Dr Dick: I Need Somebody To Love

Dr Dick, MD PhD is a qualified therapist with many years’ experience. He’s a solid, stand-up guy who tells it like it is. His likes include: giving advice and colourful hats. His dislikes include: your shit, and Coldplay. This week he helps you to find love in a hopeless place.

Step into his office

Dear Dr. Dick,

I am an average looking second year student studying a rather “nerdy” subject. During my time in Cambridge it has been really difficult for me to meet women… after one and a half years I have got exactly 0 action… and this really saddens me. The thing is I hate being drunk and even though I like dancing I can’t stand clubs because everyone else in there is drunk. My friends go out and get with people but drunk sex is really not my thing and I can’t see what other options do I have (the girls in my lectures are not really my type). What is your advice?

Best,

James

Dear James,

Much like the majority of hymens in the world, I’m torn. You sound pathetic – really pathetic, and not even the cute pathetic like a kitten stuck in the shower, but the disgusting kind of  pathetic like a puppy born with rectal cancer. You probably have nobody but yourself to blame for your current woes, and I really just want to give you a dickslap to the face and tell you to grow the fuck up. However, a large proportion of your problems likely stem from self-esteem and confidence issues, so it feels like it could be counter-productive to tell you straight that you’re the cause of your own misery because you’ll quite probably tell yourself that I’m just being horrible because I don’t understand you and your problems, and that none of it is your fault, that you don’t meet girls because you’re unlucky and when you do meet them they don’t like you because you’re a nice guy, and girls don’t like nice guys. You’ll likely externalise all blame to other people, just like you’ve done your whole life, and just like an extremely horny man with a penis deformity which makes it always face downwards, you’ll just keep shooting yourself in the foot. So I feel a little bit bad giving you the advice you need, because in the short term it’s probably just going to make you feel worse.

Oh wait. I don’t feel bad. Fuck it, let’s go.

Now imagine the rectal tumours

First, let’s debunk some myths. Here is one way to sleep with someone. You get rat-arsed, crawl your way to the club and awkwardly shuffle around your circle of friends until you’re back to back with someone who looks like they might give you a chance, then attempt to rub your crotch against their backside until they deign to pay you some form of attention before mashing your face against their face like a cat repeatedly headbutting a mirrored wardrobe door. You then go home with them and manage to get your penis just hard enough to do the helicopter dick but not really hard enough for any reasonable attempt at copulation. You try anyway. Afterwards, you apologise. You never see them again, except when you see them in Sainsbury’s and try to pretend you didn’t.

This is neither the only nor the best way to have a romantic encounter. Even if you remember it, the likelihood that you do end up ‘together’ for any significant period of time is slim. If you do happen to buck the trend and form a meaningful romantic relationship out of an encounter with a stranger on a dance floor or at a swap, then you can have the joy of telling all your future children that Mummy and Daddy (or Mummy and Mummy, or Daddy and Daddy,  or whatever fucking relationship configuration you please) met in a curry house where it was love at first game of ‘Good Pants Bad Pants’ is not what the Daily Mail would call ‘edifying’.

There are a large number of talented, intelligent, wonderful and beautiful women in Cambridge. There are also myriad ways for you to meet said women which do not involve the consumption of twelve shots of apple sourz. In fact, it is probably advantageous if you don’t meet them under these circumstances. Probably the most effective way to end up with a shot at some form of romance is to meet someone under sober circumstances, get on well, then court/date/flirt for an extended period and/or meet them in a club or bar under conditions of reduced sobriety where you can break the awkward tension and do it like they do on the Discovery Channel. You don’t have to consume any alcohol, it can just speed up the process considerably if you do.

With that said, where can you meet these potential romantic interests and how can you prevent them from seeing you for the moderately terrible human being that you are? One suggestion you received, when you posited this question, was to join societies devoted to robotics, science fiction and the works of JRR Tolkien. Whilst these particular institutions make the sausage-fest that is the Ayia Napa clubbing scene look like a meeting of the Women’s Institute, he was half right. Joining a society has two main benefits for your chances with the opposite sex. First, the only way to meet people is to actually meet people. Lying in bed eating cheetos off your chest and marathoning all eight seasons of 24 is not meeting people. Second, by actually doing something with your life rather than vegetating in your room and wishing that you could take a degree in masturbation (cue jokes about arts degrees and intellectual masturbation, har de har, well done for being the first one to ever think of that, you’re so very fucking clever, I bet your mother is proud), you become interesting.

Fundamentally, the best way to make yourself attractive even if you have a face that makes Andrew Lloyd Webber look like an Adonis is to be interesting. This means finding things that you like, doing them, learning more about them and talking about them to people who are also interested in them (or making other people interested in them, but that involves more than basic social skills and I’m an advice columnist, not a miracle worker). Ideally, for this to be effective, you should find things that you are interested in whose participants are not exclusively male. This could be politics, sport, journalism or even religion – fuck, you could even write for the Tab if emotionally damaged people with a pathological need for attention are your bag. Just do something other than your degree, and for god’s sake get out of college. You’ll be a much more interesting (and therefore attractive) person for it. Of course this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how to gain confidence, become a good conversationalist, dress well etc, but I’m not your fucking mother and you have access to google.

You have to make yourself an attractive human being before anyone will find you attractive. To do this, you have to get off of your arse and do interesting things. But that’s hard, so you’ll probably disregard all this and carry on using your own body fluids to make mosaics on the wall of your room whilst lamenting the fact that nobody loves you.

Much love,

Dr Dick