Estimated reading time: 18 minutes
Hi Doctor,
Before I being this long paragraph of ranting like George Carlin, there are a couple things I’d like to bring up. One is that im on a path in pursuing a career through college and finding hobbies to keep myself occupied. Second is that I’ve been on Prozac to treat my anxiety for 3 weeks now. However, occasionally I get these thoughts sometimes, they also pop up when im taking walks. I also decided to take a monthly break from dating apps and put my focus into school, but I feel like I might go through some withdrawal symptoms.
My birthday is 2 months away and I’ll be 31 but sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something random, serendipitous to happen to the point that it drives me crazy. But of course they all say “just be yourself and something will come along”, as if you don’t have to do anything. It just seems like everyone meets someone or experiences a hookup or whatever all because of seren-f***ing-dipity/random chance. Even when I try not to think about finding friends/partners and distracting myself, the thoughts still pop up. These months/years just go by quick. And how can one focus on themselves? If you focus on yourself, you’re still blocking out the rest of the world, in your own head. That’s bullshit.
How come in movies/TV series something spontaneous always happens? What happens in Perks of Being a Wallflower? 2 people find each other and all they had to do was “just be themselves” and something RANDOM happened. The Way Way Back? 2 people also find each other. Again, RANDOM. Twilight? Same shit. Maybe in 5-10 years from now I’ll still be by myself without those things, and you know what? Fine by me. Beethoven was a complete loner and he never married. Erik Satie also never married and plenty other famous philosophers/scientists went their whole lives without anyone. I’ll continue “just being myself” or in other “just be the guy who stares at walls listening to Morrissey and Radiohead” and then something RANDOM will happen”.
Being Myself Now What?
This isn’t the first time you’ve written in with this question, BMNW and if I’m being perfectly honest I half-considered just rerunning my reply to your previous letter and calling it an April Fool’s joke.
Except then I remembered I hate April Fool’s Day and 99.999% of the “jokes” that come with it, so hey, you’re in luck; you get a second bite of the apple with a new, hand-crafted reply. But the advice? The advice is more or less the same.
The problem here is that you’re missing the forest for the trees, here. “Just be yourself” doesn’t mean “do nothing”, nor does it mean “don’t change and everything will happen for you.” This is in the same vein of people who misunderstand the famous quote attributed to Marylin Monroe: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best”. The (mistaken) idea, again, is that this excuses you from responsibility; you don’t need to work on things or take an active hand in being a better person, people just need to accept you no matter what if they want access to you.
What the “handle me at my worst” quote actually means is “there is no such thing as the ‘good parts’ version of a person or relationship where you only get the happy/sexy/glamorous stuff and none of the bad; if you aren’t willing to be part of my life when it’s not the manufactured ideal, then you don’t get the rest of me either.”
So it is with “just be yourself”. When people say “just be yourself”, what they mean is “don’t try to be someone or something you’re not in order to appeal to others”. This is inherently good advice on multiple levels.
For one thing, people aren’t stupid. They can tell when someone’s being fake or inauthentic and it turns people off. Think of the times when you’ve seen politicians trying to pretend that they’re “men of the people”, grimacing their way through state fairs and town halls and quietly counting down the seconds until they can get away from the hoi polloi whose votes they need.
Another level is how this advice applies to trying to force yourself into someone else’s idea of being “attractive” or “desirable”. The recent discourse online about whether Jack Black is attractive or not is a great example of this. While many, many women will go on about how they find him desirable and why, a horde of men will vociferously insist that those women are lying because… reasons, I guess.
The obsession some men have with needing a Marvel superhero body or having a particular career, income level or social clout is part and parcel of this. Not only is it not true, but all it ever achieves is teaching them to hate themselves and increase feelings of alienation from their own bodies and lives. It ignores the fact that women aren’t a hive mind, that attractiveness is personal and falls on a very large multi-axis graph and tries to force men to exist in a very small, very narrow and confining box.
But, possibly most importantly: people are bad at lying. Very few people are capable of being completely fake, all the time. The stress of trying to keep up the façade and the incongruity of working against who you are at your core comes with a price and that price is frequently your mental health and well-being. A lot of the folks I knew back in my PUA days ended up hitting the wall and having mental health crises of varying degrees of seriousness – up to and including a couple who had to check themselves into treatment centers.
Being yourself doesn’t mean “do nothing” any more than it means “don’t try to improve; that would be fake and inauthentic”. It just means be authentic to who you are. The idea that you just sit and wait for things to happen isn’t part of it. That, it seems, is your own little addition to the mix.
But speaking about luck and serendipity and things “just happening”…
Here’s the fun thing about serendipity and luck: the people who are the luckiest aren’t the ones sitting around doing nothing. They’re the ones who actually lay a lot of groundwork that makes it more likely that they get “lucky”. They aren’t sitting on a chair in their apartment under the assumption that someone is going to kick in their door and hand them a dream job, a dream relationship or a check for ten million dollars; they’re out creating the circumstances that make it possible for fortune to find them. As I’ve said before, the key to getting lucky is to be prepared so that when an opportunity comes along, you’re in a position to maximize it.
Let’s apply that to dating, for example and how someone might “get lucky” and meet their partner through seeming serendipity, rather than through dating apps or making cold approaches. The people who tend to “get lucky” in those circumstances aren’t dividing their time between going to work and staying home or complaining on the Internet. What they’re doing is going out and being social. They’re hanging out with friends, taking in the sights, planning activities and being out interacting with the world. This puts them more firmly in fortune’s path. After all, the odds that your ideal woman is going to come crashing through your window is the fodder of bad sex comedies.
But in addition to putting themselves in the way of opportunity, they have other factors that increase their capability of taking advantage of the moment when those opportunities come around. Because they’re active and social, they lead more interesting lives. They have more to talk about, more things going on in their lives than work and playing Fortnite and Destiny or watching YouTube videos that demand they get angry at strangers. They develop their social skills, learning how to talk to people, how to communicate effectively and – importantly – how to make people feel good when they’re around. They tend to be more social, talking to more people and creating social networks that not only make it easier to talk to new folks but increase the likelihood of new people coming into their lives organically. And so when they happen to encounter that sexy somebody, whether at the park, Starbucks, the book store, a party or what have you, they are ready, willing and able to strike up a conversation and connect with that person on a meaningful level.
What they aren’t doing is sitting around staring at the wall with their headphones on, putting out every possible “do not disturb” signal known to man and hoping that some Manic Pixie Dream Girl is going to pull their headphones off and forcibly drag them into a whirlwind adventure of self-discovery and also blowjobs.
A singer once said it takes years of work to be an overnight success. Well, it takes a lot of preparation and active planning for things to happen spontaneously. The social equivalent of “being discovered at the soda fountain” is as much of a myth as that old canard is. At best, it’s like winning a billion dollars at Powerball; it may happen to someone, some time, but it’s going to just be that ONE person. It’s not something to go all-in on unless you like wasting time and losing money.
So why does it happen in all those movies you mention? Well… because the scriptwriter said so. That’s why. Why does Bella meet Edward seemingly at random? Because that was a literally fantastical story that Stephanie Meyers dreamed up; a “plain, ordinary” young girl (who just happens to resemble the author in every way) meets a guy who realizes that she’s actually Very Special in the same way someone removes the glasses from the mousey nerd and says “good heavens, you’re beautiful!”
I would note, however, that “everything just falls into place for Bella” is one of the most common and recurring criticisms of the book and movie. People have long been pointing out that she literally does nothing to advance the plot in any way. She’s an example of what Kelly-Sue DeConnick calls the Sexy Lamp test; you could replace her with a lamp and nothing about the story would change.
But I might point out that you’re also missing the point of many of the examples you bring up. Leaving aside that The Perks of Being a Wallflower is semi-autobiographical, Charlie’s entire character arc is that he stops being a passive figure in his own life and learns to become an active participant. His meeting Sam isn’t something that “just happens”, it occurs because he becomes friends with Patrick, who introduces them… which, I might point out, is one of the ways most people meet their future partners in the real world.
The reason why you’re struggling is that you’ve created a scenario for yourself where the only options are failure – where “working on yourself” somehow blocks out the rest of the world (it doesn’t) but also where you don’t have agency and have to rely on dumb luck and you’re expected to just cross your fingers and hope real hard.
(I would also point out that Beethoven wasn’t “a complete loner” and in fact had some rather tempestuous affairs, including with his “Immortal Beloved”. You might want to actually look into that before just tossing shit around; there was a movie about it and everything.)
If you want things to be different, you have to do things differently. If you want serendipity to work for you, you have to do the work to make it possible. Want to increase the odds that you meet someone special? You gotta go where the people are and interact with them. You gotta be willing to interact, to connect and to make sure that you’re the best version of yourself that you can be. That means investing time and effort in yourself, not passively waiting.
If you want to wait around and hope someone will grab you by the hair and drag you kicking and screaming into a relationship, that’s certainly your choice. But before you decide that’s what you’re resigned to, you might want to ask yourself precisely what about your attitude and behavior is going to entice people to want to interact with you in the first place, never mind invest that level of effort in a complete stranger.
It’s understandable that you’re frustrated. But there’s being frustrated because shit’s complex and people are complicated and frequently contradictory and there’s being frustrated because you’ve done nothing and now you’re all out of ideas. Change requires action and action requires agency. If you’ve decided you’re helpless and hopeless, that’s where you’re right. Not because the universe has foretold it, but because that’s what you’ve decided. Want different outcomes? Gotta do different things. So if you want to get lucky and have SEREN-FUCKIN-DIPPITY on your side, you have to put in the work to make it so.
Good luck.
Dear Dr. NerdLove,
As someone who has observed the social landscape evolve over the years, I find myself grappling with the shifting dynamics, particularly with the emergence of platforms like Tinder and Bumble. It seems that in today’s marketplace, a select group of individuals, often characterized as super attractive, garner the majority of matches and attention. This phenomenon has left many of us wondering about the feasibility of finding genuine connections in such an environment.
Furthermore, I have noticed a decline in the social acceptability of striking up conversations with strangers, a trend that seems to have intensified over the past decade. Coupled with the effects of lockdowns and a growing societal tendency towards asocial behavior, the prospect of meaningful human connection feels increasingly elusive. This trend is even more pronounced in the younger college aged generation, that I am a part of.
In reflecting on these observations, it appears that society has become increasingly superficial, with physical appearance often dictating one’s social and dating prospects. The rise of social media has only exacerbated this trend, making it challenging to cultivate meaningful platonic relationships, let alone romantic ones, which have always been more or less susceptible to superficial judgments.
I am curious to hear your perspective on navigating the complexities of modern social landscape. How can individuals like myself, who may not fit the mold of conventional attractiveness, foster genuine connections in an environment seemingly dominated by superficiality and asocial tendencies?
I appreciate you taking the time to read through this E-mail.
Warm regards,
A Modern Ape
Funny thing, AMA: making the same complaints about the whole “80/20” meme around dating (especially on dating apps) and difficulties in meeting people doesn’t get any more valid or correct when you dress them up in pseudo-formal language like you’re in the end-stage of losing a fight with someone on Twitter.
In fact, this actually serves as an illustration of why you feel like you’re stuck and struggling. One of the most important parts of dating – or any social relationship, really – is facilitating a connection with other people. The more barriers you put in the way of connection and communication, the more you’re going to struggle. Part of effective and clear communication isn’t adopting a cod-intellectual manner of speaking, it’s communicating with people in the way they understand.
Writing in a florid style like this instead of the vernacular comes off more like a theater kid who doesn’t know how to step away from the Ren Faire persona than someone unique and intelligent. While I’m sure you think of this as an amusing affectation, it’s the sort of thing that people take one look at and decide to go talk to someone else who’s not being performatively weird because they think it makes them interesting.
As Scalzi famously said: “The fail-state of ‘clever’ is ‘asshole’”.
Now as for the rest… once we translate back into plain English, a lot of this can be summed up as “sounds like a skill issue, bro”.
I’ve talked plenty of times about the issues with dating apps in the post-Tinder, post-Match Group world and why they are less useful for actually meeting people and it has nothing to do with “only the most attractive get attention”; it has far more to do with algorithmic matching, monetization strategies and men generally being shit at dating apps than anything else. There are reasons why I’ve been saying that dating apps should be a supplement to how you meet people, not the primary method.
“Ah,” – I hear you say – “but you have fallen into my clever trap, for have you not noticed where I said that it’s less socially acceptable to approach people for conversation in public?”
No, I caught that. And that, too, is something I’ve long been talking about. It’s still entirely acceptable to strike up conversations with people you don’t know. I do this on the regular, as a matter of fact. The problem isn’t that it isn’t “acceptable”, it’s that there are a shitload of people – almost exclusively men – who don’t know how to do things like “read the room” or who are trying to have an actual conversation instead of trying to pick up a stranger.
If you actually parse what people are saying when they complain about someone talking to them, it tends to come down to two things, often simultaneously: not respecting someone’s lack of interest and not actually being interested in a conversation. When women complain about guys at the yoga studio or the dance class or trying to talk to them at the coffee shop, they’re not complaining about social niceties. They’re complaining about guys who a) are only there to try to use it as a sex ATM, b) don’t pay attention to or respect the indications of “please do not disturb” and c) just end up making people feel uncomfortable because they think “no”, “not interested” and “please go away” are things that happen to other people.
The guys who go because they want to practice yoga, but who will make small talk with people (not just the most attractive women, people) before and after the class aren’t the ones that people complain about. Those organic interactions are normal and acceptable, and the folks who get that also recognize when someone’s just not in the mood to talk. It’s the dudes who go to yoga classes just because there’re attractive women there are the ones who cause a problem.
Now at the risk of sounding like An Old, especially as I round the last laps towards turning 50, there are issues with social media inhibiting people’s social skills. When we do all of our communication through screens and keyboards, we neglect the skills that we need to communicate in person and those skill sets tend to atrophy. And to be fair, the increasing lack of third spaces makes this much harder; there’re far fewer places for kids and teens to socialize outside of school and home. But that, again, doesn’t mean that people can’t meet folks in the physical world, it just means that they’ve gotten progressively bad at it.
This is one of the reasons why I’ve long said that an important part of meeting people is to understand and respect the social context and to recognize the difference between an inherently social space and one that’s just out in the world.
A bar, a Meet Up, a party, the Student Union at your college campus… these are inherently social spaces – places where the general expectation is that these are places where people go to interact, to meet other people and possibly strike up relationships of all kinds. While not everyone at the bar or what-not is going to be interested in meeting someone new, the understanding is that these are places where talking to strangers and meeting new people is accepted behavior.
Other places aren’t covered by that sort of social contract. That doesn’t mean that you can’t talk to people at, say, the grocery store or on the subway. It just means that this isn’t the point of why people are there. It’s certainly possible to start a conversation with folks in those spaces, even one that leads to trading phone numbers, connecting on messaging apps or even dates. However, doing so requires a higher level of social fluency and social calibration – that is, being able to read the room and respond accordingly.
Women walking down the street, for example, are usually not in the mood to start a conversation with a stranger; they have shit to do and places to be and they’ve already dealt with men who think that their existing in public means that they’ve consented to whatever interaction those men what to have.
The same applies to someone waiting for the bus or sitting next to you on the train. Some people might be in the mood to talk. Many aren’t, and it’s on the person who wants to initiate a conversation to be able to recognize the difference instead of assuming that there mere presence is implied consent.
I would also point out that “society is getting more superficial” is a complaint that is literally older than steam; much like “nobody wants to work”, the idea that people are becoming more shallow has been something folks have railed against since before Socrates said “hey what was in that drink?” And yet somehow perfectly average people – people who don’t look like superheroes, movie stars beauty influencers and cover models – meet, date and marry all the time. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok etc. may give the illusion that You Need To Be This Hot/Rich/Successful To Exist, but it’s just that: an illusion, and one that’s generated as much by the content that you are interacting with. Strangely, if you close the apps and go outside to touch grass, you see that there’re all sorts of people out living their lives, having relationships and all the rest without looking like they got the MCU glow-up.
Do you want to foster genuine connections with people? Start with being genuine. Want to meet people and start relationships with them? Start by just meeting people and being social, get to know them over time and see if there’s even anything there to begin with. And yes, I do mean over time. Leaving aside that you know little about this person to begin with besides that you find them attractive, what people consider to be attractive changes as they become more familiar with others. The more we get to know people, the more their uniqueness makes them more interesting and more attractive to us.
But like I said at the top: the first step is to lose the performative weirdness that just get in the way of creating those connections. It’s one thing to have an affectation that’s a genuine expression of who you are. It’s another when it’s acting as a substitute for a personality.
Good luck.
www.doctornerdlove.com
