Watch the subtitled video above if you prefer to listen to my advice.
Codependent Dating Habits: How your Past Relationships Impact your Present
Being codependent as a man is like being a superstar musician who’s always aching for the next bit of attention: Somehow you’ll always need something new to fill you up. There’s always not enough attention from the woman you are dating. Whether you end up dating a substandard woman or a great woman showering you with love, you’ll always need more attention, validation, appreciation, and so on.
I call this the “Demi Lovato” syndrome — the insatiable desire for love because someone didn’t love you enough as a child. In the case of Demi Lovato, she chooses to be gay, then bisexual, then pan-something, next thing she’s non-binary, maybe next month she’ll identify as a non-binary transman because she believes that’ll give her the attention that she craves so hard.
Now, I may be making a sarcastic remark at the expense of Demi Lovato, but I have sympathy with this level of codependency, because I used to be extremely codependent until my late 20s. And this showed up in the poor quality of my relationships with women. Codependency for a woman’s approval always results in bad dating outcomes.
Just like it’s plain to see that Demi Lovato’s problems have to do with her own self-perception, rather then the way others perceive her, it’s also clear to see when a man’s self-perceptions is the root cause of his insecurities and dating problems. No woman wants to date a man whose own identity is an unstable mess that he’s not in control of.
There’s always another unnecessary reason why a codependent man can’t be happy with what he has. And that’s why addressing your problems from your early childhood that make you shy, insecure, timid, and dependent on a woman is the most important thing you need to focus on if you want to have a happy relationship with a great woman.
When you lack inner masculine strength and constantly depend on another woman’s opinion of you for your happiness, you’ll always seek out low-quality women who aren’t good enough just to feel worthy enough to date her, and you’ll never appreciate when a woman is good enough and loves you. But quite frankly, with a mental state like this, dating a woman who is no drama is more like winning the lottery. It’s much more likely that you’ll always chase the type of woman who isn’t good for you if you’re codependent.
So, I got a situation from a guy, 23 years old, and he’s dating a girl, and he’s realizing there are some problems with her. And he’s recognizing that this is a pattern from his past relationship. And he’s not sure what’s the next step. The takeaway from this message is that if you got issues you’re probably dating a woman with issues. Your past flawed relationships and your issues from the past tend to impact your present relationships. So, let’s dissect the problem.
Hi, I’m looking to get your opinion as what I am currently feeling right now is very weird. To start, I am 23 and have been single for three years. Throughout late high school and midway into college I was involved in a long-term relationship that quite honestly was not healthy. When it ended it I took it pretty badly and it took me about two years to heal and in a sense to get over it.
About a year after it ended, I spent about two years on active duty military. Looking back I think it was not the best idea as it was an emotionally charged decision.
The Healing Process: Taking Time for Yourself & Learn from Past Mistakes to Choose Better Women
So it’s really great that you took your time to heal from it. It took you a while, but you made an important breakthrough. That’s a good step. Because a lot of men jump into a new relationship right away after a breakup, and especially when you jump from one relationship to another and you haven’t healed, you cannot see how messed up some of the women are that you’re dating. So kudos for first focusing on yourself and your healing process.
And regarding your military decision, I want to cut you some slack but also give you advice. Whenever we have a breakup, especially when the woman meant a lot to us, we do really stupid stuff. I’ve done the same in the past. Making the wrong choices. It’s best to focus on yourself and take things slowly. Don’t make any rash and impulsive decisions right after a breakup. We’re never in a good place after a breakup to make big life decisions.
Usually, you need at least one year to really heal, or often that barely starts the healing process for you to be able to make rational decisions again. And especially in that period when you’re most vulnerable, you don’t want to make these decisions — life decisions, dating decisions, or relationship decisions. You should simply focus on yourself and slow things a little bit down. So shit happens. We make mistakes after breakups. That’s okay. You probably learned from it.
Anyway, over that time I learned to move on and lost my feelings for this girl. I knew that to be true because I eventually ended up speaking to her again as a friend and when I did that, I had no butterfly feelings or anything of that nature. It was just as if I was talking to a friend that I had not seen in a while. During this time I found out that she ended being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and a few other things.
Our friendship ended after she started dating the second guy after me, as he was not comfortable with us talking, which I understand and don’t blame him. So we don’t talk as friends anymore.
It’s good that you moved on! So for the viewers who aren’t familiar with bipolar disorder, that’s roughly speaking a mix of depression, moodiness, and being up and down with your attitude. So the girl had some issues. And in your relationship, it probably was like that. You were very often dealing with your girlfriend’s mood swings. Lots of fighting. Drama. Problems. That’s why the relationship wasn’t very healthy because she got deep unresolved issues. Whenever you end up dating a woman with deep psychological issues, ask yourself why you were attracted to her in the first place. Most of the time, you should spot red flags early on and have the assertiveness to walk away from such a woman. We all got our own individual issues, but there are plenty of women with only mild psychological problems.
It was a good decision to no longer talk to her! Especially if your relationship was very unhealthy, it’s a good idea to not stay in touch with your ex. If the ex is on good terms with you and there was no big drama and you can see that both of you talk with each other is polite, friendly, and healthy, and you don’t have feelings for each other anymore… Then it’s perfectly fine!
But often we still have feelings for our ex-girlfriend and then it doesn’t work out to stay in touch, or often it’s that your ex is an ex for a reason. In that case, you should stay away from your ex-girlfriend because it just couldn’t work out between the two of you. She might work out with someone else, but between the two of you, things didn’t work out for a reason. Although in this case, it’s clearly related to her issues that probably would also surface in other relationships.
Anyways, fast forward when I got home a few months ago. I started using Bumble to kinda see what’s out there. Now I am not a very attractive guy, so I don’t get very many matches, let alone actually meet up with the ones I matched with. Regardless, I started talking to this really pretty girl over the weekend. We hung out last night and I had a decent amount of fun, and she claimed to enjoyed it as well. However, after talking I realized I started to draw a lot of parallels with the past girls I have been with.
So now you’re seeing a pattern. Something is wrong with the girls you’re dating. Why do you think that is? That’s not a coincidence. Most guys subconsciously choose a very specific type of woman that they date — and often that’s for the worse. Usually, when we don’t have a clear definition of who we want to be as a man, and when we lack a clear definition of the type of woman we want to date, we tend to end up with the same kind of woman with bad behavior patterns that aren’t good for us.
So there is a pattern of red flags that you’re starting to see but before we go more into this, I want to draw the focus on something that you said:
Building Self-Confidence: Overcoming Insecurities in Dating is 70% your Mindset & 30% your Looks
Now, I am not a very attractive guy, so I don’t get very many matches.
I don’t know what you look like and it honestly doesn’t matter. You should think that you’re attractive. What does that even mean? “I’m not a very attractive guy.” How many guys are extremely attractive? Do you have to be super muscular? Am I super muscular? No, I’m a very slim-fit guy. I will never be muscular, even in my best times before COVID happened I was always a very skinny guy.
Does that mean I’m not attractive? Well, lots of women find me attractive. My girlfriend finds me attractive. A woman’s attraction is determined by many factors — looks are only one of them. So what’s the problem here? The problem isn’t that you’re not attractive. Some gorgeous woman will always be attracted to you — often when you least expect it.
The problem is that you don’t value yourself and you think that women cannot see that you’re attractive, but there are plenty of women who think that you’re absolutely handsome / hot. So this a confidence problem with women.
You don’t believe that you deserve attractive women and that’s why you don’t match with attractive women. I’m sure your Bumble profile reflects that belief in how you talk about yourself in the profile. I’m sure you haven’t maximized your profile pictures. I’m sure your energy doesn’t radiate confidence. That’s partly why you don’t get enough matches, and that’s also why these women don’t go on dates with you when they match with you. They can feel that belief that you just expressed. It’s a dating mindset problem.
Of course, if you’re completely letting yourself go, never hitting the gym, if you’re borderline overweight or skinny, don’t have a clean haircut and shave, and so on, then you won’t be attractive to a woman. But the average guy who on average takes care of himself should always be able to find some woman who’s into him. You might not get the top 20% of women, but you should be able to get SOME women. And if you that’s not the case despite you being relatively average, maybe slightly above average, then you got a mindset problem, not an attractiveness problem.
Regardless, I started talking to this really pretty girl over the weekend and we hung out last night and I had a decent amount of fun time and she claimed to enjoyed it as well. However, after I started talking I realized she started to draw a lot of parallels with the girls I’ve been with, specifically the ex I had dated for a long time.
She stated that she was bipolar, had a lot of issues with her dad, and without going into too much detail a lot of it sounded a lot like the girl from the past, which made me start thinking about it a lot in the back of my head. I knew that this was not gonna go anywhere.
What are the odds that you end up dating a woman with bipolar disorder twice in a row?! I don’t know the exact statistics on bipolar disorder based on your country, demographics, etc. but roughly 2.8% of all women at least experienced bipolar disorder once in their lives. Man, that number is higher than I expected! I think this is relatively high compared to other psychological mental health problems. Anyway, the bottom line is that she got a very specific behavior pattern that’s relatively rare among women. It’s hard to run into this multiple times!
So you’re catching on that there’s something wrong with her. Another girl with bipolar disorder. They say “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”
After a second time, you can often already see patterns. After the third time when something happens in your life, it’s definitely a pattern. At that point, you should be paying attention. I don’t know how often this happened already but you’re starting to notice that this is weird. Another bipolar disorder girl. So why is this happening? Let’s see.
Today we texted back and forth and then she hit me with the ‘you’re really cool and all but we are very different. I don’t think it would work.’ I kinda figured after last night, but I went ahead to ask for her to explain as I am a pretty open person and was curious to hear what she had to say.
Anyways, I never got an answer and got blocked on everything. This is not new to me, as I have had a couple others block or remove me on everything.
This should be a major red flag indicator. Do women sometimes block a man after breakups? Yes. There are several reasons why she might block you after a breakup. Maybe she just can’t deal with the pain because you meant so much to her. It’s understandable. If you feel that way, I wouldn’t recommend it. If your ex-girlfriend isn’t mean, evil, or has narcissistic traits, I’d only do this as a last measure.
If you can’t help it. If you think this will help you move on, or to get some space from your ex girlfriend to heal — that’s perfectly fine! It happens. Sometimes you’ll end up blocking your ex because she turns out to be a very manipulative and narcissistic woman. I help men to get their ex back but often I also help them to discover “Well, damn, I’m seeing a lot of red flags here. This is not normal”, because sometimes you use the no contact rule to get your ex back and you’ll feel great about certain reactions that you get from our ex. But often there’s more behind the curtains.
Your ex isn’t always a healthy, normal woman. You shouldn’t always get your ex back. In such a case, you often discover “OMG This woman has some major, major problems!“ When that happens, especially with narcissistic women, most guys just block their ex-girlfriends after a while. Men get tired of it and they’re like “I’m done with this! You are never going to change. I deserve better. I’m out of here!”
It does happen now and then — but not too often. Most of the time when we have breakups we don’t block each other. So it might hurt a little bit for a while, of course. You loved each other. But eventually, you both calm down.
Breaking Unhealthy Patterns: Identifying Red Flags in Relationships and Avoiding Drama from Women
But sometimes you can move on pretty fast, or at least you are able to move on after some time has passed. In scenarios like this blocking and ex isn’t necessary. Sometimes you can even stay friends and/or rekindle the relationship at a later time.
So it’s not the most common action to block each other. But you’re seeing a pattern that happens over and over, and this girl doesn’t even know you that well. You recently started dating on Bumble. You had one date. Or maybe it’s been more than one, but it’s obviously nothing serious. So why would she block you?! That’s just really strange. So she got some obvious issues here. She’s overreacting. This is not normal behavior.
She’s being moody. Maybe she’s insecure. Of course, I don’t know everything that you’re telling me. Maybe there’s something that you’re not telling me. But I’ll trust you with your story. Her reaction is quite strange. Maybe she’s a very controlling woman.
Maybe she’s very impulsive and very insecure — This is the type of woman that you should stay away from. Why would you need to block an ex if you don’t even know them properly yet?! If you haven’t been in a relationship for a relatively long time, e. g. at least for six months, then you’re not very close with each other yet. You haven’t bonded. You haven’t attached romantically. At least not on a deep enough level. So why block the ex? It wouldn’t matter to you that much. You’d just move on with your life. But she blocked you even though you’re not even that close yet. There’s something fishy going on here.
Regardless, I don’t know if I had started to like this girl or something because it left me feeling really strange and down after getting unadded, especially I guess removed from Facebook or whatever. Especially without an answer. I knew that I wasn’t gonna go anywhere so I don’t know why I feel the way I do. I’m not sure if this brought up repressed feelings, as the way I had gotten dumped in my long-term relationship was a text without answers.
But usually when this would happen, I just brush it off. This time though I’m just left feeling down and haven’t felt like she hadn’t felt like this in a while. My question is. Is this rejection feeling a sign of me somehow still being hung up on my ex, or constantly being attracted to the same type of person, which I know is incompatible?
So you desperately need closure, especially because the last girl also dumped you. And now you got no closure from this girl. The scenario is similar and this is why you’re too attached to this situation and this girl.
Are you feeling depressed because you’re still hung up on your ex? Or is it because the new girl rejected you? It’s probably a bit of both things. You likely have a problem with rejection and you probably have a problem with being hung up on your ex on some level. But, most likely, your problem is that you’re too insecure. In reality, rejection always messes with your brain no matter how confident you are, but the more resilient you are, the easier it gets to resist the urges of getting closure from the last girl.
So you’re problem a little bit too insecure. You sometimes can brush it off, but seriously you’re having a problem here right now with a toxic girl who is massive dating red flag. I would never consider dating a girl like this. If I would see a pattern like this in a girl I’d be like “I’m out of here because I can have so many more women that are so much better!”
Why would I waste my time with a girl that is having a lot of issues? She’ll only be drama & problems. Only a man with a scarcity mindset and lack of confidence would put up with this. That tells me, given all these patterns that you’re seeing, you likely have issues yourself with your insecurity, and your confidence, e. g. when you said that you think you’re not attractive enough.
And that’s why you don’t get matches and asked me “Am I constantly being attracted to the same type of person which I know is incompatible?” Unfortunately, it is common knowledge in relationship psychology & specifically attachment theory that in a way, we attract women who are seemingly incompatible with us.
Codependency Dating: Why we Choose to Date Women With Issues when we Could Do Better
Often they have similar issues, either on the exact opposite spectrum of the issues that we have, or they could also have almost the exact issues that we have. And the reason why we do that is because we crave to heal our own trauma. We all grow up with our own problems, especially related to our parents and how we were raised. The kind of attention that we didn’t receive sometimes in our early childhood years.
And often we end up dating toxic women because we subconsciously want to heal our childhood wounds. And there’s not necessarily something wrong with that. We all have our issues. But the point is that we have to fix those issues. And most women can fix their issues. But some women have more problems than others. So I assume that you probably have some deeper problems from your childhood, which are the reason why you’re always attracted to bipolar women.
Being insecure, impulsive, randomly blocking — these are strange. I’m sensing that you probably have some codependency issues, to some extent. I don’t think you’re extremely codependent because you often brush it off, but that’s what codependent men do. A codependent man is a notorious woman-pleaser. And yes, that means also “pleasing”, aka choosing to date and give your time & affection to a woman with issues. It’s a form of nice guy syndrome.
So the key here is to not get trapped in what I like to call codependency dating. When you overcome your codependency, you tend to not accept these kinds of women any longer. Because you realize being a nice guy doesn’t work. You’d rather just walk away from a woman like this. The key is to be more assertive in relationship, or more precisely, already before you enter the relationship, or even choose to date this kind of woman.
I don’t know if you brush it off because you don’t want to deal with that, but you are at least acknowledging “Something’s wrong here”, and so instead of asking “Is there something wrong with the girls?”, I would start identifying what’s wrong with you. Not to beat yourself up by saying to yourself “This is how messed up am I,” but rather, to identify why this happens repeatedly. Patterns. Ask: “Why would I want to date a girl like this?!”
I believe that every man has the capacity to live strong like a king. We should believe that we are kings. We should believe that we deserve the best woman on this planet. The best woman for you. We all have different expectations of what is the best woman for us, so think about what this woman is like. You deserve the best woman for you.
You should value yourself and believe that you deserve your queen. And I don’t think that a bipolar woman is a queen. I don’t think a woman who blocks you impulsively even though you’re not very attached to each other is a high-value woman.
So these kinds of patterns… there’s something off here. You’re noticing right now that there is something off, which is great. I think your problem is that you have an issue with being confident enough to date better women. You’re being too nice. You should even entertain these types of women. And yes, sometimes you can brush it off, so you don’t have major codependency issues. But some issues with your confidence. You’re not feeling confident enough. Well, at least you can move on from certain toxic women. But at the same time, you are too scared to take the leap to date a really attractive woman. Time to level up!
You don’t give yourself enough credit. You only give yourself enough credit to date the same messed-up women. You’re choosing to date a woman who you perceive to roughly have the same value as you do. So you probably have some issues yourself. You should identify those and try to level up your game. You should consciously try to date more attractive women. You should avoid these women where you think “There’s no way I could date these women!”
I used to think the same thing in the past. “I could never date this hot woman.” But one day I woke up from my slumber of self-pity and defeatism. And then I started waking up next to women who blew my mind even in my wildest dreams. You can do the same. You just need to take a leap of faith and approach these women. Take a step forward because that builds up your confidence. Right now I can tell you’re lacking some confidence and once you start working on this you are going to become more confident. Feel better about yourself.
The more you repeat, the more you succeed. I truly believe it. The more often we repeat something, especially in dating, the more confident we become. And that’s the moral of the story:
The more often you date very attractive women, the more unwilling will you be to date a woman like her. Now, she’s not a bad woman, but she got some flaws and she is probably a woman that you should stay away from. Maybe. I don’t know her. But, some women need to be avoided.
I’m sure there are better alternatives out there. A queen. And you are king. You deserve that.
