It’s All Fun & Games Til You Die Lonely After a Lifetime of Awful Relationships

Why having a broken picker is no laughing matter

Before I created FixYourPicker.com, I used to hear countless people describe their terrible relationship history by saying, “Yeah, I have a broken picker, haha.”

In most cases, they would literally laugh about it.

I was one of these people too, so I can’t really judge.

But I inevitably thought, “Why the hell are people laughing about this tragic situation? Why are they so resigned to the certainty of their relational ineptitude?”

I suspect now it’s because some part of them knows deep down that dating other wounded people is their very best strategy for getting their needs met while protecting themselves from the unavoidable risks of true intimacy.

I’ll say it again for the people in the cheap seats.

Dating shitty people is a protective defense mechanism.

It’s a maladaptive coping strategy to thwart our fears of vulnerability, of not being good enough, of not being lovable.

If it didn’t serve a good purpose, no one would do it.

But it works very well, so it’s actually quite common.

Therefore, the dating pool is teeming with people who simultaneously want a relationship and are terrified by the realities of profound human connection.

Hollywood got some of y’all thinking love is what happens when you find someone cute who wants to get naked with you. That’s basically just hormones and 10th-grade biology.

Love is more about stripping off your masks and defenses and letting someone see your naked soul.

Because, in many cases, even sex is a kind of performance or facade used to gain validation, power, or acceptance.

And to be fair, droppin your skivvies is a hell of a lot easier than droppin the plated armor around your heart that protects you from reliving the painful relational trauma of your past.

But getting into relationships without whole-hearted emotional intimacy is like doing the same biology experiment with a different lab partner, over and over again.

You already know how that experiment ends.

Try something different.

Adam Murauskas is a relationship coach and writer. He and his wife Rebecca abandoned their careers and moved to Panamá in 2019 to pursue passions for helping people heal. Take a free relationship quiz at FixYourPicker.com or see Instagram @fixyourpicker for daily microblogs.