Estimated reading time: 19 minutes
Hello Doc,
I’m not really sure how to start with my question here. Basically, I’m a 25-year-old man, going to be 26 soon, and I haven’t had a real long-term romantic relationship since when I was in college before the pandemic. In that time, I’ve switched majors, changed schools, moved states to help my parents settle in to a new home, moved back to my home state, got my first degree, got employed, got a Master’s, and am now currently job-hunting for a position that will help me receive a certification that is required for another certification that will help me advance my career.
I make 21,000 a year currently and am set to make less initially after switching jobs, but with that certification I can potentially make six figures. I have been job-hunting for three months, have filed over 100 applications, been through about a dozen interviews, and have not yet been hired. The main issue is that I don’t have this one specific certification that is difficult to acquire unless you’re hired by a company that will help you get it (basically a catch-22 type thing). I live with my mother and I don’t pay rent; still, I buy all the food and I put most of the money I make towards my student loans + car payment. Plus, they spend half the year in Florida so I have the house (mostly) to myself during that time. To get my certification, I will either need to retake several classes or spend significant money on a different program that will still take months to achieve.
All that to say, I have really just been focusing on myself for the last 5 years. I still really don’t have a whole lot to show for it and I will only be making a decent amount of money in 2-3 years after I get those two certifications. I cannot move out due to rent in my area being prohibitively expensive – the cheapest apartments are 2,000 a month. I am also five foot seven and losing my hair, though I’m on medication for that, I don’t think looks are my main issue. Despite all this I still want to try and date, as my ultimate end goal in life is to get married and have children someday.
I guess what I’m really struggling with is how to get back into dating after such a long break. The expectations are a lot different from when I was in college (only making 21,000 a year is a hard sell when I’m trying to find a woman to buy a house and have kids with) and I am not naturally meeting new people like I used to. Here is what I have tried so far:
* I have been on and off dating apps since I was eighteen and have never gotten a single real date off of any of them.
* My aunt signed me up for a professional matchmaking service two years ago and I have not gotten a date from that either.
* I have already asked my sister to set me up with any friends but she does not have any who are interested in me.
* I have tried church but the women there are either uninterested, older than I am, or already married.
* In-person approaches (bars, parties, etcetera) have failed.
My “public-facing” hobbies are mostly male-oriented (TCGs, TTRPGs) so I can’t really meet women doing them. (Women do come but they are usually already partnered. I have made friends but it hasn’t proven conducive to actually finding a partner at this point. I’m not particularly close with any of them at this point so asking them to set me up with any single friends they may have would just kind of be awkward.) Aside from those hobbies I spend most of my time reading. I have considered joining a book club but most of the ones in my area are women-only or only meet online, which does not seem very helpful in finding a partner.
I guess my question is, is it worth bothering trying to date with the position I’m in currently, or should I just dedicate my time to improving myself more? I think I will have an easier time of all of this relationship stuff when I’m thirty, out of the house, and more well-off in my career, but also, I really don’t want to wait that long to have a girlfriend again, I’m kind of going insane here.
Are there any other things you think I could try and do? I’ve considered doing stand-up comedy. I know you suggest this to everyone but I really don’t want to do salsa dancing, so anything non-salsa dancing-related would be good. I’m open to any suggestions but that.
Thanks for your time.
Full Of Potential
FoP, I’m going to level with you: you spend a lot of time laying out info that I ultimately edited out because very little of it was actually relevant. I realize it all seems important to you, but it’s demonstrating an important issue here: you – like a lot of men in similar circumstances – are focusing on all the wrong things if you’re hoping to find a relationship.
Case in point: your salary, living in your parents’ house and your career ambitions are all important to you. However, they’re far less important when it comes to actually meeting women. They matter in as much as you see them as impediments, but the fact is that those are your concerns, not the concerns women have about potential partners. Your problem is that you’re so zeroed in on them that you’re not seeing what you actually need to work on. Most of what you’re thinking of isn’t just putting the cart before the horse, you don’t even have a horse to put the cart before.
Your biggest impediment right now, for example, isn’t the fact that you (currently) only make 21k a year. Yeah, that would make it a challenge to raise a family; people do, and do so successfully, but it’s a serious challenge. However, unless you plan on getting married within months of meeting someone, that’s not something you need to worry about yet. This is you putting unnecessary obstacles in your path, especially if you are on the path to a significant pay bump in the near future. Women aren’t looking for someone who’s going to sweep them off their feet and immediately keep them in a lifestyle to which they intend to become accustomed; they just want to date someone who’s not going to be a drain on their finances, credit rating or time. If you’re at all responsible with money, living within your means and staying up on your monthly expenses, you’re clearing the bar just fine. You’re demonstrating that you’re a responsible adult, rather than a potential leech. The fact that you have a clear and well-established path to advancing in your career (and thus financial security) is a plus, not a prerequisite.
Similarly, your biggest impediment isn’t even the question of whether you have the time to fit a relationship into your life. Don’t get me wrong: this is an obstacle. A lot of people don’t consider how much time is invested in not just meeting people or getting dates, but in actually maintaining a relationship. The investment of time and energy needed to get an advanced degree – including the certification courses you need to take – can be immense. This can strain even pre-existing relationships of long-standing. Trying to start a relationship just as you’re returning to complete your education can make it even more difficult. But again, this is getting ahead of yourself.
No, your biggest impediment is very simple: do you have the skills to meet someone? Do you have qualities – besides looks or money – that would make you a good partner for someone? Do you know what you bring to the metaphorical table and why someone would value those qualities? Because right now, it sounds like you don’t. This is where you want to invest your time and energy, whether you’re actively seeking out a relationship or not. You’re not going to have an easier time when you hit 30 if you’ve neglected developing your social skills in exchange for career and financial development instead. You may have a nice bank balance and apartment, but that’s not going to help if you can’t talk to women or get them to like you.
This tends to be a blind-spot that a lot of guys, especially guys your age, fall into. They focus on the aspects they think that women want, and assume that these are all self-executing. When they’re working on self-improvement, they tend to be working from a mindset that if they get the right body, the right hair, the right clothes, job or hobby, then the rest will fall into place for them with minimal effort on their part. Then, months or years later, I’m getting letters about why they have everything women want but they’re still single.
It’s Underwear Gnome logic – first step, get a six-figure job; second step, ???; third step, girlfriend! But the fact of the matter is that there is no level of abs, teeth or bank balance that make up for a lack of social skills, nor for a lack of initiative.
A relationship requires a proper foundation in order to work, but that foundation isn’t your bank account or career path. It’s in having the things that make you a good partner to someone – things like kindness, personal warmth, agreeability, shared values, ambitions and interests, emotional intelligence, communication skills, generosity, mutual affection and mutual respect. These are all about how you make people feel, rather than what you can provide. Women aren’t looking for someone to pay their bills, they’re looking for someone they want to spend their time with. Someone who makes them feel good when they’re together, the person they would want to be with, even when they’re both dealing with the Venusian Death Flu and hacking up viscous green goo that looks like it should be demanding to be taken to their leader.
That is the foundation of a strong relationship and the skills you should be working on cultivating. It doesn’t matter what your career prospects are if there’s no there, there. No method of meeting women – dating apps, matchmakers, asking to be set up – is going to make a difference if you don’t have the foundation that will make people want to spend time with you.
So my suggestion would be to stop focusing on getting dates and instead to focus on being social and building relationships – ones that aren’t just about finding someone who’s marriage material. Case in point: you’ve got casual friends in your hobby spaces, but you aren’t particularly close with them. Well, there’s your starting point – strengthening your friendships with them, presumably you actually like them.
You’ve dismissed other options as seeming to be less than ideal for meeting women. But if you take “a place to find dates” off the table, do they become more appealing, or do they stay the same? The book clubs could be a great time and a place to make friends (not dates, friends)… if it’s something you want to do for its own sake. If not, then all it’s going to be is a drain on your time and resources, and you’ll start to resent going.
The same applies to doing stand-up. Do you want to do stand-up comedy? Is this something you’d pursue, even if it weren’t I the name of self-development and meeting women? If so, then by all means, go for it! But if it’s just about trying to hit imaginary pre-reqs, then again, it’s going to be a waste of your time, money and energy… and frankly, it doesn’t sound like you’ve got a lot of free time to waste.
Now, if you want to incorporate personal development into this, you certainly can. The key, then, is to look at what aspects you want to work on and how you could develop them while also meeting your primary goal of being good company.
Partnered dancing, for example, is an area where you can reap a multitude of benefits. On a social level, a man who can dance and wants to dance is a man who will be in demand, whether at a dance hall, a party or a wedding. On a practical level, it’s a great way to learn to be more confident in your body and in being physical with others. Whether you’re talking about ballroom, swing or Latin dancing, dancing with a partner requires strong non-verbal communication, awareness and control of your body. A good dancer needs to have the ability to pay attention to multiple different things at once, and to be comfortable with initiating and maintaining physical contact with another person. All of these help build and improve various aspects of yourself that come into play in connecting with and interacting with others, especially people you’re attracted to.
It’s also incredibly fun… and helping people have fun with you makes them like you.
Similarly, you could take classes in acting, improv or other performing arts and work on the courage and confidence to put yourself forward in front of strangers, how to influence the way people perceive you and be aware of the message that your posture, facial expression and vocal intonation send. It would also give you a creative outlet, and potentially help you make new friends. And – again – it can be incredibly enjoyable for you in the process.
Now, if it seems like I’m putting a lot of emphasis on making friends and social networks, rather than self-improvement or getting a girlfriend… well, that’s where you’re right. Because here’s the thing: the skills for making friends and getting dates are exactly the same. You’re meeting strangers, connecting with them, finding commonalities, spending your time, sharing experiences and building emotional intimacy. The better you are at making friends and meeting people, the better you’ll be at finding someone you want to build a life with.
And like all skills, these are skills that are developed and honed by deliberate practice. Unlike many aspects in life, the credits absolutely transfer; if you are capable of talking to a stranger and becoming friends, you’re fully capable of talking to some baddie and getting a date.
So do yourself a favor: put dating to the side for the moment and instead focus on building your soft skills. Make friends of all stripes – acquaintances and familiar faces to nod at, activity friends, drinking buddies, lifelong connections and sisters and brothers from other mothers. Live an interesting, well-rounded life that’s spent far more in the physical world than behind a screen. Have reasons to get up and attack the day that go beyond “have to go to work”.
Not only will it make you someone that people will want to date, it’ll give you the skills and the confidence that you need to meet those people and start something magical with them.
Good luck.
I’m 18, not currently in a relationship and still a virgin. Throughout my high school years I constantly heard my peers talk about their sex life, the guys they’re dating and more (which was ironic because I went to a very ‘traditional’ Christian high school. I’ve never felt ‘attracted’ to anyone sexually before and now that I think about, I’ve never really felt romantically attracted to anyone either. I was never the one being asked out on a date (privately or publicly).
To be fair, I’m not exactly attractive – I’ve never been attractive even when I tried, nor am I very intelligent (In school my marks averaged around Cs – As.) While I was never jealous of WHO my peers were dating, I was incredibly jealous of what they were doing. Having cute dates, the fun, the sex and a companion.
I have tried dating and all of my attempts either ended up horribly or didn’t go anywhere at all. It’s not like I don’t want sex It’s that I’ve never seem to find the right situation for it. I’m not looking for constant hookups – that life is just not for me, but sex every now and then sounds fun. I don’t want to wait for marriage either, I mean unless my partner is a virgin too because then by all means why not, because then we get to explore it together instead of just showing the other person what sex is like.
TL;DR: I’m 18 and a virgin, incredibly ashamed about it even though I want to experience it before marriage since I want sex between me and a partner to feel more than them just teaching me what sex is like.
Family Disappointment
Oh man, FD, you are so very young. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a judgement on you, but a simple observation: you’re making a lot of assumptions and proclamations based on so very little experience and insight and it’s reminding me of how certain I was about the world at that age. More importantly, it’s a reminder of how very wrong I was about how the world worked. And not to put too fine a point on it… you’re wrong in very similar ways.
Specifically, you’re running yourself down and denigrating yourself and you are absolutely wrong on all of it. To start with, grades aren’t a measure of intelligence, grades are a measure of how well you do in classes and tests. Some of the smartest people I know – people who are literal geniuses and, in many cases, credentialed experts in their fields – got horrible grades. Some were neurodivergent and didn’t do well in traditional classroom environments, some had test anxiety, some had personality clashes with their teachers and some were just bored.
But even allowing for all that, getting a range of C’s to A’s doesn’t imply that you’re not intelligent; if anything, it suggests you’re above average. But even if you were dead bang in the median, that’s not bad; it means that you are in the majority. You don’t need to be exceptionally smart to date, have sex, get married or have any kind of relationship you might want – stupid people do all of the above, all the time. Beating yourself up for not being Stephen Hawking is just a pointless exercise in self-abuse… and not the fun kind.
I’m also going to cock a skeptical eyebrow at your being unattractive. Guys – especially teenaged guys – are notoriously bad at gauging their own attractiveness; more often than not, they’re comparing themselves to someone who is professionally hot and then blaming themselves for not measuring up. If I had a nickel for every time I heard from someone who would swear that they looked like the bastard son of a muppet and the Toxic Avenger and they turned out to need a better haircut and a skin care regimen, I would be swimming through my money bin like Scrooge Mc-fucking Duck.
I’m also going to let you in on a secret: your peers aren’t having all that sex they’re telling you about. If they’re not rounding up significantly, they’re outright lying, making it up out of whole cloth. In fact, the vast majority of your peers are not having sex. At all. Teenaged boys, however, are prone to lying about sex, because they want to come across as cool and special. They want the status and social benefits from their peers that they think comes with having sex, and so they just make shit up.
But here’s the thing: the fact that you’re a virgin doesn’t matter. Being a virgin says literally nothing about you except that you haven’t had a particular experience yet. That’s it. Nothing about you being any better or worse than anyone else, nothing about being more desirable or less worthy, nothing about being more or less manly, mature or quite literally anything aside from Tab A has not gone into (or up against or…) Tab B. And quite frankly, this is something that you didn’t even care about until very recently. This was a non-issue for you, up until you were basically told to feel bad about it. This is more than a little like not being interested in soccer until two weeks ago and then being upset you haven’t been drafted to a team yet.
More importantly however, you’ve got a distorted about how sex works in a relationship. You’re assuming that you’re going to be the ‘lesser’ partner if you haven’t had sex based on nothing but your own supposition and schoolyard gossip. The reality is significantly different.
I mean, let’s start with the fact that you’re assuming that someone “showing you what sex is like” is a negative and not an incredibly common fantasy. There are a hell of a lot of people who love the idea of showing someone the ropes; there’s a reason why “Mrs. Robinson” still exists as a point of reference. But even if it’s not someone’s particular fantasy or fetish, there’re far more people who are entirely cool with being their partner’s first, rather than turned off or repulsed by it. Many, if not most, are neutral at worst about it.
But there’s also this idea that someone else being experienced means that they aren’t also learning what sex is like with someone new. Having sex with someone for the first time – whether you have never so much as held hands with someone or you’ve been putting up Wilt Chamberlin numbers – is always an exploration with them. You are both learning about one another: what you like, what they like, what works for you, what works for them, what absolutely doesn’t work and makes your skin crawl, what you might try and what you might need a few tequila wallbangers before being brave enough to attempt.
It’s going to be an exploration, because sex with each person is going to be different, because each person you’re having sex with will be different. What one makes one person start hitting high notes like an opera singer will make another person climb a wall and start hissing like a vampire confronted with a crucifix. The trick you know that made one person orgasm so hard they touch the face of God will make another person swear off human contact for months. Why? Because there’s no universal technique, no Dim (Petit) Mak that works on everyone. People aren’t robots or computer programs where the same inputs will get the same results. Everyone has their own little quirks, anatomical variations, fetishes, hard nos and absolute requirements, and no two are going to be exactly alike. Think of snowflakes, but ones made of clitorises, penises, vulvas, anuses, nipples, nerve clusters and energy meridians.
And then get another tequila wallbanger to try to wash the mental image out of your brain.
The point is that sex is as much in the brain as in the body. What makes sex good isn’t just knowing how to do the Swirly-Go-Round, the Transylvanian Twist or the Rusty Venture, it’s about connecting and communicating with your partner. It’s as much in the trust and security you feel with one another as it is in knowing how much pressure to apply and where.
Numbers don’t tell the complete story, in no small part because quantity doesn’t imply quality. A person who has slept with hundreds of people can still suck in bed, because they’re a selfish pork-face who’s functionally just masturbating using another person. Meanwhile, a person who has never done more than getting an underwater squeezer at Wasaga Beach can be the Orgasm King of Ontario because they’ve got hands, a tongue and a can-do attitude and they’re willing to listen to their partner without letting their ego get in the way.
All of which brings us back to the fact that you’re so very young, and this is the problem. You’re running yourself down based on nothing – no true experience, no true basis of comparison and just a lot of assumptions. The only purpose that any of this is serving is to make you feel bad about yourself for absolutely no reason. You’ve convinced yourself that there’s something shameful about you when there isn’t. The only thing your outlook is doing is serving to demotivate you and leave you feeling deficient and you are not.
Well, I’m here from the future to tell you: you are fine. You aren’t falling behind, you’re not a loser, you’re not doomed and you certainly aren’t freakish or weird, ugly or stupid. You’re an 18 year old with a riot of hormones surging through your body, trying to establish yourself as more than just the son of your parents and no experience in the world yet… the latest in a long and glorious lineage of everyone who has been 18 in the past or will be 18 in the future.
You are fine. Shit’s chaotic and scary and it feels like you don’t know things you should. I know, because I’ve been there, as have everyone who read this. Everyone feels like that, because life doesn’t have dress rehearsals or scripts. Everyone – including your parents – knows that we’re all just improvising as best we can.
You are fine.
You have nothing to feel ashamed of, nothing to apologize for and nothing to make up for. Don’t worry about what you haven’t done, don’t worry about how old you will be when you’ve done it. It will all sort itself out. The only thing you need to do is to do your best to live a good life… whatever that looks like to you.
You’ve got this, my guy. I promise.
All will be well.
