Stop Dating Your Unresolved Issues

Most of us can easily recognize flawed dating patterns in other people, particularly on social media. We watch their relationships begin, see their pictures, read their status updates, and then we watch them fall apart in memes, quotes, and markedly fewer loved-up selfies. We often see the signs, and we might even have predicted that ending just from our own distant observations. It’s easy to see, right?

But seeing these flawed patterns in ourselves? Not so much.

We really need to stop dating our unresolved issues.

I’m seeing this with the benefit of hindsight, but I sure did spend a lot of time dating my unresolved issues. I dated my low self-esteem, my codependency, my family issues, and my poor boundaries. The issues I needed to deal with kept showing up in the form of people I dated. Sometimes, I worked those issues out for myself during the relationship, but often, I didn’t, and then they would show back up again in the form of someone else.

The Universe is like that. It keeps sending us opportunities to learn. So we date the same types and have the same problems and keep dating in the exact same ways we always have because we aren’t learning from what we’re doing. So the cycle continues as we keep confronting our shadow selves in partner form.

I look back on my dating history and shake my head. You’d think, at some point, I would have learned. And the truth is that I did learn- but usually the hard way. I went through one difficult relationship after another because I didn’t fully absorb the lesson the first time. I could learn it on an intellectual level, but I wasn’t putting it into practice. Or I would learn part of the lesson and not the whole of it, and it would come back again until I learned what I needed.

How do we avoid dating our unresolved issues?

We work out our issues with self-help or therapy rather than addressing them in our relationships.

Getting into a relationship isn’t the best way to deal with trust issues. Dealing with our trust issues is the best way to deal with our trust issues. If we don’t want to keep dating our unresolved issues, we should resolve them whether that’s through reading and working through self-help programs, attending support groups, or seeing a therapist.

We can learn from our dating patterns.

If online dating isn’t working, we should stop doing it. If the types of people we’re choosing is the problem, we should choose differently. We have to know the game to change the game.

We can learn from our relationships.

Instead of playing the blame game after a relationship ends, we can figure out what the lesson was inside the relationship. There’s always a hidden lesson. Were we supposed to learn to have stronger boundaries? To communicate better? To pay attention to red flags? If we look for the lesson, we just might learn from it.

We can listen to feedback.

Ask a trusted friend what they think we’re doing wrong. A good friend will tell us. They’ve probably told us before, but we’ve ignored it. Take in that feedback and see if it resonates. If we’re honest with ourselves, it probably will. The truth might hurt, but if the problem is that we keep dating our problems rather than our partners, we’re going to hurt more in the long run.

For instance, if we keep dating people we need to rescue, we’re working out our need to rescue rather than dating these people for who they are. We’re developing relationships built on codependence and not on a healthy foundation. If we start looking for healthy, independent partners who want us but don’t need us, we have a chance of forming strong relationships.

We can empower ourselves to change.

Instead of waiting around hoping our partners will change or expecting our dates to be what we need, we can empower ourselves to change. We can address our issues rather than leaving them unresolved. We can own up to the fact that our dating patterns aren’t proof that the people we dated were garbage but that we have garbage patterns in how we date. And garbage needs to be thrown out, not prized and kept.

When we empower ourselves to change, we quit blaming everyone else for our experiences. Instead, we decide to make changes in how we’re behaving. We stop trying to impress anyone else and learn to be exactly who we are. We quit playing games. We stop dating the way we always have and start trying to connect at a deeper level. We quit messing with the pretty face who is clearly not interested in a relationship. We see the red flags, and we don’t make assumptions. We raise our standards, and we understand that being alone isn’t some kind of life punishment, but a privilege.

We can love ourselves enough to enjoy the privilege of being alone.

Spending time with ourselves isn’t the worst thing. Wasting our lives hating every moment of being alone is the worst thing. It’s watching our lives go down the drain because we’ve decided that being coupled is the only way we can be happy. We need to learn to love to be with ourselves before we can be healthy inside our relationships. Yes, being single can be lonely but so can being coupled. Choosing happiness now, regardless of our relationship status, is an important step in uncoupling from our tendency to date our issues.

I watch and wonder why so many people settle for so much less than they deserve. But then again, I’m sure people used to watch me and think the same thing. It would be easy to turn this into a shame cycle of feeling bad that we didn’t know better until we did, but that’s missing the point. We don’t need to feel bad that it took us however long to learn. We just need to find the lesson and learn it so that we don’t have to stay in the cycle any longer.

But we do need to remember that the lesson will come back to us again after we’ve learned it, just to make sure that we’re practicing what we’ve learned. So we’ll likely see it again in other forms to test that we are where we need to be. We’re not being punished. We’re being elevated, awakened, evolved. We’re becoming ready for everything we’ve always wanted if we’ll just stop attending our lessons without ever learning them.

The next lesson is coming. Are you paying attention?

To hear more on this topic, listen to the podcast interview on Done Being Single with Treva & Robby Scharf.

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