Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
Hello Doctor NerdLove,
Not even sure why I am writing this, maybe I just feel like venting or feeling way too negative about everything and just want to get it off my soul.
To sum up the issue. I have always been rejected by woman when it comes to romance. The first rejection was back when I was 16 and asked out my crush to a school dance, she made fun of me in front of the whole class and pretty much told everyone I was way to strange and odd to ever find anyone interested in me like that. More rejections followed across the years, thankfully at least more polite. I would meet them through shared interests/hobbies (book clubs, TTRPGs, sailing, board gaming, historical events, etc) volunteering, autism support groups, through work (not coworkers, but I work for an international NGO that often has conferences or trainings where people from all walks of life tend to mingle), or just at bars or night clubs when I was traveling.
There was just no one that was ever interested outside of a lady 50 years my senior who kept confusing me for her long-departed husband whenever I helped her whilst volunteering. It has become something of a running joke at the agency.
I have been in therapy for 2 decades, because of depression, autism (got diagnoses sometime in my 30es), work stress and this deep feeling of alienation.
People sometimes randomly insult me on the street, in public transports or when I when I go to places. Usually, young men, drunks or volatile people. A few times it was just random woman. It started back in school, kept happening at university and it has never really stopped. The thing here is, I look perfectlcy normal and tend to be dressed in suits because of work. It baffles everyone, especially people that know me, who tend to consider me pleasant, fun to talk to and deeply compassionate. Sometimes people who insulted me would then apologize after I just give them a confused look or just go about my business. I pretty much just shrug and tell them no harm done. No one has ever really been able to explain to me why it keeps happening.
I have close friends but still feel deeply lonely, especially since I have never been able to find anyone interested in me beyond friendship and I am just really frustrated at times. I have read more books about it then I can even remember, changed my approaches, hired a dating coach (felt like a scam). I started voicing erotic audio shorts for woman, since I have been told I have a pleasant manly voice and at least it is something of an outlet. Also, I get fan letters, which is nice, but nothing ever come from it either. They seem to like me as a fantasy voice, not truly as the person behind it.
I keep bringing it up in therapy, but they just keep throwing platitudes at me. A few months ago, I just snapped and went on a half hour long nonstop angry rant at my therapist about how nothing is working or helping. It has not for decades and if he can’t help me with this it seems to be a waste of time to keep bring my problems to him. I have since switched to seeing someone else. It is starting to feel like a waste of time again.
Which brings me to the reason I even wrote this letter. I went to a work trip to Asia a few weeks ago. It was a long flight, long tiring conference and I some of the other people from the conference went to the lobby afterwards. Whilst there I spotted this stunningly beautiful Asian woman sitting alone at the bar. She gave me an encouraging smile and so I asked her if I could buy her a drink. She agreed. We talked, got a little drunk and we just kept talking. She laughed at the stories I told, seemed really interested in me and asked about my work, what my life is like, hobbies, interests. She casually stroked my arm, and it felt so incredible nice. Making me realize just how much I wanted something like this. She asked if she could come to my room. I was stunned and stuttered a yes. And then she let me know she was an escort and that it would not be free. I almost choked on my drink laughing because of my naivety.
Buying Prostitution is illegal in my home country, offering it is not though (it is complicated) and since my work deals with helping people exploited by human trafficking, I am kind of opposed to it. So I thanked her for the offer but politely refused, offered her another drink and asked if she maybe wanted to keep talking. She went cold instantly and left without another word.
I went back to my peers. They asked me what had happened. I told them I did not want to talk about it. I later spotted her talking to some other guy, putting in the full facade again and this deep regret just washed over me. This feeling of me just being a fool for just not paying her, having as much fun as I wanted for once, but then I just got completely drunk and went to sleep.
I have been thinking about the whole thing since then and still feel like I made a mistake. Not like I have any opportunities lining up here. Maybe I should just move overseas or something, before I spent another decade or two here alone. Just throw this whole life that seems to not be serving me anymore away for some kind of hope.
I just really don’t know anymore.
Kind Regards
Whispers of the North
I’m going to be honest, WotN: I’m coming off a rather unpleasant illness that has left me feeling like a wrung out washrag, so I’m going to be a little blunter than normal: I get a lot of letters like yours, many with similar origin stories and as much as I empathize with your situation and those like you… folks have really gotta let go of the shit that happened in high-school.
I get that it’s traumatic. I get that its humiliating. Trust me: been there, done that, have enough nightmare stories of my own that put a few therapists’ kids through college and then some. But there comes a point where you have to recognize that high-school is almost custom-designed for people to act out in all sorts of shitty ways. Hundreds upon hundreds of teenagers, all caught up not only in the surge of hormones in their rapidly changing bodies but also desperately trying to find and establish identities outside of the ones their parents gave them while also trying to figure out how to operate in a society with next to no meaningful guidance, all the while many are also dealing with being mistreated by authority figures who see symptoms of neurodivergence as willful defiance and trying to wrestle the often contradictory expectations being placed on them by both the authorities and their peers?
It ain’t normal, it ain’t the real world and while the pain is real, there comes a point where holding onto it past graduation instead of rejecting it and saying “fuck all of this and everyone who said this about me” is just allowing them to continue harming you. So much of what comes after is often the result of seeing the world through the filter of that high-school experience and expecting the world to react the same way.
That doesn’t mean that you can just snap your fingers and the pain will be gone… but it does mean starting from a position of “ok, that sucked, so how do I move on from it?” And a big part of that is just recognizing that sometimes people are assholes, and life is too fucking short to care about what assholes think.
This is especially true when you’re allowing the way you see yourself to prevent you from seeing the ways that the world is trying to prove that outlook wrong. The fact that you’re hearing from people who, for example, love your voice and find it erotic and appealing is a prime example. To give an odd comparison: Jeff Hayes, an audiobook narrator, is currently having a moment because of his narration of the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks. Hayes is probably single-handedly responsible for at least a quarter of the DCC audience becoming fans of the series on his own. And this isn’t because people are conflating him with Carl or Princess Donut or even Matt Dinniman, but because of what he brings to the story and the characters
I mention this because what people are responding to isn’t the fantasy in the audio stories you narrate – or rather, that’s not the only thing they’re responding to. They’re responding to your performance, specifically, as the voice actor. If they’re following your work from story to story, then that’s more about them appreciating what you are bringing to the narrative, not just the narrative behind it. Someone else could be reading the words, but they wouldn’t have the same je ne sais quoi that you have.
The fact that you can pull this out of your back pocket and apply it when you choose means that you have the ability to bring this energy to your in person encounters. You have a talent that, if harnessed and applied correctly, could be a major boon to your trying to meet people and build relationships with them. But you discount that this is even possible, waving it away by saying “no, they’re just responding to the fantasy, not to me,” as though you’re not the one making the fantasy come to life.
If you want to start having better luck with finding a relationship, then the first thing you need to do is start accepting that it’s possible instead of insisting that it’s not. You can point at your lack of success up until now as a counter-argument but consider this: what if you’re wrong? What if many, if not most of the roadblocks you encounter, are because you refuse to see the possibility that people could be interested in you. That you don’t accept that you have the capacity to be the sexy someone that people hear in your voice and that this is part of who you are, not just a weird quirk that only applies in specific situations? What if the problems you have stem as much from your not trusting yourself enough to actually be someone people could desire and you neither comport yourself as a someone people could be interested in, nor to notice when folks are interested in you? What if, in part because you hold onto this identity of someone nobody could be attracted to, you sabotage your ability to meet people because you refuse to even acknowledge it’s a possibility?
And part of the problem is that you beat yourself up for even having hope. Your anecdote about the escort at the bar is a prime example – you treat it as “proof” of how much of a loser you are for even thinking that she could be interested in you. That’s counterproductive and incredibly unhelpful, especially after making the not-unreasonable choice to say “no”. You had good reason to worry that maybe she’s not doing this of her own free will, and – considering that you were a tourist in a foreign country – a non-zero chance that this would have ended not with hot crazy sex but your either waking up to your wallet being stolen or getting shaken down by her “driver”. You made a sound decision under the circumstances. That’s not something to feel stupid about.
The same goes for the fact that you later saw her pulling the same act on someone else and took that as yet more reason to shame yourself. Look, I’m all in favor of sex work and I think going to an escort to lose your virginity is an entirely legitimate option if that’s what you’re actually looking for. But I can tell you with great certainty: if you had gone with her and it had been a straight pay-for-play transaction, you would’ve come out of this feeling even worse than you do now. You would have seen it as being even more shameful because you “had” to pay for it, when what you want – what you were hoping for – was the validation of having been “chosen”. That’s what she was selling you when she was flirting with you, that’s why you were responding the way that you did. If she came up and was straight to business, you wouldn’t have had the same reaction, especially after saying “no thanks.”
Here’s the problem you’re having: you’re looking for hope, but you’re also refusing to see it when it’s offered to you. You’re getting angry at the people who are trying to help you because what you’re asking for is ultimately for them to have some way of telling you that you’re wrong about yourself, but in a way that actually can pierce through the shield of denial you’ve built up around yourself. People aren’t telling you platitudes, they’re trying to give you advice and direction on how to see yourself and how to find that hope from within. They can’t force you to see it or experience it. They can’t grab you by the chin, turn your head, pull open your eyes or strap you into a chair to give you the Ludovico Technique and make you see things differently. You have to be willing to accept that maybe you’re wrong in how you see yourself and let people help you see yourself differently.
And that has to come from you. If you don’t believe in the possibility, then that possibility won’t exist. If you’re going to continue to point to your past and say “well this proves it,” without ever accepting that you might be wrong or drawing the wrong conclusions or just missing shit entirely, then nothing is going to change. And even if it were objectively true – it’s not, but we can run with the hypothesis – that your interpretation of your past was 100% correct and accurate, then you need to be willing to believe that change is possible. That you can improve and move past your past.
And yes, trust me, I know from which I speak. I spent most of my life convinced that I was destined to be The One Who Was Bad With Girls, and I didn’t break out of that belief until I spent new car levels of money to open my mind to thepossibility that I could do better. Until that happened, nothing was going to change because nothing could change.
You’ve already got evidence that you’re wrong. You’ve got people who get an erotic charge just out of your voice. People have done far more with much less than that. If you can act like the world’s greatest lover for an audio drama, you can bring that same energy to your daily life until you live it. But you dismiss it and then complain that other people aren’t breaking through the shield you’ve raised around yourself.
Nobody’s going to be able to bring that shield down but you. You have to be the person to say “ok, what if I’m wrong”, and then proceed to live as though you are. That’s what “fake it ‘til you make it” means. You’re not faking anything; you’re training yourself to accept that you’re more than your self-limiting beliefs.
I know you don’t want to hear this, but the fact of the matter is that you’re the one who has chosen to believe how limited and stuck you are, my guy. You’re the only person who can choose to change those beliefs. As long as you believe it’s impossible, that’s always going to be true. It’s not until you allow yourself to believe differently that you’ll see the proof that you were wrong this whole time.
The choice, as always, is yours.
Good luck.
