Why Don’t I Like My Perfect Boyfriend?

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

Hello Dr. NerdLove,

I was previously in a two year toxic relationship. My ex cheated on me and it was me continuously chasing something I knew would never love me the way I loved him. I dealt with continuous betrayal, and even felt his love for partying/drugs was more of a priority than me…

About 9 months after that relationship I started dating the “perfect” guy. He has all the requirements I need in a guy: stable/successful career, life goals, handsome, funny, loyal, empathetic, low-key, and much more.

The first couple of months were always full of excitement. Now we’re reaching 6 months together and I can’t get rid of the thoughts in my head… I get annoyed by him easily… he shows genuine interest in my day, and I just give him short answers. I stopped showing full interest in his days.

There are days where I am excited to see him and days were it just feels like another day… He is someone that likes to plan a whole month in advance and I just like to go with the flow… he gets extremely excited over the holidays and I am just meh… he recently got a promotion as well, and while I am excited for him I have been hard on myself.

I cheated on him recently, innocently flirting at a bar, and he found out… we communicated and stayed together. He loves me and wants to be with me, but all I can think is… “am I treating him the way my ex treated me?”

I have always wanted to be with someone like him that listens to me and changes behaviors based off the feelings I communicate, but I still can’t find out why I am just not infatuated with him anymore… I just have this constant thought that I can get all this from someone else that I won’t lose interest in, but then I get severely upset about having these thoughts because I genuinely care about him and don’t want to hurt him.

I cannot pinpoint over why I just am not excited etc.… I feel I am obsessively thinking that he is not the one instead of seeing what us right in front of me…

I then also think… omg he is gonna be bald in a few years… I have these shallow thoughts and it’s killing me…

We have so much fun discussing the future together and it seems perfect, but I don’t think we’re meant to be…

What do I do?

Overthinking In Overdrive

A quick question for you to think about while you read this, OIO: is your ex the only toxic relationship you’ve had, or is he the latest in a string of shitty relationships? Keep that in the back of your mind; it’ll be relevant in a moment.

I think your issue is that he’s “perfect”, OIO. Or, rather, he’s “perfect” in as much as he’s the opposite of the last guy you dated.  

Yeah, I know, the last dude you dated was so toxic as to be a one-man Superfund site. Meanwhile your current beau is stable, secure, safe… and that’s the problem.

No, seriously.

One of the annoying things about the human condition is that what we think we want and what we respond to can be two different things. What makes this especially annoying is that what we respond to is often counterproductive to sanity, safety, emotional health, etc. This isn’t because “oooh ladies love bad boys” so much as “I’m used to relationships where I haven’t felt secure or cared for and so I’m used to having more drama and strife in my relationships and I don’t know what to do when someone just loves me for me.”

What you describe sounds a lot like an insecure attachment style. A lot of people who have insecure attachment styles have a hard time with more stable, connected relationships. It sounds weird, but knowing that someone is there for you, cares for you, wants to hear about your day and generally be a source of security and comfort actually ends up being a problem for folks with insecure attachment styles. Not because there’s anything wrong with the partner, but because the person with that style is more used to chaos and uncertainty. It’s what they know, it’s often the relationships that their parents or parental figures modeled for them and it ends up causing a lot of problems.

If you’ve spent a lot of time feeling like you had to “earn” affection and attention from someone, that you had to chase after somebody or that you were always at risk of them taking their affection away from you, then that can carve something of a groove in your brain. It creates a pattern of expectations and behaviors that you unconsciously follow – choosing partners who’ve got first class tickets on the Hot Mess Express, ending up in relationships with more drama than a three season show on Hulu and often ending up with partners where their love and attention felt conditional at best. These relationships are also very rarely boring; it’s always lurching from one crisis to another, one more moment in a long line of times when you’ve had to paddle like a motherfucker trying to keep yourself metaphorically afloat.

And because that is what you’ve come to think of as “normal” for you, then relationships that don’t follow that pattern feel weird and unusual and off-putting.  

To make matters worse, these sorts of relationships make it harder to feel secure in yourself – you often feel like you’re not “worthy” of someone secure and stable and may act out in order to sabotage things. You may, for example, go out and cause trouble because on a subconscious level you feel that you don’t “deserve” a “good” relationship with a “good” partner and so you’ll do things to blow it up. You’re not consciously thinking “hey, I’ll go grind up on a stranger in front of my boyfriend because he deserves someone better than me,” but you’re still slamming your hand down on the self-destruction button as a form of penance for not being “good enough” – whatever that would mean.

Case in point: you’re having these shallow intrusive thoughts and acting out in ways that are designed to provoke and upset him. It’s telling to me that the level of “cheating” you did seems to be confined to “flirting with a dude at the bar”. Leaving aside whether that actually fits the definition of “cheating” (I don’t think it does), the fact that it doesn’t seem to have progressed further than that tells me that you’re not actually acting maliciously; you’re just trying to get a response out of him that’s more in line with what you’re used to.

Is it fucked up? Yeah, kinda is. But it’s fucked-up-edness in the general spectrum of “human brains are stupid and neurotic”, not “you are a self-destructive force who’s going to detonate messily and all over the place”.

So while it’s certainly possible that there’re actual issues of compatibility here too – just because a guy is great doesn’t mean he’s great for you, specifically – it sounds a lot more to me like a safe relationship makes you uncomfortable and you’re squirming around like a feral cat who doesn’t know if it can trust these big people that keep wanting to feed it and give it pets.

Now, maybe I’m completely off base here. It could be that you need more spontaneity and surprise; some people are chaos muppets and some people are order muppets, and the two can clash when they’re on opposing poles of this particular spectrum. It could be that you need someone who is a little more of a chaos muppet, but who has enough order to not be a complete trash fire – a little more controlled chaos and extemporaneousness, but without the toxicity and emotional withdrawal or mind games of your shitty ex.   

But I suspect that it’s more the former than the latter. I think it may be worth your time to talk to a counselor about attachment issues, especially if your shitty ex really is just the latest in a line of bad relationships. If it is ultimately a matter of self-esteem and self-sabotage, untangling that particular knot is going to be really helpful. It may or may not fix things in this relationship, but it will mean that you’re less likely to try to blow things up because you feel like you don’t deserve to be loved, or that love means being messy as hell.

Meanwhile, talk to your boyfriend about all of this. Tell him that these are things you worry about. Maybe getting some actual reassurance from him that yes, you’re wonderful, yes he wants to be with you and you don’t need to be afraid he’s going to wake up and realize he could do better might help ease the need for chaos and strife. Even the least trusting of feral cats will settle in and love up on someone who proves that they’re safe, secure and reliable.

Good luck.

Dear Dr. NerdLove: I’m a 26-year-old woman with limited relationship experience. My only relationship occurred when I was 16 years old. Since then, I’ve been on dates and experienced one-sided infatuations. Typically, when things go well or conversations click, I find myself envisioning a future with the person after just a couple of dates. However, I don’t struggle with being without romantic relationships day-to-day, and I don’t obsess over dating. While I appreciate romantic connections, I find it challenging to develop attachments to men randomly. My past relationships stemmed from friendships and long-term acquaintances. I’ve also harbored many crushes on friends but was too shy to confess my feelings to them.

Eight years ago, I added someone on Facebook whom I didn’t really know, but we became Facebook friends. Since then, a lot has changed for him—he pursued acting and is now a full-time actor, living nearby. Last year, out of the blue, he wished me on my birthday, despite us never really interacting.

Suddenly, a year later just out of the blue, I found myself imagining marrying him. I began envisioning our encounters, the parties we’d attend, our arguments, conversations, his proposal, and how he’d become an integral part of my life. These fantasies offer me a glimpse of being captivating, desired, and pursued by someone intriguing. The mental connections I forge with them reflect the kind of relationships I aspire to have. However, these infatuations typically fade over time.

Since entertaining the idea of marrying him, I’ve started noticing him more frequently — on the streets, on Instagram, everywhere. While I acknowledge that celebrities and individuals live separate lives from their public personas, I can’t help feeling jealous when I see paparazzi photos of them dating someone or when he posts pictures with others. It’s not just celebrities; I tend to construct narratives for crushes too, visualizing an idealized movie-like scenario where everything works out perfectly for us.

I guess my question is – well, is it weird? Do you think this is a bad habit (if it is how do I overcome this), something that’s worth getting rid of? Is this something that I should worry about? I feel it does give me some sort of comfort but the question is – should I feel guilty about this?

Daydream Believer

DEAR DAYDREAM BELIEVER: Is this weird? Yeah, kinda. But honestly, weird doesn’t mean bad, and normal’s overrated.

Is it a problem that you need to fix and should you feel guilty about it? Not really… but also why should you feel guilty? Fantasies are just that: fantasies. They’re products of pure imagination. Unless you actually take steps to try to manifest them in real life, they’re just little stories your brain is telling itself; they may be distracting, but they’re ultimately harmless.

Now, if it’s the case that you’re finding yourself avoiding relationships or passing on opportunities to date other people that you also find attractive or alluring, then yeah, that can be a problem. But from the sounds of it, this infatuation isn’t actually interfering in your life or causing you distress, nor do you see it as being anything more than a simple infatuation that hit you out of the clear blue sky. If you were seeing this as being a prelude to your fated love affair to last the ages… ok yeah, that’d be a problem. As it is, it sounds like it’s just a series of fantasies you’re indulging in.

I understand that it feels like maybe you’re falling too deeply into it, especially with the whole “Now I see him everywhere” aspect. But honestly, this is equal parts confirmation bias and social media algorithms at work. With the former, it’s like how after you buy a particular purse, you suddenly see that purse everywhere; it’s not that suddenly everybody was buying them, so much as you never had a reason to notice them before. Now you’re more aware of them, so you perceive them more often. With the latter… well, you interact with his posts and his pictures, so Instagram is going to throw more of them in your feed. Facebook pixels and website cookies track your movements online, so you see more ads with his smiling face or topics that’re related to him because the algorithms see that he’s a topic and content you react to. And if he’s a successful working actor with a modicum of fame? Yeah, it may seem like he’s all over the place.

But, again: that’s the Internet these days. If you were into Dimension 20, you’d probably be seeing Brandon Lee Mulligan and Erika Ishii all over instead.

(And you should, they’re awesome. But I digress.)  

With all that having been said, there were a few things in your letter that jumped out at me – nothing distressing or alarming, but telling, I think.

Part of it is the way you describe your attraction patterns, how you usually end up attracted to friends and people you’ve known for a while. It sounds to me like you might be demisexual – someone who really only starts to feel attraction (especially sexual attraction) to a person after you’ve gotten to know them and feel an emotional connection to them. That might be useful information to keep in your back pocket, because of how it may inform how you might want to pursue real-life relationships instead of fantasy ones. It’s clear that you want to feel desired and pursued. That’s far less likely to happen if some of the guys you’ve been crushing on don’t know that you might like to touch their butts or do some deep-breathing exercises around that soft part of their neck, right where it meets their clavicle.

You also mention how you’re usually too shy to act on your crushes. That, combined with the fantasies you describe, suggests to me that maybe part of the appeal of these is that they’re safe. An imaginary relationship – one that can’t happen – is by definition, perfect. It means that everything will go perfectly, that you never have to worry about making mistakes, screwing things up or dealing with the messiness that comes from human connections. It also means you never have to question how the other person feels about you or whether you’re “worthy” of them. It goes exactly as you want it to and everything works out because you’re ultimately the author of the whole experience.

In real life though, things don’t follow the Happily Ever After formula of romance novels. People argue and fight, people snipe at each other, cheat and break up. A relationship in the real world means deliberately making yourself vulnerable, opening yourself up to be hurt by someone you care about. That can be incredibly scary, especially if you feel to some degree that someone wouldn’t choose you. So, rather than pursue relationships where you might actually have a chance of getting together in the real world, with its accompanying risks and responsibilities, you subconsciously choose impossible ones because you know they can’t happen. They’re inherently safe, because they pose no real risk.

If you’re happy with this, then hey, more power to you. It doesn’t sound like these are causing you actual problems outside of the “is this normal/ should I feel bad” issue and pinging your jealousy meter on occasion. But it may be worth working on your shyness and building up the courage to ask an actually attainable crush out to coffee and start making some in-roads in your physical life, too. Fantasies can be fun, but the real world has them beat hands down. Even with all the risk and the mess. Or perhaps, especially because of those.

Good luck.