If You’re Avoiding Dating Because You’re Afraid of Getting Hurt, I Totally Get It. This Will Help.
Sooo . . . Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar:
Your last breakup hurt more than stepping on a Lego in the dark, and opening up again feels too vulnerable.
You’d rather be alone than risk getting hurt again, you say Your life is pretty good as-is, and getting involved with somebody new would just mess everything up.
It feels safer to hang out here and to bypass the whole dating thing.
So that’s what you do. Instead of dating, you barricade yourself behind a moat of inspirational quotes about buying your own flowers and self-love, and you complain about men and dating apps over mimosas with your girlfriends.
I get it.
When we’ve been hurt in the past, it’s tempting to avoid dating altogether while we nurse our wounds.
You’re alone, but at least you’re not getting hurt.
But here’s the tough-love truth:
Avoiding dating, while it FEELS like it stops the pain in the moment, ultimately leads to MORE pain in the future: we stay lonely, we miss out on the special moments we could have shared with a partner, and, what’s more, we never give ourselves the opportunity to prove ourselves wrong and to connect with a partner with whom we feel even safer than we do on our own.
While our solitude FEELS safe, it also keeps us stuck: being alone carries no risk, but it also yields no reward.
I like to think of taking risks in dating like jumping into an icy pool on a hot summer day.
The hardest part of jumping in the pool is taking the leap.
Once we’re IN the pool, the cold water actually feels pretty good on our skin, and our bodies adjust. But taking the leap is the scary part.
If we’re avoiding dating because we're scared of making ourselves vulnerable again, the BEST thing we can do for ourselves is to jump in the water and get started. We can get used to cold pool water — and once we’re in it, we can have a lot of fun. But getting over our initial fear and taking the leap is the prerequisite to getting the thing we want: healthy, fulfilling, passionate relationships.
As my uncle always said: “To play the game, you’ve got to be IN the game.”
The only way to figure out how to be successful at something is by getting out there and DOING. Not by thinking about doing, not by endlessly preparing, and not by reading a million self-help books.
When we wait to feel “ready,” we convince ourselves that if we’re perfectly prepared, we’ll be able to avoid the thing that feels scary. But we’re never going to completely vulnerability-proof dating, so if that’s what we’re waiting for, we’re never going to be “ready.”
DOING the scary thing is how you figure out whether what you’re doing works or doesn’t work. If you get rejected or things don't turn out the way you were hoping they would: GREAT! You’ve learned something. You can now take that new information and use it to iterate your dating strategy. You can learn from what that person or experience had to teach you, and you can use it to date differently in the future. You can go back and make changes and make your strategy better so that you CAN succeed in the future.
But if you never start, you’re never going to get to the part where you’ve found what works and you’re succeeding. If you don’t start, you’ll miss out on a lifetime of love and companionship because you were afraid to play the game. You’re guaranteed to lose if you don’t play.
Once we’re in, we’ll find that we can learn to cope with the occasional setback, and we can even use it to improve how we date. But we can’t build the fulfilling, loving, safe relationships we crave if we aren’t even in the dating pool.
I KNOW dating feels vulnerable, and vulnerability feels really scary.
But the truth is that we can’t build meaningful relationships without risk: and that includes the risk of loss, vulnerability, and heartbreak.
Nothing important or meaningful in life was built without some risk. Just as in finance, high risk means high reward.
So get out there and jump in the pool! If you’re brave and take the leap, I think you’ll find that the water’s just fine.
PS. If you're drained from drowning in a sea of dreadful dating dossiers and want nothing more than to just find someone attractive and normal for once — I see you, I was you, and I'm here for you!
I walk you through how to spot the sneaky red flags that are lurking in your Hinge queue and how to gain the CONFIDENCE to walk away from them inside of my FREE workshop, Confident & Clear Dating. Confident & Clear is my FREE workshop where I walk you through how to attract high quality matches, avoid hidden red flags and date with confidence — EVEN IF you hate dating and never want to use a dating app ever again. (I get it!)