Struggle to Emotionally let go Despite Really Poor Behaviour

[Ian4996]

Good. You may find it helpful to take break from the dating merry-go-round for a while until you find some passion for something beyond trying to make your relationship fantasies happen. You're not in the right place for that, and so you'll keep choosing to invest in anyone who makes the right noises to seduce you. The dating scene will still be there later, so it's not as though you'd be missing anything by taking some time to fortify your sense of self and your standards for what you consider to be a good match for you.

 

Recognize that most people are NOT our match. That's not cynical, it's natural odds. So the goal of dating is to screen OUT wrong matches, not play with them in the hope of turning a bad match into a good one. It sounds as though you're bypassing the screening process and diving straight into investment.

 

I find it helpful when meeting people to set my internal trust meter to a neutral 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. Then I observe. I allow people to show me whether I'll want to invest more trust over time, or whether I'll withdraw trust and walk away.

 

Advice from grandma: "The problem is not that snakes will cross your path, they will. The problem comes when you lack the self respect to avoid picking up the snake to play with it."

 

Thanks, that's good advice. I do genuinely feel ok to date and I do have a lot of other passions / outside interests. Part of the problem for me right at the moment is that my work is seasonal and I'm more or less off for the summer (so I have a lot of time on my hands). But I'm having a lot of problems with my knee at the mo (which is preventing me from throwing myself into my normal stress reliefs / feel good activities such as hiking, running, tennis etc etc). I know I shouldn't complain as a lot of people would love to have a month or 2 off work but when you're feeling a bit down and lacking your normal pick me ups, too much spare time isn't necessarily a good thing!

[Wiseman2]

Maybe they were free spirits, whatever, but many women hope you stop seeing/having sex with others when you have sex with them. Why not consider that they ghosted because you never brought that up. Number of dates is irrelevant, what's relevant is spreading STDs and women possibly perceiving you as a player or pump and dump kinda guy because you won't speak up.

I didn't initiate any talk as I felt like an exclusivity talk after 3 dates would be putting them under too much pressure too soon

[reinventmyself]

Pay attention and see if you trying to get these women who've pulled away to ultimately like you in the end, that you aren't tying your self esteem or self worth to that.

 

As if. . `if they don't like me there must be something wrong with me. If I can get this woman to like me, then I must be ok'

 

You could find yourself winning over a woman who has character traits you don't care for . . just for the sake of feeling ok with yourself.

 

Feeling ok with yourself is your job.

 

Allowing unsavory people to define you never works. It just makes things worse.

[DancingFool]

Just curious - do you get so quickly and intensely attached if you don't sleep with them so soon? Just something else to consider. While generally deemed more common among women to get seriously attached after sex, it can affect men the same way. It's not so much your heart as hormones plus chemicals in your brain.

 

Perhaps one thing to try is to stay out of the bedroom and let your upper head make better decisions, learn more about the woman you are dating and give yourself some time to evaluate whether she is gf material or not before your lower head takes over. The little head isn't known for making good choices.

[Ian4996]

Pay attention and see if you trying to get these women who've pulled away to ultimately like you in the end, that you aren't tying your self esteem or self worth to that.

 

I agree and that's what I've been guilty of doing and am trying to stop. In the 5-10 minutes on Saturday when me and Girl 2 were chatting on friendly terms again, I felt loads happier. Then when she f***ed off 15 minutes later without a word, I felt pretty desolate again.

I know that basing my feelings on the acceptance of another, particularly someone who can be so flaky and unreasonable, is unhealthy and I'm really trying to address this.

[Ian4996]

Just curious - do you get so quickly and intensely attached if you don't sleep with them so soon?

 

I don't think having early sex makes a big difference one way or the other for me. With Girl 1, it was close to love at first sight for me. By the end of our 1st date, I totally couldn't wait to see her again and this was obviously before sex.

This love at first sight wasn't the case with Girl 2 but I wouldn't say that when we had sex, it caused any huge surge in my level of interest. I liked her and was enjoying seeing her before we had sex and equally, I liked her and was enjoying seeing her after we had sex.

[DancingFool]

I don't think having early sex makes a big difference one way or the other for me. With Girl 1, it was close to love at first sight for me. By the end of our 1st date, I totally couldn't wait to see her again and this was obviously before sex.

This love at first sight wasn't the case with Girl 2 but I wouldn't say that when we had sex, it caused any huge surge in my level of interest. I liked her and was enjoying seeing her before we had sex and equally, I liked her and was enjoying seeing her after we had sex.

 

There is no love at first sight. There is only lust at first sight. Love is a calmer, deeper emotion. Takes time to develop. More importantly love requires actually getting to know the person in front of you. You are operating on intense lust plus a whole lot of imagination and projecting who you want the person in front of you to be because....hormones... So yes, a big part of your issues is super fast unhealthy attachment because your little head is leading hard and fast.

[dias]

There is no love at first sight. There is only lust at first sight. Love is a calmer, deeper emotion. Takes time to develop. More importantly love requires actually getting to know the person in front of you. You are operating on intense lust plus a whole lot of imagination and projecting who you want the person in front of you to be because....hormones... So yes, a big part of your issues is super fast unhealthy attachment because your little head is leading hard and fast.

First you lust and then you love. Not the opposite.

 

That's the point lol

[Ian4996]

So yes, a big part of your issues is super fast unhealthy attachment because your little head is leading hard and fast.

 

Being totally honest, I don't agree with this at all.

 

I know in myself when I have an attraction to someone that is purely sexual (I can think of numerous women for whom my attraction has been sexual only) and I can tell the difference in cases like these when just being with that person (even if we're in a place where sex is never going to happen) puts me on cloud 9.

 

But thanks for your insights nontheless.

[bluecastle]

Being totally honest, I don't agree with this at all.

 

I know in myself when I have an attraction to someone that is purely sexual (I can think of numerous women for whom my attraction has been sexual only) and I can tell the difference in cases like these when just being with that person (even if we're in a place where sex is never going to happen) puts me on cloud 9.

 

But thanks for your insights nontheless.

 

The trouble with a post like this? It's basically you using insightful and reflective language to avoid growing out of the very place you're presently frustrated to be in.

 

Get smaller, humbler, so you can see around more corners and actually get out of this place. "Love at first sight," as DancingFool said, is not a thing that exists. I'm not saying the thing that exists in that moment is just you wanting to rip someone's pants off, but that you've met someone who has a certain kind of juju that lights up your imagination. It's like you've got a movie already on the shelf—the movie of love, of connection—and you meet someone who puts that movie in the DVD player. Now it's playing in your mind in high definition, with them as the projection screen, and the problem becomes that the movie is so good that you lose sight of the person behind the screen and the story you're actually living in, together.

 

Further, per the overall topic here, it seems that what you respond to most fiercely is when someone presses eject on the DVD player when you were still snacking on popcorn. They reference another Tinder date, or drunkenly kiss a friend, and you're suddenly really into things because you were really into the movie you were watching. It is, in other words, all about you, controlling the narrative, and wanting people to be characters in your story rather than, say, co-authors of the screenplay to see about making a movie together.

 

So what you are calling a difficulty in "letting go" is, in ways, a desire for control. And yet where you find heat—the thing we want along with the comfort of the couch—is in loss of control. All of that, really, is fun house mirror stuff, illusory. It's people as vessels for feelings and experiences, rather than people, like you, who you connect with, or don't. When you decide you really want to connect—to throw out all the control stuff—I think you'll find yourself yawning through certain movies that now get you really excited.

[Ian4996]

I think you could well be right on the control thing. I can see it in other areas of my life i.e. I run my own business. I'm much happier making my own work related decisions than having a boss telling me what to do. I live by myself. I prefer individual sports to team sports - I much prefer having winning or losing within my control, rather than relying on others. So you may well be right in that I need to feel in control of how a dating relationship is progressing.

 

"Love at first sight," as DancingFool said, is not a thing that exists. I'm not saying the thing that exists in that moment is just you wanting to rip someone's pants off, but that you've met someone who has a certain kind of juju that lights up your imagination.

 

Agree. I would say I probably used the phrase 'love at first sight' simply because that's the saying. In reality, it was more 'I became massively attracted to this girl over the 4-5 hours of our 1st date and I couldn't wait to see her again'. But that isn't a phrase so instead we say 'it felt like love at first sight'. It's one of those things where for me, the words shouldn't be taken too literally.

I honestly cannot agree with the 'you were just thinking with your d**k' thing though. If I was, I'd be honest enough to say so (and I can think of lots of encounters I've had in the past that were nothing more than lust) but I know in my mind that this wasn't the case here. It wasn't 'love' but it also wasn't just 'lust'. I don't believe it's as black and white as one or the other.

 

Something that I would ask here at this point is having identified a possible cause for feeling the way I do (such as the aformentioned control thing), how best to overcome that?

As I don't feel that I'm choosing to feel the need for control, I feel like it's a natural personality trait of mine that, as I mentioned, shows itself in other aspects of my life.

[Wiseman2]

Everyone wants command over their own life. However you can't control others. The best thing you can do is to date with a strategy and common sense. This means communicate, be straight forward, pace yourself and lay your cards on the table when you want to focus on someone and be exclusive.

 

If you stay in limbo, fail to communicate with confidence and have no plan of action, you'll be blowing in the wind rather than having command over your life. It may be more about confidence than control.

As I don't feel that I'm choosing to feel the need for control, I feel like it's a natural personality trait of mine that, as I mentioned, shows itself in other aspects of my life.

[Ian4996]

Thanks, that's good advice. I've been reading and re-reading the advice on this thread and 1 or 2 others and I think maybe the key for me is just to have lower expectations in the early stages.

Just to accept that they might display unpleasant behaviour / characteristics which make them a no-go. And rather than getting too hacked off by this, just to say 'that's ok. It just shows that they're not my match'.

Just to accept that I can't be fully in control of how dating a specific person goes because, unlike with my business and my house and my sports, it's a joint enterprise - it needs both parties to play ball and it's impossible for me to be in control of more than half of that.

 

So I'm thinking lower expectations and more of a 'what will be will be' attitude and an acceptance of this. Thanks for all the advice in this thread by the way, I've found a lot of it really really useful