Dating

Help, I Stink… And I Can’t Fix It!

October 19, 2022

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Hi Doc,

I do realize how ridiculous this question is going to sound, but stick with me, for a second.

I’m a 27 year old male, that is single and never had a relationship in his life. As I was reading in your archives, about all the usual stuff like how to meet women, talking to them, I found the article about “How to Smell Better” and how important it is to actually smell good for a first impression and I do agree with all of what you written in there.

Now my problem is that I have a chronic middle ear inflammation in my left ear.

One of the problems is that I just hear less on my left side, but that’s not what this is about. What is actually important and relevant about the my question, is that pus flows out of my left ear and it’s smells bad. I’ve lived with that inflammation now for 17 years and as you probably can guess I was bullied in school and also at work a lot.

Of course, since I was 10, I go every year to a doctor to see if the inflammation is getting worse or better and the good news is, it’s not getting worse. But the bad news about all of this, since I was 10 years old, I was told by the doctor and many others, that this specific inflammation is not treatable, so I’m pretty much damned to live with it till I die. A big problem is that the pus is flowing out of my ear, pretty much the whole day and I regularly need to wipe it away, which is for me at least is always a bit disgusting, you get used to it, but you know, it will always stay disgusting.

I pretty much always try to hide the cleaning of my ears bit, when I’m with people or if I can’t do that, I wear headphones so that my left ear stays covered, but if I try to get to know people or I go to a date, I can’t really do that, without the other people noticing it. So I need to tell people I have that, but then for me there is this fear, that I get rejected, simply by just having that inflammation.

So my actual question is, do I just need to accept that I will never have a relationship, because of how important it is, to actually smell good?

It’s on my mind a while now and I just want you know an answer to that, like working on other fields that I can offset this downside of me in the dating world somehow or if I should just give up on dating and try to live to the best of my abilities a happy single life.

With regards,

The One With The Bad Ear

Well just when I thought I’d seen them all, you came in with a really unique question, OWTBE. And to be blunt, this is going to very much be a “good news/bad news” sort of situation. The bad news is: yeah, this is likely to present challenges for you in your dating life. Scent is one of the most primal of our senses; it’s the sense that seems to have the most direct connection to our brains and that means that scent carries a LOT of power. Scent, for example, tends to be a powerful trigger for memories – the smell of fresh cut grass, for example brings up memories of smiley days from summers of our childhood, while certain floral or herbal scents may bring to mind memories of family members or specific events. Casinos and theme parks will subtly scent the air in order to help create specific moods, whether of excitement and anticipation or calmness and confidence.

And of course, scent has a lot to do with attraction as well. There’re inconclusive studies as to whether humans have (or don’t have) pheromones, scent and olfactory cues do carry significance and weight when it comes to attraction and how we perceive folks. We associate certain scents and odors with general good health, with cleanliness and hygiene and even personality; we associate piney scents with more outdoorsy people or spicy or herbal scents with adventurousness or a taste for the exotic and unusual. And of course, how we smell can be a turn on… or a turn-off. In fact, many women have stated that the way that a man smells is far more likely to be a turn off than how they look. So if you have a persistent odor problem – even if it’s not something you can control or affect – then yeah, that’s going to be something that needs to be managed. Even if it’s a side-effect of a medical condition, the way you smell can affect how you move through the world around you and how people are going to perceive you or how much they’ll want to interact with you.

The good news is that, while this isn’t necessarily a solved problem, it’s one that a lot of other folks in similar situations have dealt with and have found, if not solutions, than at least some ways of working around the effects or mitigating them.

(Big thanks to my friend Yam for help with this)

Now seeing as Dr. NerdLove is not a real doctor, one of the first things I would suggest is that you talk to an ENT specialist, in no small part because what you describe is… troubling. Generally the eardrum separates the middle ear from your ear canal; if you have a constant flow of pus that would seem to imply that you’ve got a ruptured membrane, which may need to be addressed. While you say you’re going to the doctor every year to track how the inflammation is doing, I wonder if you’ve since gone to a new doc or if you’ve gotten a second opinion. Medicine is a science that’s always in motion and getting a second (or even third) opinion could have significant benefits for you. You may get a doctor who’s more experienced with your specific issue, treatment or surgical techniques may have changed; you may have options now that simply didn’t exist when you were first diagnosed or your life circumstances may have changed enough that treatments that were otherwise advised against may now be relevant.

If, for example, your original doctor thought surgical intervention might’ve been too radical a procedure when you were 10, being a grown man of 27 means your circumstances are very different. Even if the potential downsides – hearing loss, issues with equilibrium, etc – were significant, as a 27 year old, you may have decided that the reward is worth the risk or that the tradeoff is acceptable.

But even if those haven’t changed and the situation is still untreatable – which is awful and I’m so sorry – then your care options have almost certainly changed and improved. Again, if you consult with an ENT specialist and make it clear how much this is a quality of life issue for you – between just pus management and the smell problem – then they may be able to direct you to new and different ways to manage the problem. This may mean new materials that help absorb the pus or clean the infection or even something as simple as new types of earplugs that you could wear unobtrusively during the day. So my first suggestion is to talk to a specialist and make it clear just how much this impinges on your day to day life. In fact you want to use that framing: how much it affects your day to day functioning. When you can explain, in detail, how it directly interferes with your daily life, then doctors tend to pay more attention and take the issue more seriously than if you just say “Doc, it smells and it’s icky.”

My second suggestion – assuming that either talking to an ENT is either not feasible or doesn’t change things significantly – is to look to folks who’re dealing with similar issues surrounding unpleasant and unwanted smells and dating. In this case, you’re going to want to look to folks who’ve had various forms of ostomies and to ostomy clinics or supply stores. People who’ve had to have an ostomy of one sort or another have to deal with literal bags of human shit, as well as the attendant smells and gas issues, and there is a wealth of resources for dealing with the problem.

And that, honestly, should give you some comfort and confidence. Yeah, the drainage from your ear is unpleasant, but it’s not going to necessarily doom you to a life of singledom. After all, folks who’ve had ostomies also date, have sex, get married and have the full range of human relationships while managing the complexities of their conditions. I personally know folks who’ve had to have ostomies for Crohn’s disease, for cancer treatment or physical injuries and who have robust and active love lives. And you can as well.

(In fact, if I didn’t know in advance, I would never have been able to tell that they had the ostomies in the first place just by hanging around with them.)

Another thing you should consider: you have other relationships in your life already. You’ve got friends and family and people you spend time with regularly. The fact that you have to manage the drainage and cleaning isn’t keeping you from having those relationships in your life; by that same consideration, there’s no reason why you can’t have love and sex and romance either. Just as you don’t want to be friends with people who’ll bully you or mock you for your medical condition, so too do you not want to date people who will give you shit for it. Yeah, it means you’ll need to tell folks, but hey… that’s going to be true about a lot of things.

And it’s worth remembering that even folks who don’t have persistent inner ear infections (or ostomies or any other medical condition) are in great shape now, all of us are ghosts piloting suits of meat and bone. That means that time is going to have its way with all of us, with all the attendant squick and grossness that crops up with living in a meatsuit. Things ooze, things sag, squirt, squish and shift. Time and entropy make fools of us all, and being in a long-term relationship with someone means you’re gonna be dealing with gross shit coming out of (or going into) your partner at multiple points in your life.

Anyone who thinks that humans are going to be perfectly sterile, perfectly functioning machines that never have any sort of issues – some of which will result in unpleasant or nasty smells or secretions or whatever – is someone who’s going to bail the first time their partner gets food poisoning. Or COVID. Or cancer. Or any other of the faults that flesh is heir to.

So when you do bring up the ear issue – assuming that it can’t be addressed now that time and science have marched on – don’t treat it as the great sin you must apologize for. You can acknowledge that it’s not pleasant, sure… but there’s a difference between acknowledging this vs. acting as though it’s a generational curse that will be inflicted on those who stay too close to you. It’s just a single part of the holistic being that is you, OWTBE, not the totality of you. It’s one solitary fact about you… but how people react to your telling them will tell you everything about them.

Good luck.

Dear Dr. NerdLove: why do I (f/20) feel like less because I haven’t lost my virginity yet?

I definitely already could have if I wanted to, everyone that I know in university right now is hooking up because their first time was with someone special back when they were 18. I’m 20 now and my ex-boyfriends were never worth it, why do I feel like I’m missing out? I wouldn’t even be into the hookup culture but I don’t know, I feel like less, like I’m a child or something.

I lack the basic experience too besides kissing, I feel like guys wouldn’t want to put up with this or would struggle to.

I hate how much I’m thinking about this. Help?

Virgin On My Mind

Let me start to answer your question with a question of my own: are you feeling like this because of other people tell you that you should feel ashamed about this? Or because you feel like you should have had sex by now and by passing on it you’ve done something wrong?

While you think about that, let me put your mind at ease: far fewer people are having sex than you think. Leaving aside the recent hue and cry about the “Great Sex Recession” or whatever the hell they started calling it, people tend to radically overestimate how much sex other folks are having, especially in university. It can feel like you’re the Last of the Virgins when it seems like sex is everywhere, but even in the supposed (and greatly exaggerated) “hook up culture”, people are actually talking more about sex than they’re having it, and most of the sex folks are having tends to be in the context of a relationship (short or long term), rather than a free-floating fuck zone where everyone’s doing the pants-off dance off with all and sundry.

You feel like you’re missing out in part because it feels like everyone else is having crazy sex and you’re “supposed” to be doing the same thing too. But it’s like you said: you’ve had opportunities and you’ve passed on them. And to be clear: it sounds to me like you made the right decision for you. Your exes just weren’t worth it. That is absolutely, 110% the right call. While I don’t necessarily think that one’s first time should be “special” or that the “meaning” needs to be more than “I’ve decided I want to lose my virginity”, I do think that when you have sex for the first time, it should be worth it. And worth it doesn’t necessarily mean “with someone who’ll make me orgasm until my eyes bleed”; it just means “I’m glad I did this and I’m glad I did it with that person and generally enjoyed the experience.”

If the guys you were dating didn’t reach that particular bar? Well, then you made the right call and – more importantly – the right call for you. What’s right for you may be different from what’s right for someone else and that’s fine. Because at the end of the day? Sex, while pleasurable, when done right, is just an activity. Having not had sex yet just means you haven’t had that particular experience or done that particular activity yet. If you wouldn’t judge someone for, say, not having gone skydiving or having visited a water park or been on a drive through a safari park, then why should you judge yourself a being less for having not had this particular experience yet?

But notice very carefully how I said “it should be worth it”? The person who you do eventually decide to sleep with – if you ever do, and you might not! – is very much a part of that equation. If someone’s worth having sex with, then they’re going to be someone who’s compassionate, who cares about your comfort and pleasure and that this should be an enjoyable experience for both of you. If they’re only thinking about sex in terms of what you do to (and for) them and sees your lack of experience as a sign that you aren’t going to be able to please them? Then they’re showing themselves to be a selfish pork-face who isn’t worth your time, your attention, your thoughts or your body.

If they’re worth sleeping with, then your being a virgin isn’t going to make you seem less, or something that they “have to put up with”. Neither, for that matter, are they going to fetishize it or make some big production about your “purity” or “virtue”. They’re going to be most concerned with making sure that you want this, that you’re comfortable and that you enjoy yourself. So if and when you decide you’re ready – whether you want to wait for love or just an acceptable Saturday night when the roommate is out – then make sure the person is good at communication and compassion, giving and attentive and who will listen to you.

And here’s the other thing folks often forget: every new partner means learning about what makes them tick. And groan and moan and squeal and giggle. What is a major turn on for one person will squick another out, and vice versa. So rather than thinking of it as “something they’ll have to put up with”, think of it as learning about one another and about what you both like, dislike and absolutely require. And one thing that can help with that is to have a better idea of what works for you – what turns you on, what gets you off, what makes your skin crawl and so on.

So if you’re interested in having sex some day in the future – and again, it’s cool if you aren’t, too! – get to know yourself with some dedicated solo practice as well. Learn about what kind of speed, pressure and angle you need, whether you need direct clitoral stimulation or if you’re one of the lucky women who can orgasm from penetration. Learn about what sorts of touch feels good to you and what leaves you drier than Death Valley. Try different lubes and see what you dig and don’t, what vibrators or toys do the job or if your hands are all you need. The more you know about yourself and your body, and the more you can communicate this to any future partners? The better the sex the two of you will have over all… including your first time.

Good luck.