March 6, 2025 • 54 mins
Dating right now can feel like a minefield - in today's episode we break down exactly how to reclaim your power in today's dating climate, including:
- The 3 reasons we lose our power
- The consequences of becoming defeated with dating
- My 5 tips for reclaiming your agency
- Why we need to STOP playing games
- What to do when you get attached too quickly + so much more
Listen now!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. There is really no easy
way to say this. Dating in your twenties is hard,
(00:23):
especially right now. It feels like a bit of a
minefield of people who won't commit, people who seem way
too good to be true, and it turns out that
they actually are incompatibility, getting ghosted, dates canceled last minute,
just to name a few experiences that I'm sure a
lot of us have currently been enduring. When this has
kind of been going on for a while, and these
(00:45):
experiences definitely dominate our dating story or our dating narrative,
we can become very detached and very defeated and very passive,
and to put it simply, I think we lose our
power and our agency in dating. We're no longer as
picky as we would like to be. We don't call
(01:05):
out disrespect or bad behavior. The whole activity becomes a
lot more anxiety inducing than it is fun. And I
think we get into this really negative headspace of expecting
people to disappoint us and then not being surprised when
they actually do. I think the biggest way to counteract
(01:26):
this mindset and this defeatist reality when it comes to
dating is to really come back to ourselves and focus inwards,
not just for the sake of our love life, but
for the sake of actually loving our own life. And
I was speaking about this on Marchra recently. Mantra, for
those of you who don't know, is my other podcast.
It's a lot more spiritual. We talk about a specific affirmation,
(01:48):
grounding saying or Marchra every single week. Recently, I did
an episode on I Nurture Relationships That Enrich My Life,
and I talked about how something I wish I had
learned sooner was that dating is meant to be a
enjoyable and it's meant to be a selfish activity. Truly,
(02:08):
dating is actually meant to be rather selfish. We are
taught to always be ready to compromise and to be
flexible and to be good and to meet everyone's needs.
And that's great, fair enough, but I don't think that
shouldn't be the case when it comes to trying to
find your life partner. Very few decisions are as important,
and I think compromise now in the early stages of
(02:31):
dating is misery and frustration. Later on, I wish I'd
known that at twenty one. I wish I'd known that,
maybe even at twenty three. But when we really do
start to focus on what do I want, how do
I want to be treated, what is my vision for
love and what would it take for that to be meant,
we experience such a huge and powerful shift that not
(02:53):
only makes dating fun, it makes it intentional, and I
think it makes it fruitful as well. So today I
want to give you my formula for reclaiming your power
in dating and also talk about why it is that
we do lose our agency, why repeated rejection and relationship
trauma and a scarcity mindset are some of the reasons
(03:14):
dating feels so personally hard. And I want to talk
about some of the dating dilemmas that you guys have
been facing as well as people in their twenties. Some
of you reached out with some pretty epic stories, some
pretty frustrating stories to read from my perspective, So I
want to talk about exactly how you can bring back
your own control, how you can be in control of
(03:36):
those situations. So, without further ado, my lovely, lovely listeners,
let's get into my guide to reclaiming your power in
dating in your twenties and beyond. I want to start
out by talking about a time in my own life
when I completely abandoned myself to who I was, essentially
(04:01):
because I thought that their approval and if they liked
me and if I was good enough for them, that
could turn into love, and that could make me happy
and spoil the alert. In reality, it actually took me
to a very low point, and I'm sure a lot
of you could probably tell me a similar story. So
(04:22):
back in twenty twenty one, I was dating like my
first really serious boyfriend, and longtime listeners will know that
that breakup is really what created the psychology of your twenties.
But you know, he was great, he was a nice guy.
It just didn't work. We broke up and he moved
on really really quickly, like very quickly. And it was
(04:47):
this whole story where I was still somewhat under the
illusion slash delusion that we were going to get back together,
and one of my friends had to be like, hey,
he actually has a new girlfriend. I think it just
put me into the real painful part of relationship grief
very very quickly. I was like, oh, I thought that
(05:07):
maybe I would have time, that maybe we could still
have this shared experience of grieving and missing each other.
And suddenly he's moved on. He's on the next he's
on to the next person, like he's he's all good
and fine and dandy. I think that created a bit
of a chain reaction in me where I looked at
my own life and I was like, how come it
was so hard for me to find someone else. I
(05:30):
was very very lonely. I'd been with this person for
a while. It was still in Australia COVID lockdowns, so
you know, I didn't get to do all the fun
things that you would normally do post breakup. I didn't
get to go out and party with my friends. I
didn't get to go out on these dates. I didn't
get to, you know, just be alive and present and
out and about, and so I was feeling very very rejected.
(05:54):
I was feeling very poorly about myself. I think my
self worth was definitely not an asset that I had
at that time. And it was during this period where
I thought, Okay, maybe I should start dating again. Insane.
It was an insane decision because I was four months
out of a heartbreak, probably like my most significant one
(06:18):
to date. I really had a support network, but it
wasn't readily available to me. We had this like little
break from lockdown where you know, everything kind of went
back to normal for a couple of months, and I
went dating. It was almost like a sport for me.
I was going on sometimes two dates a day, meeting
(06:41):
all these people, and the thing was, none of them
were particularly nice to me. And yet I don't think
there was a single date that I went on where
I thought, oh, he's not interested. I should leave this.
Every single one I was like, potential, potential, potential, potential.
I basically, I'm going to say it as it is.
(07:03):
I'd lost my power and I met someone during that time,
which really any semblance of agency and control and autonomy
I had in this process, any slither that I had
left that was finally taken away from me because basically,
I fell in love with someone very quickly who had
(07:27):
absolutely no interest in loving me back, and everything about
everything about our relationship became dictated by what he wanted.
We would only hang out at his house. We would
only do the dates that he wanted. We only had
the label that he wanted to give the relationship, which
(07:48):
was not the label that I wanted. And it was very,
very painful, and I basically sat in that relationship that
wasn't quite a relationship for six months and it was
like I was looking at myself from a high up place,
just losing who I was. I was just in this relationship.
And I used to be such a forthright advocate for myself.
(08:10):
You know, if someone didn't treat me right, I was
gonna call it out, And in this situation, I just
absolutely did not. I just sat there and I just
let him say, you know sometimes really mean things about me,
and I let him just be do. I just let
him take control and get whatever he wanted out of
the relationship, whilst I was very clearly sitting there miserable,
(08:32):
not getting what I wanted out of the relationship. And
you best believe I was not going to advocate for
myself because all I wanted in that moment was love. Really,
I was not in the place to be dating, and
I was so fragile and I was so insecure. All
I wanted was someone to just like hold me and
say I was special, or at least kind of treat
(08:54):
me like I was special a couple of days a week.
Needless to say, this relation relationship, if you can call it,
call it a relationship, did not work out. It most
certainly did not work out, and we kind of ended things.
And if I thought that I had been in a
low place before, the six months post that relationship was
(09:19):
so painful and almost like in so I think about
it and I feel so bad for that girl because
I've spoken about it on the show before, but I
couldn't even like speak to someone. I just moved to
Sydney at the time as well, and obviously I had
to try and meet all these new people. I just
didn't feel special at all. I was like, why would
anyone want to be my friend? Why would anyone want
(09:41):
to talk to me right now? I'm just wasting their time,
I'm boring them. I have these distinct memories of being
at parties that my friends had invited me to, like
the two friends that I had in Sydney at the time,
and just not being able to hold a conversation with
someone and just being like, oh my god, they're bored,
they're bored, they don't want to talk to me anymore,
and then leaving the compversation and self sabotaging, and I
(10:03):
just really felt absolutely terrible about myself. And it all
stemmed back to the fact that I had let myself
be I don't want to say taken advantage of I'd
let myself be treated badly. Now I say that, and
I don't want people to take that out of context
and think that I am saying that anyone who's been
(10:23):
through a terrible relationship or even an abusive relationship is
responsible for their treatment. Really not the case, like, really
not the case. But I can say in terms of
my experience that I knew very clearly and I could
feel it bubbling up that I was not being treated right,
(10:44):
that I had lost my agency, that I was not happy,
that I was not confident, and I continued to almost
subject myself to that environment and to that emotional environment
and situation because I did not feel like I deserved more,
And the idea of having to go back out there
and be single when I had no power as a
(11:04):
person who was dating just felt absolutely terrible. Obviously, I
made it through. I made it through, and now I'm
with someone really, really amazing. Obviously, I've skipped an important
chapter here, and that's the chapter that we're talking about today.
You know, how did I go from having that terrible
relationship which genuinely broke me and which I still sometimes
(11:28):
sit and think about and think, whooh out to where
I am now? I've been with my partner for two
years and he is wonderful and he is spectacular, and
he treats me so well, and he is just like genuinely,
it's like we are two complete people coming together making
(11:49):
each other more whole. Gemma, you know, five years ago
would not have imagined that could have occurred. And it's
because when it came to dating, I became in selfish,
I became independent. I became so focused on what I
needed and what I wanted because I really realized after
(12:09):
those experiences, no one else was going to advocate for me.
You know, everyone else in the dating scheme, in the
dating sphere was putting themselves first. So it was my
turn to put myself first, and it was my turn
to be bossy about what I wanted. And honestly, it's
funny because I think I almost went a little bit
(12:30):
too far my current boyfriend. I almost didn't go on
a date with him. It's like a funny story retell now,
whereby he hadn't confirmed plans the day of, and I
was texting my friends being like, no, a real man
wouldn't treat me this way. My soulmate wouldn't treat me
this way. I'm not going to go on this date.
But I gave him a second chance. I'm so glad
(12:52):
that I did, and here we are now. So my
experience aside, what is it that makes us lose our
power in dating? I think the first reason why you
may end up in a similar situation to me kind
of dating losers, with people that don't treat you right,
is because of repeated rejection. Being rejected by someone you
like or admire. It stings on a very deep interpersonal level.
(13:17):
A great deal of human emotion is going to come
from rejection, and is going to emerge in the face
of real, anticipated, imagined, even remembered rejection by other people.
We are socially primed to experience rejection as a painful experience,
(13:37):
almost physically painful, and then as a result of that
turn inwards looking for answers as to why we were
the ones who were wrong, We were the ones who
were different, We were the one who couldn't make this
person happy or couldn't fit in. A consequence of that
(13:57):
is that we believe that we must be the ones
who have to change or who have to adapt in
order to be accepted. So there was a two thousand
study that found that the more rejection you experience, the
more you actually do begin to cope through avoidant strategies.
So this was actually a study done on academics, university
(14:18):
academics who were told that their papers and manuscripts had
either been rejected or not, and they found in the
experimental condition where certain participants were having papers rejected left, right,
and center, the more rejections they received fake rejections, the
more they withdrew, the more they became quite hostile, but
(14:41):
in general, the more they actually began to doubt themselves. Now,
obviously this was an experiment. These rejections actually had nothing
to do with the quality of their work, but they
ended up really believing that just because this random person
told them that their paper was terrible or that they
didn't deserve some kind of accolade, it must be true.
(15:05):
And very few of them said, Oh, I don't actually
think you're right. I think your criticisms of me are wrong.
It's so bizarre how we as humans are so quick
to trust other people's approval or judgments of us, but
we are so ready to dismiss or not even think
about our own, not even think about what we think,
(15:26):
and rejection will do that to you. Another piece of
research from the University of New South Wales here in
Australia also found that, you know, repeated rejection is one thing.
Sometimes for some of us, all it takes is one
really profound, emotionally salient rejection to change you. So, according
(15:48):
to this doctor who ran the study, doctor Zimmermann, if
we experience a really unexpected romantic rejection early in life,
this can actually be a catalyst of events for a
lot of trust issues. And it's very hard to understand
why it's happened, But it's because this experience of really
committing to someone and wanting them to like you and
(16:11):
then feeling rejected is so painful that your brain almost
promises to itself for that to never happen again. Now,
if your self worth has been depleted by a number
of dates not working out, a few instances are being
ghosted or turned down, or just even a significant one off.
You may firstly try to avoid those feelings, but then
(16:35):
you'll begin to change your attitudes and your actions. And
one way that we do that in one way that
we respond to romantic rejection is that we lower our
standards and we settle. We do this because we have
likely developed an actual fear of rejection at this point,
so we want to prevent it from happening again. And
(16:55):
the way that we can prevent it from happening again
is either a completely withdrawing or be shaping ourselves to
constantly be what someone else wants, because that will ensure
that no one will ever make us feel the way
that we've already been made to feel. The second reason
we may have lost our power in dating is because
(17:16):
of a really unfortunate and painful experience of relationship trauma.
This is going to come in a lot of forms,
but some examples of relationship trauma include being cheated on,
even repeated instances of micro cheating, being in quite an
emotionally volatile relationship where you never knew where you stood,
(17:39):
being betrayed, a traumatic breakup, just some examples. Something that
many of us don't know is that relationship trauma in
our late teens in our early twenties does actually have
the ability to reshape our attachment style. We often tend
to think that our attachment style is somewhat locked in
(18:00):
after childhood and that the only thing that influences attachment
style is our parental relationships and our attachment to them.
That is not true. A twenty seventeen paper titled adult attachment, stress,
and Romantic Relationships. I actually discovered this piece of research
when I was researching my book, but it found that
(18:23):
there are three types of negative events in adulthood that
can actually rewire your attachment style. So there's negative external
events this has nothing to do with your relationship but
still makes you feel unsteady, So may have been the
death of a loved one or the death of a partner,
or an injury or a really traumatic, dangerous situation you
(18:45):
went through with someone. Then we have negative relational events,
so conflict, separation, abandonment, breakup, and then cognitive or emotional events.
So this may be that your attachment style has been
rewired because you, as a person have started experiencing heightened
levels of anxiety due to some biological change. Due to
(19:07):
some cognitive change, you start seeing everything with anxiety, including
your relationship. The biggest one, though, is the second relational events,
specifically negative relational events. So much trust and vulnerability goes
into caring for someone and goes into loving someone, And
(19:28):
when someone takes that trust and vulnerability and treats it
like it's nothing, that does leave permanent damage. And it
may explain why we can enter a relationship entirely secure
and in an entirely healthy place, only to leave it
anxious or avoidant or insecure, and with a whole new
(19:51):
perspective on love. So finally, the third reason we lose
our power in dating is because we begin to adopt
a scarcity mindset. In other words, we let whoever it
may be, the media, our married friends, our parents, we
let them convince us that we are running out of
time to find a quote unquote good one. The scarcity mindset,
(20:12):
it's actually an economics term, and it refers to the
belief that a resource is limited and that results in
us making irrational decisions. It's why say you're at the
grocery store and you're trying to buy your favorite yogurt
and suddenly there's only two of these yogurts left, like
it's almost sold out. You only need one yogurt, but
(20:34):
you're going to buy two because this idea of scarcity
is making you make irrational decisions. It's the same reason
why if someone tells you that a bag is one
of a kind or exclusive, you're more likely to want
to buy it because they've created scarcity within you, where
(20:56):
if something seems less available, it actually feels more worthwhile
to have. Yes, the scarcity mindset usually refers to a
consumer good, it can also refer to love and why
we feel that a good partner is becoming a lot
harder to find. So the other important part of this
(21:16):
concept is that it can actually be artificially altered. So
basically in economics, people can make you think that something
is scarce and can make you think that something is
less available, and they do that as a way to
make you want to buy it. There are a lot
of ways that we are made to feel like a
good relationship is quite scarce at the moment, whether it's
(21:38):
dating horror stories, whether it's you know how dating apps
are structured, whether it's all the hit pieces people are
writing in magazines that it's harder for millennials to find love, etc. Etc.
It's all making us very very scared. I want to
remind you people come on and off the market, the
(22:00):
dating market, every single day. People move cities, People suddenly
come back on the market and are ready to date again.
People break up. There is someone perfect for you out
there thinking exactly what you are thinking right now. Oh
my gosh, there's no good people left, and here you
are thinking the same thing. And I think that's part
(22:21):
of the story that you're going to tell each other
one day of like, oh my god, I'd really given
up hope and here you are. But in the meantime,
don't let a scarcity mindset take over and cause you
to miss out on meeting that person because you felt
like you had to hurry up and settle down. I
don't think that's I don't think that's the healthiest decision
(22:43):
for you right now. And I always say you would
much rather be single for another ten years and find
your person at thirty five or thirty nine or thirty two,
then spend the next ten years with someone that you
settled for and have to break up anyways and be
back in the same spot. But now just with more
emotional damage. So we lose our power because of rejection,
(23:08):
relationship trauma, and a scarcity mindset. To name the big three,
What are the consequences of this? Where we've already spoken
about a few, I think the biggest one is self abandonment,
abandoning what you need in a relationship, ignoring your needs
just for the idea and the promise of love. This
(23:29):
can mean that we often let others make decisions for us,
We ignore what we need from a situation, We ruminate
constantly about whether this other person likes us, rather than
whether we like ourselves or whether we even like them.
And we also begin to tolerate behavior that we never
(23:50):
imagined for ourself and we never imagined would be part
of our love story. Another consequence of abandoning ourselves or
lowering our standards losing our power, it's that I actually
think we begin to feel feel it in our body,
feel a lot of discomfort, distress, and emotional pain when
you're dating someone or when you know you're in the
(24:11):
process of courting people who are treating you poorly, where
you feel like you have no agency, you have no control.
I often find that that creates a lot of bodily tension.
It creates real signs, physical signs of emotional distress, like
crying a lot, like feeling sore in parts of your body,
feeling nauseous. There's a really fascinating paper that was published
(24:35):
in twenty fourteen, and it attempted to map where we
feel emotions in our body, because typically we do feel
emotions physically before we feel them consciously and mentally, we
just don't realize it. And what this paper found was
that when we feel discomfort, stress, anxiety, emotional tension, we
(24:59):
tend to I feel at first in our face, behind
our eyes, in our throat, in our stomach. When you
lose your power in dating and you are dating people
who make you feel terrible, you are going to feel terrible.
Your body is going to let you know that it's
not happy with these emotional circumstances. I remember a friend
(25:20):
telling me how she went through this period of dating
the wrong person and she felt nauseous and ill the
entire time. She went to the doctor. She thought she
may have an ulcer. She thought it was something serious,
maybe like a really bad bacteria. When she left the relationship,
(25:42):
that illness cleared within weeks and I know that sounds
quite I don't know serendispotus or convenient or like a coincidence.
I promise you it's not the emotional and social interactions
that you're having, specifically one that feel so intimate and vulnerable.
(26:02):
If they are not right, if they don't sit right
with you mentally, they're not going to sit right with
you physically. And I think love and dating is not
something that we can play games with, especially if you
are someone who is rather sensitive and rather romantic, because
it does influence you. It influences your mind, it influences
your body, it influences your soul. Okay, so now to
(26:26):
the juicy bit. What can we do about it? We're
going to take a short break, but when we return,
I've got my five biggest tips for you today, So
stay tuned. This is gonna sound so cliche, and I'm
sorry for it in advance, but it's not you. It's
just dating. It's just the way that dating is working
(26:49):
at the moment. It's a battlefield where the way we
have been socialized to date in the twenty first century
and to treat others, especially these days, is in a
very transactional way, a very flippant way, and also in
a way that I think essentially assumes that someone better
(27:09):
is always going to come along, and it means that
you have to have stronger boundaries and be a lot
more intentional about what you want from a relationship. If
this doesn't come naturally to you, it didn't come naturally
to me. If it's been scared out of you, don't worry.
I'm going to give you the formula for how to
(27:31):
really reapply agency and control when it comes to your
dating experiences. Now, some of these may sound kind of obvious,
you may have heard them before, but I think the
reason I'm saying them again is because they are very,
very important. So even if they're not new to you,
I do hope that you still absorb them in the
same way. Let's start with my first tip. My first
(27:54):
tip is that you need to take a dating detox.
You need to take a full, big step back from
dating before you can dive in again. Half the reason
I finally start cutting corners with dating or giving up
control is because we are simply emotionally exhausted and our
ability to uphold our values has been slowly whittled away
(28:18):
over time. If you're feeling more tired then excited to
go on dates. If you are dragging yourself to dates
just wanting to get it over with, hoping to find
someone good enough so you don't have to be single anymore,
pause and just stop dating all together, because this is
a very straight and narrow path to settling. You're probably
(28:43):
experiencing dating burnout, and it's very similar to career or
workplace or emotional burnout. And it's very similar in the
sense that it's going to get progressively worse and worse
until you do a full reset. Now, something I see
with people who expel speriencing dating burnout is that they'll
take a step back for like a couple of weeks.
(29:04):
That doesn't give them the chance to fully fill up
their cup and to restore all their depleted emotional resources.
I think you need six months minimum to get back
to yourself post dating burnout before you were ready to
date again. And I'm going to give this my most profound,
(29:25):
big personal endorsement ever. I actually did do a six
month dating detox before I met my partner Tom, and
I'm not saying that it magically made the love of
my life appear. What I am saying is that I
was able to really see clearly when he showed up,
and I was able to kind of push through all
(29:49):
the garbage and the chaos of other people who weren't
meant for me. But if I hadn't done a dating detox,
I would have overly invested in them. My second tip,
you need to have a list of non negotiables. This
list is going to be your best friend, and it
will allow you to shift from seeking validation to seeking
(30:11):
self approval. It will allow you to stop asking yourself,
Oh do they like me? Are they enjoying my company?
Do they want to go on a second date with me?
To do I like them? Did I have fun on
that date? Is this someone I could see a future with?
I think what it really does is it recenters something
(30:33):
that we've lost along the way. What it recenters is
our own opinion at the center of our life. This
really is the judgment and the opinion that matters the most.
Be as selfish as you want. I don't think we
hear that a lot in life. I think there are
very few instances where society is okay with telling us
to be selfish. But I'm going to tell it to
(30:55):
you right now, be selfish and assume that everyone else
is dating with their own best interests at heart until
they prove that they can be a good partner, until
they prove that they are worthy of compromise or of selflessness.
I think you need to keep the focus squarely on
(31:15):
you and what you want. And this is where this
list of non negotiables becomes really really important, because if
we just say, oh, yeah, I'm not going to compromise,
and we don't have a list, or we don't have
some idea of what we don't want to compromise on,
essentially we just end up doing it anyways. It's like
imagine going to a financial planner and saying, I want
(31:36):
to be rich, but you don't know what you want
to spend that money on, and you don't know what
you currently spend your money on, and you don't know
what your essential financial needs are. Your financial planner is
going to sit there and say, so, what exactly do
you want from me? Like you're not going to be
able to achieve what you want in money, in life,
in relationships without already having a vision. I'm going to
(31:59):
give you a actually, my non negotiable list. I pulled
this out of my notes at archives. I used to
bring up this list after every single first date or
sometimes second date that I'd had with someone, just to
be very clear with myself. Is this person matching my requirements?
Or am I being delusional? So this was my list.
(32:20):
They must be someone looking for monogamy. They must be
someone who I respect and admire. They must have a career, job,
or hobby that they're passionate about. They must have time
for me. They must openly communicate with me. They must
want to live overseas, and they must want to have
a family one day. These were all things I knew
(32:43):
I needed to feel emotionally secure and to have a
future with someone. But they were also things that I
knew that if I overlooked in the present, they would
be relationship ending in the future. And I saw dating
as something I couldn't just have exclusively have fun with
any more. I was still having fun, but I knew
that I was someone who got carried away very very easily.
(33:06):
I got attached very very easily. This was my insurance.
You know, whose advice was going to take out of
any ones, I was probably going to take my own,
And so this was a way to say, Hey, your
past self thought this was important. Why are you neglecting
it now? So make a list. It should have at
least five things on your list. If you can't think
(33:27):
of five, I think you need to be more picky
because there are most certainly five things that you can
think of that would make a relationship perhaps not work
for you. So make sure you know what they are.
You're clear about it, you reflect on past experiences, and
you use your list. My third tip for reclaiming your
(33:48):
power in dating is to stop playing games. Stop playing
games and set the example for how you want to
be treated. Dating is hard enough, you don't need to
make it any more confusing for yourself. The kind of
games I'm talking about include things like not texting them
(34:09):
back for the same amount of time that they didn't
text you. I'm guilty of doing that once or twice,
pretending not to be interested at parties or when you
see them, making them jealous, deliberately ignoring them, or expecting
them to read your mind, or testing them without them
(34:29):
knowing it. All of this just puts up further barriers
between you and the other person. In all honesty, I
think that the games we play in the early stages
of dating. They are a defense mechanism. I think it's
a way of feeling more in control or of keeping
people at a distance because of previous times that you
(34:50):
have been hurt or you have been let down, and
so pretending not to be interested keeps this nice buffer
between you and them where you can pretend to yourself
as well. Or ignoring them allows you to ignore the
fact that you are actually really invested in them as
a person and you do really like them, and that's
okay even if it doesn't work out. It's really just
(35:12):
a healthy sign that you know what you want and
that you are brave enough to feel deeply about someone else.
That I think is I just think that's a good
sign for future relationship health. So don't wait to text them,
don't pretend you're not interested, show up the way that
you would want someone else to show up for you,
without the games. I think in the same vein, if
(35:34):
someone is playing games with you, I want you to
remember that a mixed signal is still a signal. If
they are making you feel anxious or uncomfortable, if they
are causing you to doubt yourself, I need you to
detach and pull all of your energy back. I need
you to show them very clearly, this kind of behavior
(35:58):
will not get my attention, and it will not get
my respect, and it most certainly will not get me.
And honestly, I actually don't think it's a bad thing
to just say that to someone, to just say I
don't like these games. And I'll be honest. When I
met my partner, when I met my boyfriend Tom, he
(36:18):
he's a lawyer. I don't think I've said that before,
but he's a lawyer, and so he's very, very busy.
And when we first started dating, like, we would text
a lot and I wouldn't hear from him for like,
you know, four hours, and I'd be like, oh my god,
he's playing games. And so I said to him, I
was like, hey, I need you to text me back
quicker because this makes me feel really insecure and it
makes me feel like you're not interested. So if you're
(36:39):
playing games with this, like I'm not interested in it,
and if it's something else that I need to understand
about your communication style, let me know. And that's how
I found out that my boyfriend actually has a really
healthy relationship with his phone, and I perhaps do not,
but yes, please prioritize self respect over temporary feelings. But
(37:00):
if someone is disrespecting you playing games or they don't
align with your standards, walk away. I don't think your
self worth is up for negotiation. The way they treat
you in the beginning is the way they're going to
treat you for the entire relationship. It's not going to
get any better than the early days when they're trying
to court you. Please remember that if you're someone who
(37:22):
does still find that they put the rose colored glasses on.
This is my litmus test. This is the question I
would ask myself, Is this the story that I would
tell about my soulmate? If in the future we had
children and our children asked about how he first met
and how he first started dating, would I want to
(37:43):
tell them the truth about this story? Because if someone
is not giving you a good story or a good narrative,
or is not treating you in a way that you
would be happy to tell your children or your parents
or your friends how they were treating you. No, they're
not the one, Okay. So my fourth tip is actually
(38:03):
to do with the first date and how to really
make sure that you are stepping into the room the
bar wherever you are meeting this person, feeling confident, feeling
like you can advocate for what you want, feeling like
you have the power. So before I would go on
first dates, I used to have three or four affirmations
that I would always tell myself. I would get ready,
(38:25):
I would listen to a specific playlist that I had made,
filled with like music that was over one hundred beats
per minute, so like high energy, exciting, And then before
I would leave, I would repeat these four affirmations three
to four affirmations to myself in the mirror. The first one,
I already have everything I need in life. Love is
(38:48):
just a bonus. That was my favorite. The second, I
am enigmatic, The third, I am masterful. The fourth I'm confident.
The words that you speak to yourself become reality. We
see that time and time again in studies and research
on positive self talk. You can let yourself and your
(39:11):
sense of self be dictated by external judgments and other
people's opinions, or you can take all of that information
and say, none of this is as important as what
I have to say about myself, the judgments I have
of myself, how well I feel in my own body.
Right before I would go into the date like I
had done my positive self talk, I had done my music,
(39:34):
I had done all these little small things that made
me feel like I was gonna have fun. I would
do this like physical exercise where I would stand outside
and I would right before I would go in, put
my chest up, shoulders back, and I would just like
shake everything out. I do this like huge smile, and
I would just imagine all this energy lifting from my
(39:55):
toes all the way to my head, and I would
just be ready to have a fun time. And I
would go in being like this could be the worst
date I ever go on, but at least it's going
to be a good story. And at least there is
nothing that this person can say or do that's going
to make me feel bad about myself because I've already
kind of put on this emotional armor. I used to
call this like the high value person mindset. Basically, I
(40:19):
was doing everything in my power to convince myself first
and foremost that I was valuable, I was deserving a love,
respect effort, that I was magnetic. I needed to make
sure I believed that about me before I was trying
to convince someone else. Often, because if you really do
believe that about yourself someone else is going to immediately
feel drawn to you. As humans, we love when other people,
(40:44):
when we can see other people respect themselves, and when
they are confident, and when they know that they're the shit.
So my final tip for reclaiming your power in dating
is to reframe rejection as filtering. Research on rejection sensitivity
(41:04):
shows that we obviously personalize rejection and we immediately assume
that it's always coming down to something about us rather
than about someone else's preferences. This is not a you problem.
If someone doesn't like you, I need you to understand
(41:25):
that it is their way of doing exactly what I'm
asking you to do, which is advocate for yourself. And
the thing is, if they know that you're not the
right match for them, it's actually a real gift that
they have made that clear early on, instead of convincing
you and trying to convince themselves that this could work.
(41:48):
This is all just a form of filtering. Rejection is
a way of weeding out incompatible partners before you invest
too much, too soon, too early, And the fact that
someone else has done it for you is great because
eventually you would have found some reason to reject them,
and you may have felt pretty awful about it. They've
(42:11):
saved you the pain, They've saved you the stress. They've
also saved you the cognitive and mental effort of having
to figure that out for them. The right person is
going to come along and all of those rejections are
going to feel worth it. And I just want you
to be someone that your soulmate would fall in love with.
You know, I know this sounds bizarre, but when I
(42:33):
went through that really terrible period, I remember saying to myself,
I just don't think my soulmate would fall in love
with me right now because I have no love for myself,
and because I'm not, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be in
this situation ready to see them for who they are.
They could anyone could give me the smallest amount of interests,
(42:54):
and I would confuse them as a soulmate, so I'm
not actually able to delineate or tell. And most importantly,
they could show me all the love in the world,
and at some level I would crave it, but at
another level I would think I didn't deserve it. So seriously,
the focus has to be on you at every single
(43:15):
stage until this person proves them to prove themselves to
be a partner like you, will find so much more
success in dating when you make it a completely selfish activity,
when you focus on yourself, and when you realize once
again you already have everything you need in life. This
(43:35):
is just a bonus. All Right, We're going to take
another little short break before we come back with our
listener questions and our listener dilemmas around reclaiming power in dating.
So stay with us. So question one from a listener,
(43:56):
I get attached way too quickly. But I like that,
I love people. D how do I balance those I
want to firstly say, I actually don't think that it's
a bad thing to get attached too quickly. I know
it can like feel kind of painful for us. But
if the reason you don't like that you get attached
too quickly is because other people shame you for it,
(44:19):
or because you feel like people get scared off, I
don't think they're the one. I don't think that they're
the one if you put everything on the table and
they go, oh, that's awkward. So the shame around getting
attached too quickly, I'll never understand. What I do understand
is the difficulty that comes with seeing people for their
(44:40):
potential and not for what they're actually going to give you,
or for their actions or for who they are. So
I would say for the first month, if you get
attached too quickly, just roll back the emotional investment so
you're not completely cutting them off. I've often had this
problem in the past where I know I can get
(45:01):
attached really really quickly, so I kind of deny myself
any access to that person, thinking that it's gonna stop things. No,
what we want is a balanced access, So limit how
much you see them, don't try and rush the timeline.
In fact, create milestones for you now that you have
to have to stick to. So basically, create like a
(45:23):
calendar for yourself that you know this person isn't allowed
to meet your friends before week six, no overnight stays
before week four, no weekend trips before week eight, don't
meet the parents before month three. Basically, despite everything that
you want to do, I want you to commit to
these previous limits that you have put on any relationship
(45:47):
that you are in, such that you don't end up
speeding down this road and it ends up being a
dead end street and you crash at the end. And
you feel, you know, a bit embarrassed for having introduce
them to family or having made such an investment of
time and energy in them before they prove themselves to you.
So spend as much time as you can getting to
(46:09):
know them before you progress to that next stage of
a relationship. All right, So question number two, should you
hold off on sex to reclaim your power? This is
an interesting one because I feel like this idea of
holding off sex kind of comes from like a purity
culture perspective, But I do also think that sometimes we
(46:30):
use sex as a way to like make someone like
us a little bit too soon. When I was single,
I found that when you slept with someone didn't really
matter because if they were going to respect you, they
would regardless of when you chose to be intimate, if
you slept with them on the first date versus the
(46:52):
tenth date. If that person was real and if they
really liked you, it wouldn't scare them off, so they
were involved as well. You know, it's not like they're
thinking you're giving it up too early and that's a
sign that like you're this impure person or like that
you're loose, because they are equally doing it so that
(47:12):
logic like you never really made sense for me. For me,
I think reclaiming my power was deciding that if I
wanted to have sex on the first day, that was fine.
If I wanted to have sex on the twentieth date,
that was also fine. My power came from deciding for myself.
My power came from not being rushed into it and
making sure that I examined my intentions so that the
(47:34):
only reason I was doing it wasn't just to, you know,
keep them for a little bit longer because I thought
that's what they wanted from me. I just think properly
evaluate what tone you want to set, what you're after,
and whether you feel like emotionally prepared for that vulnerability,
whether you would be okay with sleeping with them and
not wanting anything serious, whether you feel like you need
(47:57):
to have sex with them just for them to like you,
like if that's your only reason, and definitely don't have
sex with them, but if it feels like a natural
progression of the relationship and if you want to do it,
you should totally totally do it. I think again, it
comes back to playing games. If someone isn't going to
respect you or isn't going to make you feel in
(48:17):
control or you're not going to feel powerful if you
have sex with them, don't do it. But yes, I
don't think that. I don't know. I don't want to
say it doesn't really matter, because it does matter. But
I think that if it's going to change someone's opinion
of you, then they're probably not the right person, all right.
Question number three, how to put yourself out there when
you've never been in a relationship before. This is actually
(48:40):
a question I get quite a lot. I think there
are a lot more late bloomers in our twenties and
in this decade than we imagine. There is a huge
focus on dating and sex and having these romantic experiences
as like a ride of passage. If you're not quite
there yet. Honestly, I'm excited for you. I really am
(49:01):
quite excited for you because there is so much really
amazing stuff to come, and the experience of falling in
love for the first time and having your first boyfriend
or girlfriend or partner like it is. Actually it's just
a really fun experience. So don't feel like you've fallen behind.
Feel like there is just so much opportunity ahead of you.
I wish sometimes that I could go back and experience
(49:23):
falling in love again for the first time, all over again,
because it is so beautiful. But in terms of dealing
with the insecurity of going out there and feeling like,
oh my god, everyone like I've never dated before, this
is a new thing. Shift your mindset to think of
it like an experiment and it makes it feel less serious.
So commit to like a three month experiment of asking
(49:44):
people out, being forward, getting on the app or getting
on the apps, making the first move, asking friends to
set you up, and just go on as many dates
as you can. Whether it's amazing, terrible, awful, it's all data,
it's all research. Each experience is an important one, even
if it's bad, because it's all about getting comfortable with
(50:06):
being visible and being seen and building up those dating skills,
because it really is such a skill to be able
to talk to someone that you don't know and find
out the information that you want to know. And it
is a real skill to be vulnerable, and it is
a real skill to have confidence in these situations and
to be self assured. So I think you just need
(50:27):
to move past firstly that mental barrier and then the
social barrier. And just get more experience up. I'm actually
just so excited for people who are in this situation.
I feel like not being in a relationship feels like
a burden, especially if you're at a certain age, but
actually it's kind of a blessing because you get to
(50:48):
be more mature when you step into your first relationship
and you've saved like such a beautiful thing to come
a little bit later, so you have more time to
really savor it. So I don't want to be like
toxic positivity on you. I do just want you to
see like the grass is greener perspective, you know, as
someone who's been in quite a few relationships who started
(51:10):
dating really early, Like sometimes I do look at the
experiences of people who have waited a bit longer and
have just been like, wow, I'm really excited for you,
and it's quite a magical time, all right. Fourth and
final question for today, how to come back from a
horrible date that you feel completely defeated by one word
and one word only, it's humor. It's humor. Laugh about
(51:32):
it with your friends, Treat it like a good story,
even write like a funny story about it in your notes.
App Like almost in the sense of this is a
story that could go in like your biography or whatever,
and just remember that we've all been there. These are
the stories that I think really exhaust us. Right, We've
(51:52):
all been through a really terrible date where we thought
it was going to go really really amazing, and this
person has just been rude, They've not been what we expected.
It just hasn't turned out right. It's all for the plot.
And the first thing I would do is call your friends,
laugh about it with them, write about it, post like
a funny private Instagram, sorry, just anything so that you
(52:14):
can turn away from despair and to laughter, because I
think if you let those bad dates really get you down,
you're going to start expecting a bad date from every
single person, and then you start acting like they've already
disappointed you, and then you both end up disappointed. So
keep it light, keep it fun, keep it airy, and
remember that if this person has problems that they've projected
(52:37):
on you, and if they've treated you poorly or just
been like a dick, that all comes down to their insecurity.
Please don't let them drag you down as well. Don't
let them make you think that you don't deserve love
and don't make them think that the next day isn't
going to be better, because I promise that it will be.
(52:58):
Sometimes it is just a numbers game. I don't know.
There's so many theories about this. It's a numbers game.
It happens when you least expect it. There's one soul
mate for all of us. I think the defining theme
of dating in your twenties and reclaiming your power during
this period is just to go out there and have
fun and be open to the opportunity of romance, even
(53:21):
if you've been burnt before. So I want to thank
you all for listening. If you made it this far,
drop a little rose emoji down below. I love knowing
how many of you listen to the full episode. It
always makes me feel so so special. If you have
further like dating dilemmas or questions about reclaiming your power,
also drop them in the comments. I'll be around answering
some of them. Make sure that you are following us
(53:43):
on Instagram so that if you have your own listener
question for future episodes, you are around to ask them
and you know when they are going up. If you
haven't already, make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube.
We have video coming out very very soon, and hello
along the podcast right here where you are now. Give
us a five star review. Join the community. We'd love
(54:06):
to have you around, and we'd love to let you
know when we have new episodes, dropping twice a week
every Tuesday and Friday. But until next time, stay safe,
be kind, be gentle with yourself, especially in today's dating climate,
and we will talk very very soon,
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties. There is really no easy
way to say this. Dating in your twenties is hard,
(00:23):
especially right now. It feels like a bit of a
minefield of people who won't commit, people who seem way
too good to be true, and it turns out that
they actually are incompatibility, getting ghosted, dates canceled last minute,
just to name a few experiences that I'm sure a
lot of us have currently been enduring. When this has
kind of been going on for a while, and these
(00:45):
experiences definitely dominate our dating story or our dating narrative,
we can become very detached and very defeated and very passive,
and to put it simply, I think we lose our
power and our agency in dating. We're no longer as
picky as we would like to be. We don't call
(01:05):
out disrespect or bad behavior. The whole activity becomes a
lot more anxiety inducing than it is fun. And I
think we get into this really negative headspace of expecting
people to disappoint us and then not being surprised when
they actually do. I think the biggest way to counteract
(01:26):
this mindset and this defeatist reality when it comes to
dating is to really come back to ourselves and focus inwards,
not just for the sake of our love life, but
for the sake of actually loving our own life. And
I was speaking about this on Marchra recently. Mantra, for
those of you who don't know, is my other podcast.
It's a lot more spiritual. We talk about a specific affirmation,
(01:48):
grounding saying or Marchra every single week. Recently, I did
an episode on I Nurture Relationships That Enrich My Life,
and I talked about how something I wish I had
learned sooner was that dating is meant to be a
enjoyable and it's meant to be a selfish activity. Truly,
(02:08):
dating is actually meant to be rather selfish. We are
taught to always be ready to compromise and to be
flexible and to be good and to meet everyone's needs.
And that's great, fair enough, but I don't think that
shouldn't be the case when it comes to trying to
find your life partner. Very few decisions are as important,
and I think compromise now in the early stages of
(02:31):
dating is misery and frustration. Later on, I wish I'd
known that at twenty one. I wish I'd known that,
maybe even at twenty three. But when we really do
start to focus on what do I want, how do
I want to be treated, what is my vision for
love and what would it take for that to be meant,
we experience such a huge and powerful shift that not
(02:53):
only makes dating fun, it makes it intentional, and I
think it makes it fruitful as well. So today I
want to give you my formula for reclaiming your power
in dating and also talk about why it is that
we do lose our agency, why repeated rejection and relationship
trauma and a scarcity mindset are some of the reasons
(03:14):
dating feels so personally hard. And I want to talk
about some of the dating dilemmas that you guys have
been facing as well as people in their twenties. Some
of you reached out with some pretty epic stories, some
pretty frustrating stories to read from my perspective, So I
want to talk about exactly how you can bring back
your own control, how you can be in control of
(03:36):
those situations. So, without further ado, my lovely, lovely listeners,
let's get into my guide to reclaiming your power in
dating in your twenties and beyond. I want to start
out by talking about a time in my own life
when I completely abandoned myself to who I was, essentially
(04:01):
because I thought that their approval and if they liked
me and if I was good enough for them, that
could turn into love, and that could make me happy
and spoil the alert. In reality, it actually took me
to a very low point, and I'm sure a lot
of you could probably tell me a similar story. So
(04:22):
back in twenty twenty one, I was dating like my
first really serious boyfriend, and longtime listeners will know that
that breakup is really what created the psychology of your twenties.
But you know, he was great, he was a nice guy.
It just didn't work. We broke up and he moved
on really really quickly, like very quickly. And it was
(04:47):
this whole story where I was still somewhat under the
illusion slash delusion that we were going to get back together,
and one of my friends had to be like, hey,
he actually has a new girlfriend. I think it just
put me into the real painful part of relationship grief
very very quickly. I was like, oh, I thought that
(05:07):
maybe I would have time, that maybe we could still
have this shared experience of grieving and missing each other.
And suddenly he's moved on. He's on the next he's
on to the next person, like he's he's all good
and fine and dandy. I think that created a bit
of a chain reaction in me where I looked at
my own life and I was like, how come it
was so hard for me to find someone else. I
(05:30):
was very very lonely. I'd been with this person for
a while. It was still in Australia COVID lockdowns, so
you know, I didn't get to do all the fun
things that you would normally do post breakup. I didn't
get to go out and party with my friends. I
didn't get to go out on these dates. I didn't
get to, you know, just be alive and present and
out and about, and so I was feeling very very rejected.
(05:54):
I was feeling very poorly about myself. I think my
self worth was definitely not an asset that I had
at that time. And it was during this period where
I thought, Okay, maybe I should start dating again. Insane.
It was an insane decision because I was four months
out of a heartbreak, probably like my most significant one
(06:18):
to date. I really had a support network, but it
wasn't readily available to me. We had this like little
break from lockdown where you know, everything kind of went
back to normal for a couple of months, and I
went dating. It was almost like a sport for me.
I was going on sometimes two dates a day, meeting
(06:41):
all these people, and the thing was, none of them
were particularly nice to me. And yet I don't think
there was a single date that I went on where
I thought, oh, he's not interested. I should leave this.
Every single one I was like, potential, potential, potential, potential.
I basically, I'm going to say it as it is.
(07:03):
I'd lost my power and I met someone during that time,
which really any semblance of agency and control and autonomy
I had in this process, any slither that I had
left that was finally taken away from me because basically,
I fell in love with someone very quickly who had
(07:27):
absolutely no interest in loving me back, and everything about
everything about our relationship became dictated by what he wanted.
We would only hang out at his house. We would
only do the dates that he wanted. We only had
the label that he wanted to give the relationship, which
(07:48):
was not the label that I wanted. And it was very,
very painful, and I basically sat in that relationship that
wasn't quite a relationship for six months and it was
like I was looking at myself from a high up place,
just losing who I was. I was just in this relationship.
And I used to be such a forthright advocate for myself.
(08:10):
You know, if someone didn't treat me right, I was
gonna call it out, And in this situation, I just
absolutely did not. I just sat there and I just
let him say, you know sometimes really mean things about me,
and I let him just be do. I just let
him take control and get whatever he wanted out of
the relationship, whilst I was very clearly sitting there miserable,
(08:32):
not getting what I wanted out of the relationship. And
you best believe I was not going to advocate for
myself because all I wanted in that moment was love. Really,
I was not in the place to be dating, and
I was so fragile and I was so insecure. All
I wanted was someone to just like hold me and
say I was special, or at least kind of treat
(08:54):
me like I was special a couple of days a week.
Needless to say, this relation relationship, if you can call it,
call it a relationship, did not work out. It most
certainly did not work out, and we kind of ended things.
And if I thought that I had been in a
low place before, the six months post that relationship was
(09:19):
so painful and almost like in so I think about
it and I feel so bad for that girl because
I've spoken about it on the show before, but I
couldn't even like speak to someone. I just moved to
Sydney at the time as well, and obviously I had
to try and meet all these new people. I just
didn't feel special at all. I was like, why would
anyone want to be my friend? Why would anyone want
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to talk to me right now? I'm just wasting their time,
I'm boring them. I have these distinct memories of being
at parties that my friends had invited me to, like
the two friends that I had in Sydney at the time,
and just not being able to hold a conversation with
someone and just being like, oh my god, they're bored,
they're bored, they don't want to talk to me anymore,
and then leaving the compversation and self sabotaging, and I
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just really felt absolutely terrible about myself. And it all
stemmed back to the fact that I had let myself
be I don't want to say taken advantage of I'd
let myself be treated badly. Now I say that, and
I don't want people to take that out of context
and think that I am saying that anyone who's been
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through a terrible relationship or even an abusive relationship is
responsible for their treatment. Really not the case, like, really
not the case. But I can say in terms of
my experience that I knew very clearly and I could
feel it bubbling up that I was not being treated right,
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that I had lost my agency, that I was not happy,
that I was not confident, and I continued to almost
subject myself to that environment and to that emotional environment
and situation because I did not feel like I deserved more,
And the idea of having to go back out there
and be single when I had no power as a
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person who was dating just felt absolutely terrible. Obviously, I
made it through. I made it through, and now I'm
with someone really, really amazing. Obviously, I've skipped an important
chapter here, and that's the chapter that we're talking about today.
You know, how did I go from having that terrible
relationship which genuinely broke me and which I still sometimes
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sit and think about and think, whooh out to where
I am now? I've been with my partner for two
years and he is wonderful and he is spectacular, and
he treats me so well, and he is just like genuinely,
it's like we are two complete people coming together making
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each other more whole. Gemma, you know, five years ago
would not have imagined that could have occurred. And it's
because when it came to dating, I became in selfish,
I became independent. I became so focused on what I
needed and what I wanted because I really realized after
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those experiences, no one else was going to advocate for me.
You know, everyone else in the dating scheme, in the
dating sphere was putting themselves first. So it was my
turn to put myself first, and it was my turn
to be bossy about what I wanted. And honestly, it's
funny because I think I almost went a little bit
(12:30):
too far my current boyfriend. I almost didn't go on
a date with him. It's like a funny story retell now,
whereby he hadn't confirmed plans the day of, and I
was texting my friends being like, no, a real man
wouldn't treat me this way. My soulmate wouldn't treat me
this way. I'm not going to go on this date.
But I gave him a second chance. I'm so glad
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that I did, and here we are now. So my
experience aside, what is it that makes us lose our
power in dating? I think the first reason why you
may end up in a similar situation to me kind
of dating losers, with people that don't treat you right,
is because of repeated rejection. Being rejected by someone you
like or admire. It stings on a very deep interpersonal level.
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A great deal of human emotion is going to come
from rejection, and is going to emerge in the face
of real, anticipated, imagined, even remembered rejection by other people.
We are socially primed to experience rejection as a painful experience,
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almost physically painful, and then as a result of that
turn inwards looking for answers as to why we were
the ones who were wrong, We were the ones who
were different, We were the one who couldn't make this
person happy or couldn't fit in. A consequence of that
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is that we believe that we must be the ones
who have to change or who have to adapt in
order to be accepted. So there was a two thousand
study that found that the more rejection you experience, the
more you actually do begin to cope through avoidant strategies.
So this was actually a study done on academics, university
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academics who were told that their papers and manuscripts had
either been rejected or not, and they found in the
experimental condition where certain participants were having papers rejected left, right,
and center, the more rejections they received fake rejections, the
more they withdrew, the more they became quite hostile, but
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in general, the more they actually began to doubt themselves. Now,
obviously this was an experiment. These rejections actually had nothing
to do with the quality of their work, but they
ended up really believing that just because this random person
told them that their paper was terrible or that they
didn't deserve some kind of accolade, it must be true.
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And very few of them said, Oh, I don't actually
think you're right. I think your criticisms of me are wrong.
It's so bizarre how we as humans are so quick
to trust other people's approval or judgments of us, but
we are so ready to dismiss or not even think
about our own, not even think about what we think,
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and rejection will do that to you. Another piece of
research from the University of New South Wales here in
Australia also found that, you know, repeated rejection is one thing.
Sometimes for some of us, all it takes is one
really profound, emotionally salient rejection to change you. So, according
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to this doctor who ran the study, doctor Zimmermann, if
we experience a really unexpected romantic rejection early in life,
this can actually be a catalyst of events for a
lot of trust issues. And it's very hard to understand
why it's happened, But it's because this experience of really
committing to someone and wanting them to like you and
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then feeling rejected is so painful that your brain almost
promises to itself for that to never happen again. Now,
if your self worth has been depleted by a number
of dates not working out, a few instances are being
ghosted or turned down, or just even a significant one off.
You may firstly try to avoid those feelings, but then
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you'll begin to change your attitudes and your actions. And
one way that we do that in one way that
we respond to romantic rejection is that we lower our
standards and we settle. We do this because we have
likely developed an actual fear of rejection at this point,
so we want to prevent it from happening again. And
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the way that we can prevent it from happening again
is either a completely withdrawing or be shaping ourselves to
constantly be what someone else wants, because that will ensure
that no one will ever make us feel the way
that we've already been made to feel. The second reason
we may have lost our power in dating is because
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of a really unfortunate and painful experience of relationship trauma.
This is going to come in a lot of forms,
but some examples of relationship trauma include being cheated on,
even repeated instances of micro cheating, being in quite an
emotionally volatile relationship where you never knew where you stood,
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being betrayed, a traumatic breakup, just some examples. Something that
many of us don't know is that relationship trauma in
our late teens in our early twenties does actually have
the ability to reshape our attachment style. We often tend
to think that our attachment style is somewhat locked in
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after childhood and that the only thing that influences attachment
style is our parental relationships and our attachment to them.
That is not true. A twenty seventeen paper titled adult attachment, stress,
and Romantic Relationships. I actually discovered this piece of research
when I was researching my book, but it found that
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there are three types of negative events in adulthood that
can actually rewire your attachment style. So there's negative external
events this has nothing to do with your relationship but
still makes you feel unsteady, So may have been the
death of a loved one or the death of a partner,
or an injury or a really traumatic, dangerous situation you
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went through with someone. Then we have negative relational events,
so conflict, separation, abandonment, breakup, and then cognitive or emotional events.
So this may be that your attachment style has been
rewired because you, as a person have started experiencing heightened
levels of anxiety due to some biological change. Due to
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some cognitive change, you start seeing everything with anxiety, including
your relationship. The biggest one, though, is the second relational events,
specifically negative relational events. So much trust and vulnerability goes
into caring for someone and goes into loving someone, And
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when someone takes that trust and vulnerability and treats it
like it's nothing, that does leave permanent damage. And it
may explain why we can enter a relationship entirely secure
and in an entirely healthy place, only to leave it
anxious or avoidant or insecure, and with a whole new
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perspective on love. So finally, the third reason we lose
our power in dating is because we begin to adopt
a scarcity mindset. In other words, we let whoever it
may be, the media, our married friends, our parents, we
let them convince us that we are running out of
time to find a quote unquote good one. The scarcity mindset,
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it's actually an economics term, and it refers to the
belief that a resource is limited and that results in
us making irrational decisions. It's why say you're at the
grocery store and you're trying to buy your favorite yogurt
and suddenly there's only two of these yogurts left, like
it's almost sold out. You only need one yogurt, but
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you're going to buy two because this idea of scarcity
is making you make irrational decisions. It's the same reason
why if someone tells you that a bag is one
of a kind or exclusive, you're more likely to want
to buy it because they've created scarcity within you, where
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if something seems less available, it actually feels more worthwhile
to have. Yes, the scarcity mindset usually refers to a
consumer good, it can also refer to love and why
we feel that a good partner is becoming a lot
harder to find. So the other important part of this
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concept is that it can actually be artificially altered. So
basically in economics, people can make you think that something
is scarce and can make you think that something is
less available, and they do that as a way to
make you want to buy it. There are a lot
of ways that we are made to feel like a
good relationship is quite scarce at the moment, whether it's
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dating horror stories, whether it's you know how dating apps
are structured, whether it's all the hit pieces people are
writing in magazines that it's harder for millennials to find love, etc. Etc.
It's all making us very very scared. I want to
remind you people come on and off the market, the
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dating market, every single day. People move cities, People suddenly
come back on the market and are ready to date again.
People break up. There is someone perfect for you out
there thinking exactly what you are thinking right now. Oh
my gosh, there's no good people left, and here you
are thinking the same thing. And I think that's part
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of the story that you're going to tell each other
one day of like, oh my god, I'd really given
up hope and here you are. But in the meantime,
don't let a scarcity mindset take over and cause you
to miss out on meeting that person because you felt
like you had to hurry up and settle down. I
don't think that's I don't think that's the healthiest decision
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for you right now. And I always say you would
much rather be single for another ten years and find
your person at thirty five or thirty nine or thirty two,
then spend the next ten years with someone that you
settled for and have to break up anyways and be
back in the same spot. But now just with more
emotional damage. So we lose our power because of rejection,
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relationship trauma, and a scarcity mindset. To name the big three,
What are the consequences of this? Where we've already spoken
about a few, I think the biggest one is self abandonment,
abandoning what you need in a relationship, ignoring your needs
just for the idea and the promise of love. This
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can mean that we often let others make decisions for us,
We ignore what we need from a situation, We ruminate
constantly about whether this other person likes us, rather than
whether we like ourselves or whether we even like them.
And we also begin to tolerate behavior that we never
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imagined for ourself and we never imagined would be part
of our love story. Another consequence of abandoning ourselves or
lowering our standards losing our power, it's that I actually
think we begin to feel feel it in our body,
feel a lot of discomfort, distress, and emotional pain when
you're dating someone or when you know you're in the
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process of courting people who are treating you poorly, where
you feel like you have no agency, you have no control.
I often find that that creates a lot of bodily tension.
It creates real signs, physical signs of emotional distress, like
crying a lot, like feeling sore in parts of your body,
feeling nauseous. There's a really fascinating paper that was published
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in twenty fourteen, and it attempted to map where we
feel emotions in our body, because typically we do feel
emotions physically before we feel them consciously and mentally, we
just don't realize it. And what this paper found was
that when we feel discomfort, stress, anxiety, emotional tension, we
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tend to I feel at first in our face, behind
our eyes, in our throat, in our stomach. When you
lose your power in dating and you are dating people
who make you feel terrible, you are going to feel terrible.
Your body is going to let you know that it's
not happy with these emotional circumstances. I remember a friend
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telling me how she went through this period of dating
the wrong person and she felt nauseous and ill the
entire time. She went to the doctor. She thought she
may have an ulcer. She thought it was something serious,
maybe like a really bad bacteria. When she left the relationship,
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that illness cleared within weeks and I know that sounds
quite I don't know serendispotus or convenient or like a coincidence.
I promise you it's not the emotional and social interactions
that you're having, specifically one that feel so intimate and vulnerable.
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If they are not right, if they don't sit right
with you mentally, they're not going to sit right with
you physically. And I think love and dating is not
something that we can play games with, especially if you
are someone who is rather sensitive and rather romantic, because
it does influence you. It influences your mind, it influences
your body, it influences your soul. Okay, so now to
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the juicy bit. What can we do about it? We're
going to take a short break, but when we return,
I've got my five biggest tips for you today, So
stay tuned. This is gonna sound so cliche, and I'm
sorry for it in advance, but it's not you. It's
just dating. It's just the way that dating is working
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at the moment. It's a battlefield where the way we
have been socialized to date in the twenty first century
and to treat others, especially these days, is in a
very transactional way, a very flippant way, and also in
a way that I think essentially assumes that someone better
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is always going to come along, and it means that
you have to have stronger boundaries and be a lot
more intentional about what you want from a relationship. If
this doesn't come naturally to you, it didn't come naturally
to me. If it's been scared out of you, don't worry.
I'm going to give you the formula for how to
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really reapply agency and control when it comes to your
dating experiences. Now, some of these may sound kind of obvious,
you may have heard them before, but I think the
reason I'm saying them again is because they are very,
very important. So even if they're not new to you,
I do hope that you still absorb them in the
same way. Let's start with my first tip. My first
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tip is that you need to take a dating detox.
You need to take a full, big step back from
dating before you can dive in again. Half the reason
I finally start cutting corners with dating or giving up
control is because we are simply emotionally exhausted and our
ability to uphold our values has been slowly whittled away
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over time. If you're feeling more tired then excited to
go on dates. If you are dragging yourself to dates
just wanting to get it over with, hoping to find
someone good enough so you don't have to be single anymore,
pause and just stop dating all together, because this is
a very straight and narrow path to settling. You're probably
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experiencing dating burnout, and it's very similar to career or
workplace or emotional burnout. And it's very similar in the
sense that it's going to get progressively worse and worse
until you do a full reset. Now, something I see
with people who expel speriencing dating burnout is that they'll
take a step back for like a couple of weeks.
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That doesn't give them the chance to fully fill up
their cup and to restore all their depleted emotional resources.
I think you need six months minimum to get back
to yourself post dating burnout before you were ready to
date again. And I'm going to give this my most profound,
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big personal endorsement ever. I actually did do a six
month dating detox before I met my partner Tom, and
I'm not saying that it magically made the love of
my life appear. What I am saying is that I
was able to really see clearly when he showed up,
and I was able to kind of push through all
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the garbage and the chaos of other people who weren't
meant for me. But if I hadn't done a dating detox,
I would have overly invested in them. My second tip,
you need to have a list of non negotiables. This
list is going to be your best friend, and it
will allow you to shift from seeking validation to seeking
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self approval. It will allow you to stop asking yourself,
Oh do they like me? Are they enjoying my company?
Do they want to go on a second date with me?
To do I like them? Did I have fun on
that date? Is this someone I could see a future with?
I think what it really does is it recenters something
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that we've lost along the way. What it recenters is
our own opinion at the center of our life. This
really is the judgment and the opinion that matters the most.
Be as selfish as you want. I don't think we
hear that a lot in life. I think there are
very few instances where society is okay with telling us
to be selfish. But I'm going to tell it to
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you right now, be selfish and assume that everyone else
is dating with their own best interests at heart until
they prove that they can be a good partner, until
they prove that they are worthy of compromise or of selflessness.
I think you need to keep the focus squarely on
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you and what you want. And this is where this
list of non negotiables becomes really really important, because if
we just say, oh, yeah, I'm not going to compromise,
and we don't have a list, or we don't have
some idea of what we don't want to compromise on,
essentially we just end up doing it anyways. It's like
imagine going to a financial planner and saying, I want
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to be rich, but you don't know what you want
to spend that money on, and you don't know what
you currently spend your money on, and you don't know
what your essential financial needs are. Your financial planner is
going to sit there and say, so, what exactly do
you want from me? Like you're not going to be
able to achieve what you want in money, in life,
in relationships without already having a vision. I'm going to
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give you a actually, my non negotiable list. I pulled
this out of my notes at archives. I used to
bring up this list after every single first date or
sometimes second date that I'd had with someone, just to
be very clear with myself. Is this person matching my requirements?
Or am I being delusional? So this was my list.
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They must be someone looking for monogamy. They must be
someone who I respect and admire. They must have a career, job,
or hobby that they're passionate about. They must have time
for me. They must openly communicate with me. They must
want to live overseas, and they must want to have
a family one day. These were all things I knew
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I needed to feel emotionally secure and to have a
future with someone. But they were also things that I
knew that if I overlooked in the present, they would
be relationship ending in the future. And I saw dating
as something I couldn't just have exclusively have fun with
any more. I was still having fun, but I knew
that I was someone who got carried away very very easily.
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I got attached very very easily. This was my insurance.
You know, whose advice was going to take out of
any ones, I was probably going to take my own,
And so this was a way to say, Hey, your
past self thought this was important. Why are you neglecting
it now? So make a list. It should have at
least five things on your list. If you can't think
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of five, I think you need to be more picky
because there are most certainly five things that you can
think of that would make a relationship perhaps not work
for you. So make sure you know what they are.
You're clear about it, you reflect on past experiences, and
you use your list. My third tip for reclaiming your
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power in dating is to stop playing games. Stop playing
games and set the example for how you want to
be treated. Dating is hard enough, you don't need to
make it any more confusing for yourself. The kind of
games I'm talking about include things like not texting them
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back for the same amount of time that they didn't
text you. I'm guilty of doing that once or twice,
pretending not to be interested at parties or when you
see them, making them jealous, deliberately ignoring them, or expecting
them to read your mind, or testing them without them
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knowing it. All of this just puts up further barriers
between you and the other person. In all honesty, I
think that the games we play in the early stages
of dating. They are a defense mechanism. I think it's
a way of feeling more in control or of keeping
people at a distance because of previous times that you
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have been hurt or you have been let down, and
so pretending not to be interested keeps this nice buffer
between you and them where you can pretend to yourself
as well. Or ignoring them allows you to ignore the
fact that you are actually really invested in them as
a person and you do really like them, and that's
okay even if it doesn't work out. It's really just
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a healthy sign that you know what you want and
that you are brave enough to feel deeply about someone else.
That I think is I just think that's a good
sign for future relationship health. So don't wait to text them,
don't pretend you're not interested, show up the way that
you would want someone else to show up for you,
without the games. I think in the same vein, if
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someone is playing games with you, I want you to
remember that a mixed signal is still a signal. If
they are making you feel anxious or uncomfortable, if they
are causing you to doubt yourself, I need you to
detach and pull all of your energy back. I need
you to show them very clearly, this kind of behavior
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will not get my attention, and it will not get
my respect, and it most certainly will not get me.
And honestly, I actually don't think it's a bad thing
to just say that to someone, to just say I
don't like these games. And I'll be honest. When I
met my partner, when I met my boyfriend Tom, he
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he's a lawyer. I don't think I've said that before,
but he's a lawyer, and so he's very, very busy.
And when we first started dating, like, we would text
a lot and I wouldn't hear from him for like,
you know, four hours, and I'd be like, oh my god,
he's playing games. And so I said to him, I
was like, hey, I need you to text me back
quicker because this makes me feel really insecure and it
makes me feel like you're not interested. So if you're
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playing games with this, like I'm not interested in it,
and if it's something else that I need to understand
about your communication style, let me know. And that's how
I found out that my boyfriend actually has a really
healthy relationship with his phone, and I perhaps do not,
but yes, please prioritize self respect over temporary feelings. But
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if someone is disrespecting you playing games or they don't
align with your standards, walk away. I don't think your
self worth is up for negotiation. The way they treat
you in the beginning is the way they're going to
treat you for the entire relationship. It's not going to
get any better than the early days when they're trying
to court you. Please remember that if you're someone who
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does still find that they put the rose colored glasses on.
This is my litmus test. This is the question I
would ask myself, Is this the story that I would
tell about my soulmate? If in the future we had
children and our children asked about how he first met
and how he first started dating, would I want to
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tell them the truth about this story? Because if someone
is not giving you a good story or a good narrative,
or is not treating you in a way that you
would be happy to tell your children or your parents
or your friends how they were treating you. No, they're
not the one, Okay. So my fourth tip is actually
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to do with the first date and how to really
make sure that you are stepping into the room the
bar wherever you are meeting this person, feeling confident, feeling
like you can advocate for what you want, feeling like
you have the power. So before I would go on
first dates, I used to have three or four affirmations
that I would always tell myself. I would get ready,
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I would listen to a specific playlist that I had made,
filled with like music that was over one hundred beats
per minute, so like high energy, exciting, And then before
I would leave, I would repeat these four affirmations three
to four affirmations to myself in the mirror. The first one,
I already have everything I need in life. Love is
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just a bonus. That was my favorite. The second, I
am enigmatic, The third, I am masterful. The fourth I'm confident.
The words that you speak to yourself become reality. We
see that time and time again in studies and research
on positive self talk. You can let yourself and your
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sense of self be dictated by external judgments and other
people's opinions, or you can take all of that information
and say, none of this is as important as what
I have to say about myself, the judgments I have
of myself, how well I feel in my own body.
Right before I would go into the date like I
had done my positive self talk, I had done my music,
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I had done all these little small things that made
me feel like I was gonna have fun. I would
do this like physical exercise where I would stand outside
and I would right before I would go in, put
my chest up, shoulders back, and I would just like
shake everything out. I do this like huge smile, and
I would just imagine all this energy lifting from my
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toes all the way to my head, and I would
just be ready to have a fun time. And I
would go in being like this could be the worst
date I ever go on, but at least it's going
to be a good story. And at least there is
nothing that this person can say or do that's going
to make me feel bad about myself because I've already
kind of put on this emotional armor. I used to
call this like the high value person mindset. Basically, I
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was doing everything in my power to convince myself first
and foremost that I was valuable, I was deserving a love,
respect effort, that I was magnetic. I needed to make
sure I believed that about me before I was trying
to convince someone else. Often, because if you really do
believe that about yourself someone else is going to immediately
feel drawn to you. As humans, we love when other people,
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when we can see other people respect themselves, and when
they are confident, and when they know that they're the shit.
So my final tip for reclaiming your power in dating
is to reframe rejection as filtering. Research on rejection sensitivity
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shows that we obviously personalize rejection and we immediately assume
that it's always coming down to something about us rather
than about someone else's preferences. This is not a you problem.
If someone doesn't like you, I need you to understand
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that it is their way of doing exactly what I'm
asking you to do, which is advocate for yourself. And
the thing is, if they know that you're not the
right match for them, it's actually a real gift that
they have made that clear early on, instead of convincing
you and trying to convince themselves that this could work.
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This is all just a form of filtering. Rejection is
a way of weeding out incompatible partners before you invest
too much, too soon, too early, And the fact that
someone else has done it for you is great because
eventually you would have found some reason to reject them,
and you may have felt pretty awful about it. They've
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saved you the pain, They've saved you the stress. They've
also saved you the cognitive and mental effort of having
to figure that out for them. The right person is
going to come along and all of those rejections are
going to feel worth it. And I just want you
to be someone that your soulmate would fall in love with.
You know, I know this sounds bizarre, but when I
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went through that really terrible period, I remember saying to myself,
I just don't think my soulmate would fall in love
with me right now because I have no love for myself,
and because I'm not, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be in
this situation ready to see them for who they are.
They could anyone could give me the smallest amount of interests,
(42:54):
and I would confuse them as a soulmate, so I'm
not actually able to delineate or tell. And most importantly,
they could show me all the love in the world,
and at some level I would crave it, but at
another level I would think I didn't deserve it. So seriously,
the focus has to be on you at every single
(43:15):
stage until this person proves them to prove themselves to
be a partner like you, will find so much more
success in dating when you make it a completely selfish activity,
when you focus on yourself, and when you realize once
again you already have everything you need in life. This
(43:35):
is just a bonus. All Right, We're going to take
another little short break before we come back with our
listener questions and our listener dilemmas around reclaiming power in dating.
So stay with us. So question one from a listener,
(43:56):
I get attached way too quickly. But I like that,
I love people. D how do I balance those I
want to firstly say, I actually don't think that it's
a bad thing to get attached too quickly. I know
it can like feel kind of painful for us. But
if the reason you don't like that you get attached
too quickly is because other people shame you for it,
(44:19):
or because you feel like people get scared off, I
don't think they're the one. I don't think that they're
the one if you put everything on the table and
they go, oh, that's awkward. So the shame around getting
attached too quickly, I'll never understand. What I do understand
is the difficulty that comes with seeing people for their
(44:40):
potential and not for what they're actually going to give you,
or for their actions or for who they are. So
I would say for the first month, if you get
attached too quickly, just roll back the emotional investment so
you're not completely cutting them off. I've often had this
problem in the past where I know I can get
(45:01):
attached really really quickly, so I kind of deny myself
any access to that person, thinking that it's gonna stop things. No,
what we want is a balanced access, So limit how
much you see them, don't try and rush the timeline.
In fact, create milestones for you now that you have
to have to stick to. So basically, create like a
(45:23):
calendar for yourself that you know this person isn't allowed
to meet your friends before week six, no overnight stays
before week four, no weekend trips before week eight, don't
meet the parents before month three. Basically, despite everything that
you want to do, I want you to commit to
these previous limits that you have put on any relationship
(45:47):
that you are in, such that you don't end up
speeding down this road and it ends up being a
dead end street and you crash at the end. And
you feel, you know, a bit embarrassed for having introduce
them to family or having made such an investment of
time and energy in them before they prove themselves to you.
So spend as much time as you can getting to
(46:09):
know them before you progress to that next stage of
a relationship. All right, So question number two, should you
hold off on sex to reclaim your power? This is
an interesting one because I feel like this idea of
holding off sex kind of comes from like a purity
culture perspective, But I do also think that sometimes we
(46:30):
use sex as a way to like make someone like
us a little bit too soon. When I was single,
I found that when you slept with someone didn't really
matter because if they were going to respect you, they
would regardless of when you chose to be intimate, if
you slept with them on the first date versus the
(46:52):
tenth date. If that person was real and if they
really liked you, it wouldn't scare them off, so they
were involved as well. You know, it's not like they're
thinking you're giving it up too early and that's a
sign that like you're this impure person or like that
you're loose, because they are equally doing it so that
(47:12):
logic like you never really made sense for me. For me,
I think reclaiming my power was deciding that if I
wanted to have sex on the first day, that was fine.
If I wanted to have sex on the twentieth date,
that was also fine. My power came from deciding for myself.
My power came from not being rushed into it and
making sure that I examined my intentions so that the
(47:34):
only reason I was doing it wasn't just to, you know,
keep them for a little bit longer because I thought
that's what they wanted from me. I just think properly
evaluate what tone you want to set, what you're after,
and whether you feel like emotionally prepared for that vulnerability,
whether you would be okay with sleeping with them and
not wanting anything serious, whether you feel like you need
(47:57):
to have sex with them just for them to like you,
like if that's your only reason, and definitely don't have
sex with them, but if it feels like a natural
progression of the relationship and if you want to do it,
you should totally totally do it. I think again, it
comes back to playing games. If someone isn't going to
respect you or isn't going to make you feel in
(48:17):
control or you're not going to feel powerful if you
have sex with them, don't do it. But yes, I
don't think that. I don't know. I don't want to
say it doesn't really matter, because it does matter. But
I think that if it's going to change someone's opinion
of you, then they're probably not the right person, all right.
Question number three, how to put yourself out there when
you've never been in a relationship before. This is actually
(48:40):
a question I get quite a lot. I think there
are a lot more late bloomers in our twenties and
in this decade than we imagine. There is a huge
focus on dating and sex and having these romantic experiences
as like a ride of passage. If you're not quite
there yet. Honestly, I'm excited for you. I really am
(49:01):
quite excited for you because there is so much really
amazing stuff to come, and the experience of falling in
love for the first time and having your first boyfriend
or girlfriend or partner like it is. Actually it's just
a really fun experience. So don't feel like you've fallen behind.
Feel like there is just so much opportunity ahead of you.
I wish sometimes that I could go back and experience
(49:23):
falling in love again for the first time, all over again,
because it is so beautiful. But in terms of dealing
with the insecurity of going out there and feeling like,
oh my god, everyone like I've never dated before, this
is a new thing. Shift your mindset to think of
it like an experiment and it makes it feel less serious.
So commit to like a three month experiment of asking
(49:44):
people out, being forward, getting on the app or getting
on the apps, making the first move, asking friends to
set you up, and just go on as many dates
as you can. Whether it's amazing, terrible, awful, it's all data,
it's all research. Each experience is an important one, even
if it's bad, because it's all about getting comfortable with
(50:06):
being visible and being seen and building up those dating skills,
because it really is such a skill to be able
to talk to someone that you don't know and find
out the information that you want to know. And it
is a real skill to be vulnerable, and it is
a real skill to have confidence in these situations and
to be self assured. So I think you just need
(50:27):
to move past firstly that mental barrier and then the
social barrier. And just get more experience up. I'm actually
just so excited for people who are in this situation.
I feel like not being in a relationship feels like
a burden, especially if you're at a certain age, but
actually it's kind of a blessing because you get to
(50:48):
be more mature when you step into your first relationship
and you've saved like such a beautiful thing to come
a little bit later, so you have more time to
really savor it. So I don't want to be like
toxic positivity on you. I do just want you to
see like the grass is greener perspective, you know, as
someone who's been in quite a few relationships who started
(51:10):
dating really early, Like sometimes I do look at the
experiences of people who have waited a bit longer and
have just been like, wow, I'm really excited for you,
and it's quite a magical time, all right. Fourth and
final question for today, how to come back from a
horrible date that you feel completely defeated by one word
and one word only, it's humor. It's humor. Laugh about
(51:32):
it with your friends, Treat it like a good story,
even write like a funny story about it in your notes.
App Like almost in the sense of this is a
story that could go in like your biography or whatever,
and just remember that we've all been there. These are
the stories that I think really exhaust us. Right, We've
(51:52):
all been through a really terrible date where we thought
it was going to go really really amazing, and this
person has just been rude, They've not been what we expected.
It just hasn't turned out right. It's all for the plot.
And the first thing I would do is call your friends,
laugh about it with them, write about it, post like
a funny private Instagram, sorry, just anything so that you
(52:14):
can turn away from despair and to laughter, because I
think if you let those bad dates really get you down,
you're going to start expecting a bad date from every
single person, and then you start acting like they've already
disappointed you, and then you both end up disappointed. So
keep it light, keep it fun, keep it airy, and
remember that if this person has problems that they've projected
(52:37):
on you, and if they've treated you poorly or just
been like a dick, that all comes down to their insecurity.
Please don't let them drag you down as well. Don't
let them make you think that you don't deserve love
and don't make them think that the next day isn't
going to be better, because I promise that it will be.
(52:58):
Sometimes it is just a numbers game. I don't know.
There's so many theories about this. It's a numbers game.
It happens when you least expect it. There's one soul
mate for all of us. I think the defining theme
of dating in your twenties and reclaiming your power during
this period is just to go out there and have
fun and be open to the opportunity of romance, even
(53:21):
if you've been burnt before. So I want to thank
you all for listening. If you made it this far,
drop a little rose emoji down below. I love knowing
how many of you listen to the full episode. It
always makes me feel so so special. If you have
further like dating dilemmas or questions about reclaiming your power,
also drop them in the comments. I'll be around answering
some of them. Make sure that you are following us
(53:43):
on Instagram so that if you have your own listener
question for future episodes, you are around to ask them
and you know when they are going up. If you
haven't already, make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube.
We have video coming out very very soon, and hello
along the podcast right here where you are now. Give
us a five star review. Join the community. We'd love
(54:06):
to have you around, and we'd love to let you
know when we have new episodes, dropping twice a week
every Tuesday and Friday. But until next time, stay safe,
be kind, be gentle with yourself, especially in today's dating climate,
and we will talk very very soon,
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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