If you missed the first part, here’s an overview: I had a test date with a blog reader, “Jack”, who took me up on my offer to do a phone chat and message exchange then give him feedback on where he might be going wrong. It was also a challenge for me. I am prone to avoiding constructive critique because I’m a rampant people-pleaser who never wants to upset anybody. Would I be able to tell Jack where he was going wrong without burying anything useful in a torrent of consoling positivity? Let’s see, shall we?
Accidental ghosting
Full disclosure: in the run-up to my test date with Jack, I drop the ball spectacularly. Thanks to too much desk work and time on my phone, I have a dodgy shoulder which makes it agony to type. The last few messages in our pre-date thread are all from him, and they’re fun/nice/question-asking ones to which I’d like to reply in depth. But I’m injured, and traveling, so when I do get the chance to sit at a proper desk I have to prioritise work. Jack’s thread slips down my inbox. I send a couple of holding messages (‘sorry, I’m a bit fucked/busy at the mo, will get back to you tomorrow or the next day!’) then fail to meet my self-imposed deadlines. Huge apologies, Jack. This is genuinely crap of me and you should deduct points from my own score, if you’re keeping one.
Jack’s response to me being a disorganised, underdelivering prick is to send a couple of gentle messages. He gets the balance just right – he’s not nagging, just reminding me that I’ve agreed to do this, which is welcome. However, I later discover that he thought I had ghosted him, which is broadly reminiscent of what men on dating sites often think about me too. I can leave messages or matches for days sometimes, if I’m too busy/ill/injured or just not in the mood to reply. To me, dating is meant to be fun, so I’d rather take my time and send something decent than hurriedly bash out a shit answer. Quality over speed. In fact, if I’m excited about a match, it’ll take longer for me to reply because I want to compose something honest, fun and open, with suitable questions about the things I’m curious to know. Men get annoyed with this sometimes – a guy once sent me a ‘ghost’ emoji because I hadn’t replied to his previous message within 24 hours. Lol.
When we discussed this piece afterwards, Jack wanted me to make clear that men do often get ghosted on dating sites, so it’s not an outrageous assumption for him to make. I definitely understand this and am happy to acknowledge it – that’s partly why I wanted to explain my thinking in these paragraphs. I get it, dating sucks for straight men and you get ghosted a lot, I’m trying to urge you not to take it personally. I hope that men can extend the same understanding to me (and other straight women) and see that ghosting (or taking ages to reply) is something we inevitably end up doing pretty often, because the numbers on dating apps are so skewed. It’s not personal. It is, in fact, the opposite of that.
I hadn’t ghosted Jack though, I was genuinely injured and busy. So eventually, instead of repeatedly promising (then failing) to message, I just set a time for the call. And as I said in part one, the call itself was fun. We had a good time and Jack seems like a decent person with fun hobbies and a nerdy job that I find fascinating because I am also a bit of a nerd. He told me cool secrets about things from his industry that I didn’t know, which I enjoyed immensely.
So far the only things I can think to critique are the fact that he calls my charm intimidating (I don’t want my good points to be things men are frightened of!), and the fact that he’s been a bit negative in his pre-date messaging (it feels a little like he’s going through the motions). But the date itself is fun, so what exactly is the issue?
Then afterwards, Jack asks if I’d like to see his notes on our exchange (I would!) and when I read those something clicks inside my head. His emailed notes are essentially a running commentary of how well (or badly) he thinks he is doing at each stage of our interaction, and they are deeply and powerfully unkind.
To himself, not to me.
Competition not collaboration
Jack notes how good my profile is, then immediately compares it to his own, saying mine is better than anything he’s ever written about himself (of course it is, I’m a professional writer!). This is another example of that ‘competitive rather than collaborative’ thing I mentioned in part one of this post – the false idea that the better I am, the worse that reflects on the guys I am dating.
I am especially grateful to Jack for having this test date with me now, because I don’t think I’ve ever articulated this on the blog before, or even really understood the shape of it myself. It is a problem that has come up a lot in my life.
- The boyfriend who once told me, “you know, I’ve always been jealous of how well you command a room.”
- The one who refused to admit that I was funny, because funny was ‘his thing’ – as if somehow that couldn’t be a quality both of us had in common.
- The guys who’ve been explicit about their discomfort that I might earn more money than them (not a problem in recent years, I make less than minimum wage these days – you’re welcome, dudes!)
- The many men who have told me I’m ‘intimidating’ because of my sexual experience. Or my charm. Or intelligence, or whatever it might be.
This issue deserves a blog post of its own – I don’t want to pour all my bitterness out on to Jack. He’s doing something many men have done before, and his version is far less hurtful than the ones that came from guys who knew me well. But it’s worth pointing out that this way of viewing relationships isn’t just a barrier to dating in the first place, it can be actively damaging to the self-esteem of whoever you date. I know so many women who have been encouraged by boyfriends to make themselves smaller and quieter. Appear less intelligent or funny or charming, lest the way we’re being somehow triggers insecurity in nearby men.
To me, the biggest green flag you can wave in any relationship is to recognise the shiny qualities of the person you’re with, and bask in the light that they cast upon you.
- My girlfriend is so funny, she has me in stitches!
- My wife is such an absolute boss – she presented at a massive conference the other day, I could never have done something so powerful!
- My partner is infinitely better than I am at [thing], I feel so very lucky to be with them!
See what I mean? Good qualities are not a zero-sum game. It’s important to recognise that one of the amazing things about the people who love us (or, if we’re dating, the people who might potentially love us) is the way they add to our lives – sometimes with things that we couldn’t do ourselves. You’re meant to be a team, after all. Try not to see someone’s good points as things with which to compete: they’re shining beacons that cast a light which will make your own life brighter!
Jack assures me that if he’d actually matched with me on a site, he’d have felt exactly like this, but the fact that I was doing this as a test made it trickier to lean in to that feeling.
This is a warm up to my main point here, though, which is this…
Love yourself
In Jack’s notes about our test date, he uses aggressively negative language about himself in almost every single comment. Needy, whiney, weird, boring, cringe, twat. None of which, incidentally, are judgments I would agree with.
I’m quite shocked to learn that every time I gave him gentle feedback (ask me questions!) or failed to reply to a message on time, he’d immediately and heavily berate himself. It upsets me, to be honest, as someone who is trying very hard to be nice while balancing that with requested, constructive feedback. It hands me way too much responsibility and raises the stakes of even a test date way higher than I’m comfortable with – especially given how scatty/injured and slow I am to reply.
I don’t want to be harsh here: I get it. As I said in the first post, it’s hard to put yourself out there and say ‘this is who I am, do you like me?’ so I can see why sometimes pre-empting rejection by beating oneself up might make true rejection sting less. But there’s a more important truth at the heart of this, and it’s one that I personally learned from women’s magazines, sex and relationships books/blogs, supportive friends, and above all therapy: you cannot love another until you love yourself.
Cheesy? Yes! Strap in cos we’re gonna get more so.
Love who you are
If you’re looking for a partner, ideally you want to find one who loves you for who you are, right? Your nerdiness should be something they delight in. Your personality – shy or ‘weird’ or ‘cringe’ or otherwise – should be something that presses their buttons. If you wanna be loved, you need to get to grips with the things about you that are lovable. Find them, explore them, understand them, and celebrate them.
I’m not here to tell you that you have to be a certain way in order to be worthy of love: confident if you’re shy, ‘cool’ if you’re instinctively nerdy. It was strange to me that Jack beat himself up in his notes so much for being ‘nerdy’ or not wanting to bore me with ‘weird’ and ‘geeky’ shit. I LOVE NERDS. The question is… why don’t you?
I’d never tell Jack (or anyone) that if you want to date you should pretend to be someone you’re not. I’m not a pick-up artist and that’s never been the goal. The people who tell you to be cooler and more confident, who’ll teach you tricks and lines to get the girl… they are charlatans. They weave silly illusions to make you believe in their magic, but it’s actually all a mirage. It requires you to become a certain type of person, regardless of whether that’s who you actually are. It feeds into this idea that only certain types of people can ever attain love, or are worthy of it, and that’s bullshit. You deserve to be loved, my friends: geek, nerd, weirdo, whatever. You deserve to be loved for who you are, not for a character you’ve been encouraged to play once you’ve battered all the uniqueness out of your precious weird self.
It’s obviously cheesy, and it sounds so very basic, but before you launch into dating, you really do need to love yourself first. Become comfortable with who you are – the body you live in, the hobbies you enjoy, the passions you want to wax lyrical about. Every single one of us has a limited, niche appeal. We should never try to appeal to everyone, but instead aim to understand what makes us excellent so we can work out how to find the right people – ones who’ll recognise that too.
Love yourself first. Please. You deserve it.
Loving yourself is not easy
As I say, this is cheesy, and it probably sounds very basic. I don’t care. Basic it may be, but easy it ain’t. I’ll be honest, even as a charming, funny sex blogger, I still wake up some mornings wishing I could be anyone but myself. I go through periods where the very idea of writing a dating profile feels like pulling teeth: how can I sing my own praises to an audience of strangers when I can barely look in the mirror without wincing? At those times, I don’t date. Or realistically, I sometimes date anyway but then friends help me recognise that I may not be in a great headspace for it, so I step back in deference to their wise advice.
Here’s what I do instead:
I hang out with my friends and family. I go to gigs and parties and the pub. I plan silly little trips that make me happy. I get therapy, or read books and articles that help me with my self-esteem. I focus on my hobbies and passions and work. I spend quality time with myself, understanding the shape of who I am and how I fit into the world. I affirm the things about myself that are good, and take note of the things I’d like to work on. I introspect about the qualities I genuinely enjoy about my personality or my body or whatever and I work really hard to turn self-hatred into self-love, or at the very least self-acceptance. I force myself to remember that I should only be dating when I know for a fact that I can meet a rejection with a shrug and ‘their loss!’ rather than taking it as a damning critique of who I am. ‘Oh you don’t like me? That’s cool! Thanks for letting me know (or ghosting) so I can move on to someone who’s hot for what I’m offering.’
I reckon ‘taking a sex blogger up on the offer of a test date’ would fall squarely into the remit of something to do before dating, to get yourself to a place where you feel truly ready. So well done to Jack on this, big points there.
I can’t test date everyone, though, so if you feel like you’re in a similar position and you don’t have friends to talk to or the money/time for therapy, reading blogs like Dr Nerdlove can be helpful (I rate his thoughtful advice) or working through resources on self esteem. I know I bang on about it often but that’s because it’s awesome: Bish’s website, though aimed at young people, gives a tonne of advice that many many adults (myself included) could have done with learning when they were young. Here are a few starting points:
Before you go on any dates, or even set up your profile, you should have a good understanding of what you bring to the table. You’re not looking to win a prize that will turn your life from ‘bad’ into ‘brilliant’, ideally you’re dating because you’ve come to the conclusion that you’re awesome enough to spark joy for a stranger, and you’re curious about the joy they might bring you in return.
If you don’t spark joy in yourself, fix that first.
Conclusion: LOVE YOURSELF
I have no idea if this advice is helpful for Jack (I will send this to him before publication), nor do I know if I’ve achieved my own goal: could I give critique without drowning it in positivity? I’m not sure. The takeaway for Jack is pretty positive, for sure. He’s a kind, personable, nerdy guy who could maybe tweak his messaging style a little to make sure he’s showing that off to potential new matches. But he’s eminently dateable and (unlike him) I don’t think he’s a weirdo or a twat. If he were one of my close friends, I’d be nudging him towards resources like those mentioned above, maybe dispensing kind words and asking him to internalise them. I’d encourage him to be gentle with himself, to stop seeing ‘Jack’ as a problem to be solved or an unlovable inconvenience, and instead recognise that he’s very worthy of love. Not just for his sake, but for those he’s dating too.
Self-hate gets in the way of connection on a date: it’s hard to build rapport with someone over who they truly are if ‘who they truly are’ is something of which they’re ashamed. It can lead to resentment, too: if you hate yourself enough then anyone who matches with you will immediately be a source of suspicion. Why do they like me!? I’m shit! Oh no WONDER they haven’t replied within 24 hours, it’s because I’m a terrible arsehole and they despise me! It also means you’re primed to see dating as a competition, one where you need to be better than the person you’re with, to prove your worth, rather than allowing yourself to bask in the feeling that this cool person’s chosen you.
Important to note, too, that self-hate immediately introduces a power imbalance into dating: you’ve put yourself in a deferential position which allows someone to treat you badly without accountability. I fucked up and was slow in my messages, Jack assumed I had ghosted him, and rather than think ‘ugh, this woman is such a flaky prick’ (which would be extremely legit) he instead took all that on himself. Beating himself up for not being good enough, when actually it was my mistake. In doing that, he made me (a complete stranger) the guardian of his fractured self-esteem, when I was far from worthy of having that immense responsibility. He deserves better.
Fundamentally, if I were to distill this advice into a handy little snippet for you to use on social media when you share this post [HINT HINT] it would be this:
Love yourself before you start dating.
You will know you’re ready to date when you can accept rejection with a shrug and say ‘your loss!’. It ain’t easy, I know. I fail often. But remembering this as the goal can help us date in ways that are fun, open, equal and which give adequate weight to our own health and happiness.
Jack did really well here, and I hope you’re as grateful to him as I am for being willing to embark on this test date/journey with me. I have learned some things that will help me in my own dating life, and I know some of you will find this useful as well. On our actual date Jack was chatty, nerdy and vulnerable – I love all of those things! I hope that in the future he can love them a little more too.
Epilogue: Jack and I had a long debrief on the phone after he read these two posts, where he gave some input and opinions on it (which I’ve tried to reflect where necessary). He was pleased with how it went and genuinely quite surprised and delighted that I thought he was nice. As a result of the conversations we’ve had, and these blog posts, he’s re-starting therapy. I am so pleased for him and I wish him all the very best on that journey.
18 Comments
Hiya, the line about using aggressively negative language about yourself really struck a chord. I’ve absolutely been guilty of doing precisely that for many years (low self esteem etc) and the thing that really opened my eyes was when someone said to me “imagine how you would react if you heard someone talking about one of your friends the way you talk about yourself. You’d be furious, right? You’d leap to their defence”. And they were right! I would! Without hesitation!
It doesn’t mean I don’t still do it, sometimes, but it absolutely changed the way I think about doing it.
This is such a good way to frame it! My friends and I occasionally throw out a “don’t talk about my mate that way!” if someone is being really down on themselves too.
I’m a bit emotional tbh! I expected this second part to reveal something sinister, but in reality, ‘Jack’ is sound. I’m personally pessimistic about the impact this will have on his dating life, but the validation is vital – and that he’s getting back into therapy is fantastic. I’m rooting for him!
This post (and a few others) are really pertinent for me at the minute. Long story short, I got fucking dumped didn’t I? Out of the blue, by text, caught feelings, was having a crisis about compatibility because she was so excellent and I felt really good with her. So, this week, it’s been quite the menty b.
I’m struggling, in part because I do the negative self talk all the time like Jack and I’m trying not to. My relationship to dating has been shit for all my life tbh, and I so want to change it. I am always in the type of situations where I do a Jack: Nothing wrong, but beat yourself up that nothing goes right. My therapist is likely fed up with hearing it all tbh.
You are worthy of more than minimum wage, as a writer and a person imo. I am also a professional writer, and I say you are more engaging than me who has got himself into a somewhat lucrative position. Question is: what do both you and Jack think all your help and support will do for his love life?
Well firstly, I am so sorry you got dumped by someone you were excited about. That is hard, and I hope you have some fun things to do/people around you to help take your mind off it and guide you through this tricky bit. Glad you have a therapist to talk to about it too – I find that kind of thing massively helpful during difficult times, and it’s their job to listen =)
“Question is: what do both you and Jack think all your help and support will do for his love life?” This is a good question and I get why you’ve asked it. When I did the debrief with Jack he started off by asking me who I was writing for. I explained in my initial email when I sent the posts that what I had written was partly for him, partly for me, but mostly for *the audience*. So in terms of what I hope he gets out of it/what it will do for his love life, I hope that it has given him a bit of reassurance that he has a lot to offer to someone who matches well with him, and he doesn’t have to hide his nerdy light under a bushel just to be worthy of a date. I am excited for him that he’s re-starting therapy and I wouldn’t want to express much by way of what I think/want/hope because that’s something for him to decide as he moves forward.
As I said to him though, the main point of writing this (and all my stuff, really) is to bring some messages to a wider audience. So for me, the goal of this post was to find out whether there were any things Jack was doing that I felt other people could learn from or relate to, and that’s what I’d like from this piece. I’m pretty chuffed with the reception to it to be honest – it’s rare for me to write dating advice that gets this many shares and comments, and I think some of the things that Jack and I discovered through our chat have struck a chord. Whether that’s guys realising the impact of words like ‘intimidating’ on women, or women being able to relate hugely to the ‘collaborate, don’t compete’ thing, or people like you who are saying that the negative-self-talk discussion hit home. For me, that’s the aim really: get people thinking about this stuff, considering how they move about the world, and maybe introspecting about things they could do to make their own lives (and the lives of people around them) a bit happier. I never *expect* to achieve that, but that’s always the goal.
I know I said I would “keep my thoughts to myself this time”, but I kinda felt the need to to follow up with something more constructive after my kneejerk reaction to the first installment of this pair of articles.
I say this through clenched teeth and fighting against every fiber in my being – this is good advice.
Now, I will briefly explain why this is such a struggle for me: I find the concept of self-love entirely alien to my nature. I know, rationally, that it’s healthier to be holding a positive view of oneself before expecting a potential partner to be able to do the same. Unfortunately, everything about me resists that logic. It ultimately just comes far more naturally to me to find myself an unending disappointment, both to myself and to others. Like my aversion to confidence, which my brain automatically associates with arrogance, I seem to immediately conflate self-love with narcissism – so both of which I find I instinctively recoil from.
But ultimately my disposition doesn’t change that this is positive guidance. Constant self-deprecation is, I have found, not an especially attractive trait, even if couched in a jokey tone (and worse if it’s not). The less of that kind of self-talk the better, if one can avoid it. At the age of 50, with an entire lifetime of regret and disappointment behind me, I expect I’ve passed the event horizon for correcting course.
My hope for Jack is he makes a better go of it than I have.
Thank you for sharing this journey and for your patience. I wish you, as always, a
Good Journey
“my aversion to confidence, which my brain automatically associates with arrogance, I seem to immediately conflate self-love with narcissism ” OHHHH I feel this so hard, and I think it’s something a lot of people struggle with (myself included, definitely). I don’t know if the following is helpful, but I’m going to throw it out there in case it is.
Because of what I do for a living, telling stories mostly about myself, I live in a constant soup of worry that I’m somehow being too narcissistic or loud or self-obsessed (which I am, sometimes). But fundamentally the difference between narcissism and confidence comes mainly from whether you care about other people. You can be confident in yourself and comfortable in your own skin while also caring about people and… that’s actually a really good way to be! I do think we get a lot of damaging messaging about confidence, and this idea that it is somehow uncouth or crass to acknowledge that we have good qualities can be intensely damaging. So one of the things I’ve found helpful is to check in on whether I am being ‘confident’ like ‘knowing my worth and my good qualities’ or whether I’m being ‘confident’ like ‘believing I am uniquely special and better than everyone else.’ The aim is to make sure it’s not the latter.
Another thing that helped me was a friend who, like me, suffers from sometimes pretty extreme anxiety which comes out as self-hate. “Oh my god I SPOKE to a PERSON and I don’t know if they LIKED ME what if they HATED ME and thought I was TERRIBLE etc.” They pointed out to me (a thing I think they’d got from therapy) that this obsession with worrying that they’d upset/offended/hurt someone was actually a form of self-involvement too. The obsession with what other people think of us is also often very self-centred. The fact is that 99% of the time other people aren’t thinking bad things, because they are busy with their own lives. If we do stuff that we can recognise as hurtful, that’s good cos we can apologise and move on. But if we spend all our time worrying about these possible mini-hurts (or even just bad feelings) in relation to other people, that’s pretty arrogant too – to assume that *I* play such a massive part in the life of this other person, when actually they have a whole pile of their own shit to deal with.
Taking both of these things together, I try (and fail often, obviously) to focus on some core moral principles (like try not to hurt people in XYZ ways) but within that framework dare myself to have a little courage to say what I honestly think and be who I honestly am. And part of confidence, when you fake it and then eventually make it, holds your hand through interactions with people who don’t get you/like you. A narcissist wouldn’t care how anyone else thinks or feels, but a confident person can say ‘I care about the impact I have on those around me, but I don’t need everyone around me to love me because I am my own unique person.’
Waffle, sorry. But yeah, I think the conflating confidence with arrogance is a worry for me too. And I appreciate you mentioning it. Thanks for your comment <3
I’ve had many relationships – friendships, flirtations, all sorts – with people who have crushingly low self esteem. they can be so cruel to themselves, and it gets very hard to keep shouting louder than the voice in their head – but if you give up, they take it as confirmation that they really were that terrible all along. phew. it’s a mess. i’m so so glad that jack was receptive to your feedback, and hope we get to hear more from him further down the line. he sounds like good company.
“it gets very hard to keep shouting louder than the voice in their head” – THIS is so important and I think something that I still haven’t been able to properly internalise. When I slag myself off to my people, I often sense a bit of exasperation, and it must be frustrating for them, especially during long periods of feeling down, when compliments get batted back all the time. I try to do it less often these days and a while back someone prompted me to start replying ‘thank you’ to compliments without trying to argue with them. So hard though – thank you for your comment!
Ouch, this one struck a chord. I sympathise with way too much of the above… always struggled with the ‘love yourself’ advice myself. My own low self-esteem is probably the main reason for my own limited dating history; as I often feel so unlovable it’s doomed to failure, so why even bother trying to find someone in the first place?
(Rationally, and from my own experiences, I *know* that’s not true, but I too easily think that way.)
And the bit about not wanting to date someone ‘better’ than yourself… I get that too. I recognise the anxiety of thinking, ‘how can I be in a relationship with someone who’s funnier and smarter and prettier and kinder than me? What if my friends and family all prefer her to me?!’
(Again, irrational and dumb, but familiar all the same.)
I don’t really have a conclusion here, still less a solution. Just something to work on, I guess!
“What if my friends and family all prefer her to me?!” OOOOF that one’s gotta be super hard. I hope that your friends and family recognise how lovely you are and can also see that dating cool/fun/smart/awesome people is a reflection of that! <3 Thank you for your comment, and I do hope you can find more self love/acceptance in the future.
These two comments and the post reminded me of something that struck a chord in me a few years ago. My sister told me that she was berating herself for doing something wrong and during her internal yelling at herself, she called herself by my name. When she caught herself, she realized just how much I was scapegoated as a kid. We haven’t lived together in the same house for 30 years come October and her subconscious still has my name as the person who is in trouble most.
It went a long way to cementing the more positive self image I have been trying to build in myself for 30 years. Just the knowledge that it wasn’t all in my head.
It takes a lot to overcome the negative self image, but sometimes an outside perspective helps. <3
Ohhh that must have been such a revelation! I am glad you came to that but so sorry that you got scapegoated so much. Childhood can really do such a number on us well into adulthood. Best of luck on your path <3
I’m sorry there is a lot of struggling going on in the comments. Sometimes, your body can reject the support blog posts like this offer much like a kidney, and can make you feel worse in a way.
I have struggled for A LONG TIME with defining confidence and arrogance. I’ve been called entitled and arrogant by some women in the past, and while the reasons for it are mainly theirs in my opinion, my responsibility is that I actually misunderstood the difference. My original definitions were person-centric:
– Confidence. Someone believes me when I say my skills are the best.
– Arrogance. Someone doesn’t believe me when I say my skills are the best.
This is recipe for some shitty thought patterns. I’ve often complained to friends about why there’s been confusion in the things I’ve said, but I have a much better understanding now.
I figured out that I got the focus all wrong. Confidence and arrogance to me aren’t on the same spectrum at all:
– Confidence. If my skills here can’t help me out, I’ll have the resilience to cope.
– Arrogance. My skills are better than yours.
It’s knowing you’ll be okay versus telling everyone you’re better than them. Now, there are some issues here. The spectrum line doesn’t exist anymore, which is a problem because there’s a gap that doesn’t factor in noting your good skills without battering someone.
For me, this is efficacy. It is simply, “I have the skills to succeed” with no value judgements on other people.
Bear with me here, but two comedians who have a reputation for punching down are Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle. Both have confidence, because they’re professional comedians. However, Mr Carr’s presentation is arrogant and desperate to be liked and loved. His punching down is cruel and unkind in many ways.
In contrast, Mr Boyle is efficate, in that he punches down because he knows that it will get a laugh based on his skills as a performer. Of course, his work has also been publicly unkind to others, although they clearly present differently. Note that we’re not getting into whether you like these people or agree with them. It’s my subjective take from a objective position using a slightly shallow and unnuanced viewpoint.
It doesn’t help that culture and society muddle the use of confidence and arrogance, much like resentment and anger, entitlement and worthiness, and a whole host of high-octane emotions.
The TL; DR is:
– Efficacy: “I have the skills to succeed…”
– Confidence: “…but if they don’t work for me, I’ll be okay…”
– Arrogance: “…although they’re the best skills compared to everyone else.”
Splitting efficacy, confidence, and arrogance helps me when it comes to noting and working with these feelings. Do you think it would help others?
Ya know, I’m a young guy and as an avid reader of Dr. Nerdlove I took the advice of “be someone worth dating” verrrrrry personally. I interpreted it as “welp I suck so time to dedicate the rest of my life to unsucking.” I lost weight, started my career, revamped my social life, wardrobe, etc. I even went skydiving to prove I wasn’t a coward.
And even now, I’m still paranoid about being “good enough.” I get that feeling of “prove your worth” on a religious level.
When you outlined how that comparisonitis and competition makes you feel, being called “intimidating”, it took me completely by surprise.
I’ve always felt that women want reasons to date you, “what do you bring to the table” has always been a deadly question to me. If a woman is better than me in every way I always think to myself “what would she ever want with ME? I’m not even close to on her level! She would only ever want that best of the best.”
So here I am. In a never ending quest to prove my worth.
But I never thought how that might make the other person feel. I always assumed the default for dating was “be worth my time or get out of my life.” It never occurred to me that “intimidating” is actually super insulting. Taking someone’s good qualities and saying “you make me feel like I suck.”
I honestly don’t know what to think now. I still feel that need to be “better.” To be superior to everyone else in order to deserve love. Loving myself is the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. It never feels true when I hear “you know you don’t need be perfect to date or find love.”
I don’t mean to be melodramatic, I just want to be accepted. I just want someone to love me for who I am, not what I’ve accomplished or achieved.
I’ve been looking forward to the second part of your test date article and this did not disappoint! I was linked to your blog from Doctor Nerdlove — I used to post on his forums, and I post on a sister forum run by fans and still read his work — and this two-part article has more than lived up to DNL’s recommendation. I saw the first one as offering some practical advice, whereas this one offered more fundamental and deeper suggestions. They both overlap and should give people struggling a lot to chew on, so thanks to you and Jack for going thru with it. I really appreciate your perspective and honesty.
I’m not a professional blogger, but I am an avid amateur one — I’ve been on WordPress for almost 11 years, still posting at least 8-10 articles a year. It began as a bit of self therapy where I wanted to get out many of my memories and experiences with dating into another medium beyond my mind. It’s since morphed into a safe space as well as a place to comment on related things, and it has helped me overall. Though at times I do wonder if I’d have done better just by being tenacious with online dating over that span.
Your advice in this column to love oneself before trying to love another is sound, but I imagine many people will struggle with that. For a lot of men, their sense of self and self value is dependent on their romantic experience, or lack thereof, for various reasons. This can make it very hard to respond to rejections or bad dates or even a lack of progress in a healthy way. I would add that the process of self-love is a multi-step one, and one in which I have struggled with a long time. A good step to take on that journey is to get to a place of self-acceptance or at least self-neutrality, and working from there. Loving oneself can seem like a big challenge, but at least getting to a place where someone is not actively hating themselves is a step towards that.
To use myself as an example, even after 11 years and the encouragement of a lot of people (including a friend who just passed), I still don’t think I love myself. But I at least am not as hostile about myself, or towards myself. Some of that is age, but the other is perspective. Now I am striving to live my best life, warts and all. At the moment that hasn’t included dating, and I can barely remember the last time I tried. For various reasons that’s not very feasible now (including being the caretaker of a parent). But if and when I try again, the practical and fundamental advice in these two articles will be as much on the forefront of my mind than anything by DNL. So thanks for posting them, and being so kind to your readers.
Thank you so much for your comment, and I am so sorry for the loss of your friend. I clicked through and read your latest blog post and my heart goes out to you.
I really appreciate you taking the time to comment on this, and yes you’re absolutely right – self-love is HARD, and I don’t know that many of us will ever achieve a solid and permanent state of it at any point in our lives. Self-acceptance is definitely a step on the way, and it’s important. I also think that perhaps we should start to see self-love as something akin to other-love, in that it is something we feel more strongly at various points, having moments of deep connection with ourselves and understanding/care for ourselves, if we’re practicing it. But it’s also something we can fall out of, or stop practicing/caring about at various points (when life gets harder, when it deals us certain blows, etc). What you say here is important:
“Loving oneself can seem like a big challenge, but at least getting to a place where someone is not actively hating themselves is a step towards that.”
I think self-love is partly a practice, like we have to keep doing it in order to maintain a baseline. And one of the best places to start is by removing super-negative self-talk and other self-hating activity, or catching ourselves when we do it and reminding ourselves that we deserve to say nicer things about ourselves. But yeah, it’s hard for sure. Since I published this post I’ve had a fair few people say ‘but this is not always possible’ and I get it – it’s not always possible for me either. But I think we do a good thing for our partners/friends/family, as well as potential future partners/friends/family if we try to keep it front of mind as a core goal, and discover/practice whatever forms of self-love work for us.
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A friend of mine, years ago, told me a tale of how he farted on a first date. Not “toot” – “whoops, sorry” but a full-on curry and beer fuelled “ripping a velvet curtain in half followed by a bag of flip-flops falling out of the loft” motion picture in sound fart.
I was astonished. But he reasoned, “if she’s going to be offended by a fart, it’s just not going to work out. Why lure her in under false pretences?”
They’re now married with two children.
(… sorry, that was in reply to “Love who you are,” the HTML markup ate my callback.)