How Do I Stop Bullying Myself?

Hello Doc,

This is how my mind works when I see an attractive woman I want to talk to:

“Hey, my coworker is pretty cute. I wish I could get to know her more.”

“She’s in a different department, how could I talk to her?”

“If I were to go up to her for no other reason, that might creep her out.”

“Creeping out a coworker would be disastrous. What would that even mean for me in this job?”

“Do I even know how to start a conversation with a woman without creeping her out?”

“How would I even find out how to do that? Just keep approaching, trial and error, creeping women out until I eventually find out how?”

“I can’t even learn how to do that without creeping out women…”

“How can I even date without that knowledge…”

“What woman would want to date such a sad sack like me…”

And then I go into an anxiety and depressive spiral for the next few days, sometimes weeks. You can replace “coworker” there with “acquaintance”, “woman in my dance class”, or “woman at the bar”, and it’s mostly the same.
So what do I even do?

My Own Worst Enemy

So, I get variations of this question all the time and it’s almost always about hypothetical situations; it’s never about times when those incredibly harsh rejections have ever actually come to pass. In fact, outside of friend-of-a-friend stories tossed around in comments sections, I have yet to actually hear from anyone who’s actually had any of these things happen.

(Of course, the few times I see “well, I asked out a woman at work and then she maced me and called the police and I lost my job,” get tossed around by JohnnyBunchONumbers on Twitter or Reddit, they’re always surprisingly sparse on exact details — literally all you did was say “hey, would you like to get coffee on Thursday” and you lost your job over that? Those exact words and nothing else, no other information or prior history? Ok Chachi, care to show me the HR write-up of the incident that would confirm this?)

Now the fact that these are all hypotheticals, as your brain-weasels toss out any number of worst-case scenarios, each more dire than the rest, doesn’t mean that they aren’t upsetting or demoralizing. But they are just that: hypotheticals, based on nothing but your own anxieties and the crabs-in-a-bucket moaning of folks who want to believe that hope doesn’t exist. They’re intrusive thoughts that nag at you because they play to your worst fears. So I sympathize. I really do. I’ve been there, I’ve done that and built a literal career out of trying to stop having those thoughts and anxieties.

And hey, maybe you, like me, are neuroatypical; finding out that rejection-sensitive dysphoria is a common comorbidity with ADHD was a revelation to me, and getting treatment made a huge, huge difference. Or, alternately, you had a really bad experience when you were younger and it left its scars on you and your soul. This is also a thing that happens, and its entirely understandable that this fear would linger. “Once bitten, twice shy” is a cliche for a reason, especially if it happened to you in your tween or teen years, when your brain is still developing and things like “rational thinking” are more a theoretical concept than a reality. The crap that hits us when our brains are in full Hormonal Chaos Overload tends to seem larger, more real and more universal, in no small part because we have neither the bandwidth nor the experience or perspective to recognize that this is the exception not the rule.

(This is, incidentally, why I insist that dating in high-school shouldn’t be a priority. High-school is basically medium-security prison for kids, and treating it like any sort of realistic model for the rest of your life is a mistake of the first order.)

Just as importantly: it’s worth remembering that our brains don’t distinguish between what we imagine and what we remember. When we imagine these awful outcomes, our brains treat them as things that actually happened. In a very real sense, when we linger on these imagined scenarios, we are hurting our own feelings.

But by that same token, if what we imagine is functionally indistinguishable from memory… why not change the script? Why not, instead, choose to imagine things that actually benefit us, instead of bullying ourselves mercilessly? After all, if we’re going to deal with confirmation bias, doesn’t it make more sense to choose the beliefs that actually help, instead of harm us?

Yeah, I can understand why this might seem absurd. But if what your jerkbrain is whispering into your hear are hypotheticals anyway, why not try changing things around for yourself?

Here’s how you start the process, MOWE. When you start to have these thoughts, ask yourself this question: “why?” “Why would they be repulsed by me?” “Why would my just talking to someone creep them out?” And, most importantly: “why do I believe these women are so shallow, so cruel or so without compassion that my talking to her like a person would cause so many problems?”

This last one’s important, because it really gets right down to the core issue: there’s some part of you that doesn’t just worry that there’s something unloveable about you, but also believes that women aren’t going to actually, y’know, understand. Yeah, we’ve all seen the “ugh, why are men??” posts on subreddits or TikTok or Twitter, but those aren’t talking about day to day, normal interactions. Those are understandably frustrated people complaining about assholes who can’t be bothered to talk to folks like a person or not treat women like a vending machine that you pump enough coins into and sex comes out. If you caught me after a long day of dealing with asshats who can’t tolerate someone wearing a mask around them despite still being in a pandemic, you’d be hearing me complain about people at length too. That doesn’t mean everyone I encountered that day was a COVID-denying shithead; it just means I’m venting.

Instead, consider this: much of what you’re worried about – coming off weird, saying the wrong thing, being misunderstood – are all things women experience too. Despite how often people insist that dating for women is like hailing a taxi (“she just has to raise her hand and a dozen show up”), women experience the same nerves, the same fears and have made the same embarrassing gaffs, blunders and fuck-ups. There is not a woman on this earth who hasn’t had a moment where she’s shoved her foot so far into her mouth that she’s still burping vulcanized rubber. So, even if you were to say something incredibly stupid or awkward, not only are most folks going to understand, but most folks probably won’t even notice. I know it feels like you’ve got a spotlight shining directly on you, but I can promise you: we’re all so caught up in our own drama that a verbal flub or whatnot isn’t going to even register on the top 20 events that happened to her that day.

As you ask yourself those questions – and remember that women have the same fears and the same anxieties you do – the next thing to do is to change the story you’re telling yourself. Consciously choose to set those negative, intrusive thoughts aside and gently direct your mind towards imagining a positive outcome. Picture the scene in your head: you go talk to them and… nothing bad happens! Everything goes well! Imagine the scenario where you have a pleasant conversation and everyone feels better for having had a lovely experience. Picture, in as vivid tones as you can manage, that the person you want to talk to thinks you’re charming and delightful and gives you her number before you go. Do this every time you have these thoughts; make a habit out of it, and you’ll be surprised how much it becomes your new default.

And one more thing: I’ve approached more strangers than you’ve had hot meals. I can tell you, from personal experience, that the worst outcomes are “they ignore you”. They turn their backs, they don’t respond or otherwise act like they didn’t hear you. No “how dare you talk to me”, no harsh rejections, just distantly polite or nothing at all. And I’ve had moments where I have actively made mistakes – tripped over my own tongue, said the wrong thing in a moment of panic or, in one memorable event, literally choked. As in: I tried to talk to someone and aspirated on my own saliva.

9 times out of 10, they never noticed or cared, and the 1 time out of 10 they did notice, I was able to recover and move on from there; my weird faceplant would just end up being something we’d laugh about together later on.

This is your jerkbrain screwing with you, MOWE. You can take control back and change the narrative.

All will be well.

Dear Dr. NerdLove,

I’m in a small-to-medium sized social group of friends that started off as a sort of school-based gaming guild. We all got together over (virtually) over the pandemic as a way of keeping each other company by playing MMOs and virtual tabletop games together. Once we started getting vaccinated and the lockdowns eased, we started hanging out in person too.

Over the months, I got pretty close with people and if we’re not all good friends, we’re at least acquaintences who can say ‘hi’ and grab a quick lunch together or something. And of course (because why else would I be writing?) I started to get feelings for one of the girls in our group.

I’m fairly certain she doesn’t know. We’ve hung out on our own a few times and with other friends before I started feeling attracted to her and I think we were on track to being friends before I started wanting more. I think I’ve kept my feelings to myself pretty well, and I haven’t said anything because I don’t want to screw things up. What makes me nervous is how many of the other guys and girls in the group have talked about how dating friends makes things awkward or how people falling for each other ruined other groups. I don’t want to have that happen to me and I don’t want to ruin things for everyone else.

Is there some way I can ask her out? Should I be letting this go because it’ll just mess up the guild? Is it bad to ask someone out when you’ve been friends for over a year and is she going to think I was just pretending to be her friend?

Help! I don’t know what to do.

Secret Friend Destroyer

Y’know, SFD, I hear about “I’m afraid to ask someone out but I’m afraid it’ll ruin things” fairly often. What I don’t hear is how, exactly, this great calamity is supposed to happen or why. Is it the fear that the couple will eventually break up and everyone will be “forced” to choose sides? Is it because two people dating would somehow change the vibe and so everyone has to stay strictly platonic? Or maybe because one person had a crush on someone else, but they started dating another person and the dude (or dudette) who got left out made it everyone’s problem?

I dunno; it’s a lot like the Loch Ness Monster: everyone talks about it, but very few people have actually seen it and the ones who say they have have usually seen something else entirely.

That being said: in my experience, the reality isn’t that being attracted to somebody or even asking them out – successfully or otherwise – actually changes things or makes things awkward. What usually makes things awkward or uncomfortable is when one person or another is an asshole about it. This came about in some fairly common, universal even, scenarios.

You had the guy or girl who couldn’t take “no, thank you” for an answer and would make their entire friendship about “but whyyyyyyyyy won’t you date me?” You had the prototypical Nice Guy who was only in the group/being their friend in order to get into his crush’s pants. There’s the “we had sex once and now everyone knows about it because someone couldn’t keep their mouth shut” scenario and the “takes every opportunity to try to force their crush to interact with them via the game” guy, topped only by “the guy who turned everything sexual with the other person, no matter how inappropriate, in game or out of it.” And of course the classic “my crush is dating someone else and I’m going to throw a fit about it every chance I get.”

In short: assholes who couldn’t be bothered to act like a person. When the individual acted with courtesy and respect, there was rarely any actual awkwardness or “ruining” the group. The same goes with two members of the group hooking up or starting a relationship. People almost always took it in stride and there was rarely any real awkwardness…  and I only say “rarely” because of the aforementioned “my thwarted crush is everyone’s problem now” situation.

Even break ups weren’t automatically friend-group destroyers. Any drama fallout from the break up had less to do with some sort of “dating within the group is bad” and much more with “people handled the break up badly,” that ultimately only served to highlight fractures and fissures that were already there. In those cases, the group was always going to come to a dramatic end; it was just a matter of who was actually going to trigger the meltdown.

Now I can understand why you might worry. If you were to ask your crush out in a way that made them uncomfortable or gave them reason to feel weird about having you in the group, yeah, that’s going to be a problem. But it sounds like the two of you have a fairly good platonic relationship already, especially if you’re already hanging out as buds. If you were to say “hey, I really enjoy hanging out with you, but I’d be interested in taking you on an actual date. Would you like to go do $COOL_THING at $FUTURE_TIME?”, that’s hardly going to blow people’s minds or send them screaming from the room. Similarly, if she were to say “no, thanks” or “I’d rather just be friends”, and you respond with “Ok, no problem, thought I’d take a chance,” and continue to be her friend? Yeah, you should be just fine.

The one thing I could see being an actual worry is any initial awkwardness – either after being turned down or in the event of the relationship ending in a non-earthquakes-birds-and-snakes-and-aeroplanes scenario. In both cases, the way you handle it is… well, to power through the awkward together. And one of the best ways to do that? You call out the awkward. Part of what makes the awkward so uncomfortable is that nobody is willing to acknowledge it. It’s hanging there, unmistakable as a fart in church and yet nobody’s willing to say anything. Well, someone’s got to call it out, so it may as well be you.

In those situations, you want to say – literally say out loud – “so… this is a  bit awkward, huh?” This is your magic phrase to deflate the tension in the room; in fact the most common response tends to be “OH THANK GOD SOMEONE SAID IT”. The fact that you can acknowledge the awkward is a sign that you’re willing to actually handle this like a grown-ass adult instead of pretending that it never happened while everyone else gets increasingly uncomfortable. If you can call out the awkward, you are signaling that you’re ready and able to talk about what happened and move forward with being friends.

(Of course, this gets taken right back if you now make every conversation about how you two didn’t get together and hey why didn’t it happen, again? But that comes right back to “take no thank you with good grace”.)

As the saying goes: actions have consequences; if you want the consequences, you better take action. So my advice? If you’re feeling it, ask your crush out on a date. Not “hang out some time” like you’ve been doing, not some ambiguous “maybe a date, maybe not, I’ll decide when the night ends.” weirdness, but an actual, directly stated date. If she says yes, hey, blessings on you both. If she says no? You say “Ok, thought I’d ask,” and then treat her exactly as you did before, continuing to be the cool guy and good friend you were before you asked her out. People will look to how you behave for clues for how they should respond. If you don’t start drama, there won’t be drama.

And if other folks have a problem with the two of you getting together or think that dating within the social group should be forbidden… well that’s a them problem, not a you problem. Dating’s not a democracy; other folks can have opinions, but they don’t get a vote or a veto.

Good luck.