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This is part of a series. You can start at Part 1 here.
So now we’re back…back to early August. This story runs in parallel to Part 3 where I spend the fall studying for the GMAT. During this time, I take a break from dating….how long I’m not really sure but Andy Stanley’s One Year No Dating Challenge is in the back of my mind. There’s the piece of me that wants to try it but if I say I’m going to do something….I’m going to do it and I’m not sure I want to make a sacrifice that big. The last time I’ve gone on a date is late April. I don’t jump in…because jumping in is commitment…I wade in like maybe I’ll just try it a little bit.
In this year, I feel lonely…so lonely…but I force myself to sit with it. It’s when you relent and let the loneliness surround you that you learn it’s really not that powerful after all. I started realizing that when you let the withdrawal of validation and attention in the DMs subside that with that validation and attention came little jabs at your self-worth. The price you pay for the attention is that they aren’t really choosing you anyways. There are snide jokes that are tearing you down. It seems harmless til you remove it and you realize you don’t need that in your life. It is here where I start very intentionally letting people go and removing people from my life. I used to fear being alone so much that I’d settle for people who didn’t treat me with respect. There are so many times I should have left and I didn’t. I gave them the benefit of the doubt or I kept shouldering all the responsibility of the relationship. I used to ask for the things that should be a bare minimum and then think that it was a reflection of my worth when no changes were made. I used to say to myself “There’s no one else out there.” and the fact is…the fear of being alone harmed me far more than the reality of being alone ever will. It is powerful to know you can be alone and it’ll be alright. The cycle of holding on to things that don’t deserve you will continue to tear down your confidence and your image of yourself. When you let these things continue, you tell yourself that you don’t respect yourself, that you don’t deserve better, that you need to settle for less than.
There are so many side characters in this journey and this story. I’m a bystander watching someone I know go through dating relationships. We get to be good friends and he suggests we date via text message. He’s on a trip and I reply saying I’d like to talk about this first because we share a friend group and I don’t want to ruin that if he isn’t serious. He doesn’t reply and ghosts me. So many times before I would take this so personally and it would be more evidence for me that I wasn’t loveable. Except this time…I had watched the pattern so many times that this is the first time it really sticks for me. It’s really not about you. So many times in dating I took so many things personally as indicators of my worth….and the fact is most of them had absolutely nothing to do with me. This shift in belief starts to give me some closure per se on things that happened to me in the past. Their behavior wasn’t about me and it is here that I stop believing what happened to me was any indicator of my worth.
All of this isn’t as easy as it sounds like it was….I was being forged by the fire.
I say this strongly and with conviction now but in the moment these were really hard lessons to learn. There was a lot of hurt and a lot of tears. Growth is uncomfortable and even in the moments when I logically knew it wasn’t about me…emotionally it was hard for me to get there. There is logical me…and then there is feelings me…and often they are at odds. All of this isn’t as easy as it sounds like it was….I was being forged by the fire.
There are points in time where I do redownload the dating apps and think I’ll just end this no dating adventure. I’m on Bumble which requires the woman to initiate the conversation so I swipe occasionally when I’m bored to see what’s out there. I’m not actively on the apps but one day I match with a guy that’s on a birthday trip over an hour away and he lives 3 hours away. I suppose I talk to him because it feels safe like someone I’m never going to actually meet due to the distance. I don’t recall talking to anyone else this year. We match and we chat and it’s pretty benign, just like friends. I tell him I have a trip planned to his city in over 3 months. I don’t recall us talking everyday or anything like that. I think it was more like every few weeks just like a little chit chat and shockingly we are still in touch by December of this year.
I’ve made it 8 months of no dating and still I’m just over relationships and dating apps. It’s like I want to be ready but I know I’m not. I go on my trip and we are going to meet up at a Starbucks for coffee before I leave town. It’s going to be short like 45 minutes maybe. I start getting an insane amount of anxiety. My dating anxiety has gotten worse now that I know that’s what I’m experiencing. I’ve never had dating anxiety in my life or really dealt with anxiety much at all before where I started this story. I text him and try to cancel. I also don’t want to mess up my no dating streak. It’s important to me that I finish the year. He talks me into just meeting as friends.
I pay for myself, he shows up in basketball clothes, we meet for a short period of time and then I make the drive back home.
In retrospect, this guy was ready for a relationship and I was not. He was kind and much later on we tried to make plans for a date a few times but it never worked out. We continued as friends until he got into a serious relationship which is completely respectable and how these things should be. It looks like everything turned out well for him which I’m happy about. I don’t think he was my person but I do feel like he was the first example of what an emotionally available man who was actively looking for a relationship looked like in this journey.
…I’m trying and I’m working hard and I’m looking myself in the mirror and confronting things…and it really takes a lot of guts to do that.
There were other people popping up in texts and DMs who were looking for that validation. They were asking me to drive an hour to go on a date with them and then promising next time they’ll come see me. There were people testing me to see if I learned and for the most part I had. While some of these relationships didn’t end in even a relationship they did teach me important things in my journey and they restored my hope to a degree. The main characters and the side characters, they all had their purpose. The good experiences and the not so good experiences….I chose to learn from them. “Putting myself out there” didn’t result in the relationship I was looking for but at times it taught me to be a better dater, it gave me hope, it revealed the pieces of me that weren’t healed yet and that I needed to work on, it highlighted things in me that I didn’t love…like that I was drawn to avoidant men and noncommittal men that I thought I could fix if I just loved them the right way.
In this second year, I start trying to reform my behavior. I look myself in the mirror and I decide that I’m doing something wrong. I get obsessed as I normally do with random topics that I immerse myself in until I’m bored and move onto the next hobby or thing. I deep dive into attachment styles and trauma and maybe I learn the word boundary for the first time during this time period. You can see throughout this year I try to set boundaries…but when you’re first learning to set them it’s like the three little bears….the boundaries come out as too soft or way too intense and it takes awhile to learn what “just right” looks like. I’m wavering between not strong enough and a little overkill but give me credit…I’m trying and I’m working hard and I’m looking myself in the mirror and confronting things…and it really takes a lot of guts to do that.
And I wish you could guess what I do next…
*** End of Year 2 ***