By 
Welcome to another advice column. Let’s get started.
I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t putting up walls with my dating prospects. I can point to exactly how I’ve done it with every single dating prospect pretty much in my adult life. Yes, predictably I’ve had my heartbroken in the past, and I know that that’s killing me here. But what do I actually do about it?
The easy answer to this is that the solution is hard–pretty much as difficult as taking down an actual wall. Also similar in that way: you can either take the wall apart, brick by brick, and safely dispose of it, or you can drive your car through the wall, hope that it breaks, and that you don’t die from the falling bricks.
The former of those looks like you working on yourself, figuring shit out, and chipping away at your problems. The latter looks like you forcibly jumping in with someone right now.
So that’s the early spoiler: No matter what you choose, this will kinda suck.
Historically, emotional walls will always eventually come down on their own. Eventually, you’ll get so tired of getting into the cycle of getting into a relationship, closing someone off, causing them to leave, and then running through it again with someone else that you’ll eventually get frustrated and say, “Fuck it!” and get all Alzheimer’s Reagan with your wall, and communism in your brain is defeated, and shit more or less works out.
But, it’s my belief that typically, this takes forever, and requires a ton of wasted energy for you and everyone around you.
Now, it’s also true that breaking down this wall yourself, unnaturally, right now will take a ton of energy. It will be exhausting. Here’s how I think that could look for you.
- You start dating someone.
- Fuck. It starts going well. Things are headed towards the land of seriousness. This could be a real relationship. God fucking damn it.
- You start closing yourself off. You don’t say how you feel, you start being a dickhole so that they reject you, or you might just try to break up with them.
- You cut that shit out, and you really fucking look at yourself. You stare at your soul in the mirror. You demand brutal honesty with yourself about yourself.
- As a result, you see that this is what you’re doing. It’s a deeply ingrained, psychologically built-in habit, and you stop the bullshit, admit to yourself that you like this person, and that this is worth pursuing.
- You drag yourself, internally kicking and screaming, to keep yourself open, to let yourself be vulnerable, and to actually progress in your relationship.
Ugh. Sounds kind of miserable, right? I mean it’s so much easier to just passively lie to yourself all the time. Passively lying to ourselves is pretty much our default.
“I think my writing really can have mass appeal.” Look. I just did it myself.
So this won’t be easy at all. You have to force yourself to see what you’re doing, and then force yourself to act differently. It sounds shitty because it is shitty.
But fighting your defaults is always going to be necessary to make progress, because by default, we’re lazy, complacent assholes who will die alone. So moving forward, keep this in mind:
You’re here right now. You’re dating, you’re trying stuff, and you’re reaching out to someone for advice because despite what your asshole subconscious brain thinks, you really want this.
I don’t know you, and you may suck in a lot of ways, but those facts I listed above do confirm that you are in fact here and functioning and looking to be better, and that’s the start of the battle. Despite whatever may have happened to you in the past, you already survived it. You already got through the hurt, and you’re already here on the other side of it. The worst thing that can happen is that you eventually end up here again.
So despite what your dumbass self-talk may be saying, you’re actually chill, brah. You can get hurt again and end up being fine. Someone may take a dump on your heart, but you can wipe that shit off. You’ll survive.
Remember this idea over and over: getting hurt is fine. Hammer that into your head. Don’t deny that that will happen in the future. Fully accept the possibility of oncoming pain. Become fully ready for the idea that you may say how you feel to your crush, only to have them say, “Oh, but I think your head is gross. Pass.”
If you do this, you’ll be much more ready to be vulnerable, and that wall just might crumble a little more quickly.
How do I be happier? You’re not the first person I’ve asked about this, but none of the answers given really make sense to me.
I don’t know you, personally, and even if I did, I’m not inside of your brain, observing which wires are going where, and so in terms of any specifics, I have no fucking idea how you can be happier.
I know that receiving help is generally, well, helpful. So there’s of course the aspect of asking for help if you really need it–be it therapy, pills, a clown-themed bedroom, whatever. I don’t know which of those is right for you (therapy is at the very least not wrong for pretty much anyone, but it might not be worth the price for you specifically).
Here are a couple of general rules of happiness that I’ve kind of discovered.
Expectations are the enemy of happiness. Relentlessness is happiness’ BFF.
Here’s what I mean. If you approach happiness the way you are, you’re going to keep looking for one thing after the next to be your happiness solution. Not only does shit not work this way (there likely are no “solutions”) but the expectations you develop raise your hopes, which makes you that much more unhappy when they don’t fill the pit deep inside of you.
If you lose your expectations–of joy, of other people, of results–then the impact of those (good or bad) isn’t going to have much of an impact on you. It will be something to adjust to, or to enjoy, but none of it is going to make you miserable. Someone will bail on your movie plans as you sit in the theater with a jumbo popcorn and your jacket over the saved seat next to you, and you’ll just be like, “Well, all right. Time to find what exactly is eating Gilbert Grape.”
It reduces your letdown significantly, and if you’re no longer let down, then you’re free to be relaxed, and relentless.
Relentlessness is so crucial to potential happiness because it allows you to keep trying shit. Keep participating in some kind of action. Keep doing this whole life thing. Keep going to new places, and trying new activities, and talking to all new people–no matter how weird, or boring they are, or how much they wear crocs–do all of this until you land on things that don’t suck.
This will lead nowhere most of the time. Most often with this life, you’ll just be eating pirogies at an organized cuddle party, and you’ll be like, “Nah, this isn’t working.” But it’s the times when it does work that matter. It’s those times that chart the path of the rest of your life towards one that sucks less.
This is why you have to be relentless. Consistently experiment, take action, then do it again. Go into every possibility with no expectations, so that when it leads to bad times and smelly feet, you’re able to just keep plowing through to the next thing.
I just started a new job, and I always have such a hard time socially in this situation. There’s something about entering this world filled with people already wrapped up in their thing together. It makes it hard to know how to break into it.
Becoming stronger socially for me has been about a lifetime of trial and so, so, so much error.
Most commonly, the error was in going to the old default of saying nothing and standing awkwardly close to people who have forgotten your name.
If you’re in random social situations and aren’t necessarily looking for new friends, this is a totally fine result. You don’t always have to make friends everywhere you go.
But work is different for two primary reasons: 1) These are the people you see every single day. Most of us see them way more than our significant others, and your life is just way better if you actively get along with people you see that much. 2) It’s usually professionally advantageous to be someone who fits in and is well-liked at work.
So you’re right to care about this. And I’ve certainly been there. The number of times I’ve been the guy standing on the barely outside of the circle people are standing in, drink in hand, head in ass, and nodding along to everything everyone is saying is countless (try not to picture that).
Here’s a useful thing that I’ve learned myself about social situations like this: Find your commonalities with others, and have your own take on them.
So if everyone at your work talks about how much they hate something politically (not that I have any experience with this working in TV jobs in Los Angeles), and you agree with them, that’s an easy commonality to find. The same can be true for restaurants, TV shows, toe jewelry–literally anything a human could talk about.
But it’s better to get involved and to have something insightful to say. So think through your commonalities, and contribute to the commonalities. But keep in mind it’s only a contribution if it’s really adding something new.
No one gives a fuck about your comments on Donald Trump’s hair. We get it. It’s dogshit.
Have something interesting to say. Give someone a new experience with your words.
This is how you can fit in instantly, develop a part of yourself, and not be the guy who just nods and says “Yeah totally” like 80 times a day, and finds himself three months into the job, trying to overhear other peoples’ conversations until they call each other by name because he still doesn’t fucking know if his deskmate is Britta or Brenna.
