These Conflicting Dating Truths Show There’s More Nuance than Headlines Allow For
Red or pink flags in one situation can be green in another
I’ve written plenty about modern dating — about sparks, about love dusting, about distinguishing red flags from yield signs. From every experience I’d try to take a lesson that could help me and other daters down the road.
Since then I’ve come to understand that some experiences just can’t be generalized or packaged into a neat and tidy box. Each situation is distinct, and reducing it wholly into one of these limiting tropes eliminates its nuance.
Here are some pieces of dating advice that deserve deeper consideration and accommodation for grey area, so as to understand your experiences on a deeper and fuller level.
1. “It’s a red flag if someone shows too much interest too soon.”
Several women I’d dated had alluded to multiple future plans only for the relationship to come to an abrupt halt. From those experiences I’d taken the lesson:
When a person says things like that, something’s not right. It means a relationship probably won’t work out. She’s all talk with no action to back it up.
Reading up on love bombing / dusting solidified my confidence in this belief.
I’ve since wondered: But then what about those people whose partners behaved in the same eager and adoring way early on? Who said they knew they were in love from day one, and are still together?
Red or pink flags in one situation can be green in another.
2. “How they treat you now is how they’ll treat you when you’re in a relationship with them. When people show you who they are, believe them.”
Can’t people also at times be too quick to make character generalizations based off one or two isolated behaviors? Put others into boxes and jump to conclusions that may not be accurate? I’ve since wondered.
Don’t some people behave differently once you’ve established some trust with them? For instance, I once was a bit slow to respond to messages with a potential date, and my responses weren’t very lengthy — but that was because the person truly wasn’t a priority at that point. I didn’t know them. We hadn’t met. I wasn’t sure how I felt about them yet.
Getting burned out from all the typing back and forth also sometimes resulted in me not prioritizing messaging, and made me slower to respond.
I’d learned from past experiences the consequences of investing too soon. So holding back was a conscious decision to safe-guard my time and energy — not evidence of my lack of commitment capacity, or a preview into how I’d behave as a partner.
3. “It’s impossible to have a healthy and satisfying relationship with someone who has avoidant tendencies.”
The book Attached suggests that avoidantly attached individuals don’t care as deeply as their anxious partners. They’re also more likely to end a courtship or relationship with you for seemingly inconsequential reasons.
A couple of years ago I wrote the following about the anxious attachment style:
What I do think is undeniable is that we’re more invested. More willing to put time and energy into the relationship, rather than bow out at the first sign of conflict. We’re committed to resolution.We’re less inclined to give up immediately, assume there is someone better out there, or quickly downplay whatever attraction we had towards the person prior to the conflict.
Our behaviors may not be perfect 100 percent of the time, but we are often more willing to work on them than avoidants are on theirs. the avoidants I dated didn’t seem to look inward or make changes to their contributions to the dynamic (whereas I felt like I was constantly accommodating for their need for space).
I still believe this to a certain extent, but also acknowledge that at times (not always) the anxious person can play a significant role in eliciting avoidant behavior from the other person.
It’s not always a clearcut case of this avoidant person is 100 percent shut-down and doesn’t care. Many avoidantly attached individuals experience deep pain and distress about their relationships. They just may not show it in the same way their anxiously attached counterparts do.
4. “If a connection isn’t there at the beginning it’s unlikely to grow.”
Plenty of couples connect instantly and stay together for years, if not a lifetime — but not all healthy and sustaining relationships start out with that “You know when you know” feeling. And just as often as those instant firecrackers lead to enduring relationships, they combust, flicker out, and leave ashes of disillusionment in their wake.
As Logan Ury recommends: “The important thing to remember is that [the spark’s] absence doesn’t predict failure, and its presence doesn’t guarantee success.” As my mathematician client said to me once, ‘The spark is neither necessary nor sufficient for long-term relationship happiness.”
5. “If you feel like you don’t connect with a person who seems healthy, it’s probably due to your anxious or insecure attachment.”
Anxious brains interpret consistency and calmness as boring. They don’t experience the same drug-like feeling that hooks them to an inconsistent person. This made it so that any time I dated a seemingly secure person and didn’t feel a draw towards them, I wondered if it was on account of my unhealed attachment system.
Sometimes personalities just aren’t compatible, regardless of attachment style. At a certain baseline level, physical attraction is either there or it’s not. This is separate from anything attachment related.
6. “The advice ‘treat dating like a game’ is c***.”
In another entry I wrote:
If your goal is a healthy and reciprocal relationship, then it’s against your best interests to act in a way that keeps a person “hooked” to you (ie, making yourself elusive, providing intermittent reinforcement, holding back from sharing your full self, feigning apathy or indifference towards them). You should never feel like you have to make yourself scarce to increase your “value” in the eye of someone.
I still agree with this — but I also wonder where the line is between selling yourself short and respecting the pace another person wants to move at. Maybe they do care on some level, but just need time to fully trust.
What might look like game-playing from one from perspective looks, from another, like taking some pressure off the other person so that their attachment anxieties don’t kick in and sabotage the relationship for both of you.
Admittedly, at times I do feel torn between working in therapy on ways to not feel anxious dating a person who needs to take things slow — and or doesn’t provide immediate validation — versus accepting that a person who needs to move at snail pace and doesn’t offer that validation early on just wouldn’t be a good match for me.
7. “Don’t write too much back and forth before meeting.”
I was once convinced that this was unhealthy. I’d spent time doing this, and not a single one of those numerous situations had led to any enduring relationships. I concluded that this was because we’d spent too much time messaging before meeting face to face.
You start to confuse the anticipation and the idealized version with what’s real, I wrote.
Casey Tanner (who goes by the handle Queer Sex Therapist on Instagram) and her wife are examples of couples who fell in love before meeting. I’ve heard of it happening with other lesbians too. Sure, meeting early on is ideal, particularly for anyone prone to creating elaborate fantasies inside their heads — but some people can successfully transition from pen-pals to in-person lovers. It’s not a doomed or inherently unhealthy medium.
8. “Don’t make assumptions.”
According to Amir Levine and Rachel Heller:
“People with an anxious attachment style are indeed more vigilant to changes in others’ emotional expression and can have a higher degree of accuracy and sensitivity to other people’s cues. However, this finding comes with a caveat. The study showed that people with an anxious attachment style tend to jump to conclusions very quickly, and when they do, they tend to misinterpret people’s emotional state.”
Some assumptions are more reasonable than others. Part of reading between the lines, or reading the room, involves some level of casual assumption-making, for instance.
Gauging social cues does as well, in situations where a person isn’t communicating a verbal message straight-out. When someone takes a step back for instance, we infer they want some distance. When they curl their nose up, we reasonably assume they’ve just inhaled a noxious odor.
This is why I don’t want to say flat-out never make assumptions. What I think is sager advice is, “dialogue with your assumptions.” If they turn out to be reasonable, still don’t accept them as 100 percent truth. You can always leave room for a sliver of doubt, until you’re able to confirm their validity through a conversation.
Dialogue with your positive assumptions as well. Sometimes we put too much faith in others, for instance. We give the benefit of the doubt, assuming they’re doing their work. Optimistic and hopeful as that trust may be, it can also be misplaced. As an author put it on Life Hack, “Hope is a really great thing unless it is distorting your reality and derailing your future.”