Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
Dear Doctor NerdLove,
I’m a nerdy lady who has been friends with “Jerry” for about 8 years now. I would describe it as a hot and cold friendship. Some days I appreciate how he actively involves introverts in the conversation, really strives to keep up with his friends’ interests, and hosts a lot of events for our friend group.
Other days, Jerry gets on my last nerve. He has the need to be the smartest person in the room to the point he just makes up fish stories. Imagine if Sherlock was bad at deduction. Jerry told me my best friend, “Samantha”, had decided to study programming. When I asked Samantha about it, she had no clue what I was talking about. Turns out, Jerry just assumed since Samantha’s husband is a programmer, she would become one too.
During our Call of Cthulhu campaign, he was willing to get all of our characters killed to prove he was right what the monster was. Not Jerry’s level 1 grad student character mind you. Nobody had rolled anything that would say what it was. Jerry thought he knew enough Lovecraft to correctly identify a Mi-Go based on vague hints and was going to be damned if he let the rest of us stop him from getting us killed.
A couple months ago, I got laid off from my job unexpectedly. It was rough time that felt very lonely, as I was on an emotional rollercoaster of job applications. Jerry reached out. We texted a lot and he invited me out to lunch. He mentioned treating some of his other laid off friends to lunch, so I said sure and looked forward to a friendly outing.
We had a nice chat over lunch and then walked over to a brewery afterwards. At the brewery, Jerry announced he always had feelings for me and was glad I agreed to a date. I was stunned, since I had no idea that this was a date. I excused myself to the bathroom and came back. Part of me was hoping I misheard and we could just pretend it never happened. Jerry went onto to elaborate, without any affirmative input from me, we could take things slow. He then mentioned he was coming into some family money and he could take care of me!?
At that point, I made up an excuse and left. I texted Jerry the next day that I don’t like him romantically and just thought we were catching up. To be fair, he took that well.
Since then, I’ve been taking some space. I don’t know where to go from here. I used to classify Jerry as Norm from Cheers. A friendly guy with some quirks. But now, it’s full Bitch Eating Crackers territory. It’s hard to believe that a guy who is convinced he’s always right will ever change. Is it possible to salvage the friendship?
Not Always Right
Right off the bat, the idea of a “Sherlock who’s just REALLY BAD at deductions” has the potential to be absolutely hilarious. You should hold onto that for future use.
Now I will be real: I feel a smidge of kinship with Jerry, in as much as I am someone who flatters himself as being at reasonably above average intelligence in some areas, there are ones where I am almost comedically off base. I’m someone who, for example, is chronically bad at mysteries in pop culture, despite a voracious appetite for it and having consumed a hell of a lot of them. Even so, if you sit me down in front of a Knives Out movie or something less tropey than the average Agatha Christie story and I basically become a golden retriever who has a completely different idea of what happening. The odds are good that I’m going to get things almost comedically wrong, because I tend to fall into the trap of out-clever-ing the movie.
(No, seriously, I spent all of Knives Out convinced that Christopher Plummer’s character had faked his death and this was a “who deserves my inheritance?” test that everyone was failing.)
I mention this because it always serves as a personal reminder that intelligence isn’t evenly distributed; everyone’s got the things they’re good at and the things that they’re not good at, and a little self-awareness goes a long way towards not making a complete ass out of oneself. At least, not when it comes to things that matter.
Would that Jerry had a similar lesson or two to keep things in check.
What you’re describing is a very common issue that I see mostly (but not exclusively) with men, and most common with men in STEM fields. It’s what I call “the Engineer’s Disease”, where someone who is very smart and accomplished in one specific area then thinks that this means that they’re smart and accomplished in all areas… even ones that have nothing to do with their actual field of expertise. We’ve seen this, for example, in politics, where people (to pull a random example out of nowhere) can be genius heart or brain surgeons, yet utterly out of their depth and prone to buy into grifts and snake-oil in every other area.
Jerry, I suspect, is very similar. He has his areas where he is accomplished, possibly even in the top tier… but then thinks that this tracks across all other aspects of life. But because being The Smart One is a core part of his identity, he is less motivated – even actively disincentivized – to ever question whether maybe he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.
No, it doesn’t matter that he’s frequently and demonstrably wrong; the fact that it’s part of his self-concept means that there’re going to be a lot of defense mechanisms in place that can explain away why his being wrong didn’t “count” that time. Or the time before that. Or the one before that.
Under some situations, this can be an endearing, if occasionally frustrating personality quirk – the Norm or Cliff Clavin type, like you said. It gets a lot less endearing when that rock-ribbed belief in his own correctness leads to some serious overestimations about your relationship and the mind-blowing balls to just presume that somehow, you’ve gotten onto the relationship escalator with him.
However, I do want to extend Jerry a smidge of grace; it doesn’t seem like he was intentionally pulling a Schrödinger’s Date, where somebody is both on and not on a date, and it’s not revealed until the waveform collapses. Nor does it seem like he was pulling a Gaston – thanking everyone to coming to his wedding and all that’s left is to go propose to his presumptive bride. It seems like he genuinely thought that you knew you were on a date and that this was on the up and up. That mitigates things somewhat, to my mind.
Not very much. Just a little bit. No, less. Even less than that.
Yes, it’s absolutely not cool that he didn’t so much as check with you about how you felt, and the sheer audacity of “hey, it’s fine, I’m coming into money, so I’ll take care of you” honestly made me laugh. But it seems like he was coming to this from a place of mistaken, if sincere, belief, rather than manipulation. And the fact that he seems to have taken your correction with good grace likewise makes me feel that he may have been wildly off base, he’s going to eat his crow, take the L and move on.
None of this is to say that you wrong for being upset at him, or that you shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about it or around him. What he did was not cool, no matter how sincere the mistake was, and it upset you for what should be obvious reasons. Your feelings during and after are all entirely valid and reasonable.
So I want to ask you two important questions. First: has Jerry actually acknowledged and apologized for his mistake? Has he recognized that he upset you and why it was upsetting?
This is going to be an important question to answer, because it has a high chance of influencing the answer of my second question: do you want to salvage this friendship, or are you basically done?
Both are valid options. It’s good that he took your correction/rejection with good grace, but there’s still the fact that this was an upsetting experience. If he doesn’t recognize the degree to which he overstepped and how it bothers you, then I would entirely understand you being done with him.
If you do want to salvage the friendship, that doesn’t mean you need to go back to how things were before. You are perfectly within your rights to decide that he doesn’t get the same level of access or benefit of the doubt that he had before. He can be an activities-only friend or a part-of-the-social-circle friend but not necessarily someone you hang out with one on one.
I think it might be worthwhile to have a come-to-Jesus conversation where you explain why what he did was out of line and how it made you feel. This is less about getting him to change and more about letting him know that any friendship with you is going to be contingent on his understanding what happened and being more mindful of his behavior with you.
But if he doesn’t listen, doesn’t understand or otherwise doesn’t seem to grasp that this affected you in a negative way, it’s not on you to push it through a force field of denial. In that case, he’ll have demonstrated that his belief in his own correctness is going to override even someone telling him how very, very wrong he was, and that’s a perfectly valid reason to let the friendship go.
Good luck
Dear Dr. NerdLove,
I need some advice on what I should do. I broke up with my long-term boyfriend of 2 years, Jason (fake name) about a week ago now. We met in high school and as time went on, the relationship went downhill. I mentally checked out months ago, and finally brought myself to ending it. The day before ending it (not knowing I was going to) I was texting one of my old coworkers and I just felt some sort of spark that I haven’t felt in a really long time. I’ve been going out with him on dates and hanging out ever since. He’s a very sweet guy and everything I’ve been looking for. I don’t think I’m trying to fill a void or just looking for comfort. I see a genuine future with him just based off the last week. I don’t know if I should just follow my heart or not.
Is This A Rebound?
OK, ITAR, can we talk frankly? Just between you me and the readers? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you started chatting with this new guy right before you broke up with Jason. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in coincidences. But as a wise man said: I just don’t trust them.
I’m bringing this up because it ties into the question you’re asking, and I think it’s something you should be aware of… and why it’s going to change the nature of the question you’re asking.
So here’s what’s going on: people tend to think that the break up happened on the day that they said the words and made it official. But that’s not actually true. Many times, the relationship was already over; it just took time to reach the point where you actually acknowledged the reality of it. This is why it seems like people will have gotten over a long-term relationship incredibly quickly; they started the process of recovering and moving on weeks, or sometimes even months before they even let themselves think that maybe this relationship was on the way out.
Just as importantly, there’s an understandable and incredibly relatable hesitation to leave a relationship that is just… not working. It’s not bad enough to make someone say “I can’t live another day like this”, but it’s just failing to work on some critical level. It may be a lack of physical attraction, a sense that they’re just not the person they used to be, even just that vague and nebulous sense of “I’m not feeling it”. But the fact that it’s not some horrible, untenable situation leads them to think that maybe they should keep at it.
Right up, that is, until they have a reason to leave. And that reason often ends up being another person. The sudden reminder that they have options, that ending this relationship doesn’t mean that they’re giving up all hope of finding love again, is often what spurs them to make the decision they’ve known they need to make. They finally make that leap because they know that they’ve got a cushion waiting for them when they land.
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this…
You knew this relationship was over for months, but couldn’t quite admit that to yourself. But once there was a viable option – someone who was reminding you what it felt like to be excited, who brings that sense of mystery and adventure and desire – you were ready to pull the trigger and put two in the dome of a relationship that’d been shuffling along without realizing it had died a long time ago.
But here’s the thing: the fact that you’re feeling excitement again doesn’t mean that this new guy is your One True Love. Leaving aside that you’ve apparently just been dating him for a week (…I think; your timeline is a little unclear in your letter), the biggest draw here is the New Relationship Energy you’re feeling and how it feels different from the relationship you just left. It feels like the way I’m sure it felt when you first got together with Jason – like the sun was shining just for the two of you and suddenly the world is full of joy and possibilities and a future so incredible you can’t imagine a life that doesn’t include him.
This is what’s known as The Coolidge Effect – the tendency for mammal brains to go into hyperdrive and producing buckets of oxytocin and dopamine when we start having sex with a new partner. The thing is, over time the novelty of that new partner starts to wear off and our brains simply don’t produce as much of the happy chems that made us feel like the world was suddenly full of cartoon birds and blind cherubs following us around. That doesn’t mean that anything went wrongor that we fell out with the person we’ve been sleeping with; it’s just that we got used to it. But when a new partner enters the mix… well suddenly the brain revs right back into gear and starts flooding us with dopamine and oxytocin again.
All of this is to say: this is your second relationship, and you haven’t been through this cycle yet. The fact that things faded with Jason doesn’t automatically mean that anything went wrong any more than the fact that you feel so excited about the new guy doesn’t mean that you’ve found your soulmate. You’re basically feeling the high from being with someone new. But that high isn’t going to last; it always tapers off, because humans are infinitely adaptable, and there is no experience that stays shiny and new forever. Your new beau isn’t going to be the exception to this. While sexual compatibility and attraction is important in a relationship, it’s not the only thing that makes a relationship last; if you don’t have a foundation of shared or compatible lifestyle, ambitions, goals, interests and respect, the relationship often doesn’t last long past the honeymoon period.
All of which is to say: you’re not in a position to say whether this is your last relationship ever and he’s your forever person. You are in the period where everything is easy, because good sex and feeling excitement overrides almost everything. You are still very much in the position of getting to know one another as partners, not just co-workers. So while this relationship isn’t automatically doomed, it’s also far too early to have even the slightest inkling about whether it has a future.
So by all means, enjoy it. Revel in the feeling that you haven’t experienced in months. Take full advantage of those hedonistic desires you’re feeling right now and have a great time. But do yourself a favor and realize that this is very new and you’re not even at the point where either of you is comfortable farting in front of each other.
Enjoy the relationship, but enjoy it for what it is: something new and exciting that may or may not have a future for you. Keep a level head, avoid making any grand declarations or plans for a future farther out than the next couple months. It may not feel romantic and sexy to try to stay a little grounded right now, but it’ll save you a lot of avoidable heartbreak in the future.
Good luck.
