Read This If You Feel Like You Attract All of the Wrong Men.
You’re one of those people who, after a first date, “just knows” whether or not there’s chemistry.
You don’t need time. You sometimes know within the first five minutes of sliding into the booth across from your date, caramel brûlée latte in hand.
You get “that” feeling. That rush of chemistry. That sparkling feeling that starts as butterflies in your tummy and then sends electricity allllll the way down to your toes and then bubbles up like champagne until it spills out the top of your head.
But . . . do you really know?
Here’s a tricky truth for us today:
If we tend to pride ourselves on knowing “right away” whether or not we have chemistry with a new romantic partner, what we may be missing is that in the early stages of a new relationship, feelings of closeness and excitement may reflect our subconscious emotional patterning and beliefs about connection more than they reflect a relationship’s potential to be enduring, fulfilling, or passionate.
If we’ve previously dated only emotionally unavailable partners, abusive partners, or partners who avoid intimacy, it may be the case that we’re wired to only feel that "chemistry feeling" with people who are unavailable to us for one reason or another.
This can be true for us for lots of reasons. Our relationships with our childhood caregivers, childhood trauma, and our early emotional associations with safety can have a lot to do with it, but so can our experiences with relationships, trauma, and emotional safety as adults! Alllll of these factors combine to create our ingrained subconscious associations with safety, stability, and chaos, and what they mean to us and to our brain's love maps.
If our brains, for any of a myriad of reasons, are wired to code "emotional unavailability" as what chemistry "means" to us, we will (and probably already do!) meet attractive, interesting, “full-package” partners, who we nevertheless, mysteriously . . . and inexplicably . . . "don't feel anything for."
This IS miswired attachment programming at work, and it's why doing attraction pattern work is NECESSARY to finding healthy love and feeling safe in committed partnership for many people.
In the case of those of us who are experiencing the emotional ups and downs of miswired attachment programming, there is no such thing as "just waiting for the right person to come along.”
For those of us who subconsciously associate “love” with “chaos,” “the right person" never WILL come along, because the "right person" . . . doesn't exist.
Our dilemma is an internal one, and needs to be resolved internally. The belief that our circumstance is one that is external to us ("I just haven't met the right person yet!") instead of something internal ("My attraction system is stuck in a loop that isn’t serving me") is what keeps us stuck.
So — what’s the solution to this, then?
The solution to this is doing the inner work so that you can be attracted to people who are healthy partners for you.
I’ve had clients come to me and tell me: “Look, I totally get what you say: crazy chemistry means somebody is unhealthy for me and I probably shouldn’t date them.
But I just CAN’T force myself to be attracted to somebody I’m not attracted to! And I can’t be with someone just because they’re a super nice person. I’ve GOT to feel some kind of a spark: otherwise I’m always going to feel like something is missing and like I’m settling. What am I supposed to DO?”
Look: I’m never going to tell you that you need to settle for a ho-hum relationship with somebody who doesn’t excite you.
Yes, part of healing from toxic relationship patterns does mean that you need to make the CHOICE to start dating healthier people for you, but the OTHER part of the equation is that you also need to learn how to adjust your inner attraction system to actually BE attracted to healthier partners.
If, like most of my clients, you’re one of those people who has dated around a fair bit and you just can’t seem to be attracted to ANYBODY who isn’t toxic, who doesn’t drop off the face of the Earth after 3 dates, or who, like you, wants a committed, long-term relationship (and you’re SO OVER all these guys who just say that they just want casual!) . . .
Then this is a sign that you have some inner work to do.
I promise: The solution isn’t to just settle for a ho-hum relationship. The solution is to learn how to recalibrate what you’re attracted to so that you’re actually excited about someone who’s good for you.
You do this by re-wiring your brain to stop coding love = unavailability, by changing your patterns in how you relate to potential romantic partners, and by doing the deep inner healing work to re-program your attraction system to be attracted to people who can show up for you.
(This is the work I do with my 1:1 coaching clients, and I promise: it’s totally possible for you to change who you’re attracted to! I have clients who do it every day. But the first step is committing to doing this work.)
This is the work of building healthy, safe, fulfilling partnerships. In our willingness to first look inward, we permit ourselves to bring forward the aligned relationships that we seek.
PS. Of course, as much as I would like to, I can’t teach you everything in a blog post, (EVEN IF I REALLY wish I could!).
This is a sliver of what I teach my private coaching clients inside of my 1:1 coaching program.
The things we talked about in this article — re-wiring your brain to stop coding love = unavailability, by changing your patterns in how you relate to potential romantic partners, and by doing the deep inner healing work to re-program your attraction system to be attracted to people who can show up for you — are relationship SKILLS, and they can’t be learned by reading: they need to be learned by DOING, and through guidance with an experienced mentor.
If you’re ready to learn these relationship skills, and to take this work deeper and to learn the “how-to”: I’d love to invite you to apply to work with me 1:1.
You can apply here.