Estimated reading time: 18 minutes
Hi, Dr NerdLove,
I’ve been lurking around your website for years now. And I love your articles. It really helped me.
I’m a 23 years old sexually inexperienced male. I don’t know if this is the right place for my question. Because I’m not looking for a dating advice. I just want an advice related to romantic relationships.
The thing is that I’m deeply afraid of intimacy. And I have low self-esteem and I feel ashamed for living with my parents. Even though I’m aware of the fact that my two older uncles still live with their parents and brought their wives home. And I do contribute to my family. Despite knowing all this, I still have trouble believing that I’m a suitable partner. But I’m currently working on those problems.
But there’s also the other side of the problem. I’m afraid of becoming an old virgin, even though abstaining is widely respected in my religious and cultural community. But when I see people online sharing their stories and how they are older, lonely and unhappy with their lives. I panic and get anxious. Not because I’m overweight or old. I’m actually tall. Mildly handsome and slim. And I have a 6-inch penis. And I’m deeply sorry If I sounded like I’m bragging.
“Why do you feel anxious then?” You might ask. Because I feel like I’m wasting those traits. I mean God gave me all those traits. Yet I choose to hide behind fear instead of being grateful and just use them.
Those are the questions I’m asking:
How can I stop obsessing about the label “virgin”? Especially when it’s irrelevant and foreign in my community?
And how can I work on my personal issues without feeling guilty about “wasting my youth?
And how can I learn to embrace uncertainty about relationships instead of obsessing about a specific outcome?
Thank you for your time and the work you do.
Best regards,
QuietObserver
This isn’t a terribly difficult question to answer, QO, because most of the answers are actually pretty damn obvious. However, I pulled your question out of the question bucket precisely because of its obviousness… and how it relates to your circumstances.
The reason why you feel anxious about your situation – whether the fact that you live at home or your still being a virgin – is pretty simple, QO: it’s because people are telling you to feel bad about it. You say it yourself: it’s because you go online and read posts from people complaining about being older virgins and how that means that they’re lesser. The same thing applies to your living situation – you’re taking in messages from folks who insist that living with their parents or in multi-generational households make them being a loser.
I want to really underline just how much this is distorting your thinking. You’re giving the opinions of random strangers – people you don’t know and who don’t know you – greater influence over your self-esteem than your own lived experience. These strangers, people so separated from you that you’ve never seen their legs and feet, never mind know their real names, have greater say over how you feel than the fact that you have immediate family members who are married, productive members of society and also live with their parents.
You are soaking yourself in these messages and deciding that they have greater validity than even the people around you, who not only think you’re perfectly normal but who respect those qualities.
Hell, not only are you not an outlier in your community, but in your generation. A full third of Gen-Z in the United States alone live with their parents, not because they’re losers or failsons and daughters or overdeveloped children but because the economy has been hit with constant earthquakes and disasters since 2008. The Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis, the Great Recession and a global pandemic alone have made things like “steady employment”, “a living wage” and “affordable housing” take on qualities of stories told around campfires or written about like they all happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far away.
The same applies to your being a virgin – half of Gen-Z have never had sex. You aren’t an outlier or even particularly uncommon. Being a virgin at the ripe old age of 23 puts you very firmly in the median for your generation. And again, much of this comes down, not to anything being wrong with you but circumstance. I hate to sound like a broken record, but things coming of age just in time to be hit by a global pandemic that killed millions and left all of us physically isolated and distanced from our peers tends to have significant social and psychological effects on people.
However, none of that “counts” as much as when strangers online are telling you, directly and indirectly, that this means that there’s something wrong with you. And these stories are coming to you, in no small part, because algorithmic-driven social media is designed to serve you stories that make you upset. You interact with them, and so the algorithm shows you more of them, which makes you more upset, which then prompts you to keep seeking them out.
Worse, many of the complainers are just crabs in a bucket. They want you to think that they’re right and that all of this is hopeless. They want you to believe you’re stuck, just like them, and they will actively try to pull you back down if you try to leave. After all, if you climb out, that would mean that they could too… and doing so would mean that they’re stuck by choice.
This is why the first step to dealing with all of this is simple. It’s the age-old joke of “Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “Well, stop doing that, then.” Quit engaging with the people who tell you that there’s something wrong with you. And I don’t mean “cut it down”, I mean cut it out entirely. Go cold turkey on all of it. Unsubscribe from all the subreddits, delete your YouTube and TikTok accounts, unfollow all the doomers on Twitter, Bluesky, Snapchat – anywhere that you’re drowning yourself in these stories.
(Actually, it’s probably best that you get off Twitter, period, but that’s a separate matter entirely.)
Even just two weeks without reinforcing these narratives will do wonders for your self-esteem and sense of well-being. If you absolutely need to be on TikTok or YouTube or the socials, start with a clean slate and then take an active hand in shaping your experience. Don’t just passively allow the algorithm to throw things in your feed – make a point of only following accounts and creators who aren’t selling you misery, anger and despair. Don’t just mindlessly consume the grievance slop that people call content; pay attention to what you’re paying attention to and what you’re feeding your brain. If it’s stuff only serves to make you feel small, isolated and helpless, then actively reject it.
But you want to do more than just cut out the negativity; you want to, as the song goes, accentuate the positive. Find the content and creators and influencers who give you hope, who bring joy and a sense of empowerment. You don’t want or need to swing to toxic positivity; you just want to find things that make you feel like good things are not just possible, but achievable. It doesn’t even need to be specifically about your circumstances, just that life can be good and can be better… and without shitting on other people in the process.
The next step is to actually think about what it is that you want to be doing. You say that you don’t want to waste your youth, and that you have these God-given traits that you’re squandering. OK, great… what does that look like to you? What sort of life do you want to be living? What would a meaningful and fulfilling youth look like to you, specifically? Not what other people think you should be doing, not what pop culture says an ideal youth looks like, you.
What is it that you’re not doing, and what steps can you take to change that? Once you have an idea of what you want, even if it’s just a collection of “well, it’d be cool to try this thing…”, then actually go do them. If you’re not sure, then just try things because it seems like it might be interesting, lead to a cool experience or a fun story to tell later on. Learn Japanese because you feel like it might be fun to watch anime without subtitles. Take a blacksmithing class because beating hot metal seems like it could be cool as hell and you get a knife out of it afterwards. Start learning how to play guitar and write music and go play at open mic nights at your local coffee shops because why not?
Do anything that strikes your fancy, but especially the things that bring you in contact with other people. Those people are your peers, the potential spokes of your social network, folks who are potential friends, mentors, role-models, rivals and even lovers. Going out and connecting with people in the physical world is going to serve you far more than sitting at home, only ever connecting through screens and keyboards. It will remind you that the world looks very different when you actually live in it, rather than just taking the word of strangers who actively avoid doing so.
All of this will give you a sense of meaning and purpose. You will have greater self-worth and a sense of your own ability to make things happen. You’ll be less afraid of uncertainty, simply because you will remember that you aren’t at the mercy of the currents and tides of fate. If one door closes, you can blow a hole in the wall instead.
The antidote to that creeping anxiety is action, genuine action, not just the sort of wheel-spinning that feels like action but doesn’t actually lead anywhere. You know… like reading all those stories about people complaining without actually taking steps to do anything about those complaints. You want to remind yourself that you have agency, that you are the ultimate arbiter of your fate. Yeah, the world will throw curveballs your way. You will live through things that are bigger than you, things that will overwhelm you simply because it’s so immense that it swamps everyone. But that doesn’t mean that you’re powerless; it just means you have to react to changing circumstances, which is still a reminder that you have agency and influence. You may not be able to control the world, but you sure as hell can control how you live in it.
Being active in shaping and directing your life in ways that you choose, rather than just waiting or reacting makes all the difference. Everything comes from reminding yourself that you aren’t helpless and powerless, no matter how much the doomsayers say you are and the crabs try to drag you back into the bucket. You have choices and options, as long as you choose to take them. It’s all up to you.
You’ve got this, GO.
Good luck.
Hi Dr. NerdLove,
I’m writing because I’ve been stuck in a mental loop that’s slowly poisoning the way I see myself and how I experience desire.
I don’t have abs. I do have a trained, athletic body, but not one that’s visibly “shredded” or visually striking in the stereotypical way. And here’s where my problem starts: I’ve had sex, relationships, and women who desired me — but almost always after they got to know me.
On paper, that should feel validating. In reality, it doesn’t.
What it ends up reinforcing in my head is the idea that my body alone doesn’t inspire desire. That I’m not wanted at first glance. That my attractiveness only “activates” once I prove myself through personality, presence, intelligence, confidence, or charm. In other words, I feel like I always have to demonstrate something to earn desire.
My ex-girlfriend once told me she fell in love with me because of the way I walked. And instead of feeling good about that, my mind twisted it into something darker — like my physical body itself was irrelevant or disposable, and only the performance mattered.
I’ve never experienced what I imagine as raw, visual desire: the look from a woman at a rave, on the beach, or across a room that says “I want you” without context. And I’ve internalized that absence as proof that I’m lacking something fundamental as a man.
Intellectually, I know this is a distorted belief. Emotionally, it feels deeply ingrained. It makes me feel like a man who must always compensate, always earn, always prove — never simply be desired.
I want to get this schema out of my head. It’s not motivating me; it’s corroding me. I don’t want to measure my worth through imaginary abs or an idealized version of instant visual validation.
How do I dismantle this belief without gaslighting myself? How do I stop equating “being interesting” with “not being desirable”?
Thanks for the work you do, and for reading this.
Best regards,
Feeling Trapped
Women have looked at you like a piece of raw meat, FT; the problem is that you don’t believe it when it happens. You have dismissed the ways that people are into you because you don’t want to believe it’s possible. Until that changes, you’re not going to see it; your confirmation bias is going to tell you that it wasn’t “real”, that it wasn’t about your body or that you’re clearly getting it wrong.
Want proof? Ok… so tell me something: why is telling yourself that you’re desirable, not just as a person but as a piece of meat gaslighting, but “you must look like a Heated Rivalry body double to be desired” isn’t?
Seriously. That’s it in a nutshell. You have already declared that trying to believe anything else is “gaslighting”, which is precisely how you’re going to shut down any chance of changing. Do you see how that’s you closing off the possibility that your mindset is wrong?
That’s why this the place to start. Why are you willing to only accept the worst about yourself as the honest truth, but the belief that people are warm for your form as it is now are delusions and lies? Who is telling you this and, critically, why do you listen to them?
I’m not asking this rhetorically; I’m asking because I want you to actually sit down and dig into why you’ve taken this belief onboard to such a degree that you don’t believe the women you’ve dated who wanted to fuck you until the bed collapsed into splinters. And then I want you to explain to me how they weren’t actually having sex with your body and were only blowing your mind.
Seriously. Re-read your own letter and tell me why someone who thought that the way you walk was what made her fall for you isn’t responding to your body. Have you perfected some mystical technique where you are walking without physical form? Are you just projecting the illusion of locomotion, muscular contractions, and inverse kinematics through sheer psychic power? Or was it the way that you moved your body, much like how dancing is moving your body.
The answer, ultimately, is because you’re looking for a very specific form of validation. You feel like there’s a way that people are “supposed” to be into you, and the idea that context is needed – people needing to get to know you, learn who you are and realize that damn that turns them on – doesn’t “count”. It doesn’t “count”, because you don’t see yourself as being attractive, especially in that very narrow and specific way. You’re buying into a particular idea of how attraction works and I’m willing to bet you $5 cash that most of this comes from men talking about what women find attractive, rather than listening to women.
Women have shown you, time and again, that they lust for you. You aren’t willing to accept it because you feel as though it needs to come in a very specific context, but that’s not a context that actually exists. Not unless you ignore that attraction isn’t inherently and exclusively physical.
Let’s put it another way: when is the last time you wanted to fuck a piece of art? I mean it; when is the last time you looked at, say, The Venus of Arles, The Veiled Maiden or Cupid and Psyche and thought “man, I want to hit that?” Have you looked at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus or even a print of Hildebrandt’s “Unicorn Dreams” and got even a half-chub?
Ok maybe art isn’t your thing, so let’s think about photography instead. When is the last time you have gotten aroused looking at a photo of an attractive nude woman who is just standing straight in a t-pose, arms at 90 degrees to her torso, eyes looking straight forward and a completely neutral expression on her face. There’s no sign of emotion, personality, no sign that she has ever moved, ever.
Or perhaps you should picture a realistic sex doll – one that is functionally indistinguishable from a flesh-and-blood woman, but who just stands there, arms at her side, looking at nothing. Just a physical body, occupying space. Or maybe she’s just lying flat and unresponsive on a bed, a physical form with no indication of life beyond not showing signs of death or decay.
Sure, if that’s the first time you’ve ever seen boobs, it might stir something… but you have to admit, that’s a pretty unerotic image, yeah? The proportions and symmetry is nice, her features are appealing, but nothing about it is going to really inspire feelings of lust.
That’s because there’s more to desire than just meat. Meat, no matter how attractive, is just meat. It’s the spark of life that makes someone desirable – the indications of personality and emotion. There is a reason why Playboy pictorials aren’t just nude people in neutral poses; everything is about implying personality and motion. The coy look and teasing smile suggest awareness that she knows that you’re looking and she likes it. The arch of a back and closed eyes while her hands are placed as though she were running them down her body give a feeling of not just motion but sensual enjoyment – leaving the viewer with the feeling that she is someone who enjoys the physical sensations of hands touching her skin.
In other words: it’s not just her body that’s turning you on, it’s her attitude and personality, the impression of her sexuality and the desire that she feels. It’s all part of the sum totality of who she is, implied in visual short-hand that conveys volumes of meaning in a simple gesture, quirk of the lip and glance to the camera.
Even when the person is a complete stranger or is completely anonymous, you’re filling in the blanks yourself, inventing a person out of posture, pose and facial expression and imagining interacting with her. It’s not just a body, butthe person… even if all you are interested in is her physicality.
It’s why a nude model in a life-drawing class isn’t inherently erotic, no matter whether she looks like Sydney Sweeney or Dame Judi Dench. Context, personality, motion… all of these have to come together to trigger that sense of attraction and desire. You aren’t only being aroused by the body, but the holistic person.
Once you understand that – stale jokes about male sexuality aside – that you’re not attracted by physical form alone, is it really that hard to believe that women too are aroused by context?
I mean, women aren’t thirsting after Michael B. Jordan on looks alone, it’s his looks in context with what they think about him. If he were just a motionless, personality-less body like an inactive Host from Westworld… it’s a very different picture.
But maybe it’s unfair to refer to someone who is stupidly hot as an example. Let’s look at, say, Paul Potts instead. Potts, a contestant in the first season of Britain’s Got Talent is a dumpy, kinda chubby guy who, charitably, isn’t going to grace the cover of Men’s Health any time soon. But if you watch this video, you can see the way Amanda Holden’s impression of him visibly changes at the 1:05 mark. However, it’s the moment at 2:05 where things peak, because Nessun Dorma isn’t the only thing that’s reached a climax. Holden hasn’t just changed her impression of him, she’s going to need to change her underwear. He may not be the most physically impressive guy, but his voice is powerful and beautiful enough to make people fall for him.
The point is that attraction and arousal isn’t just physical, it’s contextual. Changing the context changes the association and the feelings the person inspires, because it hits that person’s buttons just right. When that context changes, it changes how people feel, and how they feel changes how they see the person. This isn’t just feel-good woo-woo bullshit, there’s actual science behind it; the more we get to know a person, the more attractive we find them.
So yes, your ex, who loved your walk loved your body… in this case, specifically how you moved your body. That’s not “earning” desire, that’s inspiring desire. That’s someone going “hold on, did it get hot in here” and fanning themselves because they suddenly got hit by a wave of lust.
I know you’ve felt this way too. Be honest – can you really say that you’ve never realized you were hot for someone after you got to know them? Or do you want all of us to believe that you and you alone only fall in lust at first sight and nothing ever shifts that for you? Have you never seen someone you knew in different context and suddenly realized that holy shit they’re hot? Do you only get hornt up immediately upon seeing someone and never later on?
The point of all of this is that you have been drawn to people because of their holistic selves, not just because of their body. You have almost certainly had times when your attraction to them wasn’t instant, but came after you got to know them. Would you consider your desire for them to be less, if it wasn’t immediate and instant?
If you are capable of accepting that you are capable of being turned on by someone after you got to know them and that this wasn’t them “earning” or “proving” themselves to you, then why doesn’t that apply to them, too?
If you paid attention to women and who they’re into and didn’t dismiss their opinions as fake, misleading or outright lying, you might be surprised. Some women like the Greek statue look. Others would let Matt Berry do any depraved things he wanted because they think he’s just that hot. Go to any forum with lots of women and do a search for “hear me out”, and you’ll be astounded at who and what women think are unspeakably desirable and why.
There comes a point where you have to either accept that the people who love and desire you are doing so because you’re you, with everything that means. That doesn’t mean that you had to “prove” anything or “earn” their desire, not more than women have had to “prove” themselves to you or “earn” your desire.
If you want to change this belief, you have to be willing to change how you feel about yourself. Part of that is going to be accepting that maybe you’re wrong about what women want or how they feel about you. Another part is going to be letting go of the ways you reinforce the belief that you aren’t attractive. This includes not listening to the men who insist they know women better than women doand listening to the women who are saying “yes, yes, OH GOD YES.”
Until then… well, you’re going to be with women who want to climb you like a tree and you’re going to keep calling them liars.
Up to you, my guy.
Good luck.
