something and I hate the way that it makes me feel. I’m trying to keep Susan from worrying and I don’t want to make her feel like she needs to avoid things that make me feel this way, so I don’t tell her about any of this, but I think she can tell that something’s bothering me. Apparently, I’m really grinding my teeth a lot, especially at night, and I’m being tense and stiff at times.

I know you’re not a doctor, doctor, but do you have any idea what the hell is wrong with me? Why am I having these irrational fits of jealousy and what should I do about it? 

Mean And Green (Eyed)

DEAR MEAN AND GREEN (EYED): Quick question, M&GE: you don’t say anything about this in your letter but are you any particular flavor of neurodivergent? Do you have ADHD, are you on the autism spectrum or have you ever been treated for something like borderline personality disorder?

I ask because some of what you describe sounds an awful lot like an especially malignant version of rejection-sensitive dysphoria, which tends to be co-morbid with ADHD and other neurospicy conditions. RSD takes the normal worries and anxieties we all have around rejection and loss, dials them up to 12 and then snaps the dial off. A lot of people who get the neurodivergence/RSD combo platter deal with a sort of hypervigilance; they’re always on the alert for signs that they’re about to get rejected or dumped. Almost anything can set it off – a different tone in their voice, how long it takes to reply to a text, even just word-choice or an almost imperceptible pause between being asked something and answering. It’s like having rejection PTSD, but usually without actual trauma to be post-.

If you haven’t been tested for ADHD or other similar conditions and you have symptoms or behaviors – besides your jealousy – that line up with them, it may not be the worst idea in the world to get tested. Speaking strictly for myself, as someone who discovered he had the ADHD/RSD combo meal in his 40s, I notice a significant difference when I’ve had my Vyvanse vs. days when I haven’t.

But let’s put that aside for the moment and talk a bit about what you’re experiencing. I’m not sure you’re jealous, per se; jealousy, after all, is a fear that someone is going to take what you have. Nor, for that matter, are you suspicious or covetous or feel some sort of unfounded rivalry. I think you may be feeling a fear of loss; not that you think she’s going to leave you for someone else but simply that she’s going to leave. I suspect that the things you imagine and the pain you feel show up when they do and the way they do because that’s a common nightmare scenario and it’s a constant part of the cultural zeitgeist. I think that the true fear is  that she (and your relationship) is too good to be true.

I assume you’d say if this has been an issue from the beginning, so I do wish you’d mentioned when this started. That could give an idea as to whether there was some change or initial event that triggered these feelings, or if this is just free-floating anxiety that hit you out of the clear blue sky. The thing about jealousy, especially when it’s unfounded, is that it’s a lot like a check-engine light coming on in a car. It’s an indication that something needs attention, but what it could be is up in the air. Sometimes it’s a warning that the engine’s about to fall out of the car or some important part is about to go boom; other times it’s telling you that you didn’t tighten the gas cap all the way after you stopped to fill up the tank. If you had some significant event or change in your life, that might explain why you’re feeling this way.

If I had to guess, I’d suspect the issue can be found here: “quite frankly, she’s way out of my league” and “even if I don’t get it.” One of the potential drawbacks to dating someone who’s supposedly “out of your league” is feeling like you don’t deserve them or that you don’t match them in some important way. This is one of the reasons why I don’t like the concept of leagues; it implies that your being with that person is a mistake somehow, that you’re a poor match for one another. To my mind, it’s very simple: if someone likes you and wants to date you, you’re in their league. But if you aren’t secure in yourself or you feel like you don’t “deserve” this person, sometimes that can curdle inside; what starts as vague anxiety can metastasize into something ugly and unpleasant.

There’s also the possibility that maybe you don’t trust yourself to be happy or to make this work. Sometimes what people are most afraid of, especially when it comes to trying to date someone they see as being ‘out of their league’ isn’t failure, but success. In a perverse sort of way, getting with someone you see as being so incredible can be horrifying because now you are responsible for the relationship. You have to deal with the risks and trials and tribulations that come with dating a person and you have an even greater risk of heartbreak than you did before. If you were rejected, then the status quo hasn’t meaningfully changed. But if you f--k up somehow or fail the relationship… well, it’s a little like dying and then being yanked out to Heaven. You’ve known paradise; how’re you supposed to live without it now that you’ve experienced it?

It may be worth digging into this question: do you feel like you deserve to be happy or to have someone who makes you happy the way Susan does? Do you feel that you’re undeserving of having a great relationship? Is that fear less about jealousy and more about not being “worthy”? Or that you’ve done something wrong in your past that disqualifies you from having this happiness? Do you feel that whatever qualities you have aren’t actually enough for her and eventually she’s going to figure that out?

I think you’re right in as much that it’s irrational. It doesn’t sound like you have anything to actually be worried about – at least, logically. In as much as logic applies in these cases, anyway.

You clearly have things that Susan loves and values, and it sounds like she’s thrilled to be with you. That, I think, makes it clear that you absolutely are in her league – especially as far as she’s concerned. Seeing as she’s the one who’s chosen to be with you and you’re both actively talking about marriage, it seems safe to say that this is more a bugbear of the mind, rather than your subconscious trying to tell you something. With as painful and intrusive as these thoughts have been, it may be worth talking to someone to help root around in your feels and see if there’s an underlying self-esteem or self-worth issue to untangle.

But the other thing I would suggest is that you shouldn’t hide that you’re having these feelings from Susan. She already is picking up on the tension in you, and I would imagine that bothers her; after all, nobody likes seeing their partner in pain or under stress. I imagine it would make her worry when she detects this anxiety in you, and I think she’d be shocked and sad to know you’re feeling this way. I feel confident in saying that she would want to help you in any way she could.

So perhaps part of what you need is to just be honest with her: you’re having these irrational feelings that you know are irrational, but they still hurt. Instead of trying to hide them, or ask her to not do things that make you feel them, whenever they come up, ask her if she could love you a little louder. I think that’ll ease things a lot more than trying to grit your teeth and white-knuckle your way through them.  

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: I’m 20 years old, I’ve never dated before, barely talk to anybody and spend most of my time alone. In fact, I’ve spent most of my time alone since I my pre-teens, and it intensified specially after my parents’ divorce. From there, I’d daydream constantly, mainly about girls I would see on TV or internet. It would fade away eventually, either after a long time without seeing her or after finding out that she was dating someone.

Now, in college, I’m still the same: no friends (other than a few people I talk to at class) and therefore no girls.

My father still puts pressure on me to find “the one”, and others constantly remind me of that. Problem is, I don’t feel like meeting people (and thus women) and I don’t see the reason for it, but I envy the seemingly happiness in other people’s relationships, as well as what I see in movies or tv shows – like I subconsciously know that I’m missing out on important experiences.

During the last months, I have been thinking about a girl I see in college, who is sorta reclusive too. She is also autistic, and we go back on the same bus. I was thinking about how to approach her all the time, without having the opportunity to do so. This year, some students decided to hold a “welcoming breakfast” for freshmen, and from there a lot of people met each other, especially the freshmen. Of course, I did not attend, and so no one from my class did. From the “breakfast”, some couples appeared – some of them formed in less than a week. It’s like I lost another big window of opportunities…

And, of course, the girl I mentioned, who was seemingly single, is now taken, since I saw her today holding hands with a guy – he is not a particularly handsome guy or anything, and even is shorter and skinnier than me in fact, but I don’t want to go and judge this part. The thing is, this really ended my day, as I realized that the reason she has been taking longer to appear on the bus these last few weeks was because she was staying over with him, and now I have no one left to daydream about – everybody I see on our 10-minute intervals between classes, is already taken. Groups are already formed. And, to be honest, I was never the type of guy who would share my feelings or tastes or anything, so logically I should not be expecting anything out of this.

What’s really eating me up is that I took too long to approach her, and now I envy that somebody else did what I couldn’t.

After all these years, it all just got worse. Every two weeks or so, I go on a mental breakdown – usually at night, while in bed – while having a s--t ton of disturbing thoughts and scenarios, and hit myself in the head several times until it goes away.

I’m not sure if you know anyone like this, but I hope you can help me.

Bad Brains

DEAR BAD BRAINS: OK BB, I’m gonna be honest: if you’re having repeated nights where you’re physically hurting yourself trying to make intrusive thoughts go away, you shouldn’t be worried about dating at all right now. Even allowing for hyperbole, that’s a pretty solid sign that you should be putting more time and energy into getting some help, not trying to meet people.

As I’m always saying, you don’t need to be in perfect shape – emotionally or physically – to date, but you do need to be in good working order. Right now, you are not. Under the best of circumstances, your having these long dark nights of the soul are going to make it a lot harder for you to deal with the inevitable trials and tribulations that come with dating. If you’re already having these kinds of responses, then you definitely need to prioritize your mental health above everything else, and put dating on hold until you get this aspect of your life under control.  

The good thing is, if you’re in college, then you’ve access to student health services. This means there’s usually at least a counselor to talk to, and likely has at least some working association with mental health professionals that they could point you towards. So my advice is to hie yourself to health services and start talking to someone now. I don’t doubt that this is causing you a lot of stress and pain, but the way you’re managing it is only going to make it worse.

Depending on how things go with the counselors your school makes available, you may want to look into finding a therapist who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy; CBT is known to be especially effective for managing intrusive, unpleasant negative thoughts. It’ll certainly be more effective than actually hurting yourself.

I think talking to a counselor is going to help with the issues you mention in your letter as well. I’m going to be blunt: I’m not sure if you know what you want. You don’t seem interested in actually meeting people or dating anyone, but you’re also having these really intense reactions to, well, getting precisely what you’re asking for. Which is to say: nothing. You say you don’t see the point of dating, but you’re also – literally – beating yourself up over supposedly missing out on meeting people. When you say that you don’t see the point of trying to date but you feel envious of other people’s happiness, it makes me wonder which part of this is actually true. You talk about daydreaming about people you see on TV, and occasional idle daydreams about your classmate, but not much in the way of actual interest in them.

Is it the case that you genuinely aren’t interested in trying to meet people, or is that the excuse you’re giving yourself to not try? Is it the case that maybe you’re telling yourself that you don’t like or want to meet people in order to avoid the risk of putting yourself out there and getting rejected? After all, one of the reasons why people focus more on celebrities or relative strangers on the Internet is because they’re “safe”; that is, there’s always the part of you that knows that these are relationships that can’t or won’t happen and thus you don’t have to ever actually take steps to do something about them. You can live with the daydreams, where you have complete control and emotional safety, without ever actually having to make yourself vulnerable or actually let people in and risk them actually hurting you.

I suspect this is part of why the interest fades when you find out they have a partner; you have a much harder time maintaining the fantasy when reality intrudes. It’s not just the safety of the imaginary relationship, but also the potential is there – the feeling that maybe, possibly this could happen. It’s a little like the way that Japanese idol singers and Kpop performers are supposed to not date or be in relationships; it allows their fans to fantasize about them. But honestly, that ain’t healthy for anyone, fans or performers. And in your case… well, I think it’s only serving to keep you isolated.

Now I’m sure some of this lack of interest could be a response to your parents’ divorce. It could also be that you fall somewhere on the asexual/aromantic spectrum – you’re just not that interested in romantic or sexual relationships and that’s fine. But it doesn’t sound to me like you’re happy with your self-imposed isolation. And this is self-imposed. You’re choosing to cut yourself off from making connections with other people – connections you seem to want and not want at the same time.

The fact of the matter is that you’re not missing windows of opportunity. You’re choosing not to take advantage of them when they come along. You could have met people at that student breakfast. You may not have coupled up, but at the very least you could’ve made some friends and gotten to know people. You decided not to. It’s important to emphasize this: you decided not to. The same goes with talking to your classmate. You’ve had chances to talk to her, even if on the bus. You see each other enough that you could have said “hey, I think we go to the same school/have the same classes; do you go to $COLLEGE/ have class with $PROFESSOR?” and then introduce yourself. You could even have said “It feels weird that we see each other daily and ride the same bus and I don’t know your name. My name’s…” and start the conversation that way. But you didn’t. The guy she’s dating? He did.

And that’s the important thing here. Maybe he’s not as physically conventionally attractive as you… but he’s still the one dating her because he’s the one who talked to her. Women can’t go on dates that you don’t ask them on, and you can’t complain that someone else is dating her when you haven’t so much as said “hello”. And even if this is all just daydream fodder for you… well, this is what happens when you’re basing your emotional life on the imagined “possibility” of dating someone – the odds are high that someone else is going to start dating them in reality.

The lesson to take away from that is that if you don’t take action, someone else will. Nobody, even some theoretical person who’s harboring a secret crush of their own, is going to wait around forever, waiting for you to make a move. Imaginary people may exist exclusively on a timeline of your choosing, but real people don’t; they go about their lives, encounter other people in the real world and start relationships with some of them. If you want to actually have a connection with any of them, you have to actually get in the game. Otherwise, all that’s happening is the consequences of your own choices and (in)actions.

(And before anyone suggests it, even jokingly: please, for the love of God and your own well-being, don’t go in for one of the AI girlfriends like Replika or trying to roll your own with ChatGPT. You’re already in a fragile state. Services like Replika come with a whole host of problematic issues – including the fact that the company can just wipe your “girlfriend” from existence – and chatbots have lead people in delicate emotional states down some really dark paths).

I would also point out that your father putting pressure on you is not helping, and it would probably do you a world of good to tell him to stop. Learning to establish and maintain boundaries would be an important step towards having a greater sense of agency and control in your own life.

But – dragging this back to what I said up top – that’s something that should be discussed with a counselor or therapist, and you desperately need to find one. Far more than you should be worrying about not having fantasy fodder because all the people you see between classes may or may not be coupled up. You’re experiencing some serious pain right now, and learning how to manage it in healthy and less harmful ways needs to be your top priority.

So head over to health services, find out what they have to offer and – if necessary – seek out a psychologist or psychiatrist; you may well need medicine as well as therapy. Take care of yourself and your mental health first. Relationships, in whatever form they ultimately take for you, will be waiting for your when you’re in a better place, mentally and emotionally.

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: I’m an almost 24-year-old Indian-American virgin guy with zero dating experience. Like a good portion of guys within my ethnic group, I pursued an education in a STEM field, which as you might know, is a very demanding time commitment and leaves little in the way for time for socialization. I’m doing a master’s degree, working full time as a web developer, and work out 6-7 times a week. As you can imagine, I don’t have a lot of time for social events, but lately, I don’t know why I should even bother.��There’s been a disturbing shift in the perception of Indians and the Indian diaspora online. Up until about the mid 2010s, Indians in western countries were largely seen as relatively harmless nerds and the men were desexualized, while the women were fetishized to a degree. If this sounds familiar, this is a similar experience many East Asians have experienced as well. While not flattering, this perception of Indians has taken a dramatic turn for the worst. Indians are now being perceived as rapists, pedophiles, unhygienic, scammers, etc. The men have gone from being desexualized to being straight up demonized. And this perception is pervasive all throughout social media, with trends like the “What race would you not date” trend being popular a couple years back, to AI-generated racist videos going viral recently. Hell, even on election night in 2024, there were STILL comments calling Indian men ugly going viral at the same time on X. It may be tempting to use the “social media is not real life” refrain, but history shows that there is a link between media portrayals and real-life violence. In Canada, the recent spike of hate led to a 143% increase in hate crimes against Indian-origin people. This is worsened by the fact that there is seemingly very little pushback on the racism, with justifications ranging from, “they deserve it”, to “it’s the culture, not the race”. The latter argument is especially problematic and insidious because they assume Indian-origin people born and raised in western countries follow this purported pro-rape Indian culture via the perpetual foreigner effect. I’m not saying there isn’t a misogyny problem in India, but if we’re being honest, most people online don’t actually care about Indian women and are just using the social problem to justify racism.��All of this has had disastrous consequences on my attempts to socialize, let alone date. The stereotype of the desexualized Indian nerd was hard enough to fight on its own, but the potential rapist stereotype is infinitely worse, and anyone who’s experienced racial discrimination knows this well. Unfortunately, people are usually not out there wearing their racist beliefs on their sleeve on dating apps, speed dating/friending events, or public spaces. So I reasonably keep my guard up a lot, and have avoided social situations as much as possible, despite feeling very lonely simultaneously.

They Don’t See The Real Me

DEAR THEY DON’T SEE THE REAL ME: Alright, let me lead off with something obvious here: I’m a middle-aged white guy. My world-view and life experiences are shaped by that.  I’m not going to have the same perspective or experiences or live through the same sort of background radiation of someone who’s South Asian, so there’re always be things that I won’t have experienced or nuances that I’m not going to be familiar with. All of which is to say: there will probably be things I miss simply because I don’t see or experience them first hand and the way I travel through the world is going to be informed by the relative bubble of privilege I experience as a white guy so my advice should be taken with all due amounts of salt and skepticism. 

Now for your letter: you seem to have left off an actual question at the end, so I don’t know what, precisely you’re hoping to hear about other than just the general frustration of, well, everything. So let’s talk about that for a moment.

There’re a few different things happening in your letter that I think should be addressed. The first is, simply: you’re not exactly going out and socializing much to begin with. This is understandable: you’re pursuing a post-graduate degree while also working full time and also spending a lot of time at the gym. That’s all well and good, but it brings up an important question: are you sure you have the available time to actually date and maintain a relationship?

This isn’t an idle question. A lot of folks, especially guys who’ve never dated before, have never really thought about what dating someone would entail on a practical level, nor how their lives would change if they were in a relationship. I don’t mean in the sense of “I’ll feel a newfound sense of self-respect and confidence and people won’t look at me with pity”, but in the sense of “what changes are you going to make to fit another person in your life?” Many times, they picture their lives as either being mostly the same but with the knowledge that there’s an attractive person around, or that there’s magically more time in the day to spend with them.

Unfortunately, that’s not how this works. We all only have 24 hours in the day, and everything we do comes with an opportunity cost. If we want to slot something else in, that’s going to come at the expense of time spent doing something else – including sleep, relaxation, hobbies or just farting around on the Internet. Going out and meeting people, going on dates and all the rest takes time. Even if you try to streamline things by, say, using dating apps instead of going to social events, you still have to factor in actually meeting people in person and going out on dates. All of that is going to require time to come from somewhere else. If you’re determined to date, you’re going to have to figure out where that time is going to come from. You’re going to have to decide where you have flexibility to shift priorities and how you will free up time for keeping up your relationship. Something’s gonna have to give.

Or you may decide that right now is not a good time for you to try to meet people and resolve to kick that particular can down the road a bit. This is an entirely legitimate and understandable choice to make! It doesn’t do any good to try to meet the woman of your dreams if doing so means barreling into exhaustion or burnout. While I understand both the desire to want to date and the social pressure that makes “find a girlfriend” feel urgent, it’s very reasonable to decide that you want to put that on pause until your schedule’s a lot more flexible and the demands on your time (and your brain and body) are less intense. Hustle culture and grindset be damned, you don’t do yourself any good by burning the candle at both ends. Even under the best of circumstances, all you do is put the consequences on credit, to be paid out of your future self’s health and well-being.

So the first thing you should really consider is whether you can manage some work-life balance, or if that needs to wait until later.

(And considering the demands that grad school made of friends and family, even when they weren’t also working 40+ hour jobs, I think waiting until you complete your Masters’ isn’t the worst idea in the world.)

But let’s talk about complicating factors, like racism and stereotypes about South Asian people and South Asian men in particular. I won’t lie: you’ve got some serious challenges here. You’re right, there’s a lot of racism directed at Eastern and South Asian men of all stripes; even the model-minority stereotype is a form of soft bigotry that robs people of their individuality and humanity and reduces them into a defined set of traits and expectations. And there is indeed a lot of stereotypes that treat South Asian and East Asian men as sexless and effete, if not bumbling and foolish or all of the above. It’s also very deliberate; it started as a campaign of social emasculation against Chinese men and spread outward from there. That’s all real and legitimate.

So too is the rise of racist rhetoric and incidents of violence. The right wing in the US has embraced Nazi wanna-be’s with their whole heart and made hating anyone who’s not the right kind of white a policy platform. These are all very real concerns that you and people like you have to deal with.

I can’t speak to the increase in a popular view that all Indian men are rapists, in no small part because I quite literally never see this come up, anywhere. I’m online to frankly a stupid degree and I do my best to follow a fairly diverse group of voices people and while I’ve seen things about sexual assault in India, I certainly haven’t seen it being carried over into popular stereotypes of South Asian men in general and not in the US specifically. 

Now some of this is easily explained by the balkanized nature of social media, and I’m not following folks who are deep into those circles. But that actually serves as a handy segue for my next point…

Your letter runs straight into one of the things I can’t emphasize enough: social media in general and Twitter in particular isn’t real life. Yeah, I know you brought it up already in order to dismiss the idea, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. It wasn’t real life before Elon Musk took it over, but it’s especially not real life now that it’s a Nazi bar full of algorithmically boosted hate. While I have no doubt that you’re seeing this all over your feed, I think you’re hitting the same issue a lot of folks do: you’re mistaking frequency and volume for ubiquity.

Any social media app with an algorithmic feed – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. – prioritizes content that gets engagement, regardless of the kind of engagement. AI-generated brainrot reels on Instagram may get shared around with “look at this s--t”, but it’s still getting shared. TikTok ragebait clips about dating get passed around by folks either asking “is this true” or “it’s so over”, but the algo doesn’t care because any engagement still counts. And nothing gets engagement like hate and racism. The racists and bigots retweet it in support and people quote-tweet to dunk on it but it still means that it’s getting shared all over the place. Doubly so on Twitter where there’s financial incentive to post the most inflammatory s--t people can come up with.

All of this is understandably demoralizing, and it’s intended to be. That’s exactly what these chuds want. It’s both the desired result but also their sales pitch. Pick Up Artists want incels to think women will hate them unless they buy their courses.  Masculinity grifters want you to think that manhood is under attack, vitally important but also incredibly fragile and you have to be on your guard at all times. Race-baiting f--kheads want folks to believe that folks from the global south are weak and pitiful but also degenerates and cunning, organized schemers who plot to take over entire cities or countries. If you’re not feeling weak and put upon, you’re not going to buy their bulls--t – both literally and figuratively.

But where this intersects with your concerns, specifically, is how you’re treating ragebait posts as real life and letting it restrict you now before you’ve done… well, pretty much anything. And a lot of it is because I think it’s likely that you’ve been mainlining this and confusing volume for ubiquity. This is something that happens to everyone; when you see the same thing being shared over and over or people saying similar things constantly with very little pushback or challenge, it’s all too easy to assume that everyone thinks this way or that this is totally normal and taken as gospel. I mean, right now, intelligent people are going around insisting that just hearing about a particularly stupid variation of Pascal’s Wager is enough to break people’s brains.

This is something that happens in all sorts of subcultures and communities, whether racial, interest based or sociopolitical, especially on social media, which is the Emotional Contagion Engine writ large. All social media has a tendency to cook people’s brains if they don’t take a moment to talk to someone who isn’t terminally online.

Without steady, regular check-ins with people in physical space, who aren’t terminally online, it’s all too easy to mistake s--tposts for reality. Touching grass isn’t just a way of saying “delete your account”, it’s saying “try to keep this s--t in perspective by reconnecting with the world around you as it actually is.”

I bring this up because I think you’ve internalized this to an unhealthy degree. Yes, racism is very real, the effects of it are very real… but I think you’ve taken online hate and ragebait and are treating it like it’s already happened before you’ve even talked to someone. One of the things I notice is that you aren’t talking about having experienced this personally, which makes me wonder how much of what you’re describing in the final paragraphs of your letter is pure anticipation, rather than experience. You know better than I would – like I said, I’m a white dude and I’m not gonna try to judge what was racist and what wasn’t. But I think it’s worth asking yourself whether you’re anticipating problems and reacting to them in advance.

That’s something I see a lot of guys do, especially guys who are socially inexperienced or socially awkward: they play out worst-case scenarios in their head and treat them as though they already happened, so they don’t bother starting in the first place. Why bother talking to that sexy somebody when it’s inevitable that they’ll think the worst about you?

In a real way, I think you’re rejecting yourself – assuming that someone inevitably is going to assume that you’re a rapist-in-waiting if you so much as say hello. And while I understand this is a form of self-protection, I think it’s serving more to isolate you than to help you. You mention that you’re lonely and that you’re avoiding social situations. Well… seeing as this isn’t making you happy, something’s going to have to give.

One of the truths about dating is that, right or wrong, people are going to make assumptions about you. That’s just human nature; we’ve got pattern-recognizing brains and some of those patterns include “what can we expect from a stranger, based these visible traits?” But we can help shape and guide the assumptions they make based on our behavior and presentation to ease the initial introduction, and we can disrupt or disprove others when we actually connect with them. But to do that, we have to actually make the effort of getting to know them and letting them get to know us as individuals. That can’t happen if you’ve permanently got your guard up or you’re avoiding people entirely.

With regards to dating, especially dating as an Indian-American man… well, leaving aside the questions of “do you even have the time”, you’re going to want to approach things with a mix of realism and optimism. That is: recognize the legitimate challenges you’re going to face, but don’t assume that you’re always heading into a buzzsaw of stereotypes, but rather meeting people as individuals. Part of this means devoting your time and energy where you’ll get the most bang for your buck. I know I’m always banging on about how much dating apps suck these days but they can suck especially hard for Asian men and Black women. It’s easy for folks to get tunnel vision and only focus on the people they think they want, while missing opportunities for serendipity. A lot of the people we think are great matches on paper don’t work in person, but we often find that we click with people we’ve met in person, even though we might have swiped left on the apps. Why? Because the apps show you a very limited view of someone from a curated list; meeting someone in person gives us a different perspective and lets us see them in ways we couldn’t possibly perceive in an “about me” summary.

So in your case, I’d recommend focusing on meeting people in person and to date slow – that is, meet folks in general without the pressure of “turn this into a potential date ASAP”. If you’re meeting someone socially without immediately putting things in a dating framework, you’ve got an opportunity to actually get to know them as a person and vice-versa. Part of the benefit of getting to know people over time is that the more we get to know someone, the more we tend to find them attractive. As we become more familiar with them, what makes them unique is what makes them special to us. So even things that we might not necessarily find appealing in others is part of what makes them who they are, and thus why we like them, specifically.   

This also means that you learn about them, beyond “ok, she’s hot” … including whether this person is worth your time or not.

That part’s important. I can understand the drive to fight the image of the sexless Indian man at every opportunity, but there’s a lot to be said for not wasting your time on people who aren’t going to be right for you, regardless. Not everyone’s going to like you – not because of your race or because of stereotypes, but simply because nobody is going to appeal to everyone, and that’s ok. A lot of those people aren’t going to be right for you, too. And quite frankly, it’s not worth your time to try to win over folks who don’t like you, whether for racist reasons or completely banal ones. The level of effort it takes to try to change “dislike” or “racist stereotyping” to neutral, never mind a positive impression, is never commensurate with the reward. Better to focus on the people who are positively inclined towards you, instead.

So – again, allowing for having the time and energy �– if you want to date and ease that loneliness, you’re going to have to be willing to lower your guard and meet people where they are. Are some folks going to be s--tty? Yeah. Are there folks who are going to be s--tty to you specifically because you’re an Indian man? Certainly. But all of life is going to have risk. It’s not evenly distributed, but it’s always going to be there. You have to decide if the reward is worth the risk, but you also have to be willing to take the risks to get the reward.

You’re the only one who can make that decision.

Good luck.

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