Dear Eva,
I think I’m undateable. All my relationships have ended with the guy either ghosting or dumping me. My most recent fling ended two months ago with a message saying that he didn’t see a future with me. I wasn’t in love with him or anything, but I still feel completely devastated and like such an idiot for thinking he liked me. I can’t picture ever going out with anyone again, at least not until I’ve changed practically everything about myself!
The hardest thing about dating isn’t the endless scrolling, or the awkward small talk about alcohol-free beer, or the anxiety about oversharing or taking your clothes off or getting something wrong. The hardest thing happens after all this, after the drinks and the sex, and the picnics and the hangovers, and the pasta at yours, and the meeting his dog. It happens in that cold and hideous vacuum you find yourself in after the last text, the relationship’s antechamber, where insects crawl over you in the dark and bad thoughts drip down the wall. He has ended things, and you – a person with, perhaps, low self-esteem – interpret this rejection as proof that every horrible thing you’ve ever thought about yourself is true.
He says he doesn’t want to go out with you, and you hear: you’re not clever enough, you’re boring, you’re not funny, your hair is weird, your body is disgusting, your skin’s repulsive, you look old, your breath smells, you’re bad at sex, and on and on, every secret anxiety suddenly projected huge, the size of houses, a drive-in movie of every bit of shame you’ve ever felt. You’ve done what millions of people do every day, and read romantic rejection as commentary on your worth. People – sane people, beautiful people, normal, intelligent, healthy people – can be derailed for months, even years, by a dismissal like this, regardless of how much they liked the person doing the dismissal.
With practice, you can learn to distinguish your own self-worth from a romantic rejection. The important thing to understand is that it’s not you they’re rejecting; it’s the relationship you two created, that slippery jellyfish that grew under the table between your feet. Like a baby or an argument, a relationship requires two people. He is rejecting something both of you created, where his needs, or your wants, weren’t being met. It’s not you. It’s not him. It’s it.
And relationships aren’t necessarily failures just because they end. Though I’m aware this sounds slightly sickening, like I’m shouting old motivational quotes into the internet, I believe it to be true – when the awful smoke clears, those broken affairs or rejections always teach us something about ourselves, what we want, what we don’t. The best break-ups can also leave us with a friend, a new, clean relationship wiped of sexual jealousy and anxiety.
But listen, you don’t need to change. You really don’t. The only thing you need to work on is your self-esteem. You can do this by noting down the times you have negative thoughts about yourself, and next to them, writing things that disprove them. Spend time with lovely friends, the ones that make you feel good about yourself and remind you of your many, many gorgeous qualities. By the time the next relationship rolls around, the aim is to be strong enough that even if it ends, you can grieve it gently before marching on into the future, bruised but intact.
