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Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
I’ve got a problem that I don’t think I’ve seen you cover before, so I’m hoping you can help me. I feel weird even asking about this, but I haven’t been able to see a way out of this on my own.
So, my secret origin, I guess. I’m 22, heading into my last semester in college and I’m still a virgin. I’ve had a lot of stuff that I’ve been dealing with (long story, mostly depression, bullies in high-school, a shitty edgelord phase…) that I’m mostly over and I’ve been ready to stop complaining about being single and how girls don’t want to date me and start actually doing something about it.
Over the past year, I’ve been diving deep into self-improvement. I took a long, deep and honest look at myself (admittedly, while in therapy) and I realized there were areas in my life that needed a serious upgrade. I quit waiting for other people to give me permission and just decided that if I wanted to start dating, I had to fix things and be someone women wanted to actually date, you know? So I think you’d be proud, because I’ve tried to avoid the whole “girls just want jacked dudes who are six feet tall” and just focused on what would make me a happier, healthier and more pleasant person. I’ve really worked on my communication skills, put a lot more time into finding hobbies I love, hit the gym, did a little MMA for fun, took a Toastmasters course to get over my social anxiety and overall, just put in the work to become a better version of myself.
The effort has started to pay off. I’m dressing way better than I used to. I’m happier than I’ve been in years, I’ve got healthier habits, I’m more expressive, I’m more confident, I feel more attractive (and it seems like women agree), and I genuinely feel good about the person I’ve become.
But (and I’m sure you saw this coming) there’s a problem… just not the problem I expected. While I’ve been doing a lot better, my friends, who’ve known me for years, are really not happy. We’ve known each other for years and if I’m being honest, we all bonded over being dateless losers that women would cross the street to avoid. We’re the ones who shared all those memes you complain about, the ones about how it’s not harassment if you’re hot… all that. Looking back now, I have to cringe because we’re very much the sort of nerds who mostly complained about how easy women have it and why it sucks for guys.
I’m a little surprised because I honestly thought they’d be happy for me. I’m going to be real here: I kinda had it in my head that maybe I’d inspire them to do better too, like “hey guys, I did it, you can do it, let’s go get better!” That obviously didn’t happen. Instead of cheering on my newfound success and happiness, it seems like most of what I’m getting from them is resentment. I’ve overheard snide remarks about my being “too good for them now” and yeah, we busted each others balls a lot because hey, we’re guys its what we do, they actually seem to go out of their way to try to embarrass me when I’m talking to someone, like bringing up all the cringey shit I did when I was younger or what I used to look like before I talked to a doctor and got my acne cleared up.
I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s as if they preferred the older, less successful version of me. The one who’d often be the butt of the jokes or who’d lament about his dismal dating life. I’m struggling to understand why they can’t be happy for me, or better yet, be inspired to embark on their own journeys of self-improvement. Instead it feels like they actually want me to fail. If I didn’t think I sounded paranoid, I’d honestly wonder if their snide comments when I’m around a cute girl was actually about trying to sabotage my chances.
I don’t know what to do here, Doc. I’ve been friends with these guys for a long time, we did everything together, we know everything about each other and now it seems like they resent me when I’m around and get angry when I go spend time elsewhere. Like, if they’re pissed when I’m hanging out with them, why’re they pissed when I don’t?
I honestly am lost. We had plans to pool our money and rent a house together after graduation but now I don’t know if they still want to do that. I don’t know if I want to do that now. What’re they going to do if I decide to bring a girl home? Am I going to just have to deal with them roasting me all night as they bring up all my most embarrassing secrets?
I know the obvious answer is to move on but we’ve got history, you know? They’re not bad guys, deep down I think they’re just really frustrated. But they’re taking it out on me and I don’t understand why and honestly, it really hurts.
(They would give me so much shit if they knew I said that, too. Oooh my widdle feewwings, need to grow some balls, get the sand out of my puss, all that shit)
How do I navigate this situation? Can I maintain these friendships? Is that even possible? Did I break some rule about not leaving my friends behind, even though I haven’t? I’m TRYING to bring them along but it feels like they’re fighting me every step of the way. What do I do?
Evolving and Confused
I’m actually a little surprised, EaC. Not that your friends are being shitheads, but that this is all happening in person. Your story is actually a fairly common one but in this day and age, it’s something I mostly expect to see from “the other guys on my gaming Discord” or “my friends on the dateless subreddit”, not your friends from college.
Anyway, where this is happening is ultimately not as important, because the results are going to be the same. The answer is, basically, “you need a better class of friend”.
So let’s take a second to talk about what’s actually going on here.
The problem you’re running into is surprisingly – if depressingly – common. One of the more frustrating aspects when you start to change your life for the better is that you may run into folks who refuse to acknowledge how you changed or – worse – seem to try to push you back to who you were. This happens surprisingly often with addicts, where someone will actively try to ruin their former drinking buddy’s sobriety. There’re people who are invested in their “friends” not changing or growing and want to force them back into their assigned role.
This is never more true than when your changes and improvement are a threat to their sense of self.
You and your friends were unified in your communal identity of “Guys Who Are Not Good With Girls”. This isn’t unusual; that shared struggle is a commonality that you could all relate to and was clearly pretty formative for you all.
But you’re also running into what happens when you make that one aspect of your life as a defining, even dominant part of your personality. It becomes how you see yourself and the filter through which you see and interact with the world around you. And since confirmation bias is a motherfucker, it means that you’re going to constantly be finding reasons to reinforce that belief, while dismissing or ignoring the things that suggest that you might be wrong.
And it doesn’t help that your friends are experiencing the same thing. This sets all of you up for a cycle of reinforcement, as each of you agree that yup, you’ve been singled out by God or the Universe or just fucked by the fickle finger of fate. Not only are you experiencing this confirmation bias on a personal level, but the people you interact with the most are also experiencing it and creating a narrative that this is just who you are and how it is and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Where things get especially tricky – and this is how people get stuck in the incel community – is if and when self-recrimination comes into the picture. You may have noticed how, as much as incels hate women, they hate themselves even more. As much as they claim to be tortured by their existence, they also are the first to start bagging on one another and explaining in great detail how and why they’re fucked and why no woman would ever spit on them if they were on fire.
Here’s the thing though: part of the reason why they do this is that it creates a toxic sort of codependency. When you and your bros are just breaking one another down, it helps create the sort of communal bond that actually makes it difficult to separate yourself from the others. It’s not just shared misery, but the sort of thing that leaves you feeling like these are the only people who could understand you or accept you. You mention that you and your friends would bust each other’s balls… depending on how intense and nasty it got, you very well might find that you all experienced similar effects.
But then you went and did the thing that should be impossible: you went and started making substantive changes. You were getting therapy, you were working through your issues and you were doing the sort of deep work to not just change your exterior – leaving you the same bitter wreck on the inside – but actually serious internal work. And you’re actually seeing substantive improvement. Including women finding you more attractive.
That’s not supposed to happen. That’s supposed to be impossible. You’re not a 6’ tall Chad or some Henry Caville clone or whatever. Your improvement is, in its own way, a betrayal of what you and your friends had decided made you who you were.
So here you are, starting to show that maybe life doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe part of the reason why you were all struggling wasn’t because of cold, uncaring biology or cruel fate but the result of choices that you made. That’s really hard to face. Yeah, it means that you all have hope… but it also means that you’re the authors of your own misery. It’s really, really hard to be willing to look at your life and say “this was my fault”. It’s humiliating, in is way, a strike not just to one’s ego but against one’s identity.
And then, to add insult to injury, you’re starting to spend time elsewhere. You’re starting to talk to women, maybe even go on dates… and that means that, to your friends, there’s a very real risk that you’re about to leave them behind. So, as much as they’re upset that you’re proof that they have agency, there’s also a fear of losing you as a friend.
It’s not surprising, then, that they’re getting especially pissy and aggressive in the way that they’re behaving towards you. It’spure crabs-in-a-bucket behavior. They’re trying to pull you back down to their level, because if you leave… well, not only are they left with the proof that they “wasted” years of their lives, but may well be losing a friend, too. So while there’s a certain amount of “oh I guess you’re too good for us now” going on, a lot of it may well come down to being afraid that you’re going to abandon them for a cooler bunch of people and they’re lashing out because they don’t seem to have the emotional vocabulary to say what they’re really feeling.
Chalk up another one for “toxic masculinity ruins the party again”.
The big question, then, is “where do you go from here”… and honestly, a lot is going to depend on your friends. You and they are at a crossroads right now. You’ve made your choice. You’ve looked at what you thought were your limits, challenged them and pushed past them. Your friends, on the other hand, are still very much in a place where they’re controlled by their own self-limiting beliefs. They’re still invested in their identities as “The Ones Who Are Not Good With Girls”. It’s now up to them whether or not they’re going to follow your example, accept the responsibility for their own choices and (crucially) forgive themselves for it, or if they’re going to double and triple down on their own misery.
And the especially frustrating thing for you is that there’s not really anything you can do here. You can try to talk to them, encourage them to open up and talk about what’s really bothering them. But they may well not be in a place where they’re willing to hear what you have to say or give it serious consideration. You can let them know that they’re allowed to change their minds and their beliefs. You can encourage them to recognize that they made their decisions to the best of their ability with the information they had at the time. But now they have new information, so they can make different choices… just like you did.
But you can’t live their lives for them and you can’t force them to change. Even if that’s precisely what they want.
It’s frustrating and it’s heartbreaking. They’re clearly hurting, and they’re taking their pain out on you. You’re creating an easy external target for what’s ultimately an internal issue.
But they can either face it, embrace it and work through it… or they can wallow. You’ve made your decision, you’ve done the work and you’re on your way. But they’re the ones actively trying to hold you back, and to convince you that they’re right to do so. At this point, you can either regress to who you were, when you were much less happy with yourself… or you have to leave your past behind. You’ve grown past them. That may not be a forever thing. You have no way of knowing. Maybe they’ll catch up in the future. Maybe they won’t.
But you can’t live for them. You can’t set yourself on fire to keep them warm… especially not when they are clearly unwilling to do the same for you.
I know you care for them and want what’s best for them. It’s a sad truth that your current batch of friends may not be able to go on this journey with you.
Good luck.
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