How Do I Stop Resenting People Who Are Better With Women Than Me?

Hi Doc,

I’m a recent graduate in my late ’20s who started working as trainee at a company a few months back. Given my temp status, I’ve been assigned to under the supervision of one of the full-time who is in his mid-30s.

The company has a lot of women who are my age and my role often requires that I liaise with external parties like hotels and restaurants, a lot of whose points of contact are women.

Over these months, I’ve observed my supervisor interact with both my female colleagues and female staff from external parties, & I’ve found it unbelievable how easily he seems to charm and captivate so many of them.

I can understand why; he’s a genuinely sweet guy who’s athletic, has a good sense of humour, is a good listener, and most notably to me, is able to stay calm under pressure & find solutions to problems that we face at work.

I can’t help but feel that all his good qualities highlight the areas where I fall short: I’m self-centred, struggle to stay in shape, have difficulty making casual conversation, especially with girls, have a short attention span, and again most notably, often buckle under pressure and struggle to fix the personal or professional problems that I face.

I guess whenever I see him chat up a cute girl at the office or at a company we’re contracting with, it’s just a frustrating reminder of how, at 27, I’ve made so little progress in improving my dating and sex life since I first started trying at 19.

In the end, I deeply respect him as a supervisor, want to learn professional skills from him, help him successfully complete his projects, and eventually excel in my industry.

This whole thing where I compare his success with women to my lack of it gets of that, cause it only makes me resent him and feel like some beta loser who’d just fall flat on my face I tried to interact with my female colleagues the half-professional, half-flirty way he does, and that there’s no point in trying anyway cause they’re inevitably going to find him more attractive than I am.

Honestly, I think my first priority is for it to stop bothering me, just accept that I am where I am in terms of my skills with women and focus on my professional development. So what should I do to make that happen?

Thanks in advance for reading and giving me the advice Doc!

Mr. Fixer-Upper

This is the sort of thing I see a lot, MFU, especially from folks who’ve struggled with their social skills or a lack of social experience. Seeing someone else who seems to be effortless with women – a skill-set you’ve tried so damn hard to develop – makes you feel more than a little envious, even a bit resentful. After all, they’re standing there at the top of the mountain, looking all the world like they got up there without any real challenge, while you can barely get more than a couple feet off the ground. It’s enough to make you feel like there’s no real hope for you if dudes like this exist.

Hell, that’s half the reason why incels get so toxic; they let that envy and resentment build until it curdles and becomes poison. Then they alternate between directing it inward at themselves and outward at both the “Chads” who seem to have been blessed by the universe and the “Stacy’s” that reject them. They get caught in a deterministic loop, where their futures were set before they were even born and where there’s no hope of improvement or a better tomorrow, and so are caught at the intersection of despair and rage.

So I want to give you credit, MFU: you clearly recognize that this isn’t a good place to be and you want to stop feeling this way. That’s a mark in your favor. However, you still have some issues with your mindset that, while not as bad as it could be, are ultimately working against you. And I want to be clear: I absolutely understand where you’re coming from and how you feel. I have been there, done that and built a career out of trying to change that. I’ve talked many times about growing up with my friend Miles, who was a natural-born lady killer. He’s distressingly good looking, confident and seemingly effortlessly charming and delightful. Not to mention – like your supervisor – he’s one of the most genuinely sweet, friendly and generous people I know. And, again, like you, when he was around, I may as well have been invisible.

But, having the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I want to let you in on a few things that eluded me at the time.

The first is, very simple: dating and attraction isn’t a competition, nor is it a zero-sum game. Nobody is universally attractive or compatible with everyone, and every woman out there – like every man – has their own individual preferences and interests. While Miles had traits that got him a lot of initial interest at the time, there were a lot of women who could appreciate that he was an attractive and charming guy… but a man who did nothing for them. The ones who were most into him weren’t going to be into me, because I wasn’t the particular flavor that they were looking for. Think of it like being hungry – you have food that you prefer, and food that you’ll take if need be. If you’re someone who prefers meat and you’re given the choice between, say, a roast beef sandwich and an apple and brie sandwich, which are you most likely to chose? That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the other sandwich – in fact, apple and brie is incredibly tasty! – but it’s just not your personal preference.

So it is with women. The fact that someone is more compatible or in tune with a guy doesn’t mean that this person is inherently better than everybody else; it just means that this individual man was their particular flavor. It can feel like a judgement on your personal worth, sure… but it really isn’t. It’s just that you weren’t their preferred flavor and that’s ok. I’m sure you’ve had just as many times when you were attracted to one woman but not another in close proximity; that doesn’t mean that the other person was worth less, just that they didn’t have the x-factor that really revved your motor the way the woman you were into did.

The second thing I realized is that resenting Miles was a waste of my time and energy – literally. Being resentful of him did nothing for me, it just hurt me. It was the emotional equivalent of drinking poison in the expectation that the other guy would die. The time that I spent being bitter about his success only served to make it that much harder for me to improve myself. You only have so much mental and emotional bandwidth; whenever you expend it on someone or something, you leave less to use on anything else. Because I was resentful about Miles and spending so much of my bandwidth being envious of his success, I had less to actually use to see that there was a lot that I could do to make things better for me. Which actually lead to the third thing I learned, later on.

I could either be envious of Miles… or I could be inspired by him. He could be an example of what held me back, or he could be someone I could model myself after. Being resentful about all his seemingly natural gifts was easy. It reinforced a belief I’d long held – that dating success and attraction was a binary. Either you were good with women or you weren’t, and there was nothing you could do to change that. Believing this held me back for so long that I wasted years of my life, thinking that any relationship I had was going to be a matter of luck and that I had to take whatever I could get. This mindset is part of why my first serious relationship was so toxic; I didn’t realize that I didn’t have to accept things that ultimately hurt me and made me miserable.

But this also ties into the fourth realization I had – one that was admittedly a mixed blessing, since it came as part of my getting caught up in the PUA scene: that being good with women is a skill, not an inherent trait. It’s something you learn how to do through use and practice. Yes, there’re things that give some folks an advantage, just as being tall gives you an advantage in basketball or Michael Phelps’ anatomy and genetic predisposition to make less lactic acid gives him an advantage at swimming. But you can learn to play basketball – and be good at it – without being six feet tall or more. You can be a competitive swimmer without having unusually long arms or increased flexibility in your joints. And you can learn how to be more charismatic and socially skilled without having to be Perfect Tommy first.

What I didn’t realize at the time, is that Miles – or any of the other so-called naturals out there – weren’t born charisma factories. They just developed those skills at a different time than I did. Since I didn’t have a 24/7 feed of everything inside Miles’ head, the way I did my own, it only seemed like everything was perfectly effortless for him. I had no clue about what his challenges were, how he learned his skills or anything else. And in fairness: he wasn’t going to be any better at telling me how he did it any more than you or I could tell someone how to learn how to walk. It’s just something we learned so long ago that it’s hard to remember a time when we didn’t know how.

So with those realizations in mind, let’s look back at your situation and your feelings about you supervisor.

In fact, let’s work backwards, shall we? If we start with that fourth realization – that social skills are skills – then we have to acknowledge certain truths. There’s the fact that your supervisor’s older than you, which means he’s had a different upbringing and also more time to cultivate skills and experience than you have. So he has a different background than you, which has a direct effect on how he developed emotionally and skill-wise, which makes a direct comparison difficult. But just as importantly: he’s in a job that requires social fluency, an ability to connect with others and – as he’s in a managerial and supervisory position – necessitates being able to handle stressful or complicated situations on the regular.

Since he’s been on the job longer than you have and has more years of experience under his belt in general, it’s not surprising that he’s developed these skills to the degree he has. He’s been in a position where he’s had to learn them, had to practice them constantly and where the success of your company is reliant upon them. If you’re in a position where you have to learn and utilize a particular skill five days a week – even if it’s just walking a coin across your knuckles – you’re going to start getting more proficient at it.

So right off the bat: you can learn to do what he did. He had a head start on you and a lot of motivation to get good at it, sure… but that’s not a mark against you. Being upset about this would be like being upset that you weren’t made the CFO on your first day of work. But because you’re in a similar position with a similar role and responsibilities, you’re in a place where you can cultivate those skills too, if you put the time and effort in.

By that same token, look at those qualities that you said he has: he’s genuinely sweet, a good listener and has a solid sense of humor. Those are some really attractive, positive qualities for a man to have… and there’s no real reason why you can’t cultivate them in yourself. Now, you list your faults, sure, but this is where the mindset problem kicks in. You’re treating these as though they’re permanent and unchangeable, rather than things that can be improved upon. Well here’s the thing about that: you’re 100% correct. They are unfixable… as long as you believe they are. This is a classic “both the optimist and pessimist are right” situation; the way you choose to look at yourself is what ultimately defines what is or isn’t possible.

If you choose to see those qualities in yourself as being permanent, then any effort to change them is cut off at the knees. You won’t put as much effort behind trying to change them, because what’s the point? When you fail or hit road blocks in your development, you’ll take longer to recover from them, and have greater likelihood of just not bothering to continue on because clearly nothing could be done. But if you look at it as a “well, it’ll take work but I know I can do better” sort of scenario, then you’ll have a much more productive, less frustrating time. Believing that improvement is possible means that you’ll be inspired to put more of your energy into it. The times when you run into challenges, not only will you bounce back faster and more thoroughly, but you’ll be more motivated to find alternatives if one method didn’t work and to get to the bottom of why you’re facing these challenges in the first place.

You mention that you have a hard time dealing with stress and you have difficulties paying attention. Well, there’re a few possibilities here. One could well be that you’re some form of neurodivergent. God knows “low attention span” and “struggles to complete tasks” defined me for, let’s see… forty years of my life before I got my ADHD diagnosis. Getting treated changed a lot for me, since it turns out that much of my life was built around compensating for all the difficulties having ADHD caused – including how I managed stress and panic in my personal and professional life.

Or, maybe that’s not it. Maybe it’s just a matter of training and experience. You can find a number of ways of improving your focus and ability to pay attention through practice – martial arts, meditation, even learning how to dance. These all require being able to narrow your focus into one area and to pay attention to many different things at once – the rhythm of the music, your partner’s movements, your own balance and situational awareness, etc. None of it is a quick fix, sure… but that’s not how skills are developed. They’re developed over time, through deliberate practice.

The same thing applies to being less self-centered or making small talk. Those are things you can work on and improve upon. One thing that could help there would be taking improv classes. Not only does improvisation require that you be much less self-centered – it’s very emphatically a collaboration with your partner, not an opportunity to show off – but it teaches you that you want to be in the moment, instead of constantly thinking about next steps or the next thing you need to do. You learn to pay attention to what your scene partner gives you, much like with a conversation, and to build on it with them instead of trying to dominate or take over or make it about you.

Keeping your head about you and managing difficult and stressful situations is, likewise, a skill that you have to learn and practice. Nobody – not the SAS, not the Navy SEALs, not surgeons or EMTs – show up able to handle intense levels of stress or manage crisis with no training or experience. They have the benefit of rigorous training, things that turn the skills they need in that moment into muscle memory, so that when adrenaline blanks out their mind, their bodies are able to go on autopilot. They, similarly, have experienced those situations before, starting with their training, so they know what to expect, what to look for and how to best manage things. And that experience – simulated and actual – means that when they run into a scenario they haven’t encountered, they have a breadth and depth of knowledge to help inform them how to handle things.

Now in this case, you’re in luck. You actually have someone who can help teach you this, in the ways you need for your profession: your supervisor. Going to him and saying “hey, I admire how good you are at problem solving and crisis management, and I’d like to learn how you do it” will not only help you in your professional development, but it’ll actually lean into that second revelation: that you can resent someone or you can admire them and be inspired by them. See, having your supervisor around means that you have a role model. You can look at what he does and learn from him instead of grinding your teeth. What does he do when he’s interacting with your female coworkers or the women he meets on the job? How does he balance professionalism with charm? How much does he joke around vs. being serious, how much does he compliment them vs. being very “just the facts”? How does he respond to what they say, and how much does he calibrate his behavior to the person he’s talking to? How much of his genuine interest in other people can you learn by watching him and how much are you willing to emulate until it becomes natural for you, too? Yeah the whole WWMSD can seem cheesy, but having a baseline to work from while you find the way to make it congruent with your personality can be invaluable… as long as you are willing to look at it as “this is someone who makes me want to work harder and achieve”, rather than “some guys have all the luck”. And that brings us back to the first revelation I had about Miles. Yeah, he had success I would’ve liked to have had at the time… but comparing myself to him in that way was counterproductive. In many ways, it’d be like someone who plays an occasional pick-up game of soccer comparing himself to David Beckham; yeah, it’s the same game, but played in very different ways and for different reasons and very, very different timelines. Leaving aside the fact that someone doesn’t need to play soccer at the pro level to enjoy it or get a lot out of it, it’s a matter of having entirely different lives.

Your supervisor’s success and yours aren’t comparable for many reasons – age, lifestyle, experience, personal challenges, upbringing, etc. – but also because his success has no impact on yours. His being socially gifted doesn’t take away from you in any way, shape or form. Comparison, especially in this case, is the thief of joy, and by looking at it the way that you do, you’re only harming yourself. His skill doesn’t diminish yours. His flirting doesn’t make it less likely for you to find love or relationships. Hell, the women he’s most likely to have relationships with aren’t likely to be the same women you would want to date – certainly not beyond a purely superficial level.
Rather than just “accepting” your skill level and trying to force any resentment away, change your mindset and outlook, starting with your ability to grow and improve. Yeah, you’ve struggled up until now. That doesn’t mean you’ll struggle forever. Sometimes it just means that you’ve been going about things the wrong way, trying to sail into a headwind instead of with the wind. Or you may have had something handicapping you, the way I did with my ADHD. But if you start from a place where improvement is possible and your supervisor is a figure of inspiration and motivation? Then you’ll be in a much better position to learn, to improve and to work towards being your best, most polished self. And that’s far better than just trying to force yourself to not feel things. Good luck.