Let’s start with something easy and talk about who you’re actually mad at when you get so upset at all these women, especially the ones who seem to actually be interested in you. Because – and honestly, this is kinda screamingly obvious – you’re not really angry at them. You’re angry at yourself, and you have been for a long, long time.

I mean, it doesn’t exactly take Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung to see this when the origin story you lead with is basically a dramatization of The Offspring’s “Self-Esteem”; your girlfriend cheated on you constantly and blatantly and you still took her back, only to have it happen again. And while being upset at her is entirely understandable, it’s pretty clear to me that you turned that anger inward because, well, what kinda loser-beta-simp-cuck does that? If you’d had a shred of self-worth, you’d have kicked her to the curb alongside the recycling and compost with the rest of the trash. And yet here we are.

The why of it isn’t terribly complex either. You broke up with her after she quite literally cuckolded you – and not in the fun happy squishy way – and now she’s out of your life and good riddance. But you still have to live with yourself and the fact that you made the decisions to accept this behavior. And I think that still burns you up like acid. I think you, to this day, still want to kick your own ass over the fact that you did this. And like a lot of people in similar situations, you never actually dealt with that anger you feel for yourself.

Or, rather, you never dealt with the emotions. The pain of it and how you feel about yourself. It’s pretty clear that you, like a lot of people, went the “this can never happen to me again” route. And like them, you went on a campaign of trying to turn yourself into the sort of person who this could never happen to, a guy who, by all reasonable metrics, is the sort of person women would never cheat on, never humiliate or betray like this.

Which is where we came to the second issue that keeps coming up: the qualities you’ve decided to focus on aren’t the qualities that women are actually looking for in a partner. Now don’t get me wrong; you’ve done a lot of hard work and that’s admirable. You’ve come a long way and achieved a lot. Being debt free, in particular, is fucking astounding in this economy.  

But 99.999% of what you’ve accomplished aren’t the qualities that women are looking for in a romantic partner. A business partner, maybe. But not someone they can turn to when you’re both down with COVID and neither of you have the energy to switch streaming services, while you’re both hacking up things so foetid and viscous that you’re not sure whether to spit it into the toilet or worship it as the avatar of Jubbilex, and yet you can’t see yourself wanting to be with anyone else in that moment. Not someone they see sitting next to them in his-n-her Depends in the retirement home and still can’t imagine anyone else in your place.

Don’t get me wrong, your career accomplishments are great and I’m not taking away from them. I’m sure it’s very impressive to the other guys at the office. But that’s precisely the thing: it’s impressive to the other guys. As in: the qualities you’ve focused on and chosen to highlight are qualities that men admire in other men. The vast majority of women aren’t going to see “lead my team in sales, got two raises” and think “yup, that’s the man for me,” becausethat’s not what they’re looking for. That’s all great on LinkedIn, but that’s not gonna get you play on Hinge or Bumble.

(And quite frankly, the few who are looking for something like that are going to be more interested in your take-home salary than how you got there.)

This is another classic case of “you listened to all the wrong people and took all the wrong lessons”, and almost certainly from folks who look specifically for people like you so they can exploit their anger and resentment for their grift. You paid attention to the guys who misunderstood pretty much every point of American Psycho and The Wolf of Wall Street and put all your effort into being Patrick Bateman, while using empathy, emotional intelligence and communication as your dump stats. I hate to tell you this, but – TikTok influencers and grifters aside – women aren’t out there looking for dudes who will keep them in the lifestyle to which they intend to become accustomed, they’re looking for someone who reasonably has his shit together and isn’t going to be a drain on her… whether financially or emotionally. They are looking for someone who’s able to communicate and connect, who isn’t emotionally constipated and who isn’t ultimately looking for a multi-class personal assistant/maid/therapist that they can also bang.

Like a lot of other men in your position, all of the qualities you list are material. Which, again, glad you have a comfortable living and all, but there’s nothing there about being fun to hang out with or knowing how to make someone smile or feel special. You’ve put your emphasis on being valuable but not on making other people feel valued, which is what they’re actually looking for.

So I’m not exactly surprised that you’re not having a lot of success on the dating scene. For one thing, that unresolved bitterness and anger you feel for yourself has done what unresolved bitterness and anger always does: it curdles, it metastasizes and it proceeds to infect itself into everything about you. I can guarantee you that the resentment you feel is radiating off of you like you spend your summers camping in Pripyat and women are picking up on it at 100 paces. They can read it in your Hinge profile and the messages you send, they can see it in your pictures and they can feel it when they come near you.

Just as importantly, you’re upset that you’ve done all this work – and like I said, it’s hard work, I’m not going to take away from that – and you’re not getting rewarded for it in the way you were told to expect. Moreover, you’re getting upset at women for not following the agreement that they never actually signed on to. I would say “I don’t know if you noticed that women are looking for a partner, not a provider,” except it’s pretty obvious that you haven’t. They’re also not looking for a “protector” in the way you’re thinking either. Guys keep falling for the trap of thinking that “protector” means “I will defend you from the ravening hordes with furious violence” and think about all the problems that could be solved with a gun, but never once think about things like “cooking healthy meals”, “making sure your kids get their vaccinations”, “keep the house is clean, the clothes are washed and everyone’s dental hygiene is immaculate”. Because the real dangers aren’t from home invasion or muggers (violent crime is down 50% year over year since the 90s), it’s disease, malnutrition and accidents in the home.

But this is all coming from that same place of insecurity that you’ve been living in since your girlfriend cheated on you for the last time; you put all this effort into being the sort of person who you think women want and you still think you have to “prove” yourself to women, when women aren’t asking for any such thing. They’re asking for you to connect with them, to show that you like them and want a relationship, not a possession to put on the shelf alongside those awards you got at work. The only test they want you to pass is to show that going out with you is a better choice than staying home to watch Murderbot and a glass of pinot noir. You’re getting upset about having to “prove” things you don’t have to prove, and then getting even more upset that it’s not working.

And here’s the thing: even you aren’t buying into the very same goals and standards that you have been working towards. You make a point about how you’ve put in all this effort into being a protector and provider for women and, not four sentences later, ask why women – the people you supposedly are going to provide for – should have access to your provisions. Well, which is it my guy? Are you supposed to be providing for your future partner, or are you going to sit on top of your accumulated wealth and spit venom at anyone who comes close, like a dragon sitting on his hoard? What, precisely are women supposed to be “proving” to you before you’re willing to “let them into this world that you’ve built”, and why should they want to, when you’re not making any of it look at all appealing? A six-figure yearly salary isn’t going to make someone overlook all the anger issues, a nice apartment isn’t going to make up for the oppressive atmosphere of bitterness and you’re not giving any indication that there’s more to you besides a shiny surface. So what’s in it for them, when they can have their own finances, their own careers and their own place to live and not have a roommate who thinks of them as a parasite leeching off his munificence?   

Now I know this is the part of the column where I’m supposed to say “you need to get to therapy”, and to a certain extent that’s true. But honestly, that’s a bit of a pat answer that isn’t going to help; it’s a little like suggesting antibiotics for everything, when sometimes you need an antiviral, sometimes you need surgical intervention, and sometimes you need just fluids and bed-rest. If you want things to get better, you need to know what actually needs to get fixed instead of just showing up saying “I’m not happy, women don’t like me, make it better.”

So instead, I’m going to tell you precisely what you should be focusing on. And since you’ve proven that you aren’t afraid of challenges and hard work, I’m going to tell you to start with the hardest and most challenging thing you can do: you need to forgive yourself. All of this is because you’re still angry at the guy you were seven years ago for letting your girlfriend walk all over you like you had “welcome” tattooed on your back. You’re still carrying a chip on your shoulder because you “let” her use you and mock you and humiliate you, and it’s time to put it down.

Yeah, it is fucking awful that this happened. Yeah, she treated you horribly. And yes, you made a poor decision to take her back instead of saying “you know what, fuck you and the mustache you rode in on.” Her cheating on you wasn’t your fault, and while your giving her a second opportunity to do so was, you were making a mistake that lots of people have made, myself included. And that’s ok! People make mistakes! We make the best decisions we can with the info we have at the time, and with the people we are at the time. There are a whole host of reasons why you weren’t ready or able at the time to make a different decision and that’s ok too. You can forgive yourself for doing the best you could with what you had. You can forgive yourself for not being who you think you should have been and accept that you couldn’t have been that person at that time. You had to grow and change into being someone who could be who you needed to be, and the only way you could get there is… well, through the hard and rocky road of experience. It sucks, but part of the reason why we fall down is so we can learn how to get back up again and to understand why we fell in the first place.

So you need to be willing to look at your past self and say “Hey, you were trying. I see that now. It’s ok.” You need to forgive yourself and let it all go, so the infection can finally start to drain away.

The same goes for the ways you’ve developed your life since then. You’ve accomplished a lot, but not in areas that would be better for actually fostering romantic relationships. So, as you put that same energy and drive into cultivating your emotional intelligence and those soft skills that make it possible to form friendships and romances, you need to do so without beating yourself up in the process. As easy as it would be, you don’t want to get hung up on “well, now I’m behind everyone else,” or finding some other reason to kick yourself in the nuts over it. Nobody is concerned with how long it took or when you started; they’re just glad that you got there at all.

This is going to be difficult, because part of the process is going to be learning how to breathe through the moments when you feel that “HOW DARE YOU COME TO ME NOW?!?!” rise up and let it wash away until you can be open and hopeful and curious with the person in front of you. You can’t just force those feelings away or lock them up like an inconveniently mad sister in a Regency romance. You have to learn to recognize them as part of you that’s still crying at how cruel and unfair your previous relationship was, and to let it just flow around you until it’s past so that you can connect with the person you’re talking to instead of the ghost of your shitty ex.

That’s part of what you’ll want to talk to your therapist about: how to get to that forgiveness and how to process and manage the anger you’ve been holding onto like a gamma-irradiated squirrel hording rage-nuts, in ways that are actually healthy and productive. You’re going to want to develop the tools that will help you recognize a bad situation and how to handle it, alongside how to manage and reconcile conflicts in your future relationships without turning it into a relitigation of your past.

And you’re going to want to re-examine who you are, who you think you should be, who you want in your life and why. Right now, I’m not sure you even know what you’d want from a partner. Sex, sure, but you can get that without a partner. Companionship? Ok… but that can be a pet, or friends or family members. Validation? I’ve written about that enough times that everyone can quote me chapter and verse, but it needs to come from within, not from without.

If you aren’t sure what a romantic partner would bring to your life that isn’t just about being a trophy that says You Won Manhood, then you need to sit with that question and really interrogate it. How would your life be better with someone – someone specific, not just a generic warm body. Just as importantly, what can you offer her in exchange that would be unique to you? It’s not going to be money or financial security; not unless you’re looking for someone who only values money, and other people can offer that just as well as you can, regardless. She doesn’t need your “protection” either. So ask yourself: what about you would be the special sauce that she’s been looking for?  And if you don’t have an answer for that yet, that’s OK! Part of the point of all of this is to find and develop that.

But now that I’ve told you this, I’m going to drop this incredibly important qualifier on you – something that you’re going to need to do before any of the rest. Because none of this – all of these improvements, all of these changes we’re talking about – isn’t going to matter if you aren’t able to meet this qualification.

You need to want to change more than you want to be angry. You need to want to make things different than you want to be “right” or to be “vindicated”. If you aren’t ready to admit that this anger is absurd, that it’s the “ressentiment” that’s holding you back and that you need to let it go, nothing is going to get better. You will put your impressive work ethic into play, make great strides… and still get angry at women for existing and you will still be single. It will be years later and you will be exactly where you are now, just older and still single.

If you can accept that your anger at these women isn’t justified, if you are ready to let go of the need to “prove” something – to yourself, to your ex, to God, whomever – then you’ll be in a place where you can make actual changes and make them stick. But if you aren’t, then nothing is going to change.

I won’t lie: that shit’s hard. There’s that part of you that wants more than anything for the world to say “you’re right, we fucked you and we’re so sorry, we don’t deserve you” and it’s hard to give that up. That desire to be able to say “See? SEE!?” sticks to us like tar and naptha and peeling it away feels like admitting surrender and saying “ok, I was the little simp cuck who deserved to be treated like this.” But that’s not real. To quote the poet: that’s just pride, fucking with you. And that’s the sort of pride that only hurts, never helps.

But if you’re ready to swallow that and let it go? Then it’s time to start the process I outlined for you. And that begins with forgiving yourself.

Good luck.