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Dear Doc,
I’m going to start with a quick rundown of my dating history for context. I never bothered dating in high school, thinking that those sorts of relationships wouldn’t last and weren’t worth it. Once I got to college though, I…didn’t get much further. I saw relationships everywhere that looked miserable and seemed to end over very petty things. It was all very dramatic. I saw demanding women and inattentive selfish guys getting together constantly and I envied them. I kept thinking that if I had the chance, I would definitely be a better boyfriend and also would probably be wiser at choosing a girlfriend than some of these guys. Instead, regrettably, I became a Nice Guy; a strategy that as you can imagine, didn’t work at all.
When I eventually started dating during my first year of grad school, I decided that the best way to avoid getting trapped in the kind of miserable relationships I’d seen was to design a sort of committed friends with benefits model that in practice ended up with me getting sex and armchair psychotherapy and with her getting….to be quite honest, bad sex and not much else. I got my heart smashed 4 months into this bad experiment and yeah, I royally f*cked this up because I didn’t even know what a relationship was much less how to hack them to avoid the problems I saw.
Still, I was optimistic that I could do better. I’m 28 now and over the past years, I’ve dated a bit in short bursts which never ended up developing into anything you could call a relationship. It just became really clear early on that these arrangements wouldn’t work out which I honestly didn’t take too hard.
The thing that has put new terror into me around the prospect of a serious long term relationship is something that happened to my best friend. He’s a transguy which obviously comes with its own snags, but he is one of the strongest, most resilient, most emotionally intelligent people I know. He spent 3 years in what ended up being a very verbally abusive relationship with his girlfriend and spent the following 3 years depressed and trying to mend himself from the aftermath. He’s doing great now, but if I were unlucky enough to end up in that kind of situation, I think I would be a lot worse at handling it. I don’t think I would have the insight to see it for what it is or the boundaries to stand up for myself/leave the way he did. He did everything right and still had to piece himself together after. This terrifies me.
Relationships on the whole seem dangerous for me to get into at my skill level even though I’m kinda old. I really would like to be in a healthy committed relationship but I don’t have enough faith in myself or humanity to risk getting hurt or hurting someone else because I don’t know what I’m doing.
How do I gain the skills I need when the world is this scary?
Signed
Courage the Cowardly Man
I understand your fears, CCM. It’s understandable to be a little gun-shy after what you’ve gone through and what you’ve seen. But what you’re actually asking me for is a way to date without taking any risks whatsoever. And unfortunately, there’s no such beast. Dating is a full-contact sport. You take the precautions you can to make it safer (emotionally and physically), but at the end of the day, you’re making yourself vulnerable. That means you’re going to run the risk of getting hurt. Sometimes you’ll get hurt because of the mistakes you make, other times you’ll get hurt because there’re a**holes out there and assholes are gonna ass. Still other times, you’re going to get hurt and it’s not going to be anybody’s fault; sometimes things just don’t work out and while it’s a damn shame, it’s just the way things are.
So if you want to date, you have to do so with the knowledge that you’re at risk. But, risk doesn’t mean guarantee of injury. Skiing, for example, is potentially dangerous, but I’ve been skiing for years and I’ve never injured more than my pride. My friends, on the other hand, have broken bones and twisted ligaments. And you take precautions to minimize the chance of injury or trauma. Developing and maintaining strong boundaries, for example, help keep toxic partners away and help keep your relationships healthy. Being sure to avoid emotionally overinvesting in people early on in the relationship helps keep you from getting hurt needlessly and getting comfortable the potential of rejection makes sure that you don’t get stuck in The Friend Zone or start becoming a Nice Guy.
But none of this helps if you don’t actually, y’know. Put yourself out there. You can read all the books, watch all the videos and listen to all the podcasts you want, but none of them are going to do the work for you. The only way to build up the skills you need is to actually put those skills to use. You’re gonna have to grind out some experience if you want to level up, CCM.
You have to confront your fears dude. Otherwise, they’ll only grow and take even more control of your life. Avoiding the things you’re afraid of just makes you more afraid of them until you are avoiding even the potential of feeling fear. The longer you put it off, the harder it becomes to face them and overcome them.
If you want to date, if you want to find a relationship, then you have to embrace that risk. You have to be comfortable with the possibility that things aren’t going to work out and you might get hurt. After all, every relationship ends eventually, until one doesn’t. But while pain may be somewhat inevitable, suffering is optional. Things may suck, but they won’t suck as bad as you think and not forever. You can get back up again..
Good luck.
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Previously published here and reprinted with permission from the author.
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