Dating ‘tisms’

A reflection of my first year of dating, post marriage, and the pathological patterns I seemed determined to repeat!

It’s been nearly a year since I signed up to a dating app for the first time in my life, which I then navigated for 6 months before diving too fast into a relationship that has already had time called. I’m now taking a break from the whole scene until, at the earliest, my divorce is signed and sealed but truth be told, I’m not sure when/if I’ll be looking again.

I’ve heard it said that the first relationship post marriage can burn harder than the end of the marriage itself and I totally relate to that. I think because it highlights all those places that might have been considered anomalies in wedlock and instead shines a full glare hunting spotlight on the fact that they are patterns to face not mistakes to bury.

And boy do I have some motifs to confront.

Let’s begin…. the dating frenzy itself helped me see where I get sucked into a vortex of well crafted lines and flattery, which my bruised and fragile ego found hard not to latch onto, until I’d heard them a few times in a row of course (is there a guide that men read to pick up this nonsense?)!

A classic cliche was that kissing me was ‘like kissing their first crush’, filled with all that longing and anticipation and hope. I think this plays to our generation too, I’m not sure it would have held such gravitas back in our twenties when that first crush was only a few years earlier, now it’s potent and fermented with the imagery of that younger man, obsessed and fervent; letting us both forget, for a moment, how we are on the wrong side of middle age. Powerful the first time, scepticism creeping in the 2nd and future receipts!

I was also gifted an intense phrase of future bombing (think love bombing but with the next decade mapped out already) ‘I want to learn from you’ on repeat, until of course any actual learning was on the table…. Then they clung on to their diehard and previously limiting patterns as if playing tug of war with a Hell Hound.

Some men, who sprang up from my past, kept reminding me how beautiful I was then, back in the day, as if emphasising that, by aging and now being considered less beautiful, it would somehow make me feel like jumping their bones! Is this negging? Back handed compliments to keep me hanging on for the real deal and, supposedly, ever so much more grateful for when I finally receive one…

But ultimately it doesn’t matter whether the honeyed words are true or not, it’s much more important for me to realise how easily I am swayed by them rather than awaiting the identifying actions and, worse, how I try to playdoh their actions into shapes reminiscent of those words when in fact they’re barely comparable.

I have hung onto words my whole life, perhaps why I have such an affinity for writing; they’re powerful, suggestive, hopeful and full of promise and used cannily they are the aces of manipulation. But I have some sort of ‘tism’ that hinders me from filtering out the b/s. Tell me what I want to hear, or even just omit the bits that I don’t, and I’ll keep that fantasy flag of idealised romance or belief flying high long after their actions have dragged it, ragged and dusty, off piste.

So as my divorce has descended into the pits of Tartarus and my year of dating climaxed with disillusion and pain, I’ve realised I’m simultaneously brilliant and disastrous at dating. Brilliant at the practicalities and initial forays, disastrous at holding myself back long enough to really wait for the truth, beneath the charm and puppyish excitement, to be revealed.

Take it slow is an easy (and wise) adage but I’m just not wonderful at that process, I’m too trusting (read gullible) and too hopeful (read desperate) for the possibility that true love might be in that next unexpected encounter. I’ll blame Hollywood, though I suspect childhood is far more likely, and holding back seems, ironically, to be the way forward for now.

But as much is I’d like to follow through with that final nugget of wisdom, knowing me, I’ll probably be announcing my engagement next week! Crikey I really need to imbibe a jug load of cynicism to keep me on the straight and narrow.

Let’s lay bets…… will I be able to resist the charm-speak of the next love bombing avoidant or will I have to fall for it again before I learn?