Love Yourself, Not Your Drama
While I’ll be the first person to say that our dating culture is fatally flawed, I’ve also noticed an interesting dating behavior that seems to be going strong while other trends seem to come and go: falling in love with one’s own special form of self-sabotage.
By all means, love yourself.
Love yourself so completely and so well that everyone else learns how to love you better. Be authentic. Be body positive. Embrace who you are, wholly.
But for God’s sake, don’t go so far as to fall in love with your flaws.
They aren’t cute. Or precious. Or quirky.
The things we do to self-sabotage the good things in our lives aren’t things we should adopt as pets. We shouldn’t mistake toxic patterns for charming flaws in our makeup and continue to engage in them. Or, worse, indulge in them.
There’s a difference between accepting our flaws & indulging them.
Let’s just take dating, love, and relationships for instance. Like any self-respecting girl with a good reputation, I had a serious bad boy problem. Of course, the first boy I dated had to come with a bad reputation. He had to have a troubled past and a history of poor choices. He had to be loaded with sexuality and just a little bit dangerous. He needed to put the fear of God (or, let’s be honest, of sex) into my parents, and he needed to be enough of a shock to get everyone’s attention.
Not that I realized that any of those factors played into the attraction. I had just found a broken boy with a beautiful face who put me on a pedestal. He could worship, drawing a certain status from his pairing with my light, and I could feel like I was healing him while drawing a certain status from pairing with his darkness. It was exciting and destructive and ended badly for me. My heart was broken, or at least a little bit battered, by the end of it.
I had a pattern.
I could be attracted to any number of men, but there was something about the bad boys that pulled me in. I was addicted to that hit of danger and sensuality and that reckless rush of doing something I knew I shouldn’t do.
The stove was hot, I was touching it, and I didn’t even care.
That’s how a child thinks, and I grew up.
I was still attracted to the bad boy.
Still am, to a certain degree. If you’ve seen The Blacklist, you know Tom Keen. While I won’t spoil the show for you, I’ll say that watching this bad boy persona lit up every cell in my former good-girl-loves-bad-boy heart. I could indulge it as a foolish fantasy watching a television program and check it off my list as a harmless guilty pleasure.
But it wouldn’t be harmless if I still chased the kind of man who would only ever let me down. I knew that the real me, the 30-something single mother of 2, couldn’t afford to indulge in a real-life reckless love affair with a man who might seem charming but hadn’t yet grown up. I couldn’t afford it for my own heart or for the hearts of my children. I had to be smarter, and I began to understand that loving myself meant choosing better.
I don’t mean choosing better as in being practical. I mean that I need to make the kind of decisions that are right for me. And the bad boy- while often attractive and interesting- was never right for me.
He’s never going to turn out to be a good man. His pattern is self-destruction, and he’s quite happy to take his significant other along for the ride. No matter how often we give out kisses or encouragement, he’s just never going to live up to the potential we see in him and turn into the one we need. He’s going to keep being who he is, and it’s not a cute quirk if we keep going back for more.
Sometimes, we make the mistake of crossing the line from falling in love with ourselves and being accepting of our challenges to embracing our flaws and then indulging them.
I’ll listen to people sharing their dating challenges and admitting their own personal flaws without ever attempting to actually do something about these patterns of behavior. They know it’s bad and can openly admit it, but they don’t care to do anything about it. They look at it as if this is just the way life is rather than this is what they’re making of their lives.
They’ve fallen in love with their own self-sabotage.
Let me tell you this: it’s not quirky; it’s neurotic. It’s not cute to only date the damaged men (or women) who will only ever hurt us. It’s not precious to keep returning to narcissists because that’s our special thing. It’s not endearing that we keep picking the asshole, despite knowing that he’ll make us feel like shit 99% of the time.
It might be neurotic, psychotic, or quixotic. It might be toxic or self-destructive. But it’s not this fixed part of who we are that we can’t change.
It’s a behavior, and behaviors can be changed.
I can feel an attraction for some beautiful fuckboy with an attitude problem, but I’m grown enough not to date him. Or fuck him. I can think some deeply troubled man is attractive and interesting without throwing out my best interests just to feel that rush of excitement that I know for sure would only end in my own heart bruised or broken.
When we keep repeating the same toxic behaviors in our relationships, all we’re doing is falling in love with our own drama. We’ve committed to our neurosis rather than to our happiness. We keep obsessing, keep trying to make the wrong shoe fit because we like the way it might look in our lives, and we see the reality of what we’re doing without ever trying to fix the thing we’re doing.
It’s a massive form of self-sabotage.
We might even make the mistake of thinking that it’s this endearing part of us. But it’s not. It’s just setting drama into motion because we love the way it makes us feel, and we don’t care to count the cost.
And maybe for us, there’s not much of a cost. We get a little broken or bruised and get back up and keep going.
But there’s a cost we’re not counting:
There’s the person who would be right for us if we weren’t so busy with all the wrong ones.
There’s our support system. They’re tired of watching us repeat the same toxic patterns of behavior and then having to be available for us when it goes to shit like it always does. That cycle puts a lot of wear and tear on relationships.
There’s also the hearts we break along the way because we’re too in love with our own dysfunction to be good for anyone else.
And sometimes there are kids involved- on either side of the relationship- who don’t deserve to be sucked into the drama of adults who want to roleplay a grown-up relationship without taking responsibility for their own happiness by making good choices. These kids grow up to play out the same toxic cycles because we’ve normalized them.
I think every single human being should fall deeply in love with themselves, flaws and all.
But that doesn’t mean that we take our flaws out to play, hurting ourselves and others in the process. Loving ourselves means accepting our flaws and being aware of them, and it also means working on them because it’s the healthiest thing we can do. It doesn’t mean shrugging our shoulders and continuing on like we always have when we know we have a real problem.
And falling for the kind of person who will hurt us is a real problem. It’s not positive. It’s not romantic. It’s not some sort of epic love story. The person that is cheating on someone else for us isn’t ever going to be good for us. The person who is showing us that they are borderline psychotic isn’t asking for us to step in and heal them with our love. The bad boy doesn’t ever magically turn good because we loved them so much they decided to change.
In fact, I would say that my attraction to broken men looking for women to fix them has dramatically decreased over the years. Anyone can have a beautiful face, but people like us need to pair with beautiful souls. We begin to see the red flags early and then lose interest entirely, preferring more like-minded partners.
Because the bad boy magically transforming is not real life.
Change is intrinsically motivated; it comes from within us, and no amount of external motivation is going to change what we haven’t yet decided we want to change.
Those bad relationships aren’t happening because all men (or women) are shit and dating is bad. They’re happening because we refuse to stop indulging our own toxic patterns. We’re blinded by beauty and believe what we want to believe, and then we get angry or hurt when the person who was always bad for us does something that proves it.
It feels a little less precious then, doesn’t it? That quirk that we indulged because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Because it always seems like a good idea at the time.
But when we get tired of feeling that way, it might just be time for a change.
It might be time to love ourselves enough to work on the things that hurt us. If that thing is an attraction to toxic humans, we’ve got to learn how to be aware of our patterns and stop repeating them. We can be attracted without haring off in pursuit of the wrong person.
We don’t pretend an attraction for people we don’t actually like. Instead, we work on the issues that keep sabotaging our relationships, and we begin to feel an attraction for the kind of people who would never intentionally hurt us. Instead of thinking the bad boy is sexy, we see that he’s destructive and doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings but his own. We learn to recognize co-dependence, narcissism, and toxicity for what they are rather than making excuses because we liked the look of someone. In other words, we grow up.
We stay in love with our own toxic patterns and keep the cycle of damage going, or we recognize the collateral damage of all our drama and start wanting better for ourselves. We make choices. We experience consequences. If we grow up, we’ll even connect the two.
The bad boy appealed to the damaged girl that I was, but he holds no appeal for the strong, empowered, independent woman that I’ve become. I’ve left him behind, and while I’ll always have a certain fondness for the girl that I was, I know that she’d be proud of who I’ve become. She didn’t expect much for herself, but I’m making sure she’s treated right. Because that’s what I deserve.
As do you. Once we realize that we deserve better, the neurosis we once treated like an endearing trait stands out for what it is: something deeply toxic that we’ve got to get in check if we ever want to manifest healthy relationships in our lives.
Fall in love with you. Love yourself well. Just don’t fall in love with your neurosis in the process.
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