Estimated reading time: 19 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
I feel like I’m dealing with a lot of different issues, but something I keep getting hung up on is my own standards. I’ve been single for a long time now and I’ve only ever had one relationship. She was asexual (which is not why we broke up) so physical appearance wasn’t so much of a factor for her in dating. She, of course, is gorgeous. I can’t shake the feeling that she was out of my league, I messed that up, and now I can’t seem to get another chance.
I’ve had opportunities to date people, but with all of those cases there’s some incompatibility. I don’t think my standards are necessarily unrealistic on the surface. I don’t have a mile-long list of boxes someone needs to check before I’ll date them.
What I’ve noticed is that most of the people who are into me are fat. I’m fat, myself. It’s something I’m working on (I’ve lost 30 lbs in the past 6 months) and I’ve been dealing with for a long time. I know that fat people can and do date, but when I look around me at the fat people who are dating, they’re almost always dating other fat people. And good for them! That’s great. Try as I might, though, I’m just not into fat people.
I’ve tried to confront that, and I really don’t think it’s a status thing. I don’t think it’s a matter of me being embarrassed to date a fat person. There’s plenty of other “unconventional” traits in women that I either don’t have a problem with or even find attractive. I don’t care if she has acne or if she’s taller than me or if she has a lot of body hair or whatever. I don’t care what her body count is or if she has crooked teeth or a big nose. As long as I think she’s pretty, they’re kind, we vibe, we want the same things from a relationship, and we share compatible values, then it’s all good.
And it’s not like I’m only attracted to women who are rail-thin or super athletic. There’s a spectrum of body types that I like, and it just so happens that all the people that like my profile on dating apps either ghost me or they fall outside of that spectrum. I feel like a huge piece of shit for not wanting to date people who in other aspects seem like they would be good partners. I’ve even been on dates with some of those people, and the attraction just doesn’t materialize.
And I know that plenty of women I would consider beautiful date guys who aren’t exactly models, but those guys are almost never fat. They can have greasy hair, bad teeth, weak jawlines, and look like they’ve never even seen a dumbbell let alone picked one up, but fat? Almost never. And I try to look out for that. On the very rare occasion I do see a couple that breaks that mould, I try to make note of it and try to build up hope that maybe I could have that.
I know looks aren’t all that matters, but I just can’t see any of these women choosing me over someone who is much thinner than me. The dating apps just keep reinforcing that. I got professional photos, multiple profile iterations, put my hobbies and personality into it, and the almost nonexistent number of likes I get are from people who just aren’t my type. I hear phrases like “the bar is in hell” and my mind uses that as ammunition against me. As far as approaching women in person, I know that my self-image and sensitivity to rejection is getting in the way of that. I’ve been through tons of therapy, and this seems to be a belief that I just can’t shake.
So what do I do? Do I just wait until I’ve thinned out before I even consider dating? Do I try to lower my standards? How could I possibly see myself as being capable of getting a partner?
Am I The Problem?
Your standards are the problem, AITP, just not in the way you think. Not your standards for other people. Your standards for yourself. But the two are intertwined in a way that I don’t think you realize.
Like, the problem is clear right from the jump in your letter – you talk about your ex being “out of your league”. That’s no way to talk about someone you were dating, especially if you’d been dating for a while; it insults both you and her. You because it implies that you’ve somehow “tricked” her into dating you and her because it’s implying that she’s “lowering” herself to deign to date you as opposed to having a relationship with someone she cared about. There are “leagues” in as much as “if someone wants to date you, you’re in their league”. Otherwise, it’s class value judgements all the way down.
But just as importantly, it’s impossible to be secure in the relationship when you feel like someone’s feelings for you are a mistake. You will never be able to relax, be in the moment or be authentic if you’re always worried that the Sword of Damocles could fall at any time. You’ll spend more time trying to stop the future from coming and looking for signs that it’s almost here than you will actually enjoying the relationship.
And it’s that mentality that’s getting in the way of the rest of the times you’ve tried to date.
So let’s get this out of the way first: nobody is obligated to date someone they don’t find attractive for the sake of being A Good Person or enlightened or any other descriptive term. Nor is anyone obligated to be attracted to another person if that person is not their type.
(I mean, you can’t force attraction and it’s a bad idea to try, but my point stands.)
It is, however, a good idea to examine your taste and “type” and dig into why you’re attracted to those people and not others. A lot of times, the people we think we’re attracted to are who we’re “supposed” to be attracted to. We get hundreds of little lessons and messages about who’s “allowed” to be called beautiful and who isn’t, about what X qualities mean vs. Y qualities, etc, and surprise surprise, those standards are almost always hegemonic female beauty standards from the dominant cultural force. Which, for most of the Western world means young, lighter skin colors, European facial features and thin. Deviating from those is seen as an almost moral failing and finding those non-conforming features attractive is likewise a sin of sorts. This is how, for example, you get guys who are actually attracted to fat women and will fuck them on the down low, but will refuse to be seen in public with them. It’s usually not until they’ve matured enough to actually own their attraction and not care what other people think that they quit making themselves and their “dirty little secret” miserable.
Now, despite the example I chose, this isn’t about you, AITP, not in the way you’re probably thinking. But it’s tied into the problem you’re having.
As I said, your problem are the standards you have for yourself and how you see yourself. You don’t see yourself as being attractive and you don’t see how it’s possible that someone could see you as attractive. It’s very much tied into how society views fat people – as disgusting moral failures. Never mind that obesity is a complex issue with a truly absurd number of issues that all get twisted together. Never mind that our biology literally fights against weight loss and especially against permanent weight loss. Never mind how many beliefs about fat people are more about prejudice than reality. To society at large, being fat is just a simple matter of “fat = bad, therefor fat people = bad” and everything else becomes window dressing.
This is a message that’s reiterated at every possible opportunity. Going to the doctor for a broken arm? Odds are good the doctor will want to talk to you about your weight. Turn on the TV? Odds are you’ll see an ad for Ozempic or Wegovy or other GLP-1s. Ask for advice when you struggle with dating? First thing dudes will say is “go to the gym and lose weight”.
So it’s not exactly surprising that you have a hard time believing in your own worth. You’ve had a thousand voices a day telling you that your weight means you’re worth less – so many so that you probably don’t notice the chorus except for the occasional solo parts. But that’s what you’re struggling with and why you’re having a hard time connecting with anyone. This is why you can list every example of a dude who should, in theory, not be able to score a baddy, and yet clearly has… except for fat guys. Fat guys neither rate nor qualify as something that people could possibly find attractive. And I suspect that if you did see a fat guy with someone who was presumably “out of his league”, you would have a number of reasons to hand why he was the exception to the rule and thus doesn’t count. Because that’s how confirmation bias works; you pay attention and give importance to the things bolster what you already believe and ignore the things that contradict it.
That’s true of the reasons why you can’t be “attractive” either; you can ignore the people who clearly do like you – said likes from folks who you’re not into – because they don’t “count”. They don’t have the same statistical value, because they’re not the people whose opinions matter to you. And that’s a problem because you include yourself in the sample set of people whose opinions count but who don’t like you.
That’s going to be a problem because if you don’t believe in your own attractiveness and value, why should anyone else? Nobody is going to believe in you hard enough to make up for your lack and it’s exhausting as hell for them to try. And the fact of the matter is that – forgive the inelegant metaphor – nobody is interested in investing in a product that apologizes for its own existence. This is why you see people who seem to inexplicably kick outside their coverage: a big part of it is that they refuse to believe they can’t. Chefs are an example of people who tend to hook up with folks it seems like they should never be able to for precisely this reason; cooking is a super power, sure, but a hell of a lot of master chefs have monster egos and believing in their own desirability means that they’re a hell of a lot more confident and assertive when it comes to meeting people and how they behave when they’re in relationships.
Here’s the thing: you have an internal problem and you’re trying to solve it with external solutions. You can’t see yourself as being attractive because of your weight, so you’re going to try to lose weight to be attractive. But as many formerly fat people can tell you: that doesn’t necessarily change how you feel about yourself. It just removes one reason you don’t see yourself as attractive and exchanges it with another. There will always be a reason why you think you don’t qualify as One Of The Attractive People, and that reason will just swap out as needed. Once you’ve gotten to your ideal weight, you’ll then need to muscle up. Or you’ll have loose skin that needs to be dealt with. Or you’ll have “Ozempic face” or “Ozempic butt”. Or the wrong style. Or this or that or the other thing. The excuses are modular but the problem is internal, and the problem is how you see yourself.
Meanwhile, one of the sex-getting-est dudes I know is short and fat, stupid talented and incredibly funny. And he knows it. He owns all of it. And he doesn’t care because fuck it, unlike him, life’s too short.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of being healthy, working out and eating nutritionally balanced meals. I’m down with folks working hard to be in the shape they want to be in. But tying your self-worth and self-image into it and making it the alpha and omega of your life is going to fuck with you. It’s going to be a source of insecurity for you that will never go away, because the insecurity is ultimately about you, not your build and the amount of adipose tissue you carry. You’re going to need to love yourself enough to see that other people could and do love you too. You need to see yourself as an attractive and sexual being, regardless of your current size, so that you can accept that other people will do so as well.
This is why my advice to folks who want to feel sexy is to start behaving like they’re sexy. That means being willing to dress in ways that make them feel sexy, to carry themselves as though they were sexy already, to do the things they would be doing if they were the hottest thing since World War III. And a big part of that is to start working on the things that will connect you with those feelings.
Let’s take dancing as an example, because that’s one thing that goes hand-in-hand with sexiness. One of the reasons why dance is so sexy is because dancing is primal. It’s rhythm, it’s ecstasy, it’s bodies moving in synchronized patterns, blurring the lines between “you” and “me”, losing yourself in music. It’s discipline, it’s control, it’s communication with your partner and it’s intimate awareness of your own body. There are few things sexier than a guy who can dance and dance well, regardless of size. Don’t believe me? Try watching Nick Frost in the movie “Cuban Fury” and then realize that he does all his own dancing in it. He’s not the best in the world, but he doesn’t need to be, because it’s not about being the best. It’s about doing something you’re passionate about and doing it well and everything that says about you… and the ways it translates to how you connect with other people.
Learning how to dance means learning to be intimate with your body as more than the thing that carries your brain around and occasionally breaks down in inconvenient and embarrassing ways. It also means that you have to learn how to be confident, direct and straightforward with your partner; noodle arms, un-confident leads and being too worried about anything other than the dance are signs of a poorly-skilled dance partner.
Cooking is another skill that’s always worth picking up if you want to feel more desirable. Leaving aside that it’s a pro-social skill and one that signals your ability to take care of yourself, food isn’t just slop that keeps your body fueled. Food and cooking is inherently sensual; it’s literally every aspect of human senses coming together – taste and texture and scent, even the presentation – to create the experience. A good cook is someone who knows how to engage people’s senses.
Music has, likewise, long been joked as “God’s gift to ugly people”. “I’m broke, borderline homeless, don’t have drugs, don’t have a car, but I’m in a band” is such a fucking cliché because it’s true. And it’s true because music hits people in the soul. Being able to play music means being able to reach out and touch people in the most intimate ways and make them feel. Prince was a short weirdo, but goddamn could that man inspire levels of horny previously undreamt of with the right lyrics, his voice, some beats and a few guitar licks.
Music can make you sad, it can push away your depression, it can relax you into sleep and it can charge you up until you’re ready to run headfirst into the fires of hell… and the musician is who makes that all possible.
Do you need to do all or even any of these things in order to feel sexy? No. But you should understand why these things are equated with being sexy, and it’s because of two things: physicality and emotion. All of these require intimate connections with the physical – whether through touch or taste or hearing – and with the emotional. Because while sex may be of the body, sexuality and sexiness is emotion. It’s feeling and knowing how to inspire and trigger feelings in other people and doing so deliberately instead of hoping they just “happen”.
But that can’t happen for you until you can start accepting that anyone can be sexy… which means that you can be sexy. And that has to come from within.
Putting any of that off until you have “permission” to feel sexy just means that you’re going to keep putting it off forever. You’ll never get approval, whether now or later, so you may as well just do it now and fuck the haters, including the haters in your own brain. They don’t actually run the door and they’re not actually in control of who gets in or out; they just convince you they are. I’m sure you’ve heard the old CIA trick to infiltrating a building is to just walk in like you own the place. The same thing applies to hotness and being attractive. Train yourself to think of yourself as sexy now instead of hoping you’ll pick it up once you think you can fool others into accepting you into the club.
So like I said: work out and lose weight if that’s something you enjoy doing. But if you want to start actually connecting with people and finding relationships with people you are attracted to, first you have to believe other people can find you attractive. And not by mistake or in some way where you’ve “cheated the system”, but simply because you’re you and you are – as the wise man once said – a sexy motherfucker.
Good luck.
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
I honestly don’t know if I’m behind the times or if everyone on dating apps are insane and I could really use some outside perspective.
I’m 37 and getting back into dating after years out of the market (I married my high-school sweetheart, I got divorced, I took a year off to get my head right) and I feel like I’ve been transported to another planet. One that looks like mine but all the rules are different and the fact that I think this is weird makes me the alien.
The thing that I’m struggling with is meeting women. I’m on Hinge and while I have no problem with matching with people, it all gets weird as soon as we start talking. My hand to God, Buddha and the Immortal Spirit of Elvis, every match who’s around my age and professionally successful goes like this: we get about three or four exchanges in and they want to know if I’m looking to get married and have kids.
Excuse me? My dear, I don’t even know your last name! I realize we’re all out here in these streets looking for love but if I barely know someone, I’m still trying to find out if I want to see you again, never mind plan our future kids’ names. To me it’s just too goddamn early to be having the “so where do you see this relationship going” talk if we haven’t even had our first date!
When I’ve told my female friends and even polled some of my co-workers about this, nobody really saw anything wrong with it. Some people thought it was tacky, but nobody said anything along the lines of “what, that’s nuts, man.”
Am I the one taking crazy pills or is this just what dating turned into when I wasn’t looking? Do I need to bring my 23-and-Me to speed dating? Should I be ready to negotiate my prenup before we’ve gotten to the “meet my parents” phase?
Buy Me A Drink First
This one’s easy, and the reason you’re running into this is in your letter, BMADF: “every [woman] my age and professionally successful”.
These are women who I will presume are between the ages of 35 and 40 with established careers and, I will be willing to bet, a lot of time on the dating scene. Some of them may have had marriages in their past, some may or may not have had kids, but all of them have been dating and importantly, dating men. Which means that they’ve spent a lot of time dealing with folks who either don’t know what they want, are cagey about what they’re actually looking for, or are just straight up incompatible with them. If any of them are actively hoping to have kids and don’t have them yet, then they’re dealing with a ticking clock that’s part biological and part sociological. And if they’re in white-collar professions, the odds are good that they’ve had to absorb a certain amount of take-no-shit and directness to get to where they are.
So what you’re dealing with are women who know what they want, are actively looking for it, and don’t want to waste any more time on people who aren’t on the same page as them. They’re not looking to get married next week and they’re certainly not saying “ok, future father of my children, what shall we name our presumptive heirs”. They just don’t want to spend three to five dates trying to figure out if you are going to end up being another dude who just wants casual sex hiding behind “looking for short-term, open to long”. Or worse, someone who just doesn’t know what he wants and is going to waste her time dithering about it.
The thing to understand is that the folks who ask this aren’t saying “ok, here’s the timeline: we’ll date for six months, be engaged by eight and married by ten”.
OK, well, some might. There’s always a handful. But if you’re not someone (or talking to someone) who thinks this scene from NewsRadio is unspeakably hot, that’s not what you’re dealing with.
What these women are saying is “I am looking to get married and I want someone who’s also actively and specifically looking for that too.” Their stated goal isn’t to date around until they meet someone and hope that, years down the line, that person wants to get married. They’re looking for someone who’s actively and specifically looking for a partner for long-term commitment. Not “might be nice some day” and not “if I meet the right person”; “meet the right person” can be safely assumed.
This doesn’t mean that anyone who replies with “I’m looking to get married/have kids” has unwittingly signed their name and now the pact is sealed. The women who are asking you this are still planning on going on dates, seeing if you two are a good match on person as well as on paper and if you two connect well enough to have a relationship, not starting one that begins from the first time you meet for coffee. They just don’t want to fuck around only to find out that you and they were never on the same trajectory in the first place.
This isn’t insanity, this is just people saying “I don’t want to spend days or weeks on this if we’re not on the same page.” It may be blunt, but that’s a bluntness born out of the fact that a lot of guys don’t know how to answer that question and often have never even asked themselves that. Since they know what they want and they’re actively seeking that out, it doesn’t make any sense to not be direct. And if their bluntness or directness means that some percentage of dudes bounce as soon as they ask? Well, those are dudes who are answering the underlying question and that question is “would dating you be a waste of my time?”
Since you’ve gotten divorced in the recent past, I’m willing to lay odds that you aren’t looking to get married again immediately. You may even not be sure if you want to get married again. And that’s fine! That’s all perfectly valid. But that should be something you should be up front about as well. And if the directness that these women have about what they’re looking for feels weird to you… well, consider how much of dating culture is about not explicitly saying what you’re looking for and how much time you spend trying to read the tea leaves instead and how much more time you spend if and when you get it wrong.
And then ask yourself whether that time spent is worth it. Maybe a little blunt language and directness is what more people need in their love lives.
Anyway, you’re not insane and neither are they. You’re just not looking for the same things. Make it clear and explicit in your profile what you are and aren’t looking for and what you aren’t looking for, and this will start sorting itself out for you.
Good luck.
