Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
I’m not sure if this is really a dating question or more of an existential one, but I suspect the two are connected.
For the past few months, I’ve been dating a woman I like very much. She had recently ended a long-term relationship, so we’ve been taking things slowly. So far things seem to be progressing well: we’ve gone on several dates, we’ve kissed, we’ve had meaningful conversations, and she has expressed that she enjoys spending time with me. Objectively, there isn’t much evidence that things are going badly.
The problem is what happens inside my own head.
I think about her almost constantly. If she takes a long time to reply, I struggle to focus on anything else. I don’t necessarily assume she’s losing interest, rationally I know she has a demanding job and a busy life but emotionally my mind starts imagining worst-case scenarios. I become almost unable to start other activities while waiting, even though I know that’s irrational.
This has made me realize that the issue probably isn’t her.
The deeper issue is that I don’t think I’ve ever developed goals or dreams that truly belonged to me.
Throughout my adult life, almost everything I’ve worked toward has ultimately been motivated by becoming someone worthy of love or admiration. My career, fitness, learning new skills, even many hobbies have often been driven by the hope that they would make me a more attractive partner someday.
I do have hobbies that I genuinely enjoy. I like photography, cycling, running, video games, movies, anime, traveling, and I’ve recently been trying to learn piano. I don’t fake enjoyment of those things.
But I’ve noticed a pattern.
When I’m not romantically interested in anyone, my life feels… fine. Not great, but manageable. I go to work, exercise consistently, spend time with friends, pursue my hobbies, and life moves forward. Underneath that, however, there’s usually a quiet feeling that something is missing.
Then someone comes along who genuinely excites me.
At first it feels wonderful, but eventually that person begins occupying an enormous amount of mental space. Suddenly everything else loses its emotional pull. My hobbies don’t feel as engaging. Work becomes something I do only because I have to. Even small tasks like organizing my photos, answering emails, reading a book, or practicing piano become surprisingly difficult because my mind keeps returning to her.
It’s not that I consciously choose to ignore my life.
It’s that my life suddenly feels like it’s on pause while my mind waits for certainty about the relationship.
This isn’t about dating scarcity, either.
I don’t have much trouble meeting women or getting dates, and I’ve had several opportunities to pursue relationships with genuinely kind, attractive, emotionally healthy people. In fact, I recently stopped seeing someone who showed very clear interest in me because I realized my feelings for this other woman were much stronger.
The challenge is that I’m also extremely selective. It’s rare for me to meet someone who combines physical attraction, shared values, emotional compatibility, intellectual curiosity, and the kind of chemistry that makes me genuinely excited to build a life together. When I do meet someone like that, I seem to lose emotional balance.
The strange part is that I don’t think what I feel is insecurity about being rejected. If this relationship ultimately doesn’t work out, I know I’ll survive. I’ve survived heartbreak before.
What scares me is something else.
I’m afraid that if this relationship works, I’ll just bury this problem for a few years or months until the honeymoon phase ends. And if it doesn’t work, eventually someone else will come along and trigger the exact same cycle.
It feels less like “I’m obsessed with this woman” and more like “I don’t know how to stay emotionally grounded when I genuinely fall for someone.”
For context, I’ve seen multiple psychologists and psychiatrists over the years. None of them believed I met the criteria for depression or another major psychiatric disorder.
I exercise almost every day, eat well, don’t drink, don’t use drugs, maintain close friendships, and have a stable, well-paying career. From the outside, my life looks healthy and functional.
Yet internally, I’ve struggled for years with a persistent feeling that I’m drifting through life rather than moving toward something that truly feels like my own. Romantic love has often been the only thing that gives me a strong sense of purpose, direction, and emotional intensity.
So I guess my question is this:
How do you build a life that feels meaningful in its own right, instead of one where romantic love becomes the center of gravity? And how do you learn to fall in love without unconsciously putting your own life on hold while waiting to find out whether the other person chooses you?
Empty Life, Dating Strife?
I think you’ve got a couple things going on, ELDS. It’s not unusual to get excited in the early days of a relationship and for that relationship to take a higher priority than other aspects of your life. During the first six months to a year, your body is firing off dopamine and oxytocin at your brain at elevated levels. It’s part of why new couples are so constantly horny for each other; it’s like a drug with an incredible high. You’re functionally getting high off being around her, and that gets especially pronounced during sexual contact. This, not surprisingly, tends to mean that you want to spend most of your time with your new sweetie, so it’s not such a surprise that one’s interests in one’s hobbies or non-fucking activities will start to wane for a while.
However, the level of intrusiveness of your thoughts about her, the almost obsessive levels of ecstasy when she’s responding to you but equally obsessive worry that either she’s losing interest or something has gone wrong sounds like limerence more than love. The way your excitement is all-encompassing not necessarily a surprise, considering that you’re still well within the early days of the relationship and the NRE is sparking… but the fact that this is a pattern for you suggests that there’s an underlying issue.
I suspect that at least some of the issue is trust. Specifically trust in yourself and that someone is going to see your value, and that they’re going to want to be with you. You know why she doesn’t get back to you on a rational level, but there’s still that part of you that thinks that there’s not enough there there in order to really get her to want to be with you. You don’t feel like the connection you have is secure and so you worry that it’s going to fall apart at a moment’s notice.
I think that ties into your general feeling of a lack of purpose in your life. You’re existing, but you feel like you’re not quite living, and so you throw yourself headlong into a relationship when it comes along. It excites you, it gives you focus and purpose in ways that your life otherwise lacks. But since you lack that purpose and passion in life without a relationship, the relationship itself takes on dreadful significance, and the risk of losing it means losing that sense of focus.
Of course, this creates its own problems – not the least of which being that nobody is signing up to be the primary focus of your life.
(If they are signing up for that… you should run screaming in the other direction, because that’s going to end very badly for someone. Probably you.)
Now, the answer is equally obvious, if not easy; you want to find things in your life that give your life meaning and purpose that aren’t your relationship. Something that you want to live for and accomplish, something that makes you feel like a part of something that’s bigger than you. You’ve got your hobbies, which is good, but those aren’t filling that particular need. I think it would help to look at something a little more outwardly focused and that feels like you’re actually accomplishing something or doing something significant.
Fortunately, right now there’s a whole host of options. The midterms are coming up, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that this year’s election is going to drastically shape the future of this country. Your candidate for the House or Senate will welcome your support with open arms and will give you more to do than you would believe possible.
But you might also want to consider looking a little closer to home and getting involved at the local level. This may mean volunteering with an organization focused on a particular issue – working at an animal shelter, fighting back against data centers, protecting civil rights, or taking care of the unhoused and the hungry. It may mean joining your local co-op and offering your support there, building something that’s made by and for the community. Or you might want to be more involved in civic government in general; most of the time, the decisions that affect your life on the local level are being made by the people who bother to show up. If there are issues in your home town that never seem to get resolved, it may be time for you to be the person to step up and say “hey… what the fuck?”
The benefit of finding something to give your time to – besides making life better for the people in your community – is that you feel like you’re actually doing something significant. That you’re doing something that not only materially affects the world, but that shows that you make a difference. Your actions mean that you’re a net-positive to the world, someone who has made life just a little brighter and a little better, in ways that it wouldn’t be if you hadn’t stepped up.
That tends to go a long way towards building not just your sense of self-worth, but building a sense of balance in your life. You have something that drives you, so you don’t just throw yourself into the relationship and then let the vagaries of the early days of courtship drive you to distraction.
Having something that gives your life purpose and meaning and makes you feel like you’re making a positive difference is going to make you feel amazing. And the fact that you’re doing things that make you feel like you have a purpose will add some extra flavor to when you do indulge in your books or your other hobbies. They won’t feel like distractions or ways to fill the empty hours, but something you can allow yourself to savor and enjoy, rather than feeling like empty emotional calories that are just there to make you stop feeling empty.
And hey: having those extra responsibilities will mean that if you have time to count the minutes since your sweetie last texted, you’ve got time to work on some of the other projects that you’ve been putting off.
Good luck.
Hi,
I’m currently in a predicament that I don’t recall ever seeing on your blog. I’m 35M in the USA, had a lot of successes on OLD for several years but struggled to find anything with much longevity. Fast forward to a few months ago, I matched with an au pair from Colombia on FB Dating of all places. Long story short we hit it off really well and we became exclusive after 3 weeks of dating. Then life threw us a massive curveball when her host family had to leave her program and she quickly had to find a new one or face being kicked out of the country. She matched with a family on the west coast and promptly moved out there.
Before she left, we both said we love each other and we’d been having sex. Since then, it’s been regular video calls, texting every day, sending each other gifts, LDR stuff. This is my first actual relationship and to be honest, a LDR really isn’t what I wanted, but this got cut short so quickly that there’s no way that I’m letting her go.
I have concerns about our future and I have no idea what to do.
- She wants to have children and I do not. We’ve both been clear about this from very early on. She also says that she only wants me and doesn’t want another man. I’m struggling to reconcile this. She would be a terrific mother and I don’t want to take that away from her.
- Her program ends in a couple months and neither one of us knows if the government is going to allow her more time to change her status. I have no faith in the system to allow her that, but I hope I’m wrong. If she has to return to Colombia or potentially go to Spain if she can save the money, idk if I can maintain a LDR over that distance. She’s been on the West Coast for over 2 months and we’ve spent far more time apart than together. Long video calls are really draining for me in a way that in person interaction isn’t. And I really don’t like doing sex things over video calls but I also don’t want to disappoint her by saying no.
I love her though, does this mean that if I can’t overcome these barriers, that I don’t love her enough? We can’t make any future plans because we have no idea what that even looks like.
Dates of Futures Past
Let’s get one thing clear, just off the bat: the poets lied to us all. The intensity, sincerity or depth of your feelings for a person don’t magically overcome all obstacles, nor do they make it easy to do so. You can love someone with all your heart and soul, but that doesn’t make systematic barriers fall away, nor does it make it easier to endure the trials and tribulations that you may encounter. To quote the sage: “All this ‘love is the greatest magic of all;’ so, in a war, a mother and her children get fucking iced in an alleyway outside of their home, was the problem they didn’t love each other enough?”
(This is, incidentally, why stuff like The Secret sets me into a rage; if you’re going to tell me that my father died because he didn’t want to overcome cancer badly enough, I’m going to test the theory that you don’t want to NOT be punched in the face badly enough to have it not happen…)
People can love each other with mad intensity, and the relationship can still end, simply because the obstacles are bigger than what two people can overcome by themselves. Such as, for example, an administration that’s so screamingly racist and nativist that they’re breaking laws and committing atrocities in the name of removing migrants – documented and undocumented – from the body of the nation. Love, by itself, isn’t going to make that not happen, on the individual or systematic level.
I bring this up because the first thing that you need to do is recognize that asking “does this mean I don’t love her enough” is just the act of raising back the mallet that you’re about to slam into your nuts. It’s laying out the tool that you’re going to beat yourself with if this relationship comes to an end.
Let me be absolutely clear: relationships can end without it being anyone’s fault. If the distance is too great or the system so corrupt that even the laws are being violated with impunity by the agents that are supposed to uphold and execute them, that’s not a fault of yours, and it’s not an indication that you didn’t love them enough. Framing this the way that you have is just preemptively blaming yourself for not having infinite resources and time, which is profoundly unfair to yourself and to your partner.
And I am not going to lie: this is going to be a challenging relationship because of your circumstances.
Long distance is hard under the best of circumstances, and many relationships end because of it. It can be managed, but it takes a significant level of effort and resources to make things work, especially if you have a hard time keeping your connection strong over video calls and text, rather than in person. Long distance relationships tend to work best when you know that there’s a point where it will stop being long-distance; it’s easier to hold on when you know you won’t be having to hold on forever.
If your partner does have to leave the US when her program ends… well, that’s going to mean that you’re going to have to make some choices. One of those may mean either waiting (or actively campaigning towards) for a political sea-change, for a reckoning for the forces at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the rogue agencies and agents under their remit, alongside a different national immigration policy. Or it may mean looking into the possibility of being a digital nomad and being an ex-pat, so that you can live in the same country as your partner.
Or it may mean recognizing that this is going to be the end of your relationship until things do change enough that you can be together again.
Part of having a relationship is about making compromises, finding work arounds and making hard choices. Sometimes that means figuring out how to make things work and recognizing that you’re going to be making the decision of “Which option sucks the least?” Sometimes that entails finding one
Now here’s the part that you’re not going to want to hear.
As much I hate to be the one to say this, your relationship would still be a challenge without the very legitimate worry that your partner is going to have to leave the county. That’s going to be hard enough without taking into consideration that you also have a pretty significant conflict built into the relationship… one that you can’t work around or find a compromise on.
You don’t want to have children. She absolutely does. There’s not really a way to compromise on the issue. You can’t test-drive having a kid to see how it goes. Having children is a binary; you have them or you don’t. One of you will have to give in on this in the end, and while having a child doesn’t mean that you have to be a parent… it does, at the very least, mean that you’re going to be involved in some degree for 18 years at the minimum.
I’m going to be real: this is a lot. And it’s a lot that you couldn’t have planned for, accounted for or avoided, simply because sometimes life is a series of shitstorms in sequence. If this ends up being too much, or the relationship can’t work because of all the challenges you’re facing, that’s not a sign of weakness, that you’ve done anything wrong, or that you didn’t care enough to overcome them. It’s not on you, it’s not on her. There’s no good guy or bad guy and if anybody’s at fault, it’s ultimately the goons that are trying to speed-run Mussolini’s greatest hits.
I said before that you’re going to have choices to make. Well, there’s one you can make now. You are facing a very hard road, and one that may mean that this relationship may end sooner than you would prefer.
The choice you have is that you can focus on what may be the end of your relationship, or you can focus on enjoying what you have now. I would recommend the latter, rather than risking missing it because you were too busy looking at where things may be going. The last thing you want is to lose out on time you could’ve had because you were so focused on what you were losing.
If you want my advice: do your best to make the long distance work. If video and texting is stressful and harder to deal with, then I would recommend going to see her in person as often as you can reasonably afford to. Making the most of the time you have is always going to be better in the long run than lamenting what you don’t have. And if, in the end, what you have are memories of the times you had together… well, for my money, the best thing you can do is make as many good ones as you can.
Just remember: not every love story is going to be an epic poem, nor are they all meant to be. Sometimes, a love story is just as special and significant because it’s a short story. The quality or significance isn’t found in its length or duration; it’s in what you do while you have it and how it changes you and stays with you when it’s over.
All will be well.
