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Hi Doc? How do I express/word my difficulties and pain with constantly struggling to find friendships or dates with intimacy and feeling pain, skin/touch starvation, and feeling undesirable? The few therapists I visited got me to do “feel the pain” exercises by sinking in to my experience but it only made things worse and trigger suicidal ideation and the pain was worse so I noped out of those appointments.
I feel like as a guy in my thirties, I can’t express these things otherwise I’ll get lectured for not being resilient enough, or if I don’t express them I will get eaten alive form the inside and slide further into isolation without solving anything. It feels like there’s a walking on eggshell phenomenon that if I express difficulties it will collapse any potential attraction someone could have for me.
I don’t want a girlfriend to complete me, nor do I want a walking-fleshlight to service my every need like many insufferable dudes on the internet imply. I just would like friendship that may include sexual connection and intimacy that if we both feel connected to develop deeper. I think I might be atypically romantic as I don’t need romance and don’t like the standard narrative of Disney monogamy, but I do feel I need the senses of skin to skin contact and someone that understands me, the smells and sound of sexual activity (the musk and sensations make me feel more human so that’s why I would never want a sex robot or anything like that), and masturbation doesn’t help this at all for me.
Someone suggested I might be on the autism spectrum, but I don’t fit in with the autistic people I’ve met and instead of having touch aversion, I have a strong need for this stuff. Even if I did, how do I find people willing to give autistic people a chance for intimacy in world that expects normality?
Needs The Human Touch
There’re three separate issues going on here, NTHT, and I think it’s important to separate them out. Right now they’re all tangled up and it’s creating a giant knot in your head where tugging at any one aspect is tightening the rest. This is creating a situation where you’re not really going to be able to deal with any of them. Teasing them apart means you’ll be better able to actually resolve the issues without the others getting in the way.
The first is going to be getting clarity on what, precisely, you want. I’m actively invested trying to help and I had to put effort into understanding it. A complete stranger or someone who’s not professionally or emotionally invested isn’t going to be willing to put that same effort in.
You’re taking touch starvation – a real thing that a lot of people are suffering from – and then throwing sex and relationships into the mix. That’s already going to be creating confusion; you mention wanting friendship but also sex and also intimacy and contact but also you’re not interested in romance but…
Look, you’re describing dating and relationships. You are, quite literally, talking about wanting to find a fairly typical relationship. So why aren’t you talking about wanting to find a relationship, instead of clothing in talk about skin to skin contact and scents and someone who understands you but also friendship and…
Well, I’m sure you can see why this is pretty muddled and confusing. You’re asking for one thing but calling it another for reasons that don’t quite make sense. Unless you’re saying that you don’t want monogamy – which again, why wouldn’t you say that, instead?
Getting some clarity in precisely what it is that you’re looking for would be helpful. One of the most common complaints that women have about dating are guys who literally don’t know what they want and are willing to string people along until they figure it out… and then usually they end up finding it with other people. So start by doing a little self-exploration and figuring out what it is you’re hoping to find and how to express it in two sentences or less.
Now one thing that might help is the second issue: you’re feeling touch-starved. That’s legitimate. Like I said, that’s a real thing that a lot of people are dealing with. The problem is that you’re also conflating it with sex, which is… also a thing a lot of people do. And it’s one of the things that actually hurts relationships – it’s making one person responsible for all aspects of the other person’s life and happiness. That’s a lot of pressure to put on someone, but especially at the start of getting to know someone.
So perhaps you should start working on the skin-hunger aspect divorced from sex and dating. Skin hunger and touch starvation can be addressed without sexual contact, and it’s entirely possible – likely, even – that getting that need met first might make the rest a little easier.
Now, one of the complicating factors is that America in particular is a very touch-averse culture. The homophobia and excess-emphasis on partner-as-sole-supplier-for-all-your-needs have made it very difficult for people to get their needs for simple physical touch met. But difficult isn’t the same as impossible; it just means that you need to look a little further afield.
One of the easiest ways you could start getting your touch needs met would be through massage. Getting regular appointments with a licensed massage therapist can be pricy, but it’s a good way of getting the dopamine and oxytocin hits from physical contact in a way that’s easily accessible. A 45-60 minute Swedish massage every few weeks would mean some significant improvement for you. Pets – especially cats and dogs – also help with physical contact and feeling less alone. If you can’t have a pet where you live or can’t afford one, volunteering at a no-kill shelter might be an option.
You can even get a little exotic and look for things like cuddle parties; they’re explicitly non-sexual and meant for people who, like you, have very little basic physical contact in their lives.
But regardless of how you get the need met, separating your need for touch from your desire for sex is going to make it a lot easier to find both – after all, it means you aren’t going to be expecting to find one person to meet all your needs.
But the third and most influential issue is that you’re doing a lot of this to yourself. You’re doing a lot of wrestling with shadows, creating theoretical scenarios in your head that haven’t actually happened and aren’t likely to happen, but you’re behaving as if they already had.
I mean, look at what you’ve written here – “I feel like”, “I worry”, “if”, “if”, “if”. These are self-created barriers based on what’s going on in your head, not what’s going on out in the world. Who, precisely is going to lecture you for not being resilient enough and why should they have any sort of authority over you? Are you talking about, what, strangers on the Internet? Random people you meet during the day? Why should you give any of them the time of day or even a fraction of your mental and emotional bandwidth? If you can nope out of therapy appointments because you think they were doing you more harm than good, you’re just as free to disregard people who feel like they’re authorized to tell you that you’re Man-ing wrong.
The same goes with “being vulnerable collapsing any physical attraction”. First: that’s a phantom in your mind, not something that’s actually happened. Second: assuming that you express your vulnerability or your feeling lonely or touch-starved in a reasonable manner – i.e. not like you did here – and that kills the other person’s attraction to you? Well, that tells you something important: that you didn’t want to get physical with that person. Why, in pluperfect fuckery, would you want to date or have sex with someone who sees vulnerability or acknowledging your feelings as a buzzkill? That’s not a person you want in your life or in your bed. If you want someone who understands you and accepts you and wants you? You’re going to have to make it possible for them to understand you, and that means actually expressing yourself.
Now notice very carefully I said a “reasonable” manner. This is both a matter of timing, appropriateness and method of expressing yourself. In a related matter, there’s a serious difference between “I feel lonely and isolated, and I’m trying to find friends and potential lovers and forge meaningful connections and relationships with people who understand me” and the way you described things in your letter.
This will be the hardest thing to accomplish, in no small part because you’ve gotten in the habit of assuming these issues – including the idea that nobody could possibly love or want to date an autistic person – are real and have already occurred. You’re going to have to be willing to consider the likelihood that those things aren’t going to happen, to face your fear of them and do it anyway and to learn how to deal with those issues. There’s no getting around that, and avoidance only makes the fear worse – you just create scenarios where you start avoiding even the thought of it.
That actually makes things harder; you’ve spent so much time bottling up those emotions and being afraid to express yourself that you’re going to have to actively unlearn things as you move forward. You’re going to be spending a lot of time trying to force your brain out of one habit and trying to carve a new groove in your brain for the new habit. And that takes effort – especially when you’re already afraid of doing so in the first place.
Part of the reasonwhy guys complain about being vulnerable and then being judged for it isn’t because they were vulnerable, it’s because they opened the firehose and sprayed their feels everywhere at full blast – and often with no warning or consideration of appropriateness. I can’t count the number of times someone went trauma dumping in the comments on a column or people in Twitch chats start talking about their deepest traumas and issues without prompting and often out of context to whatever else was being discussed.
Now in fairness: a lot of this comes because we’ve had generations of teaching men to be disconnected from their emotions and to keep everything bottled up inside. As a result, it’s a lot like puncturing a pressurized can – it erupts messily and all over the place. This is why learning how and when to express yourself is part of developing emotional intelligence – people don’t want to drink from the firehose and it’s especially uncomfortable when it’s from someone you don’t know or have a connection to.
Plus: you don’t know what the other person’s dealing with, so dumping it all over them can be an issue for them as well.
But this is an area where therapy would do you good. Now I know your previous experiences weren’t great – and honestly, I wonder what the hell the “feel the pain” means in this case – but that is likely an issue of the wrong therapist or wrong kind of therapy. You might want to look into dialectical behavior therapy instead of what you were doing last time. DBT is specifically about learning things like mindfulness, understanding and experiencing your emotions and not letting them overwhelm you.
So do yourself a favor. While you’re working on these issues, give therapy another shot. Just remember: therapy is a lot like dating: if you don’t feel like you and your therapist are clicking, if they don’t seem to get you or aren’t actually listening, you can leave and find someone else. Just – as with dating – be clear at the start about what you’re dealing with and what you’re trying to resolve. The more you can explain it clearly, the more they can help.
Good luck.
What’s up, Doc? I’m in a weird situation.
I’m 28 & ready to start dating, but have never had a date… like, ever. Reason: Self-esteem issues caused by childhood trauma. I’m over it & ready to start dating.
I have a quite a few great prospects in my life, but I’m really scared as to the way I’ll look to these women when they find out that I haven’t started dating until recently. How should I approach this?
Thanks,
First Time For Everything
Your situation really isn’t that weird, FTFE. It’s a lot more common than you’d think. Hell, it doesn’t really hit the top ten of the weirdest situations that ever came up in this column.
In fairness, you haven’t really been on dates, so it’s understandable that you wouldn’t know this but… honestly the odds of your dating experience (or lack thereof) coming up at all are pretty remote. You’re more likely to be attacked by a shark, really.
I have gone on more dates than you’ve had hot meals and I can tell you that nobody has ever asked me about my dating experience, how many relationships I’d had or even when I started dating. The only times it’s ever come up have been with people I already knew or were in a relationship with, and even then it was in the context of either trading war-stories or sharing experiences, not “wait, you’re too under-leveled for this adventure”.
Once you’re out of high-school or college, most people aren’t going to be that concerned about your numbers; they’re mostly going to be focused on “are you compatible”, “do you like each other” and “are you looking for the same things”.
It’s possible to find people (mostly, but not exclusively men dating women) who’ll be concerned about so-called “body counts”, but that’s far less about experience and more about sexist bullshit and madonna-whore complexes. Even the “I don’t want to teach someone how to chew their food” complaints that people occasionally toss about in online discourse are outliers at best and ultimately are just disqualifying themselves from dating you, not the other way around. After all the hell would you want to share a plate of cheese sticks, never mind a bed, with someone that unempathetic and judgmental?
Now that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to find people who might be a little concerned about your lack of experience… but not because it means that there’s something wrong with you. They’re much more likely to be worried that this means that you’re not going to be in it for the long-term, that you’re not sure what you want, or that they’re afraid that you’re going to wake up one day and decide that you missed out on not sleeping with more people before settling down and you’ll leave them on an adventure of lube, awkward Tinder dates and self-discovery.
But, honestly? That’s not just putting the cart before the horse, that’s dropping the cart off in the next county and wondering why the horse isn’t pulling it.
So how do you handle all of this? Well, first of all, you don’t treat your lack of experience as a negative. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it just is. It’s a singular data point about you, and all it says about you is that you didn’t start dating before now. That’s it. Frame it that way to yourself and it’ll be how you frame it to others if it comes up. It likely won’t if you don’t bring it up first.
If it does, then remember that people are going to respond to how you roll it out. How do you explain it to others? The same way you explain a gap in your resume: short, simple and matter-of-factly. “I had other priorities”, “I had a lot going on in my life that I wanted to address first”, “it wasn’t the right time in my life,” or even my favorite: “just never met someone I wanted to go on a date with.”
If someone presses you for details – they won’t, but if they do – then you tell them what you told me: “had some stuff in my childhood that I had to deal with”. They don’t need to know the nitty-gritty or dirty details unless it’s immediately relevant, such as if you have triggers that they’re likely to run into. If you don’t… well, that’s all they need to know. If you do end up in a relationship with them, then they’ll have earned the privilege of knowing more. But only until then – and only if they’ve proven themselves to be empathetic and caring and worthy of your opening up to them about it.
Now, as for the potential concern about your not being in it for the long-term or the worry that you’re going to regret not having more notches in your belt? Well, there’re a couple of ways to deal with this. The first is, simply, to focus on short-term dating, not the long-term. You can tell folks “I’ve had some major changes/upheavals in my life, so I’m not looking to settle down or make long-term plans.”
(Addressing your trauma and healing your wounds is a pretty significant change and upheaval after all…)
If you’re cool with commitment or monogamy (make sure you are, first), you can be committed or monogamous, but understanding that you’re not looking for forever is going to be important.
The same goes for the number of partners; tell them “if I were looking to make up for lost time, that’s what I’d be doing now. I’m looking for people I really like and connect with, not numbers.”
But again: these are hypothetical scenarios. The more likely scenario is that you’re going to go on dates. Some will be one-offs. Some might see more than once. You might hook up with a couple, you might not. And, over time, you’re going to meet someone who you click with and who clicks with you and they’re going to be pretty special. Maybe they’ll be the last person you’ll ever date. Maybe they won’t. But if you focus on the now, the past won’t be as much of an issue and the future will take care of itself.
Just relax and let yourself enjoy the journey. It’ll be a hell of an adventure for you.
Good luck.
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