Dear Josh:

I am glad you had a really well date, an amazing time and she did too. I hope you continue to see her and that the next date will be for a couple of hours or so, longer than last but still limited. I think this is your best chance of success, limiting the time and over time increasing it. This way you get to get to know her gradually, over time, and she gets to know you gradually as well.

You shared that your parents divorced when you were about 8 and you lived with your mother and sister for the next 10 years, until you moved out at about 18. Your mother worked in a male dominant industry, was a machinist, working 50-60 hours a week at a certain point. Your father wasn’t a big part of your life, I gather, because you referred to your mother as a “single mother” and you wrote that your mother “was playing both the roles of mother and father”.

If I understand correctly, while your parents were married, your father was the disciplinarian and your mother was “the compassionate one of the 2”. You wrote that at one point she was “too soft” with you.

When you were about 4 or 5, an older cousin, about 10 or 11, molested you, something you have very little memory of and you are not “entirely sure if it’s had an effect on my sexual development or anything. Your family, parents, I assume, found out about it eventually, “but it had been kept pretty quiet”.

When you were about 12-13, 7th grade, after you and your sister complained about school, hating it, a sentiment you exaggerated to her, your mother took you out of public school and began homeschooling you. But because she worked so many hours, the arrangement resulted in you “just sleeping late, watching a lot of tv, and not doing much school work. And also not socializing like our peers”. You feel some lack of confidence in your social skills since and now that you believe stem from being taken out of public school, and that it “plays a very big part in the problems I face with dating, attraction, and women in general”, feeling less “comfortable speaking with and making friends with women”.

If you want to continue this exploration with me, if you do, I have a couple of questions:

1. How did your father discipline you and your sister when he lived with you and how did your mother respond to him disciplining you, what did she say or do when he disciplined you?

2. Did your mother ever complained to you about your father while still married to him or later, about him not helping the family financially, that she had to work a physically demanding job for so many hours to support her two children, because he didn’t help enough, that she had to be both mother and father to you and to your sister?

anita