DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I was previously in a two year toxic relationship. My ex cheated on me and it was me continuously chasing something I knew would never love me the way I loved him. I dealt with continuous betrayal, and even felt his love for partying/drugs was more of a priority than me…
About 9 months after that relationship I started dating the “perfect” guy. He has all the requirements I need in a guy: stable/successful career, life goals, handsome, funny, loyal, empathetic, low-key, and much more.
The first couple of months were always full of excitement. Now we’re reaching 6 months together and I can’t get rid of the thoughts in my head… I get annoyed by him easily… he shows genuine interest in my day, and I just give him short answers. I stopped showing full interest in his days.
There are days where I am excited to see him and days were it just feels like another day… He is someone that likes to plan a whole month in advance and I just like to go with the flow… he gets extremely excited over the holidays and I am just meh… he recently got a promotion as well, and while I am excited for him I have been hard on myself.
I cheated on him recently, innocently flirting at a bar, and he found out… we communicated and stayed together. He loves me and wants to be with me, but all I can think is… “am I treating him the way my ex treated me?”
I have always wanted to be with someone like him that listens to me and changes behaviors based off the feelings I communicate, but I still can’t find out why I am just not infatuated with him anymore… I just have this constant thought that I can get all this from someone else that I won’t lose interest in, but then I get severely upset about having these thoughts because I genuinely care about him and don’t want to hurt him.
I cannot pinpoint over why I just am not excited etc.… I feel I am obsessively thinking that he is not the one instead of seeing what us right in front of me…
I then also think… omg he is gonna be bald in a few years… I have these shallow thoughts and it’s killing me…
We have so much fun discussing the future together and it seems perfect, but I don’t think we’re meant to be…
What do I do?
Overthinking In Overdrive
DEAR OVERTHINKING IN OVERDRIVE: A quick question for you to think about while you read this, OIO: is your ex the only toxic relationship you’ve had, or is he the latest in a string of s--tty relationships? Keep that in the back of your mind; it’ll be relevant in a moment.
I think your issue is that he’s “perfect”, OIO. Or, rather, he’s “perfect” in as much as he’s the opposite of the last guy you dated.
Yeah, I know, the last dude you dated was so toxic as to be a one-man Superfund site. Meanwhile your current beau is stable, secure, safe… and that’s the problem.
No, seriously.
One of the annoying things about the human condition is that what we think we want and what we respond to can be two different things. What makes this especially annoying is that what we respond to is often counterproductive to sanity, safety, emotional health, etc. This isn’t because “oooh ladies love bad boys” so much as “I’m used to relationships where I haven’t felt secure or cared for and so I’m used to having more drama and strife in my relationships and I don’t know what to do when someone just loves me for me.”
What you describe sounds a lot like an insecure attachment style. A lot of people who have insecure attachment styles have a hard time with more stable, connected relationships. It sounds weird, but knowing that someone is there for you, cares for you, wants to hear about your day and generally be a source of security and comfort actually ends up being a problem for folks with insecure attachment styles. Not because there’s anything wrong with the partner, but because the person with that style is more used to chaos and uncertainty. It’s what they know, it’s often the relationships that their parents or parental figures modeled for them and it ends up causing a lot of problems.
If you’ve spent a lot of time feeling like you had to “earn” affection and attention from someone, that you had to chase after somebody or that you were always at risk of them taking their affection away from you, then that can carve something of a groove in your brain. It creates a pattern of expectations and behaviors that you unconsciously follow – choosing partners who’ve got first class tickets on the Hot Mess Express, ending up in relationships with more drama than a three season show on Hulu and often ending up with partners where their love and attention felt conditional at best. These relationships are also very rarely boring; it’s always lurching from one crisis to another, one more moment in a long line of times when you’ve had to paddle like a motherf--ker trying to keep yourself metaphorically afloat.
And because that is what you’ve come to think of as “normal” for you, then relationships that don’t follow that pattern feel weird and unusual and off-putting.
To make matters worse, these sorts of relationships make it harder to feel secure in yourself – you often feel like you’re not “worthy” of someone secure and stable and may act out in order to sabotage things. You may, for example, go out and cause trouble because on a subconscious level you feel that you don’t “deserve” a “good” relationship with a “good” partner and so you’ll do things to blow it up. You’re not consciously thinking “hey, I’ll go grind up on a stranger in front of my boyfriend because he deserves someone better than me,” but you’re still slamming your hand down on the self-destruction button as a form of penance for not being “good enough” – whatever that would mean.
Case in point: you’re having these shallow intrusive thoughts and acting out in ways that are designed to provoke and upset him. It’s telling to me that the level of “cheating” you did seems to be confined to “flirting with a dude at the bar”. Leaving aside whether that actually fits the definition of “cheating” (I don’t think it does), the fact that it doesn’t seem to have progressed further than that tells me that you’re not actually acting maliciously; you’re just trying to get a response out of him that’s more in line with what you’re used to.
Is it f--ked up? Yeah, kinda is. But it’s f--ked-up-edness in the general spectrum of “human brains are stupid and neurotic”, not “you are a self-destructive force who’s going to detonate messily and all over the place”.
So while it’s certainly possible that there’re actual issues of compatibility here too – just because a guy is great doesn’t mean he’s great for you, specifically – it sounds a lot more to me like a safe relationship makes you uncomfortable and you’re squirming around like a feral cat who doesn’t know if it can trust these big people that keep wanting to feed it and give it pets.
Now, maybe I’m completely off base here. It could be that you need more spontaneity and surprise; some people are chaos muppets and some people are order muppets, and the two can clash when they’re on opposing poles of this particular spectrum. It could be that you need someone who is a little more of a chaos muppet, but who has enough order to not be a complete trash fire – a little more controlled chaos and extemporaneousness, but without the toxicity and emotional withdrawal or mind games of your s--tty ex.
But I suspect that it’s more the former than the latter. I think it may be worth your time to talk to a counselor about attachment issues, especially if your s--tty ex really is just the latest in a line of bad relationships. If it is ultimately a matter of self-esteem and self-sabotage, untangling that particular knot is going to be really helpful. It may or may not fix things in this relationship, but it will mean that you’re less likely to try to blow things up because you feel like you don’t deserve to be loved, or that love means being messy as hell.
Meanwhile, talk to your boyfriend about all of this. Tell him that these are things you worry about. Maybe getting some actual reassurance from him that yes, you’re wonderful, yes he wants to be with you and you don’t need to be afraid he’s going to wake up and realize he could do better might help ease the need for chaos and strife. Even the least trusting of feral cats will settle in and love up on someone who proves that they’re safe, secure and reliable.
Good luck.
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