Estimated reading time: 19 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove: I
’m writing to you because I feel like I have fallen into this weird place that (I think) few men seem to fall into.
At the top, I’m sure it will seem normal. I am single. I am in my 30s and I am still a virgin and have never dated. Women won’t look at me or respond to me on the apps.
The loneliness hurts. I describe it as “I want a GF to buy cute earrings for” stage of singleness.
And it is curdling into the dreaded toxic incel-adjacent resentment. I feel anger that women don’t want to date me. I feel anger that other guys are casually hooking up with baddies. I feel anger that women who I meet in the real world turn me down – not any of them individually, but the general situation. I feel anger when I swipe right on attractive women on the apps and I get absolute radio silence. Seeing attractive people walking around or thirst traps on social media makes me pissed off that this is out of my reach and I feel a generalized resentment at the world.
I also feel anger at myself for my entitlement, for thinking that I should have an attractive partner, and I can feel a certain cognitive empathy to a lot of toxic, incel-adjacent ‘male loneliness crisis’ guys.
Normally, there is some talk about how men like me need to develop our social skills/calibration, need to see women as people, need to talk to women in a way that is friendly rather than flirty, etc.
But here is the kicker – some of my closest friends are women. Different races, different body types.
Nothing in this letter is about trying to escape the “friend zone” with any real-life woman. These are all platonic relationships and I want to keep them that way. It is more the sense that absolutely every woman will see me as someone who belongs in the friend zone.
What feels infuriating is that I very obviously, very demonstrably can relate to women – just not in a romantic/sexual way. There is clearly some extra spark in conversation that translates as “flirting” that I seem unable to implement.
I’ve asked several of them what I am doing wrong. One of my closest friends, Paulina, is conventionally attractive – she reviewed my profile and reported that my messages were better than 80% of what she gets (“The bar is in hell. At least you are asking them about what they have in their profile.”)
Paulina expressed genuine mystification that I struggle so much with connecting. Of course, she just posts photos of herself in thong bikinis on her profile and gets inundated with replies so she already seems baffled that people can be on the apps and not be matching with people constantly. My guess is Paulina and other friends already (platonically) like me so they assume that it shouldn’t be hard for me to connect with women (“Of course women will swipe right, you’re over 6 feet!” “Of course women will want to keep the conversation going, you actually ask questions that build on their replies!” “Of course women will want to sleep with you, you’re over 6 feet and you’re employed and you don’t act like you want to dismember them!” “The bar is in hell, congrats on clearing it”) Nothing I am doing is working, and, as mentioned above, my lack of romantic/sexual success is making me ashamed, bitter, and distressed.
So…what can possibly stop me from utterly failing in the dating world?
Sincerely
Normal and Friendly in the Streets, Incel in the Sheets
My guy, I get this question a lot, and I can tell you two things that you’re getting wrong right from the jump:
- The vibes are bad.
- It’s a skill issue.
Ok, I realize this sounds dismissive and reductive, but as I said: I answer this question a lot, and you’re demonstrating both of these issues from your first paragraph.
The skill issue is simple: flirting, conveying interest and building chemistry are social skills, in the same way that making lots of attractive, platonic female friends involves social skills and calibration. It’s not as though developing your social skills is only meant to get you to the point of making friends and then that je ne sais quois does the rest. Sex is social. Romance is social. It’s part and parcel of it all.
Chemistry is, in no small part, built through social expression and interaction. Flirting is just telling someone you like them and inviting them to connect with you in fun ways. Knowing how to read the room, how to recognize people who might click with you and what method will work with them are social skills, just like knowing when to tell a joke that breaks the tension in a room and when to just stay quiet.
The thing is that all of these skills are only developed through deliberate use, which includes a willingness to risk failure and rejection. It means being willing to try different things to see if maybe this works when that doesn’t, to take rejection and failure as a starting point for learning instead of taking it personally. You have to be willing to risk flirting badly. You have to take it on the chin and ask someone out, then do your best to say “ok, so what could I do differently next time? Did I misread the situation? Did I say the wrong thing? Was it just bad luck and bad timing?”
Even if I could download the world’s repository of ALL the ways to flirt, all the ways to seduce and all the ways to win a person’s heart directly into your brain, you still have to know how to apply them appropriately and when, how to recognize who is your type and who is going to respond best to which approach. All of that comes from practice via deliberate use.
So yes, much of it is a skill issue. If you don’t see that it’s social skills in the same way that making friends is about social skills… well, that’s part of the problem.
But the bigger problem is that the vibes are bad.
What do I mean when I say the vibes are bad? Well, you use the word “anger” five times in context of dating and meeting women – anger at getting turned down, anger at not getting matches on dating apps, anger at the thought that other people are dating hot women and you’re not, etc. You use other, similar terms like “infuriating”, “bitter”, pissed” and talk about feeling “cognitive empathy” (not really a thing, but whatever, I know what you’re trying to say here even if I doubt the sincerity of it) with incel culture.
Then you dismissively talk about how your attractive female friend “just posts photos of herself in thong bikinis” and thus can’t possibly understand what you’re dealing with.
These are all examples of just how the vibes are bad. I can feel the anger and bitterness coming from a letter, where you are expressing yourself with nothing but words. All of that is absolutely coming off of you in person too. You may not be aware of it, you may think you’re actively masking or hiding it… but you aren’t. It’s in your word choice, it’s in the tone of voice, it’s in the way you are approaching and talking to people. It’s things like the way you breathe through your nose when you’re getting frustrated and fed up, the slight tension in your neck and jaw when you feel like you’re not getting anywhere. It’s a whole host of micro-expressions and microaggressions that may be almost imperceptible, but noticeable at almost a subliminal level. People may not pick up or actively notice each individual aspect, but they form an off-putting whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts, a whole that people perceive almost without being consciously able to explain why.
You know, vibes.
There’s a great example of this at play in, of all things, Daredevil: Born Again. Daniel Blake, played by Michael Gandolfini is a prime case of “vibes are bad”. On paper, nothing he does is terribly bad… aside from being willing to associate with Wilson Fisk. But there’s an undercurrent of entitlement and frustrated resentment, of wanting to be one of the Big Dogs but knowing he’s small and weak inside that comes off him like gamma radiation off that weird physics PhD just trying to eat his pie at the diner and not be bothered. He frequently acts right and talks right, and does the “right” things, but he still gives the distinct feeling of someone who’s spent a lot of time in the free sections of Andrew Tate’s Discord server because he can’t pony up the cash for the War Room.
And to be clear, this isn’t a case of the classic bullshit yarn of “just be attractive; don’t be unattractive”; Gandolfini’s a good-looking cat. And there’re moments – small, but there – where he actually has instances of genuine vulnerability and humility. But they don’t last long and they quickly get subsumed by his entitlement and resentment of others for not giving him the respect and rewards he thinks he deserves, mixed with the understanding that no, he doesn’t actually deserve them even by the metrics he’s trying to live up to.
That anger and bitterness and active disdain are poisoning your interactions, and you aren’t aware of it. The fact that it’s not directed at either a woman specifically or women in general doesn’t make it better or less palpable. Nor does it make it better or more reasonable. It just makes it undirected and inchoate.
If you want better luck, a big part of it is going to be fixing the vibes, and that means actually dealing with those feelings. You may want to start by asking yourself why are you feeling angry about the idea of other people hooking up. Why are you angry at women posting thirst traps? What, precisely, about any of those situations you mention warrant anger? What purpose is that anger serving? In what way does anger help you? What are you angry about, exactly? What wrong is being committed against you that you aren’t also committing against folks who may be interested in you?
And before you say “nobody is interested in me,” consider that you’re focusing on people you’re attracted to, not every woman who enters your presence. You don’t know – in no small part because you aren’t lookin for it from everyone – who is or isn’t looking at you and thinking “huh, he’s kind of cute”. But you may only be thinking of them as a friend, a co-worker, a face in the crowd, while they’re wishing you’d notice them as more. Should they be upset that you don’t give them the time of day?
If the answer is no… then why are you getting angry at women who aren’t attracted to you? If your lack of attraction to another person isn’t you being uninterested at them, can you not see how that works both ways? If you’re not taunting them by being desirable but unavailable, why can’t you apply that same understanding to the women who, for whatever reason, just aren’t digging you?
But I think you already know that the anger is coming from a sense of being thwarted in something you want. It’s not a reasonable response to an injustice; it’s the anger of a child being denied something it wants. Otherwise, why should some stranger posting sexy pictures make you angry? Because they’re sexy, but unavailable to you? There’re billions of women that you will never sleep with; does that seem like something that’s reasonable to be angry about? Does it truly make sense to you, then, to be angry just because you know this person exists without wanting to fuck you? Someone you likely didn’t even know existed before you saw her pictures?
If she’s posting thirst traps, doesn’t that put the onus on you to not be trapped, instead of being upset at her?
The same applies to the dismissiveness and disdain you seem to hold for your friend Paulina. She’s trying to help you. She may not be able to provide the answers you want, but she also can’t read strangers’ minds, nor is she following your every move with the people you interact with. She can only see the small sliver of the interactions you’re having, and only from a limited perspective, and in that slice of a slice, she can’t see anything glaringly obvious. Pair that with her knowing you as a person, and it’s hard for her to definitely say “yes, here’s the issue.” Especially when, even under the best of circumstances, the issue could just as easily be “not the right person for you” or “bad luck and bad timing” rather than any one continual flaw.
This particularly true on dating apps, where dating is even more of a numbers game and you’re opening yourself up to far more rejection simply because the apps make it possible to approach more people in 15 minutes than you could in an entire night at a bar.
But to presume that she can’t possibly understand because of hundreds of dudes she doesn’t know throw low-effort, low-quality dick offers at her is both unhelpful and unkind and it says something about how you actually feel about her. And if you are about to say “well, I just said that because I’m frustrated, I don’t really mean it…” then consider why that’s what you reached for when you were feeling frustrated.
If you want to have better results, then the first thing you’re going to need to do is recognize that the vibes are bad and you gotta fix the vibes. Fixing the vibes means that you’re going to have to actually address and deal with that anger, because the anger isn’t helping you. It serves no purpose except to perpetuate itself. It solves no problem and gives no advantage. It only serves to make things worse. Neither does the resentment, nor the bitterness. It doesn’t matter if you feel as though it’s justified. It isn’t, but thinking that it is just gives you a reason to hold onto it instead of letting go. You’re going to have to be willing to look at yourself honestly, to confront some things that you’re going to not like seeing, and to actually dig into it, so you can do the work of uprooting it.
And to preclude the obvious: no, the resentment and bitterness can’t and won’t be treated by someone showing interest finally. The anger and resentment will just mutate because a person showing interest will not make the underlying issues go away. The insecurity will be there, the frustration will still be there and you’ll either be more bothered by “why her instead of someone else” and “how dare you come to me now?”
I’ll save you some time by showing you a shortcut: a lot of this is born out of how you feel about yourself. It’s the feeling that your lack of success makes you less of a man and that being a virgin is a statement about your status and your worth. I know I bring up “if you don’t love yourself” frequently, but this is a prime example of why – not loving or valuing yourself is part and parcel of how this anger and resentment creeps in. It’s outsourcing your sense of self-worth and value to the opinions of other men – men who neither know you nor would give a single, solitary fuck about you if they did, but who you are willing to give authority over your entire emotional state.
Feeling frustrated is understandable. Struggling like this is frustrating. Not knowing what the problem is, is frustrating. But the anger, the bitterness and the disdain, the resentment and the entitlement? None of it is helpful, and all of it just makes things worse. It’s not inevitable and it’s not unavoidable. Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.
The vibes are bad. You’ve gotta fix the vibes. And the way you fix the vibes is to do the unpleasant shadow work of unpacking and offloading a lot of what you think and feel – by yourself if necessary, with the help of a trained professional, ideally.
It’s the only way, my guy. In the end, it’s going to be up to you.
Good luck.
Hey Doc, hoping you can help me with a pretty…weird problem.
Me (18M) and my sister (also 18) don’t get along very well, we have quite different values and goals in life, but she’s gotten into a situation with someone that’s starting to concern me. There’s this girl, let’s call her The Redhead, who my sister started hooking up with somewhat regularly around the time we all graduated. A lot of people in our class gossiped and expected that me and The Redhead should get together and we’d be so perfect for each other, but I’m not interested in dating (got other things going on). Normally I wouldn’t care much who my sis is sleeping with but The Red Head has introduced her to BDSM and I know you’re not supposed to kink shame but she’s told me some things that feel really off.
My sister seems to take it as a point of pride to refuse to use her safeword, and there has been at least one situation where The Redhead forced her to do something she clearly didn’t want to do. Specifically, The Redhead wanted my sister to shave her own pubic hair (despite being pretty butch, The Redhead seems to like feminizing her a lot). My sister said she didn’t want to because it would be unfeminist but The Redhead retorted that feminism was about societal power relations and doesn’t apply to individual relationships between women like that, and then told my sister to stop using words she doesn’t understand, except clearly she does understand because the whole reason she was complaining to me about this was because she felt like it was a double standard. And yet despite all that (she went through with shaving down there), my sister insists that she didn’t *really* do anything she didn’t want to do.
It feels like this situation is only going to escalate because I can tell my sister is extremely physically attracted to The Redhead but it also feels like this kind of weird messed up consensual-non-consent thing is going to keep happening. What can I say or do, if anything at all, Doc?
-Arabian Knight
Alright, AK, you’ve got me: this is an entry for April Fool Me that I am just not catching. Once again, I invite my readers who get it to yell at me about it in the comments.
(And what I find weirdly irritating is that I keep veering between “sounds a little like the early Alanna books” “sounds a little like Sunstone” and “sounds a little like And Just Like That”, but none of those line up right, only have superficial connections to the letter and are actually absurdly different from both the letter and one another, so I have no idea why my brain is going there. Besides redheads, I guess.)
But let’s talk about this situation. First and foremost: while there are many ways to be kinky and many ways for a dom/sub relationship to play out, a good dom is going to actually care about their sub and not push lines they shouldn’t. A dom, for example, that tells their sub that “good” or “real” subs don’t use safewords or shames their sub for using a safeword is a shitty dom. Even when dealing with consensual non-consent, there are boundaries, there are limits and there is an ejection switch – all of which should be discussed and agreed to well in advance. And while an experienced couple with a lot of trust and clear and effective communication may engage at play that seems to strain the bounds of safe, sane and consensual or risk-aware consenting kink… that ain’t an 18 year old first-timer who’s been with the dominant for less than a year.
I also have a lot of active disdain for anyone who tries to dismiss someone’s concerns with “aww, you’re so cute when you think you’re smart”. Especially when even I – someone who, let’s be real, has a 101 level of understanding of feminist theory at best – can tell when The Redhead’s full of shit.
(Also, not to put too fine a point on it, “no, silly, this is just how X kind of relationships are” is a known and somewhat notorious red flag in queer relationships, especially when one partner is new to them.)
So I would say that yes, you should trust your Spidey-sense here; this shit ain’t cool at all. The Redhead sounds manipulative under the best of circumstances, and this has the hallmarks of the metaphorical frog-in-the-boiling-pot. I would be willing to bet that the “consensual” part of “consensual non-consent” is going to start getting feeling a hell of a lot less consenting before long.
But here’s the thing that you’re not going to like: there’s not really anything you can do. Like it or not, your sister is a grown-ass woman, and can make her own choices. You can’t force her to break up or not see this woman, and to be perfectly frank, trying to press the issue runs the risk of pushing her further into The Redhead’s arms and restraints. If she’s already able to talk your sister in circles over something as simple as not wanting to shave, the odds are she has a response locked, cocked and ready to rock for every argument you might make or every concern you raise. The only person who can extricate your sister from this relationship is your sister. Right now, she’s not ready, and pushing the issue is far more likely to ensure that she won’t be. Worse, it would make it easier for The Redhead to keep her hooks in, because she can play off your judgment in a whole host of different ways, from the kink-shaming to queerphobia and worse.
There’re a lot of little things you can do to help encourage your sister to keep thinking things through – asking leading questions that encourage her to really explore her feelings without pushing her to any particular conclusion, for example. Doesn’t it feel a little dismissive for her to tell your sister that she’s stupid, when you know damn good and well she isn’t? While kink is about pushing boundaries and testing your limits, doesn’t it seem like pushing too hard and too fast could cause problems? And if The Redhead keeps demanding that your sister go further than she may feel comfortable, doesn’t that suggest that maybe The Redhead doesn’t trust your sister to actually know her own limits? Or perhaps doesn’t respect her limits or her wishes, the way a dom should? Do they discuss the scenes they’re going to perform and what to expect, the way that all the respected books on the subject say? If not, why not? Letting your sister come to these conclusions herself – even if you’re giving a subtle nudge here and there – is ultimately more powerful and effective than telling her that she’s being abused.
But the most important you can do, however, is be the reliable and non-judgmental source of support and comfort for your sister. The thing about twins is that this is a very significant and unique sort of bond, and it takes a hell of a lot to come between that. It’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult, and that gives you influence. That influence needs to be used carefully, and the best way to use it is to ensure that the lines of communication stay open, no matter what. One of the biggest and most telling signs of a toxic and abusive relationship is when the abuser starts to isolate their victim from friends and family. It keeps them away from people who might both challenge the abuser’s hold and who might support them if they try to leave.
While your sister isn’t ready to see that this is a situation that, if not fucked, is heading to Fucked Town via the express lane, there will come a point where she will. When that day comes, knowing that you will be there to give her whatever help she needs, no questions asked, no answers expected and no judgement given is going to be huge. And that non-judgement is crucial; a big part of what keeps people in bad situations is the fear of dealing with the humiliation and judgement of others. That “I told you so” may feel satisfying in the moment, but it loses a lot of the appeal when it is also what drives someone right back into the arms of their abuser.
So, while this is an understandably distressing and uncomfortable situation to be in, the best thing you can do is make it clear that you are on your sister’s side, no matter what. She needs to know that you will be there for her come hell or high water; when the call comes, you’re ready to ride. Knowing that she’s got folks who’ve got her back will help her reach the time when she’s ready to bail sooner rather than later.
Good luck.
