Estimated reading time: 21 minutes
Hello Doc,
I’ve been a long-time reader, and I was wondering if you could help me with an issue I’ve been conflicted with for a long time. So in 2024, I joined a church, and they have a young adults group. Since joining the group, I have met the best people, period. I feel like they genuinely like me. Recently I sprained my ankle, and people have reached out to me asking me how I was doing. The men in the group had a bowling event yesterday, and the group leader reached out to me and asked if I wanted to go. When I told him I can’t drive and don’t want to make the sprain worse, he offered to drive me there. How could I refuse? Even though I didn’t bowl, I had a very fun time, just spending time with them. When I made plans to go to the boardwalk on a warm Friday this April with the group and pitched the idea, another group leader actually made it happen; a lot of people came, and we had a great time. Prior to meeting this group, I was struggling for years to find my community, probably because I was too passive, had low self-esteem, and had intense feelings of depression (was never officially diagnosed.) This community has been very positive for my mental health because they build each other up and are always volunteering, which is very rare in our society. It’s hard to find people nowadays that aren’t completely self-absorbed, don’t have zero social etiquette, and aren’t obsessed with TikTok.
Normally this would be where the story ends, a happily ever after. However, there has been a simmering frustration that I have felt over the years, and that is, the group has mostly been the same people, and I’m not attracted to any of the women there. One of my hopes for the groups when I joined was two things: to find community and to get a girlfriend. The first thing happened, but the second has not. The people in my group don’t appear to have large social connections; however, I could be wrong about that. A lot of people left the group since I’ve been there, presumably because they found or are seeking larger social circles or are just busy with life. One of my friends that I met at the group is looking at other churches to expand her social network and to find a church that she vibes better with. Even outside of the young adults group, I keep seeing familiar faces, and it’s a medium-sized church. My mother keeps telling me repeatedly to stay with the church and keep building relationships with the people there by being more active in the church. Unfortunately, I have to work most Sundays, and by the time I’m finished, all the services are over, so I have to rely on events where I haven’t been able to develop strong relationships outside of church service.
My plan for this year is to finally get a girlfriend by the end of the year. I’ve never been truly active on the dating scene because I was waiting until I was in a good place in my life to be a good provider, and now I am. I’ve dabbled with online dating but never had any success with it. So, I have decided to delete the apps for good and meet people IRL. People at my job like me platonically, and I have been described by many people throughout my life as handsome. I will admit that being considered handsome doesn’t mean anything. The reason I’m writing this in the first place is because I feel like I need to leave my current group for an indefinite amount of time and come back once I get a girlfriend. By leaving the group and starting over, I’ll force myself out of my comfort zone so that I work even harder towards my goal. Right now I feel like I’m too comfortable where I’m at, which is why only now have I decided to truly put myself out there. But I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. I have such a hard time leaving because they are currently my only group of friends and are great people. But forcing myself out of my comfort zone is the only way I can get a girlfriend this year. I have been there for long enough to realize that I will never meet anyone there.
I want to achieve my goal for getting a girlfriend by investing in as many passions and hobbies as I can that are popular with young adults and focus on meeting people that I’m attracted to and people that are part of a large social network so that I increase my chances of being introduced to someone and not hitting a dead end. I define “dead end” as a scenario where I’m surrounded by people that don’t have big social networks. For example, last year I went to three meetups with a social group outside of the church, and the people that had very empty personalities and were mostly the same people. That’s a dead end. It’s just them and no one else. But I have to do as many as possible because I don’t know ahead of time if they will and I have preferences that will make my dating journey harder.
I’m African American and I have a hard preference for women outside of my race. This already makes it harder because there is a societal expectation that people date within their own race. It doesn’t matter where I live and who I meet; that will never change. There’s also the racism element that I have zero control over. This makes my dating journey a thousand times harder. I have to burn through a lot of people and turn down blind dates or recommendations because I’m dealing with people’s preconceived expectations. And I have to spend a long time with a lot of people, hoping that I get lucky since dating is a numbers game and building relationships takes time to develop. That is why I need to put all of my energy and focus on meeting new people. Anyone who doesn’t have those connections I need to move on from because they aren’t getting me to my goal. That includes my group. I’m not going to lie, the thought of doing this is very stressful, but I don’t see any other way.
I also want to meet people that are focused on dating. That’s one topic that the people at my group don’t talk about. Because that is not their focus. Their focus appears to be enjoying life, having fun, and building their relationship with God. That’s great for them, but that’s not where I’m at. That’s how I remain stuck in single-ville. I want to surround myself with as many people that are as dedicated to finding love as I am. Increasing the number of people that can take me places where there are singles and I get lucky by connecting with a woman that meets my preference is the best-case scenario. Hanging out with men that can give me tips on how to succeed with women and strategize together is another good way to get out of single-ville. I believe my life will have a lot more meaning and color when I’m in a relationship. Me leaving the group has nothing to do with them and everything to do with where I’m at in life.
I need to know from you if I’m going about this the right way. Should I leave my group of friends and prioritize meeting people with large social connections? Once my ankle heals and I’m fully mobile, I don’t want to waste this year doing things that might not work.
Thanks,
Very Conflicted
This is a bad idea, VC, and worse, it’s a dumb bad idea. Right off the bat, I will tell you that giving yourself a deadline of “I will have a girlfriend by the end of the year” is a mistake. You’ve set yourself up for failure doing this because you’re not just putting intense pressure on yourself for absolutely no reason, but also creating a goal that is inherently outside of your control. Dating is a double opt-in situation, and that means that your goal is dependent on other people’s buy in – something that you have a very limited ability to influence. Under the best of circumstances, this is setting up a Peak Performance situation: that is, a situation where it’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose, simply because there is no way to ensure that someone, even someone who would be a good match for you, is going to be interested in dating you or in a place where they feel like they could date someone.
But this wouldn’t be the best of circumstances. Adding that artificial and arbitrary deadline – along with the additional restrictions you’ve given yourself, that I’m not going to get into here – just ensures that you aren’t going to be playing a perfect game. You will be putting so much pressure on yourself that you will be making mistakes right and left, without even the margin for error or grace that you might have otherwise. This is stuff you might have even learned by now if you hadn’t been “waiting” to be a good provider – something that was not just unnecessary, but that nobody you might want to date was even asking for.
(And to be clear, this isn’t to say that you “needed” to get into the dating scene earlier, simply that you’re making plans based on assumptions, mistaken beliefs and facts not in evidence, rather than experience.)
I will be blunt here: you’re hoping to give up your friend group in order to go on a social blitzkrieg of shallow connections that will somehow end with your having a girlfriend by New Years’, whereupon you will return to your friend group like Caesar’s triumphal return to Rome where you will pick things up like you never left. Well, I’m here from the future and I can tell you right now: it ain’t gonna happen.
The other week, I pointed out to a reader that the way they were thinking about dating like it was a math problem, when it’s far more like a personal essay – that is: that they were behaving as though there was a mathematical way to optimize for finding love. If they could just crack the code that would give them the necessary character build, they would finally get a girlfriend. The problem is: that’s not how love and relationships work – not if you’re trying to find someone to have a romantic relationship with. It’s not about optimized character builds and lifestyles; it’s about connecting with people and living a life that brings you contentment and satisfaction that you can share with another person.
I would suggest you go and re-read that yourself, because you’re making a very similar mistake. I think you’re giving yourself a false binary here, VC and a lot of it comes off as needless masochism and getting hung up on the wrong end of the equation.
Frankly, this reads a lot like the dating equivalent of the plot to the movie “Whiplash”, a movie that takes a character whose outlook on life is “If I want to be a great artist, I have to give up all things that make life worth living and suffer,” and asks “…but why, though?” Through the whole movie, Miles Teller’s character keeps pruning away everything in his life – love, family, companionship – in order to chase greatness as he saw it, and we see the damage it does to him and his psyche. It’s even an open question as to whether he actually achieves his goal at the end and whether it’s worth it or not.
I think you’re putting yourself on a similar path, where you’re looking at an abstract end goal and forgetting that there’s more than just optimization and maximizing options. That’s especially important to keep in view, because you seem to be falling into a trap that a lot of guys on the apps fall into: you’re prioritizing numbers instead of people.
Here’s the thing: guys tend to get hung up on getting as many matches as possible out of a misguided effort to maximize their opportunities to find someone to date. The problem, however, is two-fold. The first is that having thousands of opportunities isn’t helpful. You’d be doing the dating equivalent of looking for a particular needle in a haystack full of other needles, many if not most of which are not the right kind of needle. As women who deal with a barrage of low-quality, low-effort messages and matches on the apps could tell you: quantity does not have a quality all of its own.
For another, even if all the options were of equal quality, the Paradox of Choice kicks in, and you have a much harder time not just making a decision, but making a decision that you’d be happy with. Instead, you invite anxiety, analysis paralysis and second-guessing, making it that much harder to make a decision and be happy with it.
Even if we leave your social circle out of this – and I’ll be coming back to this in a moment, don’t worry – your plan is a great way to ensure that you’re going to burn yourself out before you ever find love, even if it went the way you think. Putting all that time into “as many passions and hobbies as I can that are popular with young people” means that you’re going to be spreading yourself insanely thin, without any real opportunity to invest in actually participating in those hobbies or passions, especially to any degree that would let you meet people and get to know them. Certainly not getting to know them on any more than the shallowest of surface impressions and vice versa. It takes time to get to know people and to become more than passing strangers or an acquaintance to nod at, and that’s time you’re not going to have to invest – especially if you are trying to meet as many people as you can. Even if everything worked out the way you think it would, you’re still going to run into the problem of trying to convince someone to be interested in starting a romantic relationship with a relative stranger – the same issue with trying to pick up women on a cold approach at a bar or club.
But it won’t work the way you hope, because you’re prioritizing quantity (of “options”) rather than quality (of connection and relationship). It’s not just a question of having the time to invest in building a connection with people – certainly not enough to connect with someone in such a way that they might be interested in you romantically. It’s also the issue of finding the right person – not just someone you’re attracted to, but someone who would be a good partner for you. Even if you managed to get dates or relationships this way (you won’t, but let’s pretend), you, paradoxically, will actually be wasting more of your time taking this approach by increasing the odds of meeting people you aren’t compatible with by orders of magnitude. All you would be doing is moving the “false positive” and “first date to nowhere” problems from dating apps with meeting people in person.
But wait, there’s more! Y’see, another flaw in your plan is that this recreates the Yoga Studio and Salsa Class Fuckboy Invasion from first principles. You’re choosing hobbies and communities that – by necessity – aren’t ones you’re necessarily actually into, because your ultimate priority is numbers, not passion. So, regardless of the hobby scene or the social networks you’re trying to join, you’re going to be the person who shows up thinking that this is a “target rich environment” or “sex ATM” and squicking people out. The social networks will see a social climber and the hobby groups will see someone who’s there to try to get laid, and that’s going to kill the likelihood of anyone wanting to give you a chance. You’re far more likely to end up being That Guy in the group chats than you are going to find a potential girlfriend, and that’s going to leave you even further from your goal than before.
Hang on though, because I’m not done yet: you’re also going to be burning the friendships you do have, because you’re taking this high-speed, low-drag, “those are rookie numbers” approach to meeting people. By deciding you need to leave those “dead ends” behind, all you’re doing is severing connections and burning bridges – connections that you actually value – because they supposedly don’t serve your goals. The problem is that those people don’t stop existing just because you moved on, nor do they reset when you decide to come back, nor do they exist in hermetically sealed vacuums. You are, at best, going to burn through social circles, implicitly or explicitly communicating that they are of low value to you, and then have to hope that there is no overlap between any of them.
Which, I would point out, is a ludicrous hope. Even in large cities, nobody is just in one community or social network; there is a lot of overlap in the Venn Diagrams, and that means you’re going to be poisoning a bunch of wells by acting like this. Not only will that decrease your options, but even if you found a girlfriend, you’re not going to have any place to come back to. People aren’t going to be all that eager to welcome someone who said “y’all aren’t worth my time” who then comes back a year later and says “ok, you’re worth my time now” back into the fold.
And all of that is before we even get to the point of how giving up a bunch of friends – people who enhance your life, give you community and support – for no good reason. It’s not as though having this group of friends is going to hold you back from also going out and meeting people. You can do both, you know.
It also means that you would be giving up something that is manifestly good for you, something that is making your life better, because you think it’s slowing you down somehow. So you would be giving up people who care for you, who have been a benefit to your life, happiness and overall well being, in order to give yourself what will end up being an increasing handicap in trying to date.
Yes, there’s a lot to be said about efficiency in dating, but the question is what that efficiency serves. If it’s serving spending less time seeking people out and not going on dates with the wrong people, because you’re putting more effort in making sure the people you date are the right people, that’s good. But trying to be efficient in making Line Go Up only makes the rest of dating less efficient and far more of a nightmare… for you and for the people you’re trying to meet.
You’ll do a hell of a lot better if you let go of the time limit, keep your friends and instead work on expanding things by finding hobbies and communities you enjoy and living your life in such a way that you’re putting yourself in fortune’s path, not by trying to optimize in ways that ultimately don’t actually do what you want.
There’s a saying that I think is relevant here: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. What you’re thinking of doing is the exact opposite, and it’s going to only serve to leave you frustrated, single and friendless.
You’ll find that a hell of a lot faster if you’re just meeting people you like and exploring things that speak to you instead of trying to do some sort of human arbitrage.
Good luck.
Hey Doc,
I’m thinking of getting back into the dating world after being out of it for a few years. I feel somewhat confident about myself and my ability to find and socialise with people, but there’s one thing that worries me. One of my interests is sexuality as a social/historical phenomenon, and as someone on the spectrum I don’t know how to parse out what would be the best time to bring that up. As an asexual man I could take or leave the “practical” side of things in that regard, but I do find the various aspects of how people conceive of and deal with their sexuality sincerely fascinating, but might not be appropriate to bring up out of the blue during casual conversation.
To be clear, I have other interests. I’m not concerned about finding subjects of conversation. My concern is that I’ve heard plenty of women talk about going on dates with men who either brought up sex way too early for their comfort or who disclosed something that weirded them out so late that it felt like a deliberate attempt at deception, and I don’t want to be That Guy. Any tips would be appreciated.
Best,
Autistic Ace
First of all, AA, the issue of people bringing up sex too early or revealed something that weirded them out is a little different than sharing random factoids like the one I edited out of your letter.
(Put a pin in that; this is going to be relevant in a minute.)
The issue that the women you mentioned complain about is less about folks bringing up sex as an academic interest, and more about guys who are either trying to bring sex up as a way to get her talking about sex with them, or a matter of “this person has no idea how to read the room and gauge whether that’s an appropriate topic for the situation”. The dudes who disclosed squicky topics later in the relationship, on the other hand, is almost always about the dude bringing up an interest that they had that the other person found unappealing, unpleasant or viscerally distressing – usually a kink, fetish or activity that they really wanted to pursue. There’s no hard and fast rule for where something’s gonna fall on the squick to squee scale – one person’s foot worship is another person’s sounding (don’t Google that), and there’s no sure way to know where on the acceptable/not-acceptable list the kink is going to fall until the reveal has been made.
Now, the latter is one I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand, I think putting your kink cards on the table early is a good thing; it gives people a chance to dip out if it trips a hard “no” for them. On the other, I can understand someone wanting to build up a level of trust and connection, so that the less kinky partner can see them as a person instead of a stereotype connected to that kink. But that’s ultimately not the issue you’re dealing with.
With the former… well, depending on what flavor of asexual you are, the odds are less that you’re going to come off as trying to take things sexual, and more of “um… not the time, my guy.”
Knowing what you can bring up and when, even as an academic example, is a question of “right time, right place, right audience”, AA – that is, you need to consider whether that interesting factoid is appropriate for the moment, the right time to bring it up, and whether the person you’re wanting to share it with is someone who wants to hear it or would be receptive to it.
Case in point, and coming back to what I alluded to at the top: you included a random tidbit about historical beliefs regarding medieval women and certain sex practices in your letter as an example of your interests. In and of itself, the specific fact wasn’t egregious, but it wasn’t strictly necessary to illustrate your point, and could distract from the point you were trying to make. It was less of a relevant piece of information and more of a digression, and that is where it failed the “right time, right place” test. It wasn’t something that was needed or relevant for the purpose of the letter, and there was a higher-than-average chance that some readers might not have wanted to see it.
(Yes, “then why are you reading a sex advice column” is an understandable question to ask them, but that’s an entirely different kettle of fish.)
Now, my mentioning it like this means that there will inevitably be folks who want to know what this tidbit was, and will likely be asking about it in the comments – that would be an appropriate time and place, in part because people will be asking, specifically to know, and it will be easier for folks who don’twant to know to skip over that comment thread. So, one way of ensuring that you aren’t crossing a line is to let folks know that this is an interest of yours and then let them ask for details. You may want to ask a question to gauge how raunchy they want to get, but if they’re asking, then they’ve proactively signaled that they want to hear about it.
Similarly, knowing your audience will affect what to share and when. I’m professionally adjacent to the sex educator community, I co-host a sex and relationship podcast with another sex educator and I spend a lot of social time with folks who are literal sex nerds; I’m someone who isn’t exactly going to clutch his pearls over discussing weird sex stuff. If anything, folks often feel like talking about weird sex stuff would be like asking me to talk about work during my off hours. But it ain’t like I got into this gig because I don’t like talking about sex and relationships. I am someone who would be the right audience under most circumstances.
Likewise, there are other folks who would want to talk about it – historians with an overlap of interests (including people who literally wrote the book on sex in the Middle Ages – shout out and tip of the hat to Eleanor Jenga and her excellent The Once And Future Sex), for example, and there’re plenty of happy perverts, weirdos and people just plain find the topic interesting. Many of us may not think it’s something to be talking about loudly at a fancy restaurant as the wait staff is bringing out the appetizers, but would absolutely be down for a discussion about it over drinks at a bar or some other hangout where talking about things like the brothel art at Pompeii or Roman phalloi statues might not be as welcome and attention-getting as a fart in church.
So, again: right time, right place, right audience. Keeping these in mind will make it a lot less likely that you’re going to drop a weird sex fact at the wrong time to the wrong people. Letting folks know that this is an interest of yours and allowing them to decide when and if they would like to know more will keep you from shoving your foot in your mouth (or someone else’s) by accident, and making sure that the info receives the reception it deserves.
Good luck.
