DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: A long standing and painful issue with a certain friend recently reared its head again. I want your perspective, because this causes me too much pain to process alone.

My friend and I are distant cousins, and we met as young children at a family reunion. We lived far apart growing up, so our in-person interactions were always family-facilitated. We are now 31.

When I moved away from home for college at age 20, I lived in an area close to Cousin, for the first time. It was amazing. He introduced me to his best friends, and I clicked with them immediately. The next 5 years were a dream. Not only did I hang out with Cousin often, I also found something I’d never had – a tight-knit friend group. 

(In middle & high school, I was bullied. I banded together with other bullied kids, but it was about survival, not genuine connection).

I met my husband through that friend group–he was Cousin’s high school buddy.

As for what happened… in early 2020, Cousin, me, my husband, and other roommates moved in together. Cousin wanted to keep the house very clean and neat, and we all agreed to duties on a chore chart. Thing is, I have ADHD, but I was undiagnosed and unaware at that time. I agreed eagerly to my share of chores…. and then executive dysfunction set in. I didn’t know that’s why, but my chores never got done. Cousin felt like I didn’t care, and I was incapable of articulating a reason otherwise. It was a source of frequent tension.

Then, Covid hit, along with a LOT more. For one, I graduated in May 2020 and my undiagnosed ADHD became hellish. I had developed coping mechanisms to manage school, but they didn’t transfer over to post-college adult life. I was falling apart and, again, couldn’t articulate why. Also, my mom died of cancer, and my husband developed a permanently disabling chronic illness.

Cousin was going through equal levels of hell; his mom unexpectedly became addicted to meth, tried to kidnap his sister, and then and abandoned their family; and his dad’s mental state declined so sharply Cousin–as the eldest child–had to manage the mess.

And on top of it all, yknow… Covid.

Cousin and another roommate responded to this by being controlling, implementing super stringent house rules related to Covid. I agreed to the rules but, I was so distressed and unstable I rarely followed through. This exploded into a huge fight in which Cousin and I both said extremely hurtful things, and he threatened to evict me. After, we both hid in our respective rooms, crying, for about a week; my husband and the other roommates were damage control.

Cousin and I made peace, sincerely apologized, and tried to move on but, it’s never been the same.

In 2021, husband and I moved out for unrelated reasons and I’ve almost never seen Cousin since, or even talked to him. We see each other at family events, we text on rare occasion. That’s it. I’ve tried reaching out, and his responses are friendly, but reserved.

I miss him terribly, but I don’t want to push him. The emotional side of me wants to send him a long, cringy text – the platonic version of, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please take me back, I’ll do anything, I love you”, but I know better. One of the things he yelled at me in our fight was that my mental problems were “too much”.

Mostly, I repress all this and pretend the wound isn’t there. It came up this week because a mutual friend was hospitalized, and I’ve contacted everybody including Cousin to plan a get together to support our mutual. Meanwhile, a second mutual friend told me I ought to reach out to Cousin, and implied that Cousin wanted me to, but Cousin’s responses are as reserved as ever.

So… help me?

Retry, Reboot, Ignore?

DEAR RETRY, REBOOT, IGNORE: If I’m being honest, RRI, I feel like 99% of anything that happened during 2020 should be quietly ignored like the entire final season of Enterprise. The entire year was cursed like someone had read from a cursed scroll while breaking all the seals around a giant obelisk marked “DO NOT TOUCH, DARK ONE IMPRISONED INSIDE” and we all went a little feral and came out with a greater appreciation for Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

But unfortunately, unlike mediocre installments in long-running sci-fi shows, we can’t simply retcon s--t into having never happened, much as we’d like to.

(While we’re wishing, if we could send everything in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer from s5 onward to the cornfield, with exceptions for “The Body” and “Once More With Feeling”, that’d be great.)

So, instead, we’ve gotta deal with things as it actually happened, even if there’s a certain amount of “look, we were all dealing with some s--t” in there.

Now, I’m going to be honest: some of what happened with your cousin is the sort of standard “living with roommates” s--t that is baked into sharing personal space with other people, undiagnosed ADHD or not. We’ve all got our various quirks, foibles and flaws and our own way of doing things and conducting our lives, and sometimes those just aren’t going to mesh cleanly with other people’s. Part of living with other people is trying to minimize those moments of friction and conflict, while also understanding that some of it is inevitable.

There’s also the fact that the more people you put into one living space, the more likely you’re going to end up with conflict. More people means more corners and edges that folks are going to bump into. Nobody goes into a home-share situation thinking “Cool, I’m gonna piss off everyone I live with by being the most obnoxious roommate possible!”  Most of the time, it’s a case of everyone having their own routines and habits that’re pretty deeply ingrained and it can take more than a couple months with a shared Google calendar and chore spreadsheet to get everyone working in harmony.

But acknowledging that this is something of an inevitability doesn’t make it easier to accept when it happens, just like having undiagnosed ADHD explains things but doesn’t necessarily make it better. I am incredibly sympathetic to how undiagnosed ADHD and its symptoms can f--k with you… but an explanation doesn’t necessarily change that things weren’t getting done when they were your responsibility.

And believe me, I get it; the main reason why I didn’t get evicted from various apartments when I was younger was that my bank implemented automated bill-pay systems. It was too late to save my credit score at the time, but it sure as hell meant I was having fewer days when the power would go out and I had to figure out if it was Florida Flicker and Flash doing its thing or if I forgot to pay the electric bill. Again.

However, while executive dysfunction and memory issues getting in the way of your chore rotation was annoying, I could see how seeming to ignore COVID safety protocols would really put people out of joint. At a time when we were all living with the very understandable terror of what COVID could do to us and when folks were turning trying to avoid getting sick into a political issue, someone seeming to be lax or outright ignoring safety protocols is going to stick in one’s craw. It’d be one thing if that only affected them – they chose to f--k around, they’re going to find out – but with how both virulent and dangerous COVID was, it can feel like they’re playing Russian Roulette with your health and the health of your loved ones too.

And again, I want to emphasize that I get it. ADHD f--ks with a whole bunch of different aspects of your life, and when you’re under the 24/7 stress that we were all living under at the time, it gets real goddamn bad. But knowing in retrospect that none of this was malicious or intentional and that you were struggling to get it under control can add context to how we see those events, it doesn’t retroactively change how we felt. We can try to be more understanding about it and acknowledge that maybe some of our reactions or responses to it were unfair or harsher than they needed to be… but the memory of how it felt at the time still exists.

Now I mention this, not to bag on you, but to say that forgiving is often easier than forgetting, and that can sometimes leave some residual friction. It’s not fair, necessarily, but it’s human. And I’m wondering, when you had your big peace-making apology session, whether you two ever talked about the emotional side of things and how you were both feeling at the time. Was it just apologizing and “I forgive you”, or did you two really dig in and air things out? If you didn’t, it could be that maybe while you’ve had your apologies and your forgiveness, there’s a lot that’s still lingering that went unsaid and continues to be unsaid. That sort of thing can sometimes hang around like Banquo’s ghost, even after two people’ve theoretically hashed things out.

But it’s also possible that, looking back on things and knowing what he knows now, your cousin could feel a little awkward about how he responded, too. Some things, once said, still echo in our heads, even when we know that we shouldn’t have said them, and that can be hard to get past.

For example, you mention that he told you how your mental problems were just “too much”, and how the pain of that has stuck with you. It’s very understandable how that affected you and I get why that’s made you very cautious about reaching out again. But I wonder if it’s also not the sort of thing that’s also bothering your cousin �– that he’s got the voice in his head saying “Jesus Christ, how could you say that, you f--king asshole?” 

Even if he offered a sincere apology for it – and it sounds like you two hashed at least some of this out – that’s the sort of thing where he might be wondering if you could forgive him for saying that s--t to you. Yeah, it may have been more in frustration and fear than honest feeling, but he may still be thinking “f--k, I actually said that… how would RRI ever forgive me for that?”��This is why I think it’s possible that some of what you see as his being reserved or distant could be embarrassment or shame, or not being sure whether you are comfortable and ready to pick back up from before things went ka-blooey, as much as it could be about him not wanting to be friends again. It could very well be that your cousin misses being friends too, but still feels weird about things, even after you’ve both talked things out, and isn’t sure how to handle it either.

Well, here’s the thing: s--t’s awkward right now. Part of the reason why everything feels awkward is that you aren’t sure how your cousin feels. I suspect your cousin doesn’t know for sure how you feel. And if it’s the case that both of you are walking around trying to act like everything’s normal and you’re both trying to pretend that you’re not missing each other and not saying anything… well, s--t’s just going to stay awkward. If you want to see if there’s a chance to fix this strained friendship, you’re going to have to stop pretending that everything’s cool and be willing to get a little vulnerable.  

So I think what you’re going to need to do is just put it out there: you miss him and hope to see him at the get-together for your mutual. That’s it. Acknowledge that truth, simply and directly: you miss him and having his friendship. Right now, you’re dancing around this without actually saying the words, and that’s a problem. Unless someone actually says it and just hopes that they’re implying it hard enough, nothing’s gonna change. It’s always way too easy to ignore or misread things when folks are trying to be indirect. And seeing as rejection-sensitive dysphoria tends to be part of the ADHD combo platter, there’s that part of your brain that’s going to actively look for anything that could be “nope, go away”.

So instead of dancing around the topic, someone’s gotta say the words first. Clearly. Simply. Unambiguously. And if someone’s gotta go first, it may as well be you.

You don’t need to beg for his forgiveness or plead for him to acknowledge you like a clingy ex who can’t accept the break-up. You don’t need to offer up an accounting of your sins as penance while asking to reconnect. Just keep it simple and direct. A straight-forward “I miss my friend and I’d like to be friends again if we could” is all you really need. Then the ball’s in his court.

Now, the big thing is, once you put it out there that you miss him and want to be friends again, you need to give it some time and to keep the anxiety weasels leashed. This means doing your best not to read anything into how long it takes for him to respond, the “tone” of his reply if it’s not a gushing “YES, ME TOO OH THANK GOD”. He may need a moment to sit with his feelings about things, he may need time to figure out how to say what he wants to say… or it could just be that s--t’s going to be a little strained or awkward for a bit because a lot of things went down, a lot of things were said and everyone may still be feeling shy and weird about it.

And that’s ok. Sometimes a person needs to take a beat to process. Not getting an immediate no is a positive sign. And if it is a no… well, at least now you’ve cleared away the ambiguity and you can actually mourn the loss of that friendship instead of being stuck in this limbo, where you get to relive the feeling of losing your friend over and over again, because you’re not sure where you stand.

But I suspect things will go a little more positively than that.

It may take some time to reacquaint yourselves and find your new relationship balance, especially if you’re both coming to this like a pair of well-meaning-but-shy cats. Or it may be that you two need to have a second talk and dig a little deeper into how you both behaved back then and why, so you can get to a better degree of understanding. But the more important part will be that you two can move forward with how this new chapter in your friendship will turn out.

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 not sure how I can move past my bitter feelings and start dating. I hold a great deal of resentment towards women because of my past dating experiences. My last ex-girlfriend cheated on me with a few different guys, came to my house sobbing her eyes out begging for forgiveness. She kept promising me she would change and be better. I stupidly believed her and took her back, only for her to cheat on me again. Want to know how I found out? She posted a snapchat story of a guy smirking at the camera grabbing her ass, then the next day she posted a picture of the claw marks on his back to her story. 

That was 6, going on 7 years ago at this point and since then I’ve had absolutely nothing in the dating department. Nothing, nada, zilch, just rejection after rejection. I’m not talking no second dates or no sex, I’m talking no numbers, no dates, nothing. The occasional match on Hinge every 4-5 months that doesn’t reply is the closest thing I’ve gotten to a relationship. I’ve also been stood up more times than I’d like to admit. In those 6-7 years I’ve done the following: worked 60 hours a week for 5 years, paid off all my debts, lost 40lbs of fat and gained 10lbs of muscle, got established in my current career, led my entire team in sales for 2024, received 2 raises and multiple bonuses, completely changed up my style to feel better about myself, pursed multiple passion projects and the list goes on. I’m not trying to gas myself up, I just don’t understand how I’ve been on such a dry steak for so long. I know I’m above average in attractiveness and height, (I’ve gotten asked if I was a model on multiple occasions, although maybe they were mocking me, and I didn’t know it) and I’ve worked my ass off to be a man that can protect and provide for women. 

All this failure with women has made me exceptionally bitter, to the point that even speaking to women offends me. Why would I want to talk to any woman who for the last 7 years would not even acknowledge my existence? Why would I ever let a woman into the world that I’ve worked my ass off to build? Why should she get any fruits of my labor? I find the “courting” aspect of dating degrading. I don’t see why I need to prove anything to these women, if anything, they should be proving their worth to me. They’ve proven to me over and over again that they can’t even be bothered to show up. When women give me IOIs, it actually annoys me. When I make eye contact across the room and she looks away and then looks back with those “eyes”, I get so irritated and offended, to a comically inappropriate level. 

How would I even begin to move past this? I know I could never have a healthy relationship with my current headspace. What advice could you give me to move past this, and potentially why I feel this way?

Bitter and Dejected

DEAR BITTER AND DEJECTED: Ok BaD, I’m admittedly saying this more for the other readers than for you: I want to make it clear that I didn’t pull your letter in order to dunk on you, and I’m not publishing it so that people can yell or poke fun at it. In fact, I empathize my guy. What your ex did was hellish and I’m sorry you went through it. I can relate; I had a toxic partner who cheated on me, and I took her back too when I should have hit the eject button instead. So I’ve been there and I get it.��I’ve pulled it specifically because there’re a couple points in here that come up a lot for guys like you, who’ve either had limited success in dating or just constant struggles, and the ways it makes them feel.

Let’s start with something easy and talk about who you’re actually mad at when you get so upset at all these women, especially the ones who seem to actually be interested in you. Because – and honestly, this is kinda screamingly obvious – you’re not really angry at them. You’re angry at yourself, and you have been for a long, long time.

I mean, it doesn’t exactly take Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung to see this when the origin story you lead with is basically a dramatization of The Offspring’s “Self-Esteem”; your girlfriend cheated on you constantly and blatantly and you still took her back, only to have it happen again. And while being upset at her is entirely understandable, it’s pretty clear to me that you turned that anger inward because, well, what kinda loser-beta-simp-cuck does that? If you’d had a shred of self-worth, you’d have kicked her to the curb alongside the recycling and compost with the rest of the trash. And yet here we are.

The why of it isn’t terribly complex either. You broke up with her after she quite literally cuckolded you – and not in the fun happy squishy way – and now she’s out of your life and good riddance. But you still have to live with yourself and the fact that you made the decisions to accept this behavior. And I think that still burns you up like acid. I think you, to this day, still want to kick your own ass over the fact that you did this. And like a lot of people in similar situations, you never actually dealt with that anger you feel for yourself.

Or, rather, you never dealt with the emotions. The pain of it and how you feel about yourself. It’s pretty clear that you, like a lot of people, went the “this can never happen to me again” route. And like them, you went on a campaign of trying to turn yourself into the sort of person who this could never happen to, a guy who, by all reasonable metrics, is the sort of person women would never cheat on, never humiliate or betray like this.

Which is where we came to the second issue that keeps coming up: the qualities you’ve decided to focus on aren’t the qualities that women are actually looking for in a partner. Now don’t get me wrong; you’ve done a lot of hard work and that’s admirable. You’ve come a long way and achieved a lot. Being debt free, in particular, is f--king astounding in this economy.  

But 99.999% of what you’ve accomplished aren’t the qualities that women are looking for in a romantic partner. A business partner, maybe. But not someone they can turn to when you’re both down with COVID and neither of you have the energy to switch streaming services, while you’re both hacking up things so fetid and viscous that you’re not sure whether to spit it into the toilet or worship it as the avatar of Jubbilex, and yet you can’t see yourself wanting to be with anyone else in that moment. Not someone they see sitting next to them in his-n-her Depends in the retirement home and still can’t imagine anyone else in your place.

Don’t get me wrong, your career accomplishments are great and I’m not taking away from them. I’m sure it’s very impressive to the other guys at the office. But that’s precisely the thing: it’s impressive to the other guys. As in: the qualities you’ve focused on and chosen to highlight are qualities that men admire in other men. The vast majority of women aren’t going to see “lead my team in sales, got two raises” and think “yup, that’s the man for me,” because that’s not what they’re looking for. That’s all great on LinkedIn, but that’s not gonna get you play on Hinge or Bumble.

(And quite frankly, the few who are looking for something like that are going to be more interested in your take-home salary than how you got there.)

This is another classic case of “you listened to all the wrong people and took all the wrong lessons”, and almost certainly from folks who look specifically for people like you so they can exploit their anger and resentment for their grift. You paid attention to the guys who misunderstood pretty much every point of American Psycho and The Wolf of Wall Street and put all your effort into being Patrick Bateman, while using empathy, emotional intelligence and communication as your dump stats. I hate to tell you this, but – TikTok influencers and grifters aside – women aren’t out there looking for dudes who will keep them in the lifestyle to which they intend to become accustomed, they’re looking for someone who reasonably has his s—t together and isn’t going to be a drain on her… whether financially or emotionally. They are looking for someone who’s able to communicate and connect, who isn’t emotionally constipated and who isn’t ultimately looking for a multi-class personal assistant/maid/therapist that they can also bang.

Like a lot of other men in your position, all of the qualities you list are material. Which, again, glad you have a comfortable living and all, but there’s nothing there about being fun to hang out with or knowing how to make someone smile or feel special. You’ve put your emphasis on being valuable but not on making other people feel valued, which is what they’re actually looking for.

So I’m not exactly surprised that you’re not having a lot of success on the dating scene. For one thing, that unresolved bitterness and anger you feel for yourself has done what unresolved bitterness and anger always does: it curdles, it metastasizes and it proceeds to infect itself into everything about you. I can guarantee you that the resentment you feel is radiating off of you like you spend your summers camping in Pripyat and women are picking up on it at 100 paces. They can read it in your Hinge profile and the messages you send, they can see it in your pictures and they can feel it when they come near you.

Just as importantly, you’re upset that you’ve done all this work – and like I said, it’s hard work, I’m not going to take away from that – and you’re not getting rewarded for it in the way you were told to expect. Moreover, you’re getting upset at women for not following the agreement that they never actually signed on to. I would say “I don’t know if you noticed that women are looking for a partner, not a provider,” except it’s pretty obvious that you haven’t. They’re also not looking for a “protector” in the way you’re thinking either. Guys keep falling for the trap of thinking that “protector” means “I will defend you from the ravening hordes with furious violence” and think about all the problems that could be solved with a gun, but never once think about things like “cooking healthy meals”, “making sure your kids get their vaccinations”, “keep the house is clean, the clothes are washed and everyone’s dental hygiene is immaculate”. Because the real dangers aren’t from home invasion or muggers (violent crime is down 50% year over year since the 90s), it’s disease, malnutrition and accidents in the home.

But this is all coming from that same place of insecurity that you’ve been living in since your girlfriend cheated on you for the last time; you put all this effort into being the sort of person who you think women want and you still think you have to “prove” yourself to women, when women aren’t asking for any such thing. They’re asking for you to connect with them, to show that you like them and want a relationship, not a possession to put on the shelf alongside those awards you got at work. The only test they want you to pass is to show that going out with you is a better choice than staying home to watch Murderbot and a glass of pinot noir. You’re getting upset about having to “prove” things you don’t have to prove, and then getting even more upset that it’s not working.

And here’s the thing: even you aren’t buying into the very same goals and standards that you have been working towards. You make a point about how you’ve put in all this effort into being a protector and provider for women and, not four sentences later, ask why women – the people you supposedly are going to provide for – should have access to your provisions. Well, which is it my guy? Are you supposed to be providing for your future partner, or are you going to sit on top of your accumulated wealth and spit venom at anyone who comes close, like a dragon sitting on his hoard? What, precisely are women supposed to be “proving” to you before you’re willing to “let them into this world that you’ve built”, and why should they want to, when you’re not making any of it look at all appealing? A six-figure yearly salary isn’t going to make someone overlook all the anger issues, a nice apartment isn’t going to make up for the oppressive atmosphere of bitterness and you’re not giving any indication that there’s more to you besides a shiny surface. So what’s in it for them, when they can have their own finances, their own careers and their own place to live and not have a roommate who thinks of them as a parasite leeching off his munificence?   

Now I know this is the part of the column where I’m supposed to say “you need to get to therapy”, and to a certain extent that’s true. But honestly, that’s a bit of a pat answer that isn’t going to help; it’s a little like suggesting antibiotics for everything, when sometimes you need an antiviral, sometimes you need surgical intervention, and sometimes you need just fluids and bed-rest. If you want things to get better, you need to know what actually needs to get fixed instead of just showing up saying “I’m not happy, women don’t like me, make it better.”

So instead, I’m going to tell you precisely what you should be focusing on. And since you’ve proven that you aren’t afraid of challenges and hard work, I’m going to tell you to start with the hardest and most challenging thing you can do: you need to forgive yourself. All of this is because you’re still angry at the guy you were seven years ago for letting your girlfriend walk all over you like you had “welcome” tattooed on your back. You’re still carrying a chip on your shoulder because you “let” her use you and mock you and humiliate you, and it’s time to put it down.

Yeah, it is f--king awful that this happened. Yeah, she treated you horribly. And yes, you made a poor decision to take her back instead of saying “you know what, f--k you and the mustache you rode in on.” Her cheating on you wasn’t your fault, and while your giving her a second opportunity to do so was, you were making a mistake that lots of people have made, myself included. And that’s ok! People make mistakes! We make the best decisions we can with the info we have at the time, and with the people we are at the time. There are a whole host of reasons why you weren’t ready or able at the time to make a different decision and that’s ok too. You can forgive yourself for doing the best you could with what you had. You can forgive yourself for not being who you think you should have been and accept that you couldn’t have been that person at that time. You had to grow and change into being someone who could be who you needed to be, and the only way you could get there is… well, through the hard and rocky road of experience. It sucks, but part of the reason why we fall down is so we can learn how to get back up again and to understand why we fell in the first place.

So you need to be willing to look at your past self and say “Hey, you were trying. I see that now. It’s ok.” You need to forgive yourself and let it all go, so the infection can finally start to drain away.

The same goes for the ways you’ve developed your life since then. You’ve accomplished a lot, but not in areas that would be better for actually fostering romantic relationships. So, as you put that same energy and drive into cultivating your emotional intelligence and those soft skills that make it possible to form friendships and romances, you need to do so without beating yourself up in the process. As easy as it would be, you don’t want to get hung up on “well, now I’m behind everyone else,” or finding some other reason to kick yourself in the nuts over it. Nobody is concerned with how long it took or when you started; they’re just glad that you got there at all.

This is going to be difficult, because part of the process is going to be learning how to breathe through the moments when you feel that “HOW DARE YOU COME TO ME NOW?!?!” rise up and let it wash away until you can be open and hopeful and curious with the person in front of you. You can’t just force those feelings away or lock them up like an inconveniently mad sister in a Regency romance. You have to learn to recognize them as part of you that’s still crying at how cruel and unfair your previous relationship was, and to let it just flow around you until it’s past so that you can connect with the person you’re talking to instead of the ghost of your s—tty ex.

That’s part of what you’ll want to talk to your therapist about: how to get to that forgiveness and how to process and manage the anger you’ve been holding onto like a gamma-irradiated squirrel hording rage-nuts, in ways that are actually healthy and productive. You’re going to want to develop the tools that will help you recognize a bad situation and how to handle it, alongside how to manage and reconcile conflicts in your future relationships without turning it into a relitigation of your past.

And you’re going to want to re-examine who you are, who you think you should be, who you want in your life and why. Right now, I’m not sure you even know what you’d want from a partner. Sex, sure, but you can get that without a partner. Companionship? Ok… but that can be a pet, or friends or family members. Validation? I’ve written about that enough times that everyone can quote me chapter and verse, but it needs to come from within, not from without.

If you aren’t sure what a romantic partner would bring to your life that isn’t just about being a trophy that says You Won Manhood, then you need to sit with that question and really interrogate it. How would your life be better with someone – someone specific, not just a generic warm body. Just as importantly, what can you offer her in exchange that would be unique to you? It’s not going to be money or financial security; not unless you’re looking for someone who only values money, and other people can offer that just as well as you can, regardless. She doesn’t need your “protection” either. So ask yourself: what about you would be the special sauce that she’s been looking for?  And if you don’t have an answer for that yet, that’s OK! Part of the point of all of this is to find and develop that.

But now that I’ve told you this, I’m going to drop this incredibly important qualifier on you – something that you’re going to need to do before any of the rest. Because none of this – all of these improvements, all of these changes we’re talking about – isn’t going to matter if you aren’t able to meet this qualification.

You need to want to change more than you want to be angry. You need to want to make things different than you want to be “right” or to be “vindicated”. If you aren’t ready to admit that this anger is absurd, that it’s the “ressentiment” that’s holding you back and that you need to let it go, nothing is going to get better. You will put your impressive work ethic into play, make great strides… and still get angry at women for existing and you will still be single. It will be years later and you will be exactly where you are now, just older and still single.

If you can accept that your anger at these women isn’t justified, if you are ready to let go of the need to “prove” something – to yourself, to your ex, to God, whomever – then you’ll be in a place where you can make actual changes and make them stick. But if you aren’t, then nothing is going to change.

I won’t lie: that s—t’s hard. There’s that part of you that wants more than anything for the world to say “you’re right, we f--ked you and we’re so sorry, we don’t deserve you” and it’s hard to give that up. That desire to be able to say “See? SEE!?” sticks to us like tar and naptha and peeling it away feels like admitting surrender and saying “ok, I was the little simp cuck who deserved to be treated like this.” But that’s not real. To quote the poet: that’s just pride, f--king with you. And that’s the sort of pride that only hurts, never helps.

But if you’re ready to swallow that and let it go? Then it’s time to start the process I outlined for you. And that begins with forgiving yourself.

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’d like some advice.

I was with my boyfriend for almost 7 years. Most of our relationship was good. It started to deteriorate in the past year. I don’t want to rehash all the details, but the primary issue is we would argue a lot because my anxiety and low self-esteem. I doubted his love and how much he wanted to be around me. We broke up because of this. At first it was just a break, and we planned to check in in two months. However, he thought I wouldn’t be able to grow long term in this time frame and if I was doing it for him.

When it was just a break, I was doing pretty well. I was journaling, doing affirmations, going on walks. Reaching out to friends. And I was starting to feel a little better.

Now it’s been hard to think about anything except that I’ve lost him. I told him this and he said he does still love me and he’d be open to the possibility, but not until at least 6 months pass and if I do show growth. He didn’t say it meanly — he was incredibly kind and I know he wants me to improve, whether we get back together or not. He said he didn’t want to hurt me anymore.

Based on past experience, again, if I do the work, I think he’d be open as well. His previous long-term ex he waited 6 months to even try dating again.

My problem is I can’t focus on the work. I’m too caught up in him. I know I need to improve myself for me, in the end, and not worry about the outcome, but I’m not sure how to do that. How can I move past him enough to not obsess over him.

Against All Odds

DEAR AGAINST ALL ODDS: I realize this isn’t necessarily the point, but this is why I really dislike when people say “we’re going to take a break” when what they really mean is “we’re breaking up, just slower.” I think it’s needlessly cruel and often a cowardly way of ending the relationship without actually taking responsibility for saying so.

And to be fair, there are times when taking a break from the relationship may be warranted – when work, school or family demands are so high that you simply don’t have the capacity to handle the responsibilities of also maintaining a relationship, for example. Those are times when it’s feasible to pick things up when s--t has settled down and you have the time and bandwidth again.

But I don’t think anyone can say “OK, you’ve got two months to solve all your long-standing self-esteem issues” and honestly think that this is a reasonable request or timeframe. I hate to say it, but I think this was him trying to backdoor his way out of the relationship without feeling like the bad guy for doing so.

But let’s be honest, I’m kind of stalling here because these are the sorts of questions I really hate answering, because I know my answer is going to contribute to a heart that’s already breaking.

Here’s the thing… while I think he shouldn’t have proposed that this was “a break”, I also think he’s not entirely wrong. You aren’t going to resolve those issues if you’re doing it for him. I think you’d reach a point where you think you’ve solved them… but what you will have actually done is gotten better at masking them or trying to pretend they aren’t there. And all that would happen is that you’ve pushed them down and compressed them. And like all contents under pressure, they will be building in intensity until containment fails, messily and all over the place.

This is why I think you were feeling ok about things when it was just “a break”; I think you were engaging with the appearance of making progress, in the same way that throwing clutter into the closet and under the bed gives the appearance of having cleaned one’s room. It’s quick, it’s easy, and for a little while you can pretend that you accomplished something instead of just putting it off… and at some point, you were going to find that your room’s a disaster area again except worse because you also have to deal with all the stuff you shoved out of sight, too.

Which really sucks because that feeling of “whew, did it” is real. But there’s always the part of you that knows that at some point you’re going to have to eventually deal with the mess; you just pushed that time it a little further down the road.

Now, however, you’re in a position where you don’t have that sense of “I just need my room clean enough to pass inspection and we’re back to it”. Now you really need to do the work, because, well, because there’s no going back. And I think the reason why you are struggling is because you’re still holding onto the hope that this is a temporary thing, a break in all but name. A little longer than you’d prefer, but surely just a matter of time.

I mean, you’re still thinking of it in terms of the time investment before he’ll take you back – like how he’d been broken up with his ex for six months before they got back together. And that right there is the problem: as long as you’re seeing this as “how long until we’re back together”, you’re not going to make real progress. It’ll be for the sake of fixing the relationship, not for improving yourself. You’ll be looking at the calendar more than you’ll be looking inward and saying “ok, how’s my progress?” And it’s very easy to convince yourself you’ve made more progress than you actually have. It’s a little like Luke abandoning his training on Dagobah; he wanted it done ASAP and he convinced himself that he was ready before he was. It was as much motivated reasoning as it was impatience, and it nearly made things infinitely worse for the Rebellion.

So as much as it sucks, and as much as I hate to say it like this… your way forward is to let go of getting back together with him. As long as restarting the relationship is your goal, I think you’re going to be more focused on that and not the difficult work of digging into your feelings and limiting beliefs and traumas. It’ll be about what your ex will find acceptable, not actually healing the wounds you’re carrying around. So I think you have to accept – really accept – that it’s over between the two of you. That you could do all the hard work, build yourself back up, really deal with these issues… and at the end, he won’t be there. It’ll just be you – happier, healthier, more secure and confident in yourself, ready to meet someone and have the sort of secure, loving relationship you want and deserve.

I hesitate to even say “well, and if the two of you are still right for each other, you’ll be able to circle back around and start over,” because I know from personal experience how quickly that goes from “could” to “will”, simply because that puts you right back at “I’m doing it for someone else, not for me”.

So, I think you have to accept that this break up was final, that this relationship ended. I think holding out hope in this case is going to end up being counterproductive and get in the way of the progress you make, because it won’t be you becoming your best self. It’ll be the self you think you need to be for him, and that’s not the same thing.

Any relationship you have going forward, whether platonic or romantic, isn’t going to be a continuation of this one. It will be new and with a different person, in no small part because you will be a different person.

Let him go. Close the book on this relationship. It will be hard. It will hurt. A lot. But it’s the sort of pain that cleanses, the kind that comes at the beginning of the healing process. And when you come out the other side… I think you’ll be surprised at how you feel about this.

Good luck

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