“Your videos are often inspiring and I feel better. I’ve caught myself in a classic situation ship but I feel stuck. I know he doesn’t want to date me but our connection is real. I am a believer that it could be right guy wrong time, however, I cannot wait. I just don’t know how to move forward. Or why I can’t just keep doing what I’ve been doing and be okay with it right now. But I also know I have many things I want to work on myself including this anxious attachment style. So why can I not keep seeing him while I go through my own growth process. Last message to add. I have continued going on dates, no one is like this guy. Why do I have to give it up when he does make me happy and I love being with him. It’s tough.”
My Dearest Bad Biddie,
I have my scuba diving license. I know this seems irrelevant to the conversation, but, as someone who spent the bulk of her twenties fitting into other people’s lives as a way to avoid having to mold my own, I have fallen in love with more men than I care to admit. I learned how to scuba dive because the guy I was dating at the time was an avid diver, and I figured that if we were going to get married one day, I would need to learn how to dive alongside him. I went vegan while dating another guy, and then found myself kneeling in a Catholic pew next to another short-lived romance despite the fact that I wasn’t raised with any kind of religion. You don’t get to be the kind of girl who goes to extreme lengths to fit into her boyfriend’s life if you don’t feel some level of, what feels like, an otherworldly connection with said boyfriend.
The spoiler to all of this is that I’m not married to any of the aforementioned men, and I no longer scuba dive, abstain from eating meat, or go to Catholic masses unless required to by a wedding. But, while I may have forgotten the way you’re supposed to breathe while descending to the depths of the ocean floor, I haven’t forgotten the intensity of how I felt with each of my previous relationships. I spent my twenties falling in and out of love with men who were sometimes in love with me, sometimes half in love with me, and sometimes only in love with the idea of me and what I could do for them. It is only in retrospect, five years out of the dating scene, that I have only begun to realize which ones were which.
Biddie, I don’t doubt that you feel a connection with this man, and I don’t doubt that he feels, in some way, connected to you. But, I can say confidently that any man who is willing to date you without actually dating you does not respect you or your time. A healthy relationship is comprised of so much more than the amorphous meaning we assign to the feeling of connection. Attempting to date a man who does not respect you while trying to find your own sense of self-respect is like an alcoholic trying to find sobriety at the bottom of an empty wine bottle – you’ve already lost before you’ve even begun.
It will be tough, at first, and maybe even for a long while. You will find yourself looking for the comfort of his presence, no matter how ephemeral it may be, in the nights when you come home from dates that leave you feeling emptier than when you left, and in the nights when all you hear is the deafening silence of your solitude. I hope you remember, in these nights, that nothing great was ever borne out of ease – that we, as humans, only define triumph in the context of victory over something or someone to be lost. But, if you lose somebody, let it be him, not you. I don’t know if he is the right man at the wrong time, but what I do know is that there is never a right time to lose yourself for the hope that the man in front of you will see you as the right woman. Weather the storm, and you might find that when the clouds break, you’ll have become the right woman at the right time for the most important person of all – yourself.
Love,
Your internet hype woman
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