5 Dating Mistakes Most Women Make

Love your partner fiercely, but never lose yourself in a relationship.

I forget where I heard this exact piece of advice, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

There’s a difference between putting in all possible efforts to create a healthy and happy relationship and losing yourself entirely in a relationship, which often stems from deep-seated insecurity.

When I talk about losing one’s self in a relationship, I’m talking about justifying, accommodating, and compromising excessively.

To be specific, I’m talking about accommodating people because you want to be liked and don’t want to be rejected. Justifying lousy behaviors because you’re afraid of being single. And compromising your values and expectations because you simply want someone in your life.

And this often leaves most people wondering what they could have possibly done wrong that makes their relationships as messy as hell since they, you know, always put in their all.

A lot of women put up behaviors that are really nothing more than a lack of love for themselves and a lack of knowledge of their self-worth and value. This causes problems in their love lives and can have the effect of making their partners treat them overly poorly.

If what I’m saying doesn’t sound clear yet, these examples will make things clear:

1. Having unbelievable and superficial relationship expectations.

Relationship expectations are important, and often ideal ingredients of healthy relationships. Because if you don’t have a well-developed idea of what you want in a relationship, your happiness and satisfaction suffer.

Firstly, if you have no concrete idea of what you expect out of a relationship, you’ll inevitably get results you won’t like.

Secondly, if you have somewhat superficial expectations like building a home and a family with your partner, creating a friendly and supportive environment for your kids, having a fight or violence-free relationship, collaborating in maintaining the household, supporting each other’s personal endeavors, etc, once these expectations are met your relationship will hit a dead end. Sometimes these expectations might not be met and the relationship will be done with.

Because thirdly, if one has only the above kinds of expectations but lacks ideal expectations like a relationship deeply founded in mutual trust and respect, open and clear communication, authenticity, compromise, and shared values, interests, etc, her relationship might likely take the wrong direction.

That’s why women enjoying great and compatible relationships strive to have a relationship where they communicate on a different level, have a deep understanding between themselves and their partners, have ideal mutual goals, complement each other despite their differences, and so on.

They seamlessly aim to have similar fundamental beliefs and norms of behaviors with their partners. They don’t have core objectives that don’t actually help their relationship thrive.

The bottom line?

If you have mostly superficial expectations that aren’t deep-rooted in the 5 pillars of healthy relationships(Respect, Trust, Communication, Healthy Boundaries, and Mutual Support,) you’ll forever have a litany of incompatible relationships.

2. Giving up interests to fit in.

There’s this common need to fit in and to be accepted, this often forces people to adopt interests, hobbies, habits, and even personalities that aren’t theirs.

I know a lot of women who simply think developing a love for drinking beer, being a football fan, attending every of their man’s sports games while showing no interest in what truly interests them will make them cool partners. But they’re dead wrong. They’re only being insecure.

Yes, relationships develop organically on great levels of similarities even in interests, of course. But pretending to be someone you aren’t because that’s what you think he’ll like will ensure that you won’t be truly happy in your relationship.

Because the truth is, instead of proving your love and showing how much you want him to love you in return, concealing your own interests and even hobbies will simply prove that you think your interests and somehow, that you aren’t good enough.

Besides, the best relationships are somewhat balanced. This implies that both parties involved all stick to things they do before getting together.

And if you find yourself giving up your interests, passions, hobbies, and maybe even friends while being consumed with his, your insecurity isn’t doing you and your relationship any favors.

3. Playing the selfless card.

It’s weird and counterproductive for one to out of sheer aversion to appearing or feeling selfish allow people to exploit, manipulate, and treat her wrongly for their own selfish benefits.

Most women make the mistake of being overly caring and unselfish up to the point that they can be easily mistreated by a needy and even abusive lover. Again, it’s a dangerous path to walk in.

When you’re too selfless that you think of self-care as a taboo, you’ll always be a puppet to needy and controlling people who will make it seem as though not meeting their needs proves that you’re selfish. And in the process, you’ll become unanswerable to your needs, feelings, and even happiness.

The point isn’t to discourage you from being selfless and nice. You shouldn’t be a bi*ch to enjoy better relationships. Of course, that will have the opposite effect. But you should always bear in mind that taking your own needs, wants, feelings, and happiness into consideration isn’t selfishness.

Because the strong urge to avoid appearing or seeming selfish is an obvious sign of neglect of self-care which is a necessary element of you so want to love and care for others well. Because if you don’t love and care for yourself, doing so for others will always drain you and you might not get enough in return.

4. Not opening up about what’s wrong.

‘Don’t bottle up your feelings.’ If you act like and say that you’re fine when you obviously aren’t, you are going to make things more complicated, difficult, and even unbearable for yourself.

Keeping mute and pretending to be okay with every single thing that stresses you will wear you thin. You might out of built-up resentment, blow up and end up saying things you will regret terribly.

It’s like when you have been holding back from expressing your feelings for a very long time and you get stung one more time which might not hold much weight compared to the ones you’ve been silent to, but you end up losing it like a possessed person amid an exorcism.

When most women choose to bottle up their feelings in this sense, they might be doing so because they don’t want to hurt their partners’ feelings, or they think their feelings are foreign and not understandable to their partners, or they hope concealing their feelings enough will eventually make the wrong and stress go away in no distant time.

Weirdly, they sometimes resort to giving attitudes here and there to passively express their unhappiness, or they use the silent treatment to make up for their unexpressed discomforts…

Or they burst into tears looking for a shoulder to cry on as soon as someone asks them if they are okay because of their messy state of mind, as a result of the prolonged period of time where they bottled up for reasons best known to them.

But the truth, however, is that life is too short to always bottle up and avoid telling people how you feel when they strike a particular hurtful chord, or about an uncomfortable situation. That’s why you should always open up and express your feelings instead of saying you’re fine when you aren’t.

5. They conform to standards they don’t believe in.

You can sum pretty much all of these mistakes into one theme. Most women make the mistake of thinking way less of themselves than others see them. They think, behave, and act in ways that obviously reek of a lack of self-esteem.

The initial scenario is more clearer here — a woman who just doesn’t understand why she consistently ends up in messy relationships because, to her, she’s investing her all and seems to be what every man can’t resist. Of course, loving your partner fiercely is important. There’s nothing inherently wrong with compromising and making sacrifices for the betterment of a relationship.

But the idea that you need to conform to standards you don’t actually believe in, compromising your values and yourself to make things work, and giving up yourself to create a new whole keeps most women from enjoying the kinds of relationships they so desire.

Your self-value, self-worth, and self-esteem aren’t determined by others — most times you need to truly believe that you’re worth a lot. That you deserve love and affection. And that you don’t need to accommodate, justify, and conform to be loved.

Your value isn’t determined by outside forces — sometimes you have to let people know how much you value by being pleased with the person you are and by knowing that you aren’t undeserving of the most fundamental things life has to offer.

The world can’t automatically detect how best to treat and even think of you — sometimes you need to lead the way by how you think of and treat yourself.

—

Previously Published on medium

You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project

Compliments Men Want to Hear More Often

Relationships Aren’t Easy, But They’re Worth It

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

..A Man’s Kiss Tells You Everything

—

Photo credit: iStock