I have no shame in admitting I went to a therapist after my first relationship ended. At the time my ex boyfriend had become a part of my identity, and I was trying to grasp a sense of who I was apart from him. I thought therapy was only this place I went to talk about myself but as my hour was coming to an end in my second session my therapist gave me homework. She told me to think about how I wanted to be treated in a relationship and to date myself for a week.
I didn’t take the assignment very seriously. I bought myself a rose at the Walgreens on the same block that day and then forgot to date myself for the rest of the week. I failed this assignment miserably but it stuck with me and is actually advice I give to friends or family members newly single or struggling in relationships now.
I really began to appreciate the point of the assignment after being single for a while. If I wanted to change the way I was treated by a man I would have to hold everyone to that standard, starting with myself. I remember my therapist saying something along those lines but I didn’t listen. I’m a true believer that sometimes it takes a while for us understand the advice we are given because we aren’t ready to make those profound realizations yet.
What does dating yourself actually mean? It’s all about understanding and improving your relationship with yourself. When we are going through a rough time in our lives we go through a period of reflection before we can really start to heal. We realize things about ourselves we have to work on if we want to be happy. And to be happy, we have to learn how to love ourselves because we are more likely to make decisions that make us happy in the long run.
After my first relationship ended, I realized I didn’t allow myself to be loved. I gave all the love I had to my ex boyfriend without accepting or expecting anything in return, and I let him treat me less than I deserved. I learned the hard way that love isn’t just about giving, it is also about receiving. I told myself that my next relationship would be different, and that I wouldn’t stay unless I was happy. I spent years learning to love myself so I could have that, and a big part of it was allowing others to love and care for me.
Trust was something I also had to address while dating myself. I’m not a really trusting person to begin with and so I didn’t know how to trust people, and this had a lot to do with the fact I didn’t trust myself. I was insecure and so afraid to trust one person because I was afraid to love and lose it. My fears and insecurities were impacting my ability to trust how I felt, and what I wanted and needed. I learned that trust is a huge component of knowing yourself. It takes a lot of work and time and also needs to be earned from others.
I’m in no way saying I’m an expert in dating yourself because I’m still figuring myself out everyday. But if I can impact just one person by sharing my struggles and experience, it’s worth writing about.
Here is a list of four things I learned about dating yourself:
1. If you want honesty in a relationship, you are going to have to be honest with yourself even if it hurts.
Being honest isn’t easy because we learn defense mechanisms from a young age to protect us from pain. Honesty is important because it helps you process and move on faster and also weed out the people who don’t deserve you in their lives. I can promise you it gets easier the more you do it.
I was in denial a majority of the time when I started dating myself so I had to begin with being honest about how things were in my life. How I did this was by paying attention to the facts to ground myself to reality. I looked at situations realistically not what I wanted them to be.
For example, with my first ex boyfriend I was always fantasizing about getting back together when it was clear he didn’t want to. I believed he loved me even though he told me he didn’t on numerous occasions. As much as it hurt me and as hard as it was, I had to tell myself he didn’t love me everyday so I wouldn’t return to that relationship. If I found myself saying he has to love me because of this and that, I told myself if he loved me then he would have told me, he would have been there at that moment, and he wouldn’t have let me go through the pain of having tell myself he didn’t love me everyday.
I even had to be honest about one of my best friends. I was the only one reaching out and she didn’t put the same effort into our friendship that I did. This hurt because it was someone I considered a life long friend. The truth was that we were no longer friends. I couldn’t continue making excuses for her because she was there for me during a hard time in my life. If I did that, then I would make excuses for others.
After I began seeing situations in my life for what they were, I continued to improve honesty. I moved on to asking myself the hard question about what I really wanted and felt whenever I was stuck in a situation.
2. Trusting yourself is just as hard if not harder than honesty.
Everyone wants trust in a relationship and I’m 100% sure that we all agree on that. How do we learn to trust ourselves so we can put trust in others? How do we really trust ourselves to not repeat past mistakes? Well, there is no way to know until you’re tested. Like I said earlier, trust is a process.
A while back, I was dating someone, we’ll call him Ky to not confuse him with my first ex boyfriend, and our relationship suddenly ended. During the breakup he told me still wanted to hang out and be friends. I felt the urge to agree because I still wanted to be with him but I found myself wide eyed saying no. I told him I didn’t want to be friends with him and that I couldn’t be his friend.
In my relationship with Ky, I was hard on him. I was actually being hard on myself because I was afraid I would let him do what my ex did to me. I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t repeat past mistakes, but when I was tested, I did what I told myself I would do if I were in the same situation again. I couldn’t be Ky’s friend because I knew I wanted more. I realized I wasn’t the same person I was before, and I could trust myself. I wished I had known because if I had, maybe I wouldn’t have been so hard on Ky. We did eventually work out the misunderstanding and I got chance to change that.
3. Everything leads back to loving yourself.
I feel this is self-explanatory.
4. Dating yourself is a continuous process.
You don’t stop improving your relationship with yourself. Don’t forget about all the work you have done. I don’t care whether you are in a new relationship or feel like you’ve done all the work in the world. Like any relationship, you continue to work on it.
Over the years, I learned a lot about myself, about what I want, about what I don’t want, and about what really makes me happy. My relationship with myself is something I’m working on everyday. Some days I learn new things. Some days I struggle with old patterns. Some days are easier than other days. The point is I continue to do the work because I want be happy.
We all deserve love and happiness and it starts with us.