Breakups happen. It's a fact baked into every relationship: all relationships come to an end until one doesn't. Sometimes the breakup comes screaming out of the clear blue sky while other times it's like watching an oncoming train and knowing you'll never get out of the way in time. But not every relationship ends with a loud and dramatic climax. Sometimes the end has already come and nobody has noticed. Your relationship is shuffling along like a zombie, putting on the empty performance o...| Paging Dr. NerdLove
Having boundaries is an important part of emotional intelligence. Boundaries are how you keep toxic people out of your life. At the same time, however, it can be hard to enforce those boundaries. Humans are social animals; we have an instinctive desire to cooperate and to get along. But there are people who exploit those desires for their own ends. Users and abusers, parasites and emotional vampires, bullies and all-around assholes are all people who will take advantage of people who don'...| Paging Dr. NerdLove
Occasionally, I'll get an email from a reader who isn't asking for advice so much as they are asking for permission. And nine times out of ten, what they're asking for is permission to break up with their significant other... because they can't manage to convince themselves that they need to. One of the most perverse aspects of being human is how hard we fight against our own best interests. Our brains are prone to a host of psychological effects and fallacies that convince us that we s...| Paging Dr. NerdLove
Recently, we’ve been talking about toxic masculinity and all of the ways that it damages men on the individual level and society on the whole. One of the enduring questions is: so what do we do about it. Part of the way we start end the damage that toxic masculinity does and help heal some of the pain is to talk openly and honestly about some of the issues that come bundled in the toxic masculinity package. And one of the biggest issues is the topic of sex - especially how it affects men wh...| Paging Dr. NerdLove