I’m In A Relationship And I’m Not Sure I Want To Be

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

Dear doctor,

I’m currently in a situationship and facing a dilemma I never thought I’d have to face: she’s giving signs that she wants this to evolve into a relationship, and I can’t make up my mind about it. I was simply looking for someone that didn’t reject me.

For some context, I’ve had a pretty terrible dating experience through most of my life. My first success ever came at the late age of 26, 4 years ago, when I met my ex-girlfriend. I was merely looking for someone that didn’t reject me, and it ended badly. I have never even once rejected or dumped a girl, it’s ALWAYS been the other way around. My ex dumped me, as well as the sparse hookups I’ve had since then, that all ended when they vanished.

So now I come to face this dilemma and I have a thousand questions going through my head as I feel as inexperienced as a teenager. Do I even love her that way? I haven’t felt NRE when meeting her, but is that something I should take into account? We have a good time together in person, but texting hasn’t been very exciting, does that even matter or not? She is cute but overweight, should I believe that she’ll lose weight or should I not count on that? We share tastes in nerdy stuff but not at all in music, can that work out anyways? We share some political beliefs but she doesn’t nearly care about it as much as I do, is that okay? She’s not accomplished much in life and works at a dead-end job that she hates, but should I even care about that or not?

And then, even the fact that I have those questions lead to me to even more questions. Do I even want to date someone or am I looking for casual hookups? Are my standards way too high? If I decide to let her go, does that not mean I’m just looking for the next best thing? Or am I supposed to have certain standards and not backing down? Am I being an asshole for thinking that way?

Thank you.
Where Do We Go From Here?

Ooof.

Setting aside my general dislike of the term “situationship”,  WDWGFH, I’m going to be blunt: you made a mistake by setting your standard to “I want someone who isn’t going to reject me”. Honestly, the fact that it bit you in the ass the first time should’ve been a tell that maybe you should aim just a little higher. But unfortunately, you didn’t, and now here you are.

First, I’m going to skip to the end: break up with her. You don’t want to be in a more serious relationship with her. You already know this. If you’re having to think about it, you’ve already got the answer. Especially with the hemming and hawing you’re doing in your letter. This isn’t a question of “do I love her, do I think this relationship has what it takes to go the distance, do we have enough in common that I would want to mix my DNA with hers…”, it’s you wrestling with being in a relationship with someone you’re not into vs. the fear of being alone.

Well, I can tell you from personal experience: it’s far better to be single and alone than to be in a relationship with the wrong person. And you’ve made it abundantly clear that this is the wrong person.

Most of the stuff you’re focused on – different tastes in music, different levels of passion when it comes to politics – those aren’t big deals. You and any theoretical partner don’t need to line up exactly in your interests or how intensely you feel about them; what matters is that you can respect and appreciate the interests you don’t share, while enjoying the ones you do. It’s more important that you’re on the same page when it comes to core values – what you prioritize in life, what you feel is important morally and spiritually and socially, and so on. If you’re a staunch libertarian who believes in lesse-faire capitalism and she’s a devoted progressive who believes in the state’s responsibility to protect and guard the least among us… that’s going to be a problem. Your liking Amon Amarth while she’s into Jason Mraz is much less of one (at least until you end up fighting about who gets to control the AUX cable on a road trip).

But when you weren’t excited about her during the honeymoon period of the relationship and your attraction to her is conditional based on whether she loses weight in the future? When you’re comparing accomplishments or weighing her job in your questions about whether you want to stay with her? Yeah, those are pretty solid indications that this is about justifying staying with someone because you find being alone to be worse.

And, quite frankly, this is unfair to her. She’s clearly in this relationship in good faith and wants something that you’re not prepared or apparently able to give her. Staying in this and keeping her on the hook simply because the alternative is having to be single again is just cruel. If you actually care for her, then you really should be setting her free in order to find someone who can give her what she wants and who will care for her the way she deserves. Right now, you’re just wasting time – hers and yours.

What I’m finding somewhat… let’s be charitable and say “confounding”, is the question of whether you think your standards are too high when the standard you chose to make your sole priority was “won’t reject me”. If you’ve been a reader of mine for any time, I’m sure you’ve seen me talk about the peril of trying to find someone to fill the hole in your life marked “girlfriend”. Well… this is why. You end up with a relationship that isn’t meeting your needs, isn’t making you happy and is ultimately not great for you or the person you’re dating.

While yes, in general you should try to figure out what you want from dating… honestly, I don’t think you’re really at a place where that should be what you’re focusing on. I think what you really need, more than anything else is to focus on your relationship to yourself. The thing about having standards is that they say a lot about how you feel about yourself. And right now… you don’t seem to feel like you have the right to have standards.

While passion ebbs and flows over time in every relationship, everyone does have the right to seek out a relationship with someone they’re actually attracted to. If you’re an allosexual person, then that’s going to be something that folks are going to expect to have come standard. You, on the other hand, set yourself up so that the people you date are the ones where you or she say “enh, you’ll do”, and then you wonder why those relationships don’t work.

If you don’t feel like you’re someone who can pursue a relationship with people you’re actually attracted to, then you need to be working on your self-esteem and your own beliefs about yourself before you worry too much about dating. It doesn’t do you – or your dates, for that matter – any good to keep going for people who you feel lukewarm about at best. And while yes, this would mean that you’re going to be single for a while – especially while you’re working on yourself – it’s still a better use of your time and energy, and it’s far kinder to the people you might be dating otherwise.

So my recommendation right now is that you should be focusing on yourself. You want to do things that help you believe – not think, not pretend, believe – that you have more options than “you’ll do”. Finding things that make you feel like you matter is going to be important; possibly even more than the things that make you feel like a sexy bad-ass. Feeling like you make a positive difference in the world, that you’re part of something bigger than yourself… these are all important parts of improving your self-esteem and being proud of who you are.

Now, when the day comes that you are ready to start dating again, do yourself a favor: focus on meeting someone you’re excited to date. You don’t want to date someone for their “potential” if they make all kinds of changes, you want to date someone who you like in the here and now. Apply the “fuck yes/fuck no” test; if they’re not a “fuck yes, I want to date them”, then they’re a “no”.

But for now? Let this woman go. She deserves better than what she’s currently getting. And so do you.

Good luck.

Hi Doctor, I have a problem I don’t think I’ve seen anyone tackle before and I hope you can help me.

I’ll start out by being real with you: I’m pretty conventionally attractive. I’m not bragging about this, I’m only saying it because I think it’s relevant to my problem.

I’m a grad student and there’s a guy in my program who I think is pretty damn hot. He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s a hard worker, he’s got hands that make me think very spicy thoughts when I’m supposed to be teaching or grading papers. He’s also fat. He’s not chunky, hefty or husky, he’s fat. That’s not the problem at all – I’m into him at least partially because of it, not despite it.

I’m not someone who wastes time when I see something I want. If I’m attracted to you, I’m going to let you know in a respectful way. If I want to date you, I’m not going to wait, I’m going to say something first. So I want him, and I said so. I waited around after he wrapped up the class he was TAing for and said that I wanted to take him out on a date. I was clear that I wanted a date (I remember you mentioning this was important), proposed going out to a cute wine bar I know about, having a drink or two and seeing where things went, if he was interested.

I’d hoped he’d say yes and off we’d go. Instead he just looked at me for a moment, turned around and walked off without saying anything. Doctor, that’s not normal for what our vibe used to be. Most of the time, when we talk, it’s very chatty. We joke, we banter, we tease. I’d even go so far as to say that we were flirting. Everything’s been tense and awkward since then and I’m worried that his walking away like that is because he thinks I was making fun of him.

I know he’s had issues with feeling attractive and dating because of his weight, and I think he’s afraid I’m just another person who’s taking the opportunity to tease the fatty, when what I WANT is to ride that boy like a pony. Maybe he thinks that someone who’s more like society’s ideal couldn’t be into someone like him? Maybe he thinks my being friendly to him was a long set up for a mean practical joke? I guess he could just not be into me, too but I would expect at least a rejection if that was it.

Doctor, is it likely that I’m right and he thinks I’m making fun of him? If so, how do I convince him that I’m absolutely sincere about being into him because I think he’s got a hot body, not despite his body?

Dad Bod More Like Father Figure

The problem with trying to decode someone’s reaction at a distance – say, days after and entirely second hand via a letter – is that there’s an almost infinite number of possibilities to why they may have shut things down.

Maybe you’re not his type. Or you might not be his preferred gender or sexuality. He might have blue-screened at the thought that you were into him and he basically walked off on automatic because there were no thoughts, just modem noises. Or he was having a shitty day and somehow your asking him on a date was just the final thing that just made him “Nope” his way out of the building and back home.

But if I’m being honest – and based on a time when a girl in high-school did something similar to me and I reacted similarly – I’m going to guess that he didn’t believe you.  

Here’s the thing: if you’re someone who’s been taught, explicitly and implicitly by people you’ve crushed on, by society in general, even by just good old fashioned pop culture, to believe that you’re not desirable or dateable, folks showing interest often feels like a trap. It goes so counter to what you have been trained to expect, that you can’t help but see the possibility of danger, even when no danger actually exists.

If you’ve been pranked by people showing interest because they thought it would be funny to make you think you had a chance (and I’m speaking from experience here), it’s entirely possible – likely, even – that someone showing you genuine interest is going to still ring false to you. And believe me, it was bad enough before the ubiquity of everyone having video cameras in their pocket and it didn’t follow you everywhere you went. If you came up in the era of smartphones and social media, there’s a good chance that your being excited about a date is about to make you LOLCow fodder online somewhere. Or worse, the possibility of it going viral means that you would never be able to escape it. So, better to gray rock it, give no reaction and just refuse to give them anything that could be used for content fodder. The only way to win, after all, is not to play.

Of course, this sort of trained defensiveness is precisely the sort of thing that makes it hard to believe that someone’s being sincere. It even causes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy; the target’s reaction reads (somewhat correctly) as rejection, so the person doing the asking likely wouldn’t try again… which would then just confirm to the target that this was all just a cruel prank.

So. Odds are good that your crush has had people, especially people who he’d been taught to believe are “out of his league”, would not be interested in him romantically. Because of that, that any signs of interest is suspect at best and an active deceit at worst. Small wonder that he just walked off.

I think, at the very least, you should make an effort to reach out, in person, to your prospective beaux and tell him that you’re worried you offended and upset him and you want to apologize if you had. But when you do come to apologize, make it clear that you’re apologizing for possibly upsetting him because you genuinely like him and you’re worried that you’ve hurt his feelings or damaged the friendship. You can even say “my offer still stands, I absolutely want to take you out on a date, but I am completely cool with things if you’re not interested. I just wanted to make sure to apologize if said something wrong or offended you.”

What I wouldn’t do is bring up the idea that you’re worried that he rejected you because he thinks you couldn’t like a fat guy or that you were pranking him. While I think that’s the likely reason – it certainly seems in keeping with his behavior – it may not be the case. And honestly, whether it is or it isn’t, I don’t think any good would be served by bringing it up. Either you risk planting the idea if it weren’t there before, or else it can end up feeling like some sort of weird double-backflip-reverse-twist way of extending the prank and make it worse. And either way, you don’t really want to put a spotlight on something he may well be self-conscious about in the first place. After all, it’s not as though the world is going to let him somehow forget that he’s fat.

I’d also let him be the one to initiate any “let’s talk out the awkward” moments, incidentally. You don’t want to start trying to unpack feelings he doesn’t have or tell him how he feels about something. If it is about his weight, he can be the one to bring it up. If it’s not… well, same story. Extend the olive branch and opportunity to talk if he wants, but let him be the one to set the time, place and terms.

If he does want to talk it out, and it turns out he has a hard time believing that you could be into him because of his body (rather than despite it), then tell him what you’ve told me; tell him you like that he’s funny and smart, tell him about his hands and that you think he’s sexy. You can bring up his weight, but I’d phrase it more along the lines of “you look like how hugs feel” – things that make it clear that yes you like his mind but you want him for his ass. It’s easier to tell someone you’re into their body when you’re making it about them as a holistic person ­­– body included – rather than just a piece of meat. It’s great when people want you for the things that make you stand out or make you unique, but it can feel dehumanizing if that feels like the only thing you care about.

Ultimately, the way to convince him that you’re sincere – assuming that he’s interested in you, too – would be to act sincere. Deeds, not words is the rule here. After you apologize, continue to behave normally with him. If you were flirty before, when things were cool, you can try being flirty again. You may want to take it slow and give a few light pings before you get back to where you were to make sure he’s still cool with it. If you were hanging out in groups with the other grad students after classes or office hours, keep doing so. But once you’ve made your peace and made it clear that you’re still interested in a date if he is, the ball’s in his court. It’ll be up to him to take you up on it or not.

Good luck.