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Hey Dr NerdLove,
I feel at a loss now. Back in December, I had my longest relationship – well, not exactly relationship since we only went on 3 dates, but the longest romantic endeavor of my life. However, I tried to go in for a kiss on the third date which she rejected saying she needed to know me better and I decided to end things, in a knee-jerk reaction. Well, I realized that was a mistake and I spent the past couple months begging her to come back, and she eventually asked me to stop contacting her in January, but I still sent her some poems and letters, weekly, which she never responded to (I stopped this last week, however).
To say I feel empty is an understatement, I feel at a loss of purpose in life, I feel like I was before I met her, like a void and I don’t know how much longer I can go on. Well, I figured the only way to make me feel better was to sleep with other woman, that maybe if I slept with enough escorts I’d forget about her, but I was wrong. I remember the first time I did, and immediately after I finished I was just begging God to just end my life in this instant. I feel emptier now, and I’ve withdrawn from my friends, and family. Deep down, I want her back. I’ve seen stories of dudes who’ve never dated for decades because they want some girl back, but that couldn’t be me – I’d never live that long if I knew she’d never come back.
Dr. NerdLove, I don’t know, I don’t know at all what to do. I don’t even know if getting her back would make anything better? But I know if there were just some clear-cut steps to getting her back I’d do it in a heartbeat – if there was some rulebook to follow, I’d follow it to the tee, but it just doesn’t feel like there is, and I’m just grasping in the dark, hoping to grab something. And I’ve started sleeping with escorts weekly now, just for some sexual relief, and I feel horrible, any advice, or wisdoms, or words, please tell me, thanks.
All The Wrong Places
Ok so there’s a lot to unpack here, ATWP, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s all coming from the same place. The problem is that you don’t understand what you’re looking for or why, and it’s messing you up.
Here’s what I mean: you went on a grand total of three dates with someone and now you’ve given yourself a nasty case of Oneitis. Why? Well because you realized that you made a bad call by cutting things off because… she didn’t want to kiss you at the end of date number three. Here’s the thing though: while I know a lot of folks might disagree with your choice, that is a legitimate reason to decide you don’t want to see someone. If you are someone for whom physical intimacy is a priority and you want at least some indication that it’s on the table, it’s not unreasonable to say “hey, this isn’t working for me” when the other person may require more time. That doesn’t mean that they’re doing anything wrong by wanting to wait, any more than you’re doing anything wrong by making it a priority. This is just an indicator that the two of you aren’t compatible in this way. No harm, no foul.
Or at least it would be under different circumstances – circumstances where you’re a little more self-aware and in better emotional working order. But to be perfectly blunt, you’re not. You’re far from it, and honestly, you’re making things worse for yourself.
You aren’t in love with this person; at most you’re stuck in limerence with what she represents – a mistake, a missed opportunity and validation about your worth as an individual. Just as folks will “make up a guy to get mad at”, you’ve made up a person to be the embodiment of your hopes and dreams and, most of all, your sense of worth as a person. The way you’re behaving is so wildly over the top and inappropriate for having ended things after – and I can’t stress this enough – three dates is kind of a tell. After all, one of the key signs of limerence is an almost obsessive attachment and desire for the other person to return your feelings.
You aren’t seeing a person when you picture her, nor are you treating her like a person. She’s a symbol, a representation. She’s the stand-in for your lack of validation and self-worth. The way you’ve been acting isn’t about her, it was about you; she, the specific individual, is irrelevant. If the person you’d stopped seeing had been literally anyone else, you would be having the same reaction because this is ultimately about you dealing with your feelings about yourself.
Here’s what I mean about self-awareness: look at how you’ve been behaving and compare that to what you say you’re feeling for this woman. For someone who claims to care so much about her and regrets ending things so powerfully that you’re compelled to write letters and poems, you only barely seem to give a thought to how she feels about things. This is evidenced by the fact that you kept writing her for months after she asked you to stop. That’s not love, that’s compulsion. That’s about you trying to fill in the holes in your sense of self, not about a relationship with another person.
The same goes with visiting sex workers. In and of itself, there’s really nothing wrong with visiting a sex worker. But what you’re doing isn’t about “getting over” someone, especially since there’s nothing to “get over” in this case. Nor is it about sexual relief, forgetting about her or even just the convenience of paying for sex instead of trying to seek out a casual encounter. What you’re doing is trying to get the validation you didn’t get from her when she didn’t want to kiss you.
To be sure: this isn’t uncommon. A lot of men, especially men with little romantic or social experience have gone through this. Hell, half the time I’ve ended up with a nasty case of Oneitis, it was for precisely these reasons. It wasn’t about love or that person so much as it was about how I felt about myself and my own sense of self-worth. If I could get $_PERSON to love me back, then surely that would prove I was worthy of being loved. I’d be whole and valued and worthy as a man.
I’ll give you three guesses how that worked out for me in those cases.
You’ve conflated sex with your sense of self-worth. The more sex you have, the more of a man you are according to restrictive and poisonous ideas of manhood. A woman turning you down is a strike against your value as a man. And since you were denied this validation in one place, you’re seeking it out elsewhere.
This is precisely why sleeping with sex workers not only isn’t helping; you’re looking for something entirely different from what they provide. The reason why it’s actively making things worse is because what you’re looking for is validation. The fact that you are paying for sex cuts against that desire. If you have to pay or coerce it, then clearly it’s not “real” and thus not valid. You’re cheating the system, or so the feeling goes. By trying to get results without actually having the goods to “earn” it the “right way”, you are just perpetuating a fraud.
That’s not actually how things work, but when you’re caught up in this mindset, it sure as shit feels that way and you’ll find no end of people who’ll happily confirm it for you.
Hence the feelings of emptiness and loss as soon as you get off. At some level you see sex with an escort as inauthentic, a cheat at best and further confirmation about your worthlessness at worst. “Look at you,” your jerkbrain whispers in your ear, “you can’t even get a girl to kiss you. You have to pay women to pretend to want to sleep with you. You worm, you loser, you pathetic little fuckup”.
Small wonder you come away feeling worse than you did before. You’re getting what you think you want, but doing so in a way that actually confirms your worst thoughts about yourself. This creates a shame spiral that you can’t break out of precisely because you are looking for the wrong things in the wrong way. You’re going to Home Depot trying to buy a hamburger and then getting mad at yourself because you left hungrier than when you arrived. This is a great way to get yourself stuck in a shame spiral that just keeps dragging you further and further down.
This is why the problem isn’t that you’re going to sex workers. Sex – no matter how you achieve it – isn’t the answer, because that’s not what you’re actually looking for. It wouldn’t matter if you were to go out tomorrow, meet someone at a bar, wined her, dined her and spent the rest of the week banging out on every flat surface of your house through the sheer force of your charm and charisma because all you would be doing is throwing more and more attempts at validation into a bottomless pit. You would, at best, get a temporary fix that would last exactly as long as it would take for your jerkbrain to invent an excuse as to why this didn’t count or for something else to inevitably come along and kick the supports out from under this rickety house of cards.
When that happens – not if, when – then you’d be right back where you started, obsessing over the latest “The One” and convinced that you can’t live without her and feeling lower than an earthworm’s taint.
Now normally I would say that “validation has to come from within, first”, but honestly, you’re not in a place where you’re ready to hear that. You’re still in a place where you haven’t fully processed what you’re doing, what you’re feeling or why. The depths of your depression and compulsive behavior are indicators of that. Anything that doesn’t address the core wound is just going to be the emotional equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
You really need to get out of the dating pool (and the escorts’ beds) onto a therapist’s couch and start unpacking all of this. This is emotional triage; you need to deal with the sucking chest wound before you worry about your sprained ankle. Until you deal with that underlying need and sense of self-worth, you’re not going to get better. You’re just going to dig yourself into deeper and worse pits that’ll be that much harder to get out of. You need to break that cycle first and then start addressing the other issues. Then and only then will you be even vaguely ready to try dating again.
Hopefully at that point, you’ll be in a better position to understand what you want, what you’re looking for and how to recognize it when you find it. Hopefully, you’ll also have much better emotional intelligence and judgement so that if you do decide to stop seeing someone, it’ll be for the right reasons and without the self-inflicted consequences.
But you can’t do that in the shape that you’re in now. Delete the numbers, block the websites and email addresses and get yourself into therapy, now. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll begin to recover. And you can recover from this as long as you do the work.
It will get better, I promise. But you have to actually break the pattern instead of digging yourself deeper.
Good luck.
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
Ever since I started dating, I’ve mostly been with emotionally abusive men. I don’t actively look for them, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I try to go for the safest options and they all turn out to be genuinely awful people. It’s gotten so bad I’ve wondered if maybe it’s me who turns them rotten, if maybe I’m just attracting what I deserve. I get love bombed and as soon as they pull away, I am hooked. The worse they treat me the more desperate I become to prove to them that I am worth their love, even if deep down I know they are not good people.
I can’t help it, I am like an addict when it comes to emotional neglect. Maybe it’s because my dad left me twice as a child and I grew up in an abusive household. Maybe it’s because my own parents don’t seem too interested in me. Either way, I am a mess when it comes to love. I’ve only ever been in two genuinely loving and healthy relationships with two amazing men. They are caring, kind, mature, gentle. They both showed me so much love. One of them is my current boyfriend. He is a walking green flag. He is literally the best guy any woman could date, but for some reason I try to find faults in him. I feel like I am always looking for an excuse to break up with him in the future.
I constantly think about some of my crappy exes and even dream about them. I know I don’t love them anymore and that I am much better off without them, but I still feel like I need their validation even though we don’t talk. I just know I have the sweetest, gentlest man as my boyfriend and I have been tempted to ruin it so many times. We barely ever fight, and the few times that we do he is so mature and understanding he makes me want to be my best self and do the same.
I don’t know what to do. Why can’t I be happy with him? Why do I look back at horrible relationships that left me broken when I have all the things I’ve ever wanted in a man right in front of me? I adore him, so why do I feel like I’m bored sometimes? Why do I look for reasons to push him away the more he wants to be with me? It was the same with my other good boyfriend, to the point I ended up cheating with a disgusting and creepy guy I didn’t even feel attracted to (never told my ex so I wouldn’t hurt him more). I ended up saying I was struggling with personal stuff and I couldn’t put all of that on him so it was best to break up. I just didn’t want him to think it was his fault or that I didn’t love him, so I lied. I don’t want to do the same again. Neither of them deserve someone messed up like me.
Red Flags Look Like A Parade
Before we get to the meat of your problem, I feel like this needs to be said out loud and repeatedly: you don’t “turn people rotten”. Nobody does that. Toxic people prey on others and they’re very good at disguising themselves. This is why it seems like a good relationship goes bad. It’s not that you “changed” them or “corrupted” them, it’s that they kept their shitty side hidden until they had you locked in.
Nobody “attracts” toxic partners and abusers; they’ll show up all on their own. The important thing is to recognize them for what they are and refuse to let them stay when you do.
But that’s ultimately not the thing we should focus on. We need to address the core issue here, not the symptoms that spring from it.
You’re not the first person to go through this. You’re not even the first person to write in about this problem this year. This is something that a lot of people experience. And much like with All The Wrong Places”, the key to getting through it is to recognize what you’re doing and why.
The ironic thing is, you actually put your finger square on the reason in your letter: “Maybe it’s because my dad left me twice as a child and I grew up in an abusive household. Maybe it’s because my own parents don’t seem too interested in me.”
As the other Savage would say: “Well there’s your problem!”
Now, it’s certainly possible that there are issues of incompatibility with your partners. Even the greenest of flags don’t necessarily mean that they’re right for you in all the ways that you need. But at the same time, you’re repeating a pattern in your life that you’ve experienced since childhood – a pattern of neglect, abandonment and abuse. Both of these can be true. But if I’m being honest, the latter is a much bigger issue than the former and much more likely.
You were a child and children are sponges; they take lessons on board even when people don’t realize that those are the lessons they’re teaching. And you grew up being taught that the people who are supposed to love you will treat you badly, ignore you and leave you.
Small wonder that you react the way you do. You spent some of your most impressionable years trying desperately to get the attention and affection of people who would hurt you, neglect you or abandon you. When you’re used to chaos, stability and safety feels wrong. There’s an understandable temptation to lob emotional grenades into a safe and secure relationship because chaos and strife are what you’re most familiar with and, perversely, the most comfortable with. It may even be a way of trying to test the limits and strength of the security they bring you; it’s understandable that you wouldn’t necessarily trust safety and want to prove that it’s all a trick or a trap. After all, it’s a hell of a lot easier to blow things up than it is to build and when you’re hypervigilant for threats or traps, you’re going to find them… even if they’re not actually there.
Again, much like All The Wrong Places, the key isn’t to address the surface issues, it’s to address the foundational problem, the core wound. In this case, it’s pattern of mistreatment and anxious, insecure attachment. These are things that need to be addressed with the help of a professional – especially someone who understands how neglect and abuse can shape people’s future relationships. Unpicking those knots and recognizing your patterns are the first step to breaking them. It will make it much, much easier to recognize toxic partners for what they are and to kick them to the curb and to appreciate safe and secure partners for their worth and to value what they bring to the relationship.
So do yourself a favor and hie thyself to the therapist. Work on those feelings from your childhood and your relationship to your family. Start building the capacity for trust and security within yourself. When you can, you’ll be in a much better place and you’ll come to your relationships – present and future – with clear and open eyes and a heart ready to accept love and to accept that you’re worthy of love.
Good luck.
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