TL;DR: 30-something guy recently out of a longterm relationship is trying to find a wife and start a family, but I feel like a creep every time I do anything. What should I do?
Alright, the details. This is gonna be a long one, Dan.
About a year ago, my longtime girlfriend and I broke up. It was mutual, no ill feelings. We just realized that we wanted different things. I’ve been back out in the field for a while now, and it’s like… indescribable. I used to have confidence and I’d be able to talk to anyone. Now I see everything I do as creepy and weird. Some of that is due to feedback, some of that is just due to me.
Some background: I spent my late teens and early 20s as a full blown Nice Guy. Not all the way to Incel territory, but my internal monologue about women was pretty bad and generally I was just trying to get them to sleep with me. That lead to a relationship where I was physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually abused for over a year. I got out, started my journey into therapy and have made a lot of progress. I do my best to be “safe,” e.g. no unwanted sexual advances, very clear boundaries, respecting friendships. It took a lot of time to get there, and I’m ashamed to say that because it feels like I should have been there all along.
Fast forward to now: I’ve pursued two partners since my last breakup. The first I had insane chemistry with. Same humor, same interests, I always wanted to be around her and vice-versa. She really, really liked kissing and cuddling and I’m all for that. I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to sex and she wasn’t in a hurry either, so that was good. Then a few months in she asked me what I was looking for. I told her honestly: I’m at the point in my life that I want to settle down and start a family. She said she has no interest in having a family, let alone having sex, so that would be a problem. I said okay, well, before things get too much more serious, why don’t we dial back to just being friends? She stated pretty emphatically that she wasn’t interested in that. For her, it was dating or nothing, let’s just take it slow, maybe she’d warm up to the idea, she’d been burned before, etc. Well, red flag factory, but I did really like her, and I really wasn’t in a hurry.
The very next day, she wants to go to my place. Then we’re in bed and she is grabbing parts of me no non-doctor person had touched in quite some time. She also started taking her clothes off. I ask her if she’s really sure and she said a “yes” with what sounded like a lot of extra Es and a dozen question marks at the end. (“Yeeeeeeees???”) In other words, no. So I tell her no, let’s not, I don’t really want to either. She pulls me against her as hard as she can. I’m really not comfortable and she’s really insisting we do it but I’m getting the sense she’s not actually into it, so I ask her if it’s okay if I go get a condom from the other room, figuring if I remove myself from the room, she will feel less pressure.
I take a couple of minutes because the condoms were next to the bed so I was really just opening and closing drawers in my kitchen anyway, and she comes out and says no, she in no way wants to have sex, and she actually thanks me for giving her a chance to change her mind. We kissed and agreed to just be friends. Sounds good.
Well, she ghosted me. Then, months later, a mutual friend emailed me to tell me that I was a manipulative asshole for pretending to have depression. (I needed a lot of help post breakup, and between the breakup and losing my job, I did try to kill myself, which I told her when we spoke about our shared depression.) And then she said everyone was going to know that I raped the girl I recently pursued—the one who ghosted on me—and everyone would also know what a disgusting pervert I am. None of that was true. There was no rape, there was no… anything other than making out, some grinding, sext messages, and lots of jokes. I know I should have just ended it earlier. But man. I don’t know what to take away from that.
After her was a former coworker. She had just gotten out of a relationship and I was still a little… unsure how to go forward with anything physical. I told her I’d like to take her out when we get our lives a little more figured out. She was very enthusiastic, gave me a big hug, and said she’d love to. A couple of months later, I felt better and I decided to give her a call and ask her if she was still interested in going out. She replied that I need to stop sexually harassing her because she is taken, pregnant, and if she has a daughter, she wants to keep her away from men like me. I genuinely wish I was holding something back here, but aside from memes and, “I hope you have a great Thanksgiving!”, our interactions were all just friendly check-ins. Nothing more.
I’m not going to say I’m some saint. I can be a horndog. It’s been two years since I’ve been laid so if you hug me too long, I will probably get hard. I can be insecure, I can be clingy, I have a lot of health problems, and my interests are “man-child-like.” I honestly never understand why anyone would be interested in me to begin with. And now I’m at the point where I’m constantly nervous. If I text too many times, I must come across as too clingy. Not enough, too distant. If I flirt, she’ll think I’m a creep. If I make a move, she’ll think I’m gross or threatening. I don’t know what to do.
I’m sorry for how this came off. I’ve read it and re-read it and I just sound pathetic. I just don’t know how to move forward with a relationship with anyone where now I’m afraid of doing anything.
What Am I Doing Wrong?
Dude…
While it’s possible for a series of misunderstandings and misread signals to leave Person A feeling violated and Person B feeling 1. terrible to learn Person A felt violated and 2. clueless as to what, if anything, they did wrong… if every woman you interact with winds up feeling this way… if you’re sending what you think are funny memes and banal holiday greetings to former coworkers and they wind up feeling sexually harassed across two generations… then you’ve got (and you most likely are) the problem.
There’s a big disconnect—huge—between the way you think you’re presenting and conducting yourself around and with women and the way you’re being perceived by those women. So I’m glad to hear you’re already in therapy and that you’ve already made progress in therapy. I would encourage to remain in therapy—or get your ass back in therapy—because you have more progress still to make.
And speaking of therapy…
I frequently get letters from people who mention they have therapists and then add that they haven’t told their therapists about the thing they’re writing to me about. Which wouldn’t be a problem if the thing they were writing me about wasn’t invariably at the root the pain/issues/unhappiness that prompted them to find a therapist in the first place. And the thing they need to share with their therapist and can’t? It’s usually something sexual—maybe it involves a non-normative desire or maybe it’s too embarrassing and/or revealing and/or incriminating to share with someone they have to make eye contact with once a week. But by not disclosing and discussing that thing with their therapists, whatever that thing is, they’re wasting their time (and money) and their therapists’ time.
Which is my roundabout way of saying…
If you’ve been talking with your therapist about your depression—which sounds pretty real to me—but not talking with your therapist about your inability to communicate and connect with and, you know, not leav women feeling threatened and/or violated, WAIDW (which seems to be contributing too or exacerbating your depression), please stop wasting your time and money and start discussing that shit with your therapist. Far too many people are worried about impressing their therapists—they don’t want to seem like the kinds of losers who might actually need therapy—so they don’t talk about things they should… like, say, the last women they almost slept thinking you nearly raped her and a woman you flirted with feeling like you sexually harassed her.
You also might want to consider getting a relationship coach—someone who can work with you on interpersonal skills where dating is concerned. (Dating, aka “talking people into having sex and/or a relationship and/or kids with you.”) Someone you can show text messages to before you send them, WAIDW, someone who can help you identify the line between flirtatious and threatening, WAIDW, since you’re currently incapable of identifying that line yourself.
And if you’re dying for touch and your desperation is making you feel worse about yourself and more depressed, please consider seeing a sex worker—but only after you’ve put in a few more months work with your therapist. (And find that relationship coach too, WAIDW, because your text messages to sex workers will need vetting too.) And if feel bad about having to “pay for it,” WAIDW, just remind yourself that everyone pays for it in one form or another. Like I wrote here in a long piece about incels…
We all pay for it. We don’t all pay cash but we all pay. All sexual and romantic relationships involve an exchange. In most cases the goods (sexual and/or emotional) exchanged for services (sexual and/or emotional) are intangible and/or physical and the exchange is of roughly equal value. (Or we convince ourselves it is.) It’s a barter system: “a system of exchange where goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money.” I give my husband emotional, social, and sexual support and attention in exchange for the same from him. If we weren’t both paying up and paying in emotionally, socially, and sexually, our relationship would collapse. A sincere bond of affection prompts us to pay up and pay in, yes, but we make our payments.
Most of the sex workers I know are happy to offer trusted, regular clients a little feedback, constructive criticism, and positive reinforcement—none of that is a sex worker’s job, of course, and you should tip accordingly. But no sex worker isn’t going to risk offering a client an honest critique until she’s certain he can take criticism without getting angry or violent. But lots of sex workers act as bonus therapists and relationship coaches to their trusted clients… and it sounds like you need all the help you can get.
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