DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: For the last 2+ years, I’ve(32M) taken a lot of steps to try and improve my social life. During that time, I moved to a city that is supposed to have a lot more people my age than the small town I was in previously. In the time that I’ve been here, I’ve gotten involved in a lot of things I’m interested in: martial arts, volunteering at church, going to a gym I like, and other smaller stuff.
The problem is, I haven’t met any single women at any of these places. I haven’t been on a date in about 11 years now, and I feel like that fact alone is on me like a bad smell. But I wouldn’t even know that for sure because I haven’t met any women who it would be possible for me to date, let alone someone I would be interested in. Back when I was around a lot of single women(college), I knew I was bad at attracting people but I had one long-term relationship. I’m not a believer in putting people on a 1-10 scale, but I have zero sense of where I stand on overall attractiveness except that I know my face is terribly unpleasant to look at. That’s my only tangible data point. The only other data I have is that most people I know like to crack jokes about men who don’t attract women (I’m not sure if they include me in that or are just not realizing that I’m the butt of the joke), and that my low confidence puts me at a gigantic disadvantage.
With that in mind, I want to experience love and belonging, so I want to know how to meet someone to be in love with. All of my friends are in committed relationships, and I’ve been told more than once that they’d like to set me up with friends of theirs, but none of their friends are available. Saturday nights are the worst for me because everyone(understandably) wants to spend that time with their SOs. There’s no space for a single guy in a gathering of couples, which is fair, so there’s no one to blame but myself. Being excluded at times is a natural consequence of being single. I view it as a sort of penalty for my failure to attract someone.
The next most common advice that is suggested is to go to activities where you can meet people. The trouble is, most of my weekdays are already packed with things I like and people I like. Some of my obligations are slowing down, so I’m thinking of getting back into yoga (I did it a few years back and liked it, but the instructor had a weird thing with calling my body “feminine” which got uncomfortable over time). But I’m worried that I’ll still be stuck in the same problem: what if I don’t meet single women there, and then I feel attached to something that isn’t actually getting me closer to my life’s goal of finding love? Additionally, yoga has the added stereotype of unattractive single dudes (like me) showing up to hit on women and/or stare at tight pants. While I’m genuinely interested in the topic, I don’t want to come off as one of those guys. Since people can sense my lack of confidence, I’m worried that I’ll walk in looking like a big ol’ red flag.
Online dating is a definite no go because it’s too picture-centric. The only way anyone might find me interesting is if I’m talking or doing something. My appearance has zero mileage.
So how do I figure out an activity or commitment to get me closer to finding love? Should I disregard my interests and throw out activities I love to find more stuff until something puts me in front of single women?
-Worthless on Weekends
DEAR WORTHLESS ON WEEKENDS: The first step to any improvement on this, WoW, is to stop kicking yourself in the nuts.
No, seriously. You lead off with a list of qualities you insist you have that explain why nobody should ever want to date you and honestly that’s going to be one of the biggest problems you have to overcome.
Not, mind you, that you actually have these issues – I will say again that if I had a nickel for every guy who thought he was the love child of Quasimodo and the Toxic Avenger and was actually average at worst and usually in need of a better haircut and occasionally a better skincare routine, I’d be able to self-fund The Avengers – but that you believe you do. That is what’s radiating off you like a nuclear reactor with low self-esteem, not your “haven’t had a date in years”.
Seriously, imagine if you came across a single woman in her 30s who was giving off that same general attitude. Is that honestly something that’s going to make you go “yes, I want to take this woman out for a drink and a rousing game of skee-ball?” Or is that more likely to make you say “man, I really don’t want to have to deal with that…”?
Yes, I know you think you’re being brutally honest about yourself. I would point out that the people most invested in being brutally honest tend to focus on the brutality and not the honesty, but also that the people who say they’re being brutally honest about themselves tend to not be honest. It’s much more about feels rather than reals, and no being single for any length of time isn’t “proof” that it’s true.
You want to start having better success meeting women? Start by working from within so that you aren’t kicking your own ass constantly. It’s not appealing to other people and it only handicaps your own ability to improve. Trust me, you can’t shame yourself, neg yourself or otherwise insult yourself into being better. What you should be doing is working on loving yourself enough that you recognize that you should be treating yourself better and learning to recognize and give credit to the things that make you awesome.
A good start would be to start complimenting yourself in the mirror. No, seriously; look at yourself in the mirror and say something positive about yourself. It’ll feel weird and inauthentic at first, but push through that and keep at it. As cheesy as it sounds, the more you start telling yourself that you’re looking good, the more you’ll start to see it.
Now let’s get to the meat of your question, because you have three separate issues here. The first is simply scheduling. This part is the hard part because there are only so many hours in the day. Everything you decide to do comes at the expense of other activities. If you want to add something in to your schedule, it means having less time to give to something else. Sometimes that means giving up free time. Sometimes that means giving up time devoted to things like “sleep”. And still other times, it means swapping things out for different activities… even when those are things you already like.
Under most circumstances, this is where you would need to decide what is going to be a higher priority for you – the activity and social group you already like, or your goal of going out and potentially meeting people (not women, people, for reasons I’ll get to in a second). If meeting people is going to be a priority for you, then that’s going to take the place of something that isn’t as high of a priority… even if it’s something you already enjoy. If you decide that the thing you enjoy is a higher priority, that’s great… but you still have to accept that you’ve decided that meeting people isn’t as much of a priority. That’s a choice you’ve made, not an inevitable fate handed down by the cold, uncaring universe.
It’s also important to note that you will do much better if you’re going out and doing things that you enjoy that also facilitate meeting new people. If you hate going to bars and clubs, for example, then forcing yourself to go out and flirt with strangers there is going to be a waste of your time. You’ll be miserable, that’ll affect how you interact with people (if you do at all) and then you’ll just go home feeling even lower than you did before. On the other hand, if you, say, find an awesome weekend kickball beer league (to pull a random example) that you dig, you’d be both having a good time and meeting some cool folks. This makes it much easier to commit to going and increases the odds of meeting a sexy someone. When you’re having fun, you’re in a better mood and that’ll come across in your interactions with people.
But I say “under most circumstances” because, quite frankly, with the way you’re talking, I’m not sure it would do you any good. Even if we leave aside the way you think about yourself, you are too busy inventing reasons why doing anything is a hopeless case before you even set foot out the door.
That is the second issue you’re dealing with: you’ve assumed failure before you’ve even begun. In the same paragraph that you mention wanting to get into yoga, you immediately start listing off reasons why you’d be shunned and it would be absolutely pointless because what if, what if, what if, ok never mind it was a bad idea anyway. I’ve already discussed in detail why there’s a difference between “guy at yoga who’s there to do yoga” and “guy at yoga who’s there to leer at women in tight spandex”. Don’t want people to think that you’re the latter? Great… don’t act like him. Problem solved. If someone is determined to think you’re a creeper even though you’ve done literally nothing creepy – you came to class, you did your poses, you rolled up your mat and left – then they’re the weird one and are emphatically not your problem.
That’s precisely the thing you need to get over – you’ve assumed you failed before you even finished talking about the idea. If that’s your mindset, you’re going to fail because you’ve primed yourself to believe it to be inevitable. That means that you’ve set a frame that says that even the slightest inconvenience is a failure and any potential success was something you obviously misunderstood.
There’s also what you said about weekends and how there’s just “no room for a single guy when everyone else is coupled”. That’s not actually true, nor is it true that your friends being partnered off means they have no time for you. That is another example of you coming up with reasons why you’re f--ked from jump street. I mean “I see that as my punishment for being single”? Jesus dude, not only is that not how this s--t works, but this is why you’re single. I can’t emphasize this enough: all this self-recrimination/self-punishment you’re doing is just making things worse.
I’m going to go ahead and guess that this belief that there’s no room for you is a you thing, not something your friends have said because if it’s something your friends have said then good news, I have figured out how to free up a s--tload of time in your schedule.
BECAUSE IT WOULD MEAN THAT YOU NEED NEW GODDAMN FRIENDS.
I can promise you that, if your friends are actually decent people, that they have no problems with a single friend being at their gatherings. If their parties and get-togethers are “must have a plus-one to attend”, then I am honestly at a loss as to why you would choose to hang around them.
But why I bring all of this up is because this is very much about your attitude and your beliefs and how they’re sabotaging you before you even start. If you want to meet women, then you need to actually be ready to succeed, not looking at it as just way of failing more slowly. This means learning to see yourself as a hot piece of meat. You don’t need to be the hottest thing since World War 3, but you can’t start from a position of apologizing for blighting the world with your existence either. Similarly, you want to be going into new situations with, among other things, the idea that these people already like you and are glad you’re there.
As woo-woo-just-
manifest
-success as it sounds, choosing to believe that people already like you works. It subtly changes not just your behavior – you’ll have more relaxed, open and inviting body language, you’ll be warmer and friendlier in your expressions and the ways you talk to people – but how you see the interactions. Your attitude and belief are the filter through which you will see the world. If you believe that people are going to be suspicious and looking for reasons to dislike you, then that’s precisely what you will get… whether it’s real or not. By that same token, if you believe that they already like you, then that’s what you’re going to see, even if their behavior is exactly the same.
And frankly, if what you believe affects the world around you, you may as well believe things that help you.
Now the third issue is going to be taking a more active role in meeting people – and I do mean people. One of the things I tell people all the time is that when you’re going to try new activities, you have to look a couple steps beyond who’s in the immediate vicinity. What if there’re no single women there? Well, you talk with the people who are there – men and women, queer and straight. Because while those folks may not be the women of your dreams, they may be the people who would introduce you to some of them. Meeting people and connecting with them facilitates meeting more people – the people they know. Sometimes it’s as overt as “hey, I told my friend Sheila about you and she wants to meet you”. Other times it’s as roundabout as some of your new friends inviting you out to karaoke and oh look some of their other friends are there too! Now you can get to know some of them – some who may very well be single.
Now let’s take those three issues and look at ways that they interact and make it possible for you to meet folks. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you go to yoga and as it turns out, the people who are in that class aren’t single. But hey, that’s fine because you wanted to do yoga and meet cool people and now you’ve got some folks who are at the very least, new friends. Now seeing as Saturdays are lonely for you, you decide that the best way you can change that up is to throw a party. Maybe you decide to host a cook-out by your apartment complex’s pool. Maybe you decide to have an old-school kickback in your place. Maybe you decide that the party will be at a nifty bar with interesting cocktails or something.
The point is that you’re arranging an event and inviting your friends – both old and new – to come. And when you’re telling some of your new yoga friends about this shindig, you tell them “and hey, bring a friend or two… but only if they’re cool”, with a bit of a wink because obviously you’re not doing a weird Studio 54 velvet rope thing.
Well, coupled up or not, you’ve got friends coming to spend time with you; old friends you already know and new friends who are getting to see this side of you when you’re in your element as host and “Guy Providing Fun Time”. If those new friends bring some single ladies, those ladies are also getting to see you being at your best and are going to be that much more interested in meeting you and you, of course, are going to treat them like they’re already your new friends because why wouldn’t you be? This encourages them to like you back, which in turn, makes it easier to talk with them, get to know them and see if there’s enough about them that would make them someone you’d like to get to know better. And if they are… well, then it’d be natural to say “Hey, I’m really enjoying talking to you; is it cool if I send you a friend invite on WhatsApp/ Facebook/ Instagram/ Discord/ get your number?” Or even “you know $COOL_THING we were talking about earlier? Well $RELATED_THING is going on this weekend and if you’re interested, I’d love to take you”.
Now does all this mean that you have to be throwing parties every weekend or becoming an event planner for your friends? Of course not; these are just examples of things that you could do. But taking some initiative and creating opportunities for meeting people and having a fun time in the process is part of how you stop feeling like you need to go out and do cold approaches until you want to puke. It’s an organic and natural way of meeting people and upping the odds of meeting someone who you click with.
But none of it can happen when you’re busy apologizing for taking up precious oxygen from all the happily coupled people or because of your supposedly-ever-so-hideous face. Nor can it happen if you’re continuing to insist that you’ve failed and success is impossible before you’ve even started. Start with learning to love, appreciate and value yourself more instead of all the self-inflicted junk-punching. Loving and valuing yourself helps lay the foundations that make the rest much, much easier.
Good luck.
Bottom of Form
Bottom of Form
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
�
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com