My dating dysfunctions.
A girl sitting on a boy’s lap in the middle of a crowded street. Kissing. It is the one and only time she will see the boy.
A girl with a boy she loves and can’t get enough of. By the time they end things, sex is the only good thing they have left.
A girl shrinks away from a hand around her shoulder because it might mean something. Her fear is blinding.
This is how my love life has always been. Episodic. Driven by passion and devoid of real emotional intimacy.
This is how my love life is. Still.
When I see a couple that seems happy, I wonder about the mechanics of their relationship. How is it put together? What makes it work? How is it kept from breaking down?
I don’t understand it. And then I think that maybe I am dyslexic in the language of love.
I have looked for answers as long as I’ve been dating. Now the only place left is in myself.
When I was a teenager I was depressed.
It was agonising to wake up. Exhausting to put on clothes. Daylight felt too bright, sounds were too loud and it was an ordeal to force my face into the expressions that would convince others I was a functioning human being. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, leave my body or just sleep.
Melancholy did not stop me from wanting a boyfriend however. I thought if I had a boyfriend I could avoid facing the world. It would just be me and my boyfriend in our private, intimate bubble and I would finally feel happy, full. Saved.
But a funny thing happened. There were boys who liked me and yet when they told me so, I shrunk away from them in fear, only to go back to daydreaming about romance again.
I gravitated towards a different kind of boys. Boys I hardly knew, mostly older, always aloof.
I met them at underage dance parties or through friends. They never liked me because I was too shy but they liked my my body enough to pretend.
I don’t remember their faces or even names although I do remember the sexual things that we did. I felt nothing during those acts, just a cold curiosity and determination to experience sex because it was what we small adults, expected from each other.
Parks, emergency staircases, schools at night, cars are just some of the places I ended up. I didn’t feel happy or fulfilled being with these boys. I knew they were using me.
Oddly enough, I did feel safe. Safe from the intense attention of someone who was truly interested in who I was.
My ugly side and my vulnerability could stay safely hidden. Away from prying eyes filled with infatuation, away from attention, away from love.
Then there was T — he was the closest I came to having a boyfriend in my teens.
I don’t actually remember how I met T. It might have been at a house party or at the designated smoking area in Chatswood where my friends and I used to hang out after school.
It is equally likely that one of his friends was sleeping with one of my friends and we had all gone for a drive together.
The first time we met we barely spoke. But every time I saw his cobalt eyes on me my stomach flipped.
I tried my best not to run away from T, even after he asked me out. We went on awkward dates and sat in his car kissing and hugging. I was younger than him and he was careful not to go further than I wanted. He didn’t know that I had already gone far enough, because when he touched me I tensed, froze up and pulled away.
It wasn’t the idea of sex that scared me. It was the idea of sex with someone who liked me. It was too close, too intimate. I may have been dating T but I was still trying to hide.
In the end I broke it off, not because I was afraid of having sex but because I was afraid of being rejected. He didn’t call me or text me often and when I went away with a friend for a week I barely heard from him at all.
When I think back, breaking up with him was just an excuse to avoid telling him how I felt. The risk was just too great. What if he just laughed at me or worse still, called me needy. It was easier to quit.
I was always struggling like this. I didn’t know where to put my emotions, how to deal with them or how to express them. They accumulated around my heart and seemed to stay there, gathering weight.
I continued not to deal with my emotions as I entered my 20s.
When I started university I was still depressed and also lightly bulimic. Cramming for my HSC the previous year had made me put on weight and succumb to a vicious cycle of binge eating and throwing up.
I stopped thinking about dating. My mind was consumed with thoughts about food. I also hated the degree I had chosen — a combined Science and Commerce degree. With each economics lecture I felt my creativity being sucked out, along with my very life force.
I spent a lot of time skipping class, lying on the floor in my room, binging, smoking and pondering life. Half a year passed before I took pity on myself and became a slightly less depressed Arts student, majoring in Japanese and Linguistics. I started going out again and stopped throwing up, although I did continue to be obsessed with food.
At the end of my second year at uni I went to Japan and worked in a luxury hotel in the mountains during the ski season.
Along with three other foreigners, it was my job to greet the customers when they arrived, show them to their room and translate their requests to the Japanese staff. We worked long hours and split shifts but after work was done we disappeared onto the slopes, inside bars or to hot springs to unwind.
Japan was where I first saw how people who were not me, made connections with others. How easy it could be without stressful thoughts.
That freedom rubbed off on me and by the time I came back to Sydney I felt like a completely different person. For the first time in a long time I was happy.
I began dating again, organically and online.
Back in those days, online dating was confined to RSVP, plenty of fish, OK cupid and e-Harmony. I took none of it seriously, posted a half-hearted profile and went on with my life. When guys began to contact me I rarely responded. I went on two dates with two different people before I met V.
V.
He wasn’t the one to reach out to me. Instead it was my mum and her best friend, both determined to set me up, who found his profile and decided that he would be a good match.
Unlike the other guys, he called me before we met. I missed his call but he left me an energetic voicemail so long it got cut off before he finished speaking.
I dismissed him immediately. I was twenty years old and extremely judgemental. It seemed odd to me that a stranger would leave such a friendly, comfortable message to someone he had never met.
I went to meet him anyway, dressed down to a baggy jumper and jeans, my hair up in a severe bun. He was late and when he did turn up, he was wearing a hoody with a stain, unflattering jeans and old runners.
As soon as we said hello, he talked at me with the same hyperactive energy I heard in his message. A current of words, punctuated by excessive gestures.
No part of me wanted to date him and so I spoke and joked without caring what he thought. He asked me a lot of questions and I replied with stories, because he gave me the space to tell them.
Yet I got the distinct impression that he wasn’t interested in dating. There was no cautiousness in him that I’d seen in people who cared about an outcome. A reckless kind of confidence set him apart. It fascinated me and made me cautious at the same time.
Before we said good-bye he tried to take my hand. I laughed and pulled away.
I didn’t think much of it when he contacted me a few days later. Or after we saw each other again. He continued to be an oddity to me; always too many words, ideas, hands flying in the air.
Despite this I found myself looking forward to seeing him. We fell into a regular routine of messaging and seeing each other casually once a week.
Although I never admitted it to myself, I was relieved to be with someone who didn’t yearn for much closeness. He was never attuned to how I felt and never seemed to wonder what I felt about him. When we were together we talked about small things and big things that had nothing to do with our relationship. For a while, it was perfect.
Slowly, what I felt deepened. When we still barely knew each other he helped my mum and I move house. It was a painful transition, from the townhouse we once shared as a family of three to a smaller apartment when it would be just the two of us. The movers we hired turned out to be useless and spent a lot more time complaining than actually doing what they were paid to do. V on the other hand didn’t complain at all, moved twice as much furniture and continued to be as chatty as usual during that very long, draining day.
In evening after the chaos of the move, his frantic energy finally subsided and he allowed silence to settle between us. In that quiet space it was easier to see him. Beyond the jokes and wild articulating, it seemed a good person was hiding.
As I began to feel for him, I also began to notice the painful duality of him. When we were together I felt amazing, but it began to bother me that we only saw each other once a week and sometimes not for long. When we were apart I felt as though I was a minor consideration to him.
And just like that I was back to the pattern of my teens. I said nothing about how I felt. Then I tried to break it off after a couple of months. It was too hard to keep going. Back then I thought that ending things was like a switch that would turn off my emotions. Instead, I was overwhelmed with pain of loss. We got back together again… it was the beginning of a very long ending.
He began to do things that made me feel rejected and unimportant. He cancelled dates without an apology and delayed the next time we could meet because the way he ran his life meant each minute was planned out in advance. On the few weekends he stayed over, he left first thing in the morning as if called away by a silent alarm that set a limit on our time.
He had little interest in going out and socialising. I don’t remember a time when we would go out on a Saturday night and come back home together, sitting on the train like I had seen many couple do. When I invited him out he was usually busy with work. Soon I stopped asking completely.
In the three years we were together I never once visited his house or met anyone from his family, apart from his mom.
It seemed that no matter how close we were, I was kept at arm’s length. He worked on his own businesses with an obsession that made everything else seem insignificant, including me.
Yet he let me be myself and through him I learnt that intimacy could be a gift. His optimism brought sunlight to my melancholy disposition. We laughed a lot and he challenged how I thought because he read and thought about the bigger things in life.
So I would bottle up my feelings of pain and rejection again, too afraid to communicate. They would build and build inside of me, a heavy stone lodged in my chest until I couldn’t take it any more.
We settled into a toxic pattern of make-up / break-up. Fighting, ending things until the agony of being apart overruled the undercurrent of pain that came from being together.
During these breakup fights, it was incredibly difficult for me to express how I felt. I’d had so little practice at conflict that language failed me. Another, more empathetic man may have understood me. But V operated on hard logic. He could not relate to my hurt. Instead he would try to rationalise why what I said did not make sense.
“It’s not my responsibility to make you happy” he would say.
I was so unsure of myself and so afraid of fighting that I wanted him to be right. Eventually I would give in, even though I knew he hadn’t really heard me. Things always went back to how they were. I continued to orbit on the periphery of his world while he controlled the dynamics of our relationship.
It’s hard for me to say when it was truly over. Maybe it was when I overheard his friend tell him to stop treating me like I was nothing.
Maybe it was when we stopped laughing when we were together.
Or maybe it was when I realised that my fear of confrontation was the only thing that kept our relationship going.
His absence never really became my norm again. I didn’t just lose him. I lost my ability to believe in happy endings.
After V.
After V, I engaged in what can best be described as sample dating. I would line up a bunch of men (thanks to the wonder of Tinder) and go on a couple of dates with each one but inevitably fail to ‘buy’ any one of them.
The rare few that I did see for longer always began with sex and ended due to sheer incompatibility.
For me, sex was also the doorway to an emotional connection. Once the physical barrier had been broken I could then relax and really start getting to know the person.
Perhaps for this reason, I never got very far with the nice boys who took things slowly and were afraid to touch. One of those boys was A.
An emotional thing with A.
An odd, slightly incestuous circumstance brought A and I in touch.
Our parents were dating. His dad, my mum. Although it was a new and casual thing, A’s dad invited us for dinner.
A is the calmest person and most patient. It is the first thing that I noticed about him when we met. And me, when I am given reign, I talk non-stop and go on tangents. All evening A listened to my stream of consciousness. Maybe he used that time to decide he liked me because at the end of the night he asked me out.
And I said yes because of such good energy I felt around him.
And so began an ambiguous un/relationship that lasted for nearly 5 years.
Two dates later we kissed. But that was all. Our parents were still together and that felt odd to say the least. Ironically , we managed to became good friends and our relationship far outlasted our parents fling.
Sometimes we saw each other lots. He would cook for me or we would go out to eat together or he would invite me to join his friends. Always there was an undercurrent of emotion there, subtle and shapeless. But neither of us discussed where we stood. I do know though, that every time he did or said something that felt like love I backed away, detached myself or talked about other men.
When that happened, months could go by in silence while we took pause on what we were. Eventually, we would connect again and things would go back to our ‘normal’ again.
We slept together once at his house after his birthday party. A mindless, detached experience. The morning after we didn’t talk about it. We watched TV in silence. An episode of Friends came on… the one where Chandler and Monica get together for the first time and have a frank and honest discussion about what it means for their friendship. It was one of the most awkward moments of my life. Still, neither one of us mentioned we had been inside each other just hours ago.
It ended quite simply because it had to. Too much confusion had entered into our dynamic and neither of us was able to breach that wall of silence to get clarity.
I moved to London. In many ways I was running away.
From fear that dating A would be a wrong decision that would trap me. From acceptance that looking back would never bring relief. And because I believed that travelling would be my cure for myself.
Dating in my thirties: Still learning
Three years in London caught the back end of my twenties and the beginning of my thirties. After the wild ride of London living, I came back to Sydney, sternly telling myself it was time to adult properly and focus on building a life, preferably with someone. Now in my 30s I have the dating standards of British royalty. Unfortunately I also have the dating behaviour of a spoilt, hard-to-please child and a knack for picking the wrong people.
The first year I started taking dating seriously was the year I dated three people, all of whom:
a. concealed things from me
b. had a complicated past
c. were slightly mentally unhinged
I was frustrated when the truth came out but I was not surprised. I am still oddly drawn to difficult men with a complicated past, or a heavy burden to carry. I still feel nothing for the nice guys with ordinary views on life.
At the time of writing this, I am again lost to this pattern, with a man raising his daughter on his own and a track record of intense but brief relationships that end with devastation.
Although that doesn’t sound promising, there is one big change that I noticed in my dating self. I started communicating. I started being transparent with people about how I felt or didn’t feel. When I didn’t feel a romantic connection with someone, I told them so. When I had concerns about our relationship I told them so. And when there was conflict I worked on not running away.
Oh me, oh my dating history
Looking back at my dating history I can see patterns, spirals of thinking that lead me deeper into myself and further from a meaningful, fulfilling relationship.
Here is what I learnt:
- I was/am scared of real intimacy
- I didn’t/don’t care enough about having a relationship to compromise my standards
- My standards were/are too idealistic
- I was/am afraid of conflict
- I was/am afraid of choosing the wrong person
- I don’t know what kind of person I want
- I am drawn to men who are emotionally unavailable
- I feel nothing for safe, stable men
- I self-sabotage when I am with someone safe and stable or a potentially high quality person
- I open myself to potentially low-quality or unsafe people
They say recognising you have a problem is half the battle. I think this is the first time I am fully recognising mine.
It may take many more therapeutic articles like this and more dysfunctional dating adventures before I can ‘cure’ myself. All I can do is move forward. Write more. Date more. And learn in the process.
