The YouTube channel Jubilee has a game show called Love or Money. It’s a show where a contestant must decipher which of five panelists actually want her or are deceiving her in order to win money. As of writing, they have three episodes out and all three contestants have chosen someone who was in it for the money.
While it is true that some of the panelists wished they could have both the contestant and the money, and while people have their reasons for wanting the money and not a date, it is interesting that people would go on a game show to deceive someone just to get a few hundred dollars.
People who have watched all three episodes marvel at the fact that everyone has been deceived. Two episodes featured a heterosexual coupling and the latest one featured gay men. So maybe the next episode will feature lesbians and they’ll show us how to choose right!
I found this trend (albeit a small trend) interesting but it confirms something about modern day dating. People do not value safety in relationships. They value edginess, danger and the possibility that things won’t work out. People want drama.
But why do we want drama? Because we’re addicted to emotional chaos and find emotional safety boring. It’s not enough to get your sexual, romantic and partnership desires fulfilled. The risk of not getting or keeping these things must also be present.
And when it is, you get exactly what you bargained for — a person who provides chaos and risk. You got what you wanted! But you romanticized it to the point that you believed in it and needed it to be true.
So when you tell people that you knew that the relationship with this dangerous, edgy person wasn’t going to work, you weren’t lying. You definitely knew. You just ignored it. You chose to throw caution to the wing because it’s exciting to see if your impractical dream comes true. We see it in movies all the time, so why can’t it happen for us, right?
Allow me to explain this dynamic with a bit more detail.
If two people get together (dating, sex or a committed relationship), and one is seen as the dangerous/edgy person, the other person is the safe one. A dangerous or edgy person is not necessarily some leather jacket-wearing stereotype. It’s just someone who cannot meet the long term needs of the safe person.
The two get together and the safe one feels great because the beast (the dangerous person) is being tamed. For now. But eventually, the dangerous/edgy person also wants excitement and drama. And since they can’t get it from their safe partner, they will end the relationship, cheat or ghost them to find someone they consider to be more dangerous/edgy than they are.
So you can see that if the safe person wanted a long-term commitment, they couldn’t get it from the dangerous person who’s only there temporarily or only there for certain aspects of the relationship but not others.
However, you can also see that the safe person is also incapable of providing what the edgy person wants because they too want an edgy person. Specifically, they want someone that will give them the drama of potentially unrequited love or temporary love.
What both these people have in common is that neither of these two people prioritize safety enough. Danger and drama are more important.
So when the edgy person leaves the safe person for someone they consider edgy and get their heart broken (because that new edgy person needs someone that they consider edgy), the initial edgy person will possibly crawl back to the safe person to get some love. At this point one of two things will happen.
The safe person will welcome them back but then will get left once again because the dangerous person still wants that danger at the end of the day, or the safe person will reject them for leaving them in the first place.
Now when that happens, that might cause the edgy person to really see the safe person in a new light. Why? Because the safe person has now become someone who could give them inconsistent love.
Do you see how wild this dynamic is? Do you see how everyone gets screwed over because no one wants to meet the needs of the other person? Can you see why no one ever feels good enough? Do you have a better understanding of why modern dating is pretty trashy?
But perhaps the most important question now is, what do we do about this?
When we see someone for the first time, our brains compute whether or not we want them very quickly. The way to ensure that our brains choose people that make sense is to first prioritize the right stuff.
In this case, it is imperative that we prioritize emotional safety over emotional intrigue, danger, risk and drama. We must choose people who exemplify emotional safety, but we must also be people who exemplify emotional safety.
What we will find is that our tendency to desire danger and drama is symptomatic of a bigger issue, which is insecure attachment. The logical mind can clearly see that it is impossible to continue in this dynamic, and yet we are emotionally compelled to keep it going.
In order to combat our insecure attachment (whether it shows up as anxious attachment, avoidant attachment or fearful attachment), we must look at our childhoods with our primary caregivers and see the similarities in how they treated us and the relationships we find ourselves in now.
And when we allow ourselves to feel the hatred, anger, fear and despair of not getting the love we needed as children, we are now in position to recognize when someone new poses a similar threat, and steer clear of them, which gives us the opportunity to choose the safe relationship as emotionally safe people ourselves.
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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? | My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
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