Hey all. I’ve been grappling with a problem that I’m not sure how to solve.
I have a life I do love. I have hobbies that fill my cup, friends that I trust, family I’m close to, I’m financially stable (buying a house solo next month at 27), I am very comfortable being single (and have been all of my life), my social skills are incredible, I like how I look, I have a path forward in life and from the outside you’d honestly think I have it all. I genuinely do love living my life and that’s not always been true. A very recent development, forged through a lot of failure and loss.
But here’s the thing, when it comes to romantic contexts, I have a tendency to abandon myself. I mean that in the sense that once I feel someone can fill a long lost need for me I start changing myself to be loved when that’s the thing that makes me loved in the first place.
It’s really frustrating for me because I lose my inner sense of power and that self abandonment cascades until I remove myself from that situation. Being a man, this is a problem that makes it so that any romantic connection never survives the starting line. Neediness isn’t attractive on either gender, but men especially are punished hard for this.
This pattern has reinforced avoidance for me. I’ll reach for connection, then self destruct that connection when my unmet needs surface. So I have largely stopped initiating romantic connection as a strategy to deal with it and grown a sort of “they won’t like me anyways so why get my hope up?” mindset. Which, as you can imagine, is ultimately unhelpful in a dating scene where men are expected to initiate and show interest. To compound it, my hopelessness gets read as “he’s got other options” or non-neediness which has ironically made the women I’d be interested in more interested in me. So this behavior has been reinforced in both directions.
I have stuff from my past I’m working on in therapy. But it’s become completely clear to me that an actual change in this belief is going to require action in the real world. I’ve done nearly everything in my power (outside of the thing I know I really need to do, going on dates) to build a life I’m comfortable with.
My question is, how did you deal with this? How do I move forward here? I’m pretty confident I wrote the answer out a few times in here, but I’m just curious if there’s anything I’ve missed. I’m tired of hurting the people around me with my own personal trauma, but I am not convinced there’s a way around that anymore. Thanks