Confessions of a Crazy Ex - A letter from S

I received an email from "S" the other day that went like this:

“I never thought I would be a crazy ex but it just happened and I didn’t realize until after. Basically my ex started seeing another guy a couple weeks after we broke up but she’s clearly just using him for hook ups because he’s going to be leaving May 16 to go to the military and she’s only known him for about a month and Snapchat has wonderful thing that you could see peoples locations. I saw she was at his house for hours and I got upset and started sending her her location and saying “how could you” and “I’m never going to be your friend”. And all she did was just block me on Snapchat and then Ignore me. So the next day I went to her college which is about three hours away for me to apologize and I bought her a rose and when she saw I was there when I knocked on her door she didn’t answer and I waited for hours for her to show and during that time she started blocking me on Instagram and Facebook and she wasn’t answering any my messages. Until she sent her friends to tell me to go away and go home. I didn’t do anything else after that but send her a message saying that I was basically they are to apologize and she was making me look bad by not replying to me. I know this sounds crazy but I just wanted to get a second opinion on how bad it is?”


Operational definition : Crazy Ex
A person whose actions, triggered by a the emotional fallout from a recent breakup, go above and beyond the normal response to save a relationship that has already ended. In other words, doing entirely too much.

As with all undesirable behavior, the first step to addressing it is to identify it. It is very positive and encouraging that you have self-identified that you may have gone a bit batshit here. While that does not make any unstable behaviors acceptable, it will go a long way towards making sure that you don't repeat such mistakes. Saying I'm sorry does so little in the real world of adults to heal emotional wounds. The most important piece of advice I give anyone is don't be sorry, do better. Words really mean very little in the big picture, but actions really do speak volumes.

You don't want to be on... either side of this really.

Now to address the reason why you wrote me, let's breakdown the tape, so to speak.  I think you already know what your first and biggest mistake was here; staying connected on social media. HUGE MISTAKE, but you have probably realized that by now. The entire point of social media is to let you know what someone else is doing at all times, whether they want you to or not. When you break up with someone, it is your responsibility to block them IN ALL WAYS POSSIBLE. I cannot stress that enough. You must be swift, thorough and you must not hesitate. And we all know what happens if you hesitate; if you hesitate then you will become dead Marine. That's what they said in Full Metal Jacket, and I'm fairly certain that's relevant here. She blocked you, and once that happened any possibility of a future relationship with her, in any form, was gone. Block first if for no other reason than it feels good to quit rather than get fired. Trust me, I know what it's like to unintentionally glean information about an ex when you really weren't trying, which is why you have to be diligent about protecting yourself from any unwanted revelations.

We live in such a connected age you will find things that remind you of her everywhere. Here are just some of the places you have to block her; Google, Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook (obviously) Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, Spotify, Gchat, Messenger, everything. Clear all of your browsing data. Erase all search history. Erase and block not only her phone number but the numbers of all of her friends and anyone who may know how to reach her. You have to protect yourself from future you, because at some point future you is going to be drunk, or tired, or lonely, or all three, and will want to try to contact her and you have to take away all of his options. An undervalued facet of any breakup is protecting yourself from yourself. You had two weeks to burn all bridges. If you had done all of the blocking immediately, you'd have saved yourself a lot of time, heartache, and gas money. If you haven't done so yet, please burn everything (figuratively speaking) immediately.

The next error you committed is in reconstructing her motivations for her current actions. It is none of your business what (or who) she is doing now, and here's why; how is anything you learn going to help you? It doesn't matter if she's seeing this guy for sex, for a relationship, or for paving her driveway (not a metaphor.) There is no scenario where you knowing about her current activities works out well for you. Look at this from a cost/benefits analysis point of view. You and her are newly broken up, and one of the ways people cope with breakups is by hooking up with someone else immediately. A human mind in the midst of a breakup is a terrible thing; it will only replay the worst outcomes over and over, and the longer you dwell on your ex the more your perceived reality will conform to fit your fears. You have to save yourself from inquiring into her new life not for her, but for you. The best motivation to mind your own business is to avoid further pain. The chances are high that she won't be doing anything you're happy about, so why put yourself through further grief? On the surface you may say that you're trying to reach her out of guilt or to apologize for some offense, but really you are just looking for an excuse to see her again. By the way, a good way to figure put if you're engaging in obsessive ex-boyfriend behavior is if anything involving your ex takes “hours.” You knew she was at his house for “hours”, you drove for three “hours”, you waited outside of her dorm for “hours”. Nothing involving an ex should take more than 5 minutes, long enough to curse them out one last time or just say goodbye forever. Anything longer that that and you are probably straying into crazy territory.

Not knowing that you were out of control is a real thing. In my personal experience, there were many times that I didn't know that I was being crazy until after it was over, which is why it is very important to have someone in your life who is boring. A completely boring, average person is absolutely essential to the life of an emotionally adventurous person. Whenever I'm very upset about something I have friends that I talk to before I act just to make sure that my response and level of emotional excitement is proportional to the stimulus. In other words, I have people to tell me if I'm overreacting. We all need a point of reference for “normal” so we don't go off and do something stupid, kind of like a lighthouse in a sea of madness. When we are operating in a heightened emotional state, it becomes difficult to think rationally. Some people's neurons are wired so that their logical thoughts are interconnected with their emotional impulses in such a way that they literally cannot think straight when they're upset. If you don't have a person like that in your life, I highly suggest going to a therapist. In fact, go to a therapist anyway. I cannot overstate how important a good therapist can be is providing you with unbiased insight into your behavior.

Let's review; she blocked you so block her on everything. Engage and feel your feelings, remember they're your feelings and it's your responsibility to resolve them, not anyone else. Block her on everything. From what you've written you did go full crazy ex, but you can pull back before any more damage is done. Work on healing you. Read this article that goes into more depth on why breakups hurt so much. It helped me to know that a lot of the pain I was feeling wasn't heartache or missing love, but stupid brain chemistry. Good luck “S”, and remember; everything RomComs tell you is a lie and they should all be burned.

Re-zoning the Friend Zone

I’ve been male for 39 years now, and in that time I’ve learned a thing or two about other males and how we function. For the good of all I’m writing a three part series about why men generally do what we do. I write “generally” because there are many broad generalizations in what you are about to read; generalizations, anecdotal evidence, conjecture, and my own personal insight as a straight male of color. I hope you find this somewhat useful. 

The rock is your self-respect

     I have often been in the Friend Zone; I own land there, I pay taxes there. I'm part of the Friend Zone Homeowner's Association. When I used to complain about the friend zone it was a generally accepted “thing.” It was harmless joke, something people referred to when they were down in the dumps. It wasn't necessarily gender specific, although it was applied to and primarily used by men. Everyone knew what you meant when you said that “I’m stuck in the friend zone.” There was no controversy surrounding the phrase back then. “Friend Zone” referred to a certain relationship state where person A is romantically interested in person B, but person B is not interested in person A the same way. Hence person A is stuck in the friend zone. It is a state in which Person B has genuine affection for person A, but not enough to be in a relationship. There is a nuance here that is lost on many people, specifically men, and specifically me. I’ll elaborate.

     I’m 39, which means that I formed all of my opinions about how relationships with women work in the 80’s. This was a terrible, terrible thing that happened to many men in Gen X and should never be repeated. John Hughes basically fucked up an entire generation of men (and women, but in a different way.) I never actually saw any of his movies but Hughes's work was part of the 80's zeitgeist. It was impossible to evade the effects of his works.I’m not sure how things worked in the cities, but in the Suburbs my generation was often left to its own devices when trying to figure out how to deal with interpersonal relationships. Our parents, the “Boomers,” were discovering that the American Dream needed constant upkeep and repair, and without such care it turned into American alcoholism, American Divorce, and American Major Depressive Disorder. They had their own shit to deal with. So, starved and desperate for romantic direction we had to figure out a blueprint for life from pop culture. The teen comedies, they ruined us. I’m talking about Porky’s (1982), Risky Business (1983), Heathers (1988) and countless others. I never saw those, but I watched a shitload of 80’s sitcoms. If there’s one thing I learned from 80’s television is that being a sincere, sensitive, caring “nice guy” who listened to a woman’s feelings was a sure way to get some vag.

Will they or won't they?

     As I discussed in "The Nice Guy Paradox" the Nice Guy lie negatively influenced male behavior for 30 years. I was often called “a nice guy” mostly because I wasn’t a dick to people. At least, I was rarely a dick. At least, I thought that I was rarely a dick... I'm going to change topics now. Anyway, I thought this was a positive thing. Men really are toddlers with guns, angry machines of destruction with little to no insight into our emotions or motivations. There I was, trying to become the sensitive caring-but-charming guy that got the girl instead of the antagonist of the story who was always an objectively better choice for a relationship than the protagonist (me.) Steve Urkel couldn’t get Laura the way he was, so he became Stephan. How many seasons did Kevin blow trying to feel up Winnie Cooper?

Really, could you blame Kevin?

     Think of the role models I had: Saved by the Bell, Who’s the Boss, Growing Pains. Sam and Diane, Jack, Chrissie, and Janet, Alf and Willie, Tony and Angela, Whitley and Dwayne, Peg and Al, Harry and Christine, Maddie and David… these wildly contrasting couples were all I had to go on. Is it any wonder I came out with my dating head up my dating ass?  I was confused. All I knew for certain is that I really, really, really wanted to be near girls, touching girls, looking at girls. To be honest from 10-13 I wasn’t absolutely certain what I would do with a girl when I got one, but I figured I would cross that bridge when I came to it. I had a point A and a point C and no idea what point B was, or how to get from one to another. I had one piece of rock-solid knowledge, one plan, one egg that all my baskets were in. If I had never picked up this faulty cognition who knows how differently my life would have turned out. If you want to be a boyfriend you have to be her friend first. Believing that was my first and biggest mistake.

     As it turns out, if you become someone’s friend they tend to think of you as a friend. Go figure. Building to a relationship through friendship made sense to me because it’s how I would ideally start going out with someone. Who wants to date someone they don’t know, I thought. Honestly I think many relationships fail because people become genital friends before they become emotional friends, but I digress. Many of the women I’d come to like in life were friends who I fell for. When I would broach the subject of dating, or try to set up that perfect romantic set piece, it would always blow up in my face.  The woman would often say “I never thought of you that way” to my eternal consternation. Sneaking into a relationship under cover of Nice Guy often meant that the girl I liked, never being approached romantically, never thought of me in a romantic way. This is how 98% of Friend Zone situations happen. Now I know to make my intentions clear within the first few times I meet a girl, and then take things from there; only took me 20 years to figure that out. In this way I avoid the friend zone but often get told that I'm too aggressive. Sigh.

     Boys are taught to never give up, that if you really believe and work hard enough, you can win anything you want in life. We never take no for an answer. When you look at men’s approach to women it all makes sense now doesn’t it? My generation was raised to believe that if you put enough work into winning a girl over, you would persevere. You would win. And in 99% of life, this is the correct course of action. Hard work and perseverance will often bring you your heart’s desire; what it can’t bring you is someone else’s heart. It took me a very… very long time to figure out that you can put effort into making a relationship work, but you can’t work to get into a relationship. You can’t work on someone else anyway. What they should have been telling us is that if you work on making yourself a better man, then women will come on their own accord. Now that I think about it, maybe someone did tell me that, but it was probably too late, I was obsessed; I still am. I’ve always been obsessed with women (Ironically before I hit puberty I hated girls.) Once I thought they were inferior in every way, and then I thought that they were superior in every way. Some of you may recognize this pattern of thinking as “Splitting.” Splitting is a cognitive distortion that pretty much defined much of my youth. It’s the tendency for a person to only think and perceive in absolutes; people are either all good or all bad. I thought women were all good; I often elevated chosen women to the status of goddesses or what people refer to today as “Beyoncé.” When I liked a girl she was Beyoncé, and when, inevitably, she disappointed or let me down (rejected me) she became the exact opposite of Beyoncé, Lena Dunham. Only in the mind of a screwed-up lust fueled boy could one woman go from Beyoncé to Lena Dunham in the space of one day.

Did I really need an excuse to insert a picture of Beyonce?

     You see this behavior everywhere from men. Watch any emotionally dysfunctional man get rejected from a woman. She goes from B to D in a heartbeat. The Virgin-to-Whore Express runs 24 hours a day in some guys minds. Unfortunately I still do this in my head, but I’m aware enough to spray myself with a water bottle and hit myself on the nose with a rolled up newspaper when I realize that I am thinking this way. “No! Bad Id! No!” If you are a guy reading this and don’t understand why it is a problematic way to interpret the world, walk with me talk with me. I once was strongly in like with a girl, let’s call her Rachel. I’d talked with her for a while and discovered that we had everything in common (in my mind.) Let’s say she’s a nerdy, geeky WoC who is intelligent, and funny. She gets all the weird malfunctions in my personality and actually finds them endearing. We talk for hours about what it’s like to be Brown people in White Nerd World. I feel like we are bonding on a molecular level. She’s beautiful and has all my preferred secondary sexual characteristics in abundance.* At this point I am idealizing her. She has flaws certainly, but I’m not being realistic about that. I make my move eventually and tell her that I want to be together, and she blocks my shot like Marty Brodeur. Turns out that she had already evaluated me as a partner and didn’t think it was a good fit. Now, nothing about the relationship has changed, not in the way she sees me. I respectfully disagree, and now am feeling three extremely strong emotions at the same time:

1.       Confusion

2.       Hurt

3.       Anger

The confusion comes because I honestly don’t see how she doesn’t see that we SHOULD (see there’s that word again) be together. The hurt comes because it always hurts when someone tells you that they prefer the company of other’s to your specific company. Anger, because that’s the only emotion men are ever really allowed to express. So now I have an abundance of hurt and confusion rolling itself up in anger with nowhere to go. I did everything the right way so all of this pain must be her fault. Since it’s HER fault and SHE destroyed MY vision of who I thought she was, now she is the enemy. She’s stupid for not seeing how great we could be together. Bonus rage; she gets together with a Nice Guy who I find to be inferior to me. Sometimes I will react in this situation by thinking “I didn’t try hard enough. I just have to work harder to MAKE her love me. I have the Touch. I have the Power!” So now I’m doing increasingly desperate gestures to win her heart, gestures that to an outside observer seem unhinged and psychotic. When you look back at 80’s pop culture, The Grand Gesture always worked. Think of the movie trope of a Person B leaving Person A’s life because he can’t commit. In the climactic scene, Person A confronts her at the gate to her flight wild-eyed and short of breath. He proclaims his undying love for her, and the woman always says “I love you too” and purposely misses her very expensive flight out of town. It’s such a guy way of thinking; if she doesn’t like me the way I am ROMANCE BIGGER AND HARDER TIL SHE LOVES ME! In reality these actions often frighten women away, and the rejection intensifies. Now I am devaluing her and directing anger at her. Since my behavioral pattern is to take anger on women out on myself, I would get depressed and stress eat or do something else self-destructive.

     Sometimes if I could stand it, I would still be friends with the girl, hoping that whenever her relationship ended (because these things happen) that I would be there to score her on the rebound. I specifically got this message from Seinfeld (“The Wait Out” Season 7 episode 23.)

JERRY: But we gotta make it seem like we're not calling for dates.

ELAINE: Then why are we calling?

JERRY: Good question. (More to himself than to Elaine) Why are we calling?

(Both start chanting "why are we calling..", thinking deeply)

ELAINE: (Loud) Oh! (Jerry has a surprised look) I've got it! I've got it! We're calling just to say, "I'm there for you."

JERRY: (Nodding, trying it out) "I'm there for you."

ELAINE: Then, after a period of being "there for you", we slowly remove the two words "for you", and we're just (Makes a "ta-da!" gesture) "there".

I’ve heard this works, but only if the person you’re waiting on has already run a dating sim of you two together in their head. If not It’s never going to work. I’m not going to get into whether it’s a morally right or wrong way to go about getting a date because really, all’s fair. I’m saying it’s not an effective way to go about winning someone’s heart. I’ve done all of these and none of them have ever worked, not because I wasn’t trying hard enough (believe me, I did) but because there wasn’t going to be a relationship there. Apparently when a woman identifies a guy as a friend a friend he shall stay unless some unforeseen circumstance changes the way she sees you. The trick is guys, that what changes her mind is not something that you can consciously manifsest. You are wasting financial and emotional resources on her when they could be better spent on yourself or someone who is actually interested in you. Changes may be needed yes, but change things about yourself not for her but for you. The hardest part to write here is that no matter how much self-improvement you do, you still may not get the girl of your dreams. That frustration and loneliness is incredibly hard to live with, I know that better than most. The thing is you have to live with it because it is NOT her fault and she is NOT a monster for not wanting to go out with you. One of the biggest emotional growth spurts I ever managed was seeing women as people; not angels or demons, but people with their own merits and flaws just like everyone else. Not dating you may indeed be a mistake, but it’s her mistake to make and her mistake to fix if she ever sees it that way. The fact that it took me, a guy with an extremely high emotional IQ decades to realize women are people shows you how distorted the average man’s perception of the average woman must be.

One of these people murdered the other minutes after this picture was taken.

Finally we come to the nuance that I, and I suspect many men, have never been able to master. A woman can like you as a friend; and that’s OK. You’re friendship may mean the world to a woman, and without it she could possibly be devastated. But she only specifically sees you as a friend. The fact that I keep typing “only a friend” shows my only cognitive distortion that friendship is not a desirable relationship status with some women. In the past 10 years of my life I realized that I’ve actually had to stop remaining friends with women that I’m romantically interested in because I do not possess the emotional maturity necessary to be able to handle seeing her with another guy. I know it’s childish and petty, but I’m just not there yet. Knowing my limitations is where I am, and for now that has to be good enough because what else is there? I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the idea of a woman finding me very date-able but not wanting to date me. A friend once told me that I was attractive but she was not attracted to me; my head still gets swimmy when I think about it. There are probably lots of women reading this who are thinking “yeah I get that” and lots of guys reading this saying “WTF?!?!” And you are all right. I don’t get that nuance. I did eventually realize that a friendship can be just as intimate as a relationship, and that allowed me to hold on to many friendships that I wouldn’t have been able to before.

This is pure speculation, but I think male behavior states that if you are attracted to a woman and she wants to have sex with you, you have sex with her, whether you want to be in a relationship or not. It seems that modern women are subscribing to this philosophy more and more as they feel less constrained by societal definitions of “ladylike” behavior. But what do I know about that. What I do know is that the Friend Zone is a real status, and no more good or evil than any other arbitrary definition of the emotional space between two humans. What men need to understand is that no one is ever “trapped” in the Friend Zone. I own a condo and some beachfront property in the Friend Zone. People know my name there. I run the Friend Zone like Diddy runs the city. The key is one day I realized that the only thing trapping me in the Friend Zone was me. It's not the Hotel California, you can leave anytime you want to. If you cannot handle being a woman’s friend and not her lover, you need to be open and clear about that. Skulking and sulking and trying to win her heart will only breed animosity and mistrust. Being open and honest about feelings, while painful in the short term, is vital to long term emotional health. If you can’t do that, and the shame and hurt and confusion and rage just won’t let you move on, talk to someone. Get a therapist, or email me, I always answer my emails.Talk about it before the Friend Zone becomes a War Zone.

It is my firm belief that unless you have the necessary insight and maturity to handle such an arrangement, you (men) should not stay friends with a woman they are in love with. All of that love will eventually turn into proportional rage. I know that I still on occasion have a lot of difficulty being friends with a woman I really like, and if I recognize I am moving in that direction I bail out as soon as possible. Neither of us wants those problems. There is a reason that throughout human history the tale of the spurned and jealous lover is a constant throughout all peoples. If you are not aware google haw many women are victims of assault or murder at the hands of men they have rejected. It's staggering and frightening and we will cover this exact issue in part 3 of this dating trilogy for men, "The Crazy Ex-Boyfriend."

CONTINUE? [YES]  NO

The Nice Guy Paradox

I’ve been male for 39 years now, and in that time I’ve learned a thing or two about other males and how we function. For the good of all I’m writing a three part series about why men generally do what we do. I write “generally” because there are many broad generalizations in what you are about to read; generalizations, anecdotal evidence, conjecture, and my own personal insight as a straight male of color. I hope you find this somewhat useful. 

Neither Russell Crowe nor Ryan Gosling appear in this essay

There is a popular saying that Nice Guys Finish Last, and they usually do. Gen X was taught that if nice guys persevere and are nice enough, we would win in the end. In the minds of the undersexed girl-crazed teenage boy, winning meant getting the girl and living happily ever after. Of all the problematic outcomes of this train wreck of thinking, one of the worst is the Nice Guy/Bad Boy Paradox. The Paradox is that in trying to be a Nice Guy, many men end up becoming a worse person than the Bad Boy. The Nice Guy Lie, that being a nice person will bring you sex, has negatively influenced male behavior for 30 years. It was a lie that I chafed against and caused me no end of cognitive dissonance. Changing yourself to fit what someone else’s idea of the perfect person is puts you on the fast track for emotional implosion, but many men don’t figure that out until it’s too late. If you were a guy for whom attracting women didn’t come easily or naturally (like me) you were always looking for some kind of an edge to make up for whatever your perceived shortcomings were. Over time as our desperation increased jealousy and anger at the more fortunate but seemingly less deserving men of the world increased in kind. We could not understand how seemingly intelligent women could choose unevolved pond scum over Nice Guys like us. Eventually we were filled with directionless rage magnified by society, men and women, telling us that we are single losers because we don’t want to change. Instead of help, society invalidates the negative feelings of men who by society’s standards don’t qualify as men. Guys like me thought that changing into something we weren’t was the only way to succeed, because being ourselves wasn’t getting us anywhere.

I didn’t choose the Nice Guy life, the Nice Guy life chose me, and it rubs me the wrong way to this day. I am not a nice guy. I’m an angry, self-centered, hedonistic, gluttonous, ball of negativity masquerading as a real live boy. I was slapped with the Nice Guy label mostly because I always try to do the right thing, whether I want to or not, and most of the time I don’t want to. I was often called a Nice Guy mostly because I wasn’t a dick to people, and I hated it. I can’t tell you how many times girls told me they weren’t romantically interested in me because I “was too nice.” Nothing is more confusing than telling a teenage boy that being a good person is stopping him from being able to touch a boob. Trust me; no teenage boy is choosing altruism and a life of servitude over touching a boob. It’s not outlandish to think that a Nice Guy shouldn’t have trouble dating but for guys like me that was often the case. I believed that if I became friends with a girl I liked and was the Nice Guy that people said I was eventually she would let me touch her boobs. Simple guy logic. If you glean nothing else from this exercise in apologist narcissism, remember that guy logic is simplistic, almost infantile. Lots of boys saw being a sensitive, caring, and sincere person as a means to an end, not a goal itself. It didn’t matter if you actually were all of those things or if you even believed in them; if you could become (or fake) those traits women had to want you. “I SHOULD be able to get a woman as a Nice Guy” is what we were told and told ourselves. The word “should” has caused more and bloodier violence than any other word in any human language.  If you wanted a girl you had to be the kind of guy you thought she wanted.

The problem every Nice Guy encounters is that at some point the Bad Boy comes along and easily scores the woman you’ve been plotting on for months, sometimes years. Inevitably the target of your affection will Uber over to your swanky apartment in the Friend Zone and tell you all about how Bad Boy screwed her over. After she has soaked your shirt with her tears, you’ll get a hug and stuck with the Uber bill as she goes straight back to Bad Boy. You discover that you overplayed the Nice Guy thing, and now that trait is seemingly all that’s holding you back from getting to second base. The frustrated energy this cycle generates could power Las Vegas for a month.  Being the simple creatures that we are we think “well if that’s what she likes, that’s what I’ll be.” The tragedy is that a lot of times it works! I speculate that there is some horrible lie that woman are told that attracts them to the Bad Boy, but whatever the cause it’s bad for society on general. The only thing worse than a fake bad guy is someone who overshoots Bad and hits  True Evil.

This guy never ended up in the friend zone. Be like this guy.

This is the Nice Guy Paradox; in trying to become a Nice Guy many men become actual bad people. The lying and pretending behavior becomes second nature, and gradually more and more shady behaviors become acceptable in the name of “love.” Guys at this level will see the Bad Boy with the girl they like, and think that they will do anything possible to separate those two because, after all, we know who is best for that girl right? Sometimes, like with me, this frustration and anger turned into depression and self loathing. In other cases men take that anger and frustration out on the target of their affection, with violent results.

The truth is that although the Bad Boy is 9/10 a genuine piece o shit, he is genuine. People like authenticity, even if it’s a negative sort of authentic. People know what they’re getting with a terrible person, and when things inevitably end in tears and lawsuits, no one is really surprised. When dealing with a guy who is an objective piece of shit a woman at least has the option of keeping her guard up, though whether she does or not is varies because human brains hate their human hosts. The guy who is secretly an awful person masquerading as a Nice Guy is seen as an affront, a violation, a fraud. A lot of times these Nice Guys have so lost track of who they really are they feel more and more victimized every time one of their manipulative efforts is ineffective. I know that cycle; the obsession with women and the compulsion to do anything to win her over creates a cycle of frustration, rejection and rage that often bubbles up into emotional or physical violence towards any women available.  Men really are toddlers with guns in many ways. I was out there trying to become the sensitive caring guy that got laid all the time which, shocker, may not even be a thing. Crazy thing is I do possess those traits naturally, but I still felt I had to manufacture a me that women wanted. We do this because we are never really told what women want. I was raised by all women and I still had (and possibly have) no clue how to be in a relationship with one. Men focus so much on how to get women and never talk about how to be with a woman. 

look at this sociopathic piece of shit

John Hughes lied to us. He lied to you, to me, to everyone.  If 80’s pop culture taught me anything, it’s that all women go for the rich/handsome/athletic guy, but what they really yearn for in their heart is the nerdy, awkward sensitive guy.  All we, the awkward, homely/unpopular nerds of the world had to do is try, try hard, and never give up. The Grand Gesture always seemed to work, and the girl-of-our-dreams would immediately leave the guy who by all traditional standards of success was the far superior choice, and fall in love with us forever. When you look back at 80’s pop culture, The Grand Gesture always worked. Think of the movie trope of a Person B leaving Person A’s life because he can’t commit. In the climactic scene, Person A confronts her at the gate to her flight wild eyed and short of breath. He proclaims his undying love for her, and the woman always says “I love you too” and purposely misses her very expensive flight out of town. It’s such a guy way of thinking; if she doesn’t like me the way I am I’LL ROMANCE BIGGER AND HARDER TIL SHE LOVES ME! In reality these actions often frighten women away, and the rejection intensifies. Now I am devaluing her and directing anger at her. Since my behavioral pattern is to take anger on women out on myself, I would get depressed and stress eat or do something else self-destructive.

when Nice Guys snap you get Michael Douglas

Nice guys don't finish last, or first. Like everyone else who has ever lived, all nice guys do is finish. If you finish alone and unloved or surrounded by family is up to you. And further also, when we come across guys who complain about not being able to meet women, the exact wrong answer is to call them losers for not fixing everything about themselves to make themselves more attractive to women. One of the reasons we are all crazy is that society sends us mixed signals. Being gay has always been used as a pejorative for men. Sharing your emotions with other men was “gay.” As such we are strongly encouraged to not share our feelings or ask for help. When men do complain about the difficulty they have with women, they are belittled, especially by those calling themselves feminists. Many times the insults are warranted because of the way men complain about things, but consider this;

I've only had one teacher who every got me, and his name was Nathaniel J. Pallone. He told us a story in class that was relevant here. People who try to eat lobster and crabs use tools to do so. You need tools to crack open the shells to get to the delicious meat inside. If you don't have tools you have to use your fingers and fists, smashing, breaking and tearing the meal apart until you and all your dinner companions are covered in crustacean goo. Lobsters are like emotions; if you have the proper tools., you can deal with them clearly and efficiently. If you don't you're just going to make a big mess. Many men do not have the social and interpersonal tools necessary to deal with the opposite sex and consequently make a big damn mess everywhere they go. And that's what we do. 

One of the most confusing aspects of reality to me is that no one ever believes me when I say that I have INCREDIBLE difficulty attracting and retaining women. It's one of the most traumatic areas of my life, but no one has ever been what I'd call sympathetic to my issues and with few exceptions I've always had to deal with them on my own. It's hard. I'm a pretty modern insightful dude though so therapy has helped in this area. At this point in life it's pretty hard to unlearn all of the mistakes and faulty cognitions, but progress has been made. For many men it's too late to see that the problem isn't everyone else, but sometimes honest listening can do a lot to humanize a Nice Guy. It's a start. This whole clusterfuck of good intentions and shitty strategy has to end somewhere. I think the only way to start is for men to be more transparent and for society in general to stop making us feel shitty for it. Trying to be a nice guy to get sex hurts everyone, and often leads to the unfortunate circumstance of being trapped in the friend zone. Speaking of...

CONTINUE? [YES]  NO

Confessions of a Crazy Ex Boyfriend 8/19

Confessions From One Ex to Another

This week I have something a little different for you. A few weeks ago I received an email from a guy who was going through a severe Crazy Ex Boyfriend phase, and he wanted my advice on how to extract himself from his situation. Here I will post his question (with the names changed to protect the unstable, of course) and what I wrote him in response. I would love for this to become a habit. If anyone knows any guys who need advice on troubling relationships, please point them in my direction. You know what they say, those who can't do, teach ;)

Hi John,

My name is Steve, and I'm responding to the blog you wrote. I'm acting
like a crazy ex boyfriend. Before I met my last girlfriend, I was a pretty even tempered man. I was peaceful living on my own and working on fixing my inner soul. I was on my way of working towards the being in the film/TV industry. Then came her, her name was Louise. We met online and starting talking for a while, soon we became an item. We were in love. Even though she was always annoying, self centered, and narcissistic, I put up with it. Sometimes she day by day stressed me out, and got on my nerves about me focusing too much on myself working. She'd compare her ex's to me and then continued to mock me, insult me, verbally abuse my ego and made me feel insecure. It was an on going emotional roller coaster for the both of us. I bought her things, drove for hours just to be with her and she did nothing. I did everything for her, when she wanted to be spoiled I did it. When she wanted to be loved, I gave her attention but it wasn't enough. When she broke
up with me, I went into a rage. Time and time again another woman takes advantage of my good heart. I acted out in revenge. I became a person I didn't even recognize, I was frighting towards her and myself. I became one of those online psychos. It felt like two dueling personalities fighting me, one that is still the same noble and honest man I was then the other is a side of me I've never seen before, full of wrath, envy, aggression. I started acting out; recklessly drinking, sleeping with strippers, just this self destructive person. I could handle the separation but it was the feeling of being used, hurt, and taking for granted and thus treated like garbage after. I started drinking more and calling her until she threatened to call the police. I can't get her out of my mind, and I just want to move on. I want to get my mind right but this past mistake is killing that. I'm trying Christ and self help groups but it's still too difficult. What should I do to get this woman out of my head?

-Steve

P.S I'm sorry this is long but I'm trying to change my ways. For good.

And this was my response.

You have some things going in your favor, and you can build on those to break yourself out of the situation you are in. you have enough insight to see both your own patterns of behavior, and those of the types of women you get involved with. That is the first step towards breaaaaaaaaaaking the haaaaaaaaaaabit tonight (sorry, I almost sounded like a Linkin Park song there for a second). First thing that helps is to not lose your sense of humor. Or if you have lost it, send out a search party for it. Life is too serious already without you making it more so.

Basically, you have four emotions that are running rampant in your psyche like rabid dogs; in fact it may help you to think of them that way. Mad, rabid Dogs named Rage, Envy, Hurt, and Sorrow. It seems that what happens is you let yourself be hurt. And yes, this is sometimes a conscious decision. Sometimes our hearts get broken out of nowhere, but you saw the signs, and you knew that this women, and women in your past were doing things to hurt you, but you stayed anyway. You probably have some Romasochist in you (see my latest post if you haven't already), which isn't awful, but is something you need to be aware of. Either consciously or unconsciously you attract or chose women who take advantage of your good nature. There could be any number of reasons for this, and until you figure out why this pattern is going to continue. You have to figure out why you continuously subject yourself to such torture. Do you have a "Hero" complex, in which you seek out damaged women and have the need to save them? Do you have low self-esteem and think that you somehow deserve the abuse you get from these women, or that you cannot do any better? Do you feel that you cannot or will not find a decent woman to be with? These are all questions that will take some soul searching and a good friend, relative, or therapist. You are doing the right thing by seeking help, but you have to know what questions to ask to get the right answers.

Your immediate problem though, is you have these Rabid dogs chewing on your heart and mind and you don't know what to do about them. You feel Envious, and you are overtaken with Hurt and Sad, which leads to Rage. And when you feel that Rage you don't care who you express it on. There is one more Dog in this Pack, and it's the Alpha, the Leader, and its name is Love. You, like most Romasochists fall in Love incredibly easily and hard and let Love rule you. Unfortunately, Love brings the rest of its pack with it, and that is where the chaos begins. So I say to you, Master your Love, and you'll master the rest of the Pack. Don't let your Love lead you into a situation where you'll be taken advantage of, and you will not have to deal with the rest of the dogs that follow Love. Even though Love is the leader, Rage is the most dangerous because it can turn inwards, and that is when you become self destructive. And you can only destroy yourself for so long before there is nothing left to break. First things first; get away from the stressors, get away from what's feeding the Rage, lock up your Love until your ego can heal itself. Right now you can't trust yourself to be with a woman because you don't know what is leading you into these poisonous relationships. Until you do, stay out of them. Muzzle your Love, and the rest of the Pack will follow suit. You can't think straight while you are still fighting the war, so take yourself out of the situation; cut off all contact with all women who hurt you, or who you have hurt; you don't want to add Guilt to your pack of dogs. Guilt will only make you obsess about the women even more, and that obsession is where a lot of the restraining orders and police activity stems from. And that is something we would all like to avoid, right?

The way to not be a Crazy ex-bf is to first, not be crazy. And the thing that makes most of us crazy is some kind of intense chemical reaction with the former object of our love. Cut that off, and the reactions die down, and sanity returns. Sometimes, you can never re-establish that contact. I have an ex that no matter how long it has been, when I see her I feel the insanity start to creep back into my brain. You have to consciously master your emotions, and save them for someone who is worthy of the Noble and Honest Man you can be. Those are the Dogs you want leading your Pack of Emotions. The second way to not be crazy is to not date Crazy… like attracts like, and Crazy girls will draw it out of you like putting a magnet on an Etch-a-Sketch pad. So if you want to move on you have to cut off the negative stressors from the past, even if they weren't all negative. Your personal growth is going to have to come at the cost of leaving some people in your past and locking them up there. You have your Hollywood Dreams; you still have YOUR LIFE TO LIVE. Write, go to writing groups, do things that will help you be the person you want to be, the person you know you can be. Do that and forget the women who want to tear you down and use you. When you heal yourself, you'll be able to see with clear eyes, and you'll be able to easily steer clear of the girls who are traps for your inner soul. You have pro-social factors in your life, support groups, God… go to them, leave the insanity behind, and you'll be on your way to being an ex-ex-crazy bf.

So yeah, I like this, it feels right for me. There's an obvious reason for that, but whatever. You have my contact information, and you can always leave comments, And as you can see, I am very enthusiastic about helping people with problems, so don't be scared, get things off your chest. As men we are so often made to feel like we should keep things in. That's why we occasionally go on shooting rampages. I'd much rather you email me instead.

Confessions of a Crazy Ex Boyfriend 8/13

Present Tense(ion)

For those of us who may or may not be affiliated with the “Crazy Ex-Boyfriend” demographic, one of the trials faced by such men is leaving the past behind. That is, in fact, what exacerbates the Crazy. The brain has a way of taking all of the good memories of the past relationship, making them seem even better than they were, and then mixing them in randomly with the comparatively miserable realities of the man’s present situation. The person almost always idealizes the past, remembering things to be better than they were, and forgetting the parts that were not so rosy. In some occasions, the past was actually rosy, and nothing was wrong; sometimes the man was the one who did all of the very bad things, and the woman was in fact pretty damn decent the whole time.

Obsession is the motor of any crazy ex, and the gas for that motor is living in the past. We all have moments in our life that we wish would never end. For some of us that wish is so strong that our minds actually make it a reality. Those moments literally do not ever end. The problem is, those moments are not always mutually valued. I remember specifically for me, there are some instances where I was with a certain person that meant more to me than they did to her, and that is what makes it hard to let those memories go. At some point there comes a reckoning, a moment when the man and women realize that they both have placed a significantly different amount of importance on a certain event or time in their shared experience. If it is the man who has exalted a time in the past, then he is not going to just let that go of that zeitgeist for anything or anybody. He becomes obsessed with making that moment in time be forever, whether the woman even believes that the “golden age” he is referring to ever existed at all or not. It is usually at this point that the man crosses the line into Crazy Ex territory, doing all he can to recreate something that has long since past, or never existed. Then come the restraining orders.

I personally believe that some of us, if our ego strength is not, well, strong enough, simply become only the sum of our shared experiences. What I mean by that is our Ego strength is similar to the main tent pole for our personalities. Our experiences are like the people who fill the arena underneath the tent. If that tent pole, our basic personality that should be stable over time, isn’t strong enough, and those people are really rowdy and drunk, eventually those experiences will break the pole and collapse the tent. Our personality then becomes entirely dependent only on our experiences. Since experiences, and our perceptions of experience, are rapidly changing and subjective, so too does the personality of that particular person become rapidly changing and prejudiced. Eventually the person who becomes the Crazy Ex, their subjective experience of the past becomes their objective reality. The person with low ego strength has based their entire personality and reality on positive shared experiences from the past that may have never existed. They CAN’T let the past go, because then there is nothing else left to hold up their tent, their psyche. Without their past, without the relationship they had, the Crazy Ex feels a complete loss of self. If there is no “them” there is no “him”. And the fact that the person’s ex is now denying that golden age and the concurrent present reality leads to confusion, frustration, obsession, and eventually, anger.

So, how do we untangle this Gordian Knot? The same way Alex did, we cut it. Cut yourself off from the past. One important step towards not being a crazy ex is to not think of yourself as an ex anymore, but to think of yourself as a person, whole and complete. And do not think of the woman you were with as your ex, but as a person you had some pleasurable memories with, but who, ultimately you could not be with in the long run. Do not let your emotions chain you to your past; don’t demonize the person who you were with, nor should you idealize her. She is a human being of flesh and blood, prone to mistakes and successes just like all of us. This is going to take some soul searching, and, most importantly, an accurate recollection of past events. The past is never how we remember it; if you don’t believe me, look up some studies about the reliability of eyewitness accounts. Our brains always twist the truth to make it a little more or less palatable to us. The point is that you cannot change the past, and like Michael McDonald says, things will never be the same again. That’s not to say your life cannot be better or worse, it just won’t ever be the same. Once you accept that, it helps towards letting go of the past. It hurts to let go of good memories, but you do not have to obliterate them; just put them where they belong, and stop trying to make them the present again. Disengage them from your waking present life and look towards the future. Concentrate on making more good memories in the future. Occupy your tent with hopeful, sober experiences, and that tent pole should get stronger and more stable, so the winds of change don’t blow it down again.

Confessions of a Crazy Ex-Boyfriend

My name is John, and I’m a crazy ex boyfriend

(Hi John)

Now it was not easy for me to come to this realization, but events over the last year have made me see that a lot of my actions in the past have definitely been of the "crazy ex-boyfriend" variety. As sobering as this revelation has been, I have taken solace in two things; One, I am in no way the craziest ex-boyfriend out there, not by a longshot. I have heard some incredible insanity lately, from many different sources, and my conclusion is that as a crazy ex boyfriend, I was really pretty tame. And two, I am very confident that my craziness is in remission. I have consulted everyone from Buddhist scholars to Psychotherapists, and I am certain that I have learned from both my own mistakes and the psychoticism I have seen in others. My purpose in writing this article (and if it gets a good response I’ll write more) is to give women (and men for that matter) fair warning when their boyfriend is crazy, is going crazy, or will be crazy when they break up with them. I also am making myself available to give advice and answer questions about whether your significant other is batshit crazy. I suppose I should give you my credentials as a crazy ex boyfriend

One of the main behaviors of a crazy ex boyfriend is a escalating pattern of crazy behavior. That pattern usually escalates because of one thing and one thing only; attention. Crazy guys hate to be ignored, and they cannot stand the idea of their ex girlfriend “getting over them”. For one reason or another, guys like I used to be seem sweet and kind and generous when we get into a relationship, and we get used to the attention we receive from our girlfriends. But that can’t last forever. At some point we will become unsatisfied at one thing or another, and arguments will occur. In the case of my last ex, I was ambivalent about whether I wanted to date her or not, so she went out and got another boyfriend. That was rough, but it was not what sent me off the deep end. She then had the absolute gall to get over me! That’s what sent me into crazy ex mode. I started doing anything I could to get her attention. I did all sorts of romantic things like bring her flowers and send her cards, things I never did when we were actually dating. But she still didn’t come back to me. The more she insisted on not breaking up with her bf, the more desperate I became. Eventually I started fights just to make sure that she still had feelings for me, even if they were negative ones. Now mind you, I never did any of this on purpose; it was just what my crazy mind thought of at the time. I’ve heard of guys doing much worse, and better. My last ditch effort was putting a personal ad in her local newspaper declaring that I still loved her and wanted her back. That s the Light side of crazy. I’ve heard of guys threatening to burn their ex’s stuff, accusing their ex’s of cheating on them during their relationship, telling their ex’s that they never loved them, and just flat out looking for anyway to hurt them in order to elicit a response.

The worst thing you can do to a crazy ex is to ignore them. They always want you to be thinking about them, either good or bad. They want you to think that they will never get over him. They want to believe that they were the best thing to ever happen to you, and every piece 0f evidence that refutes that just feeds into the crazy. If you happen to be reading this and see yourself in it, trust me, you are not the best thing to happen to anyone. There are just too many people in the world for that to be true. Even if it is true up to that point, it is quite likely that some guy will come along who will be better, and most decidedly saner than you, so get over yourself. I had to, and that’s when I took one step towards being in remission. If you have any comments, you know how to leave them, but if you have any questions or need advice about a crazy ex-boyfriend, email me at exit.eleven@gmail.com. Remember, it takes one to know one.