Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Hi Doc,
I’m asking this genuinely, and I hope for an equally thoughtful answer; how do I come to accept that I will never be desired or loved by a woman?
Like a lot of young men, I struggled with a lot of life’s early challenges, and finding my way through it all. College was the turning point. I pushed myself to get out more, try new activities, and become more socially engaged. I started therapy, and have done this for many years now. I did all of this for myself, but there was certainly a hope along the way that I would become someone that women would want to date. For the time that I was still a student, I obsessed over clothes, fragrances, and I picked up hobbies that weren’t authentically mine, just because I thought they might increase my chances of meeting someone. It was all for nothing, romantically speaking. It didn’t matter how many nightclubs I went to, no one ever noticed me. It didn’t matter how many dating apps I joined or how much money I spent on them, because I still ended up with zero matches. I sought out a lot of advice – from friends, family, and the internet – tried just about everything that was suggested to me, and even hired a couple of dating coaches. Nothing.
Now in my mid-thirties, my life is objectively good. I’m stable and self-aware, overall in a much healthier place than I was in my twenties. I don’t see myself as a finished product, as no one ever is, but I genuinely believe I’m a decent man with something to offer. I have solid friendships, and the people around me often, with genuine enthusiasm, say that they think I’m a catch. It probably doesn’t hurt that I’ve grown into my looks over the years and gotten into much better physical shape as well.
Despite all that, I don’t receive romantic interest. I have never been on a date. I can talk to women easily, and I form positive, friendly relationships. I’m respected, liked, and included. I don’t have issues with being playful and creating tension. I meet a lot of women through the hobbies that I do. However, it’s consistently clear there’s no romantic or sexual spark on their side. That’s fine – attraction isn’t owed, and I don’t feel entitled to it. However, it feels obvious that I’m missing that one quality, that certain presence or energy, that makes a woman see a man as someone she’d want to sleep with or build a long-term relationship with. As I get older, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve missed my window to date women in their twenties. More and more, the people I meet are already in relationships, and those who aren’t often come with histories and responsibilities that I’m not prepared to take on, like raising someone else’s children. It also feels like certain experiences have simply passed me by. I’m never going to have that spontaneous story about meeting a woman at a bar on holiday and ending up hooking up. Those moments seem like they belonged to a chapter of life I somehow skipped.
I’m becoming a man I’m proud of, but not one that a woman would look at and think, “I want him”. I don’t want to ever feel like a second choice.
How do I reconcile that this is not in the cards for me?
Time’s Up
Well, you asked for a thoughtful reply, TU, but I don’t think it’s the one you’re hoping for.
I get variations of this question regularly, and they all tend to follow the same storyline, to the point that I could predict with 90% certainty what was going to come up as reasons why they’re doomed to be single forever. And frankly, it’s a question that I always scratch my head over why someone decided to send it to me.
What you’re asking for, TU, is just permission to do what you’ve already decided you want to do. This is fairly common. After all, there’s not really anything I’m going to tell you that you don’t already know, in terms of “reconciling that this is not in the cards”. There’s not really any reconciling to do here, after all, because what it’s asking for not just permission but validation, an Official Seal of You’re Fucked, so that you can decide that you’re satisfied with that decision.
That’s not only not what I do, but it’s also a way of seeking to avoid accepting that this is your choice. It’s a lot easier to wave off introspection by pointing at The Official Seal and say “well, nothing to be done, wrap it up” than it is to say that this is what you’ve chosen to do.
I’m always sympathetic to people’s struggles with dating – that’s the whole reason why I do this gig. But one of the things I find that’s important with regards to solving one’s dating issues is to understand precisely what you’re struggling with and why. That requires a willingness to examine your choices, your expectations, your goals and your reasons, and to do so honestly. And a lot of the time, it’s the last part that gets tricky. Some folks will balk at it, because it ends up revealing things that either they aren’t necessarily comfortable with or don’t like admitting.
And I get that. Ego can be a motherfucker sometimes. It can be especially rough when you’ve got just enough self-awareness to understand that the issue is “but what does this say about me?”, but still not be at the point where you’re willing to own it and work through it.
To be perfectly blunt, TU, there isn’t anything in your letter that suggests that there’s no hope for you and that the only option you have is to give up and get ready to die alone. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; there’re a number of things in your letter that suggest to me what the obstacles actually are. And frankly, they’re incredibly common – they’re all things I see come up regularly.
Now, the most obvious one is one that I think almost everyone who struggles with self-worth and dating goes through: you’re a square peg who has convinced himself that the problem is that you haven’t sanded off your corners enough to fit into a round hole. That is: you’re trying to force yourself to be someone else’s idea of what an attractive, desirable man should be. As you said yourself: obsessing with clothes, hobbies that you didn’t actually care about, going to clubs to meet people when you’re not necessarily a club guy… tale as old as time, honestly. I have been there, done that and had a minor breakdown because of it.
And – as so often is the case – you were making the classic mistake of trying to get the sizzle without the steak. It seems like the effort went into outward wrapping and very little focus on what’s under that wrapping.
Presentation makes a difference, sure. Personal style, especially as an expression of uniqueness and personality, counts for a lot and helps communicate important information about you. It allows you to craft a message in short hand about who you are. It can even make it easier for people to want to strike up a conversation with you by giving them a starting point.
But it’s not going to do the work for you. Not when it’s not who you are, and not if you don’t have the substance to go with the style.
Like a lot of people who’ve talked about their struggles with dating, the problems you focused on are all surface when the actual issues go deeper. Trying to avoid the risk of rejection by hoping other people would approach you is entirely surface, because approach anxiety is ultimately about you. It’s about how you feel about yourself. The fear is entirely about whether or not you have anything of substance for someone to be interested in. If you don’t believe in your own value, if you don’t think there’s enough about you that someone would like or inspire them to want to spend time with you, then it’s entirely understandable why you would be afraid to make a move. You’ve functionally pre-rejected yourself, simply because you don’t think that interest is possible.
This is why people get hung up on getting other people to make a move, or looking for obvious and unmistakable signs of interest. It’s the hope that they will have invested in you already and thus assuage the fear that they’re going to say “enh, no thanks” when they meet you.
This is why focusing on where to go to meet people is often a secondary concern. All of the opportunities to meet people in the world don’t matter if you don’t actually take advantage of them. You can be in a room full of people who are single and actively looking to mingle, but if you’re busy holding up the wall with your back and not actually talking to folks, it’s not going to matter.
It’s especially not going to matter if the place you’re hoping to meet people is a venue like a club or bar. These tend to be places where it’s already difficult to make a serious connection, and that initial notice or interest tends to be very, very shallow. Initial attraction based strictly on appearance doesn’t last very long, nor does it tend to go anywhere if there isn’t anything to back it up. Even for someone who’s just looking for something short-term or casual – wanting to hook up that night – there’s always got to be substance to go with the style that says “this would be worth it.”
This is why looks matter less than people give them credit for; it may create an initial interest, but you also have to have the social skills to make connections. This is going to be true, regardless of whether you’re making the first move or someone else is. It doesn’t matter if someone else approaches you first if you can’t connect with them and give them reason to keep talking to you or to want to go home with you later.
Without that sense of self-worth and social ability, no amount of coaching or advice from friends or family is going to make a meaningful difference; you’re building on a foundation of sand. You have to know what you’re worth and be willing to go out and get what you’re worth, rather than hoping that you’ll get something that will “prove” or give you value.
Which brings up another important, but related issue: what, precisely, do you think “genuine romantic interest” or “that spark” looks like? More often than not, what people who say “I never get that sign of interest”, what they often mean is something so exaggerated or so obvious that they can’t rationalize it away. They want a moment that almost only ever shows up in fiction, because, again, they’re hoping for insurance against rejection.
But this ties right back into that sense of self-worth; if you don’t believe it, you’re not going to see it. Your brain is going to elide over signs of interest from people because you don’t believe it’s possible. And doubly so if it’s coming from someone you don’t necessarily find attractive. You will, however, find plenty of moments where you think someone looking away is trying to avoid your eyes (as opposed to trying to not get caught looking) or turning away because how dare you even think you have a chance as opposed to “just happens to be turning around at that moment”. So, unless and until you run into someone who is giving a response that would seem over the top in porn, you’re going to find a lot of signs of non-interest.
Related to this are the ways that you’re shutting down options without actually thinking about why. Why, for example, is it so important that you date “women in their 20s” that you feel like missing your window is such a tragedy? And – importantly – do you have a reason that isn’t about your ego and didn’t come from redpill subreddits or grievance-peddling slapdicks on TikTok who talk about women “hitting the wall” at 28? What, precisely, do you think you’re missing out on that you can’t do in your 30s or 40s?
Some of this is obvious validation-seeking – you want to see yourself as the kind of person who does get a spontaneous holiday hook-up. But leaving aside that there isn’t an age limit to this, it doesn’t seem like you’ve asked the question of why this is important to you. It’s not as though everyone but you is going out on tropical vacays and hooking up over Mai Tais or après ski Irish coffees. Nor, for that matter do people who don’t have those experiences – and that covers a metric fuckton of the general population – see that as being a tragedy, any more than they see it as a tragedy that they were never won Olympic gold or played for the Knicks.
Not every dream is one that gets fulfilled, but that doesn’t mean it’s a tragedy. Some dreams are just that: dreams. They’re fantasies, things we like thinking about, but not necessarily ones that we want to make happen in real life. Their importance and relevance to our lives is directly related to our age and priorities; as we grow and mature and change, our priorities change and so do our dreams. The dreams we have as teenagers are often incredibly out of sync for who we are in or 20s, and the dreams of our 20s tend to be very different than the dreams of our 30s and so on.
But just as importantly, is the question of whether you’ve even tried to fulfill those dreams in the first place, or if they’re idle fantasies whose fulfilment would require it being dropped in our laps.
This sounds far more like you’re wanting an experience you see in movies, without considering you’re even the sort of person who does those things. I mean, if you’re not someone who’s talking to, and flirting with, strangers at bars now, then you’re not going to magically become that person just because you crossed state lines. The issue isn’t that you need to go somewhere else to have a sexy adventure, it’s that you’re not setting yourself up for sexy adventures, period. This is partially because you don’t believe in your own sexual desirability, and partially because you’ve created weird artificial restrictions on it. I don’t know how to tell you this but people in their 30s, 40s and 50s do hook up on vacation when the opportunities arise. There are entire subgenres of movies, TV shows and novels for women that are precisely about this.
In fact, they’re often more likely to do so, in no small part because women in their 30s and up tend to have gotten over a lot of bullshit that clung to them in their 20s. The whole reason why women supposedly hit their sexual peak later in life has less to do with biology and everything to do with finally losing their last fuck and deciding to live life on their terms.
(And to forestall the objection I see you and others typing: leaving aside that it’s no different than fantasies of older men banging the babysitter or the undergrads they’re teaching, no, it’s not all “cougars hooking up with younger men”. In fact, a sizable majority of them involve them finally finding someone their own age who’s worth having a fling with.)
However, you’ve created obstacles and objections out of whole cloth that ultimately serve to justify not even trying. The fear that you’re going to be saddled with “raising someone else’s children”, for example, isn’t just putting the cart before the horse, you don’t even have a cart, never mind the horse. First and foremost: there’s so much ignorance and anxiety here that it’s kind of telling. We can leave aside that not everyone is going to have kids, but also you seem to think that all divorced or single mothers are stuck raising kids by themselves and are trying to find a replacement father figure to slot in. What you’re far more likely to find are people who are co-parenting with their exes, who may not have primary custody or who share custody with the father of their children.
Just as importantly though, is that you’re also assuming that single mothers don’t want to just date or hook-up. Having kids doesn’t mean that you also don’t want to get absolutely railed or have a social life, or just a casual relationship with someone who isn’t necessarily going to be your long-term partner.
But even if they’re looking for a long-term, committed relationship… well, you would have a while before their children will be as present as you seem to think. Trust me, my guy, single mothers aren’t sitting there plotting how they’re going to snag a new father, nor are you going to go on date 2 and discover that you’re stuck on babysitting duty. If – and this is a mighty big if– you were dating someone who already has kids and they are at all responsible as parents, the odds are that it will be a very long time before you even meet their children.
And that’s all hinging on the fact that you don’t have to date single mothers. Bringing it up at all as a thing you have to deal with is just inventing trouble that you aren’t even facing.
You should also dig a little into precisely what “histories” you’re worried about having to deal with. If the issue is “they’ll have had more relationships or more sex than me”, then I would suggest that this is very much a you issue that goes – once again – straight back to your sense of self-worth and value. If you’re worried about her having people to compare you to… well, good luck dating, period. You’ll have created a next-to-impossible requirement and one that – paradoxically – would become far less important if you weren’t so sure that you’re doomed to be someone’s “second choice”. Which is somewhat ironic because right now, you’re not ranking as a choice at all…
And that’s because you’re not in the running in the first place. What I’m seeing here are half-hearted efforts that are ultimately patch-jobs instead of working on the fundamentals. I see a lot of hoping other people will do the hard work for you and relieve you of your fears about your desirability instead of trying to find your own sense of value and worth in yourself. I see a lot of passivity and half-hearted gestures that you can then point to and say “well, I tried, time to give up”. And yes, I’m including the dating apps in this; I’m not going to repeat what I have written over and over again about the flaws about dating apps, so I will just say that dating apps are shitty measures of anything other than whether you’re any good at making dating app profiles. That’s it.
None of what you’re lamenting is inevitable, and all of it is fixable. But to fix it, first you have to actually want to fix it, and second, you have to work at it. And it’s going to be the sort of work that may seem tedious, uncomfortable and often pointless at first – getting comfortable with expressing yourself, being willing to make mistakes and get rejected, learning how to love yourself and see yourself as valued and even sexy, without relying on other people’s validation first. It’s going to require adjusting your expectations, questioning why certain outcomes or results are so important to you and whether it’s even what you want. Especially if, for example, you’ve created standards about who you could date or be attracted to that are so stringent that you may as well ask for a pot of gold while you’re wishing.
It’s also going to require that you be willing to let go of self-limiting beliefs, including those dreams and fantasies that only serve to hold you back. And yes, if the dream is a tragedy that means your life will be worth less if it never happens, then it’s holding you back. It’s just another way of kicking yourself in the nuts and telling yourself that life’s just unfair.
And here’s the wild thing: doing that work will ultimately mean that you’re living a life you’re satisfied with, with people who love and care for you, interests and work that has meaning for you and a community you participate in. All of which will make the times when you’re single and don’t want to be that much less of a trial for you. Ironically, when the love of your life is the love of your life, that makes it much more likely to find someone who’ll want to be part of that life.
If you want to give up, my guy, that’s your call. You are fully capable of deciding that you don’t want to keep trying, that you don’t think that it’s worth putting in more time or effort or examining your goals and motivations. If that’s how you feel, that’s up to you. But at least own that you’re the one choosing to give up and why.
