Dating right now can feel like a minefield - in today's episode we break down exactly how to reclaim your power in today's dating climate, including: The 3 reasons we lose our power The consequences of becoming defeated with dating My 5 tips for reclaiming your agency Why we need to STOP playing games What to do when you get attached too quickly + so much more Listen now! PREORDER MY BOOK: https://www.psychologyofyour20s.com/general-clean Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast For business: [email protected] The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Why is dating in your 20s challenging?
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of our 20s. There is really no easy way to say this. Dating in your 20s is hard, especially right now. It feels like a bit of a minefield of people who won't commit.
people who seem way too good to be true and it turns out that they actually are. Incompatibility, getting ghosted, dates cancelled last minute, just to name a few experiences that I'm sure a lot of us have currently been enduring.
When this has kind of been going on for a while and these experiences definitely dominate our dating story or our dating narrative, we can become very detached and very defeated and very passive and And to put it simply, I think we lose our power and our agency in dating. We're no longer as picky as we would like to be. We don't call out disrespect or bad behavior.
The whole activity becomes a lot more anxiety inducing than it is fun. And I think we get into this really negative headspace of expecting people to disappoint us and then not being surprised when they actually do.
I think the biggest way to counteract this mindset and this defeatist reality when it comes to dating is to really come back to ourselves and focus inwards, not just for the sake of our love life, but for the sake of actually loving our own life. And I was speaking about this on Mantra recently. Mantra, for those of you who don't know, is my other podcast. It's a lot more spiritual.
We talk about a specific affirmation, grounding saying or mantra every single week. Recently, I did an episode on I nurture relationships that enrich my life. And I talked about how something I wish I'd learned sooner was that dating is meant to be a enjoyable and be it's meant to be a selfish activity. Truly, dating is actually meant to be rather selfish.
We are taught to always be ready to compromise and to be flexible and to be good and to meet everyone's needs. And that's great. Fair enough. But I don't think that shouldn't be the case when it comes to trying to find your life partner. Very few decisions are as important. And I think compromise now in the early stages of dating is misery and frustration later on. I wish I'd known that at 21.
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Chapter 2: What are the signs that you've lost power in dating?
I wish I'd known that maybe even at 23. But when we really do start to focus on what do I want? How do I want to be treated? What is my vision for love and what would it take for that to be met? We experience such a huge and powerful shift that not only makes dating fun, it makes it intentional and I think it makes it fruitful as well.
So today I want to give you my formula for reclaiming your power in dating. And also talk about why it is that we do lose our agency, why repeated rejection and relationship trauma and a scarcity mindset are some of the reasons dating feels so personally hard. And I want to talk about some of the dating dilemmas that you guys have been facing as well, as well.
people in their 20s some of you reached out with some pretty epic stories some pretty frustrating stories to read from my perspective so i want to talk about exactly how you can bring back your own control how you can be in control of those situations so without further ado my lovely lovely listeners let's get into my guide to reclaiming your power in dating in your 20s and beyond so
I want to start out by talking about a time in my own life when I completely abandoned myself to who I was dating. Essentially because I thought that their approval and if they liked me and if I was good enough for them, that could turn into love and that could make me happy. And spoiler alert, in reality, it actually took me to a very low point.
And I'm sure a lot of you could probably tell me a similar story. So back in 2021, I was dating like my first really serious boyfriend. And longtime listeners will know that that breakup is really what created the psychology of your 20s. But, you know, he was great. He was a nice guy. It just didn't work. We broke up and he moved on really, really quickly. Quickly, like very quickly.
And it was this whole story where I was still somewhat under the illusion slash delusion that we were going to get back together. And one of my friends had to be like, hey, he actually has a new girlfriend. I think it just put me into the real painful part of relationship grief very, very quickly.
I was like, oh, I thought that maybe I would have time that maybe we could still have this shared experience of grieving and missing each other. And suddenly he's moved on. He's on the next he's on to the next person. Like he's he's all good and fine and dandy.
I think that created a bit of a chain reaction in me where I looked at my own life and I was like, how come it was so hard for me to find someone else? I was very, very lonely. I'd been with this person for a while. It was still in Australia, COVID lockdowns. So, you know, I didn't get to do all the fun things that you would normally do post breakup.
I didn't get to go out and party with my friends. I didn't get to go out on these dates. I didn't get to, you know, just be alive and present and out and about. And so I was feeling very, very rejected. I was feeling very poorly about myself. I think my self-worth was definitely not an asset that I had at that time.
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Chapter 3: How do repeated rejection and relationship trauma affect dating?
and everything about everything about our relationship became dictated by what he wanted we would only hang out at his house we would only do the dates that he wanted we only had the label that he wanted to give the relationship which was not the label that I wanted and it was very very painful and I basically sat in that relationship that wasn't quite a relationship and
for six months and it was like I was looking at myself from a high up place, just losing who I was. I was just in this relationship and I used to be such a forthright advocate for myself. You know, if someone didn't treat me right, I was going to call it out. And in this situation, I just absolutely did not.
I just sat there and I just let him say, you know, sometimes really mean things about me and I let him just be
do I just let him take control and get whatever he wanted out of the relationship whilst I was very clearly sitting there miserable not getting what I wanted out of the relationship and you best believe I was not going to advocate for myself because all I wanted in that moment was love really I was not in the place to be dating and I was so fragile and I was so insecure all I wanted was someone to just like
hold me and say I was special or at least kind of treat me like I was special a couple of days a week. Needless to say, this relationship, if you can call it a relationship, did not work out. It most certainly did not work out and we kind of ended things.
And if I thought that I had been in a low place before, the six months post that relationship was so painful and almost like I think about it and I feel so bad for that girl. Because I've spoken about it on the show before, but I couldn't even like speak to someone. I just moved to Sydney at the time as well. And obviously I had to try and meet all these new people.
I just didn't feel special at all. I was like, why would anyone want to be my friend? Why would anyone want to talk to me right now? I'm just wasting their time. I'm boring them.
I have these distinct memories of being at parties that my friends had invited me to, like the two friends that I had in Sydney at the time, and just not being able to hold a conversation with someone and just being like, oh my God, they're bored. They're bored. They don't want to talk to me anymore. And then leaving the conversation and self-sabotaging and
I just really felt absolutely terrible about myself. And it all stemmed back to the fact that I had let myself be... I don't want to say taken advantage of. I let myself be treated badly.
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Chapter 4: What is a scarcity mindset in dating and how does it affect you?
I became so focused on what I needed and what I wanted because I really realized after those experiences, no one else was going to advocate for me. You know, everyone else in the dating scheme, in the dating sphere was putting themselves first. So it was my turn to put myself first and it was my turn to be bossy about what I wanted.
And honestly, it's funny because I think I almost went a little bit too far.
my current boyfriend I almost didn't go on a date with him it's like a funny story we tell now whereby he like hadn't confirmed plans the day of and I was texting my friends being like no a real man wouldn't treat me this way my soulmate wouldn't treat me this way I'm not going to go on this date but I gave him a second chance I'm so glad that I did and here we are now so my experience aside what is it that makes us lose our power in dating
I think the first reason why you may end up in a similar situation to me, kind of dating losers with people that don't treat you right, is because of repeated rejection. Being rejected by someone you like or admire, it stings on a very deep interpersonal level.
a great deal of human emotion is going to come from rejection and is going to emerge in the face of real, anticipated, imagined, even remembered rejection by other people. We are socially primed to experience rejection as a painful experience, almost physically painful, and then as a result of that, turn inwards looking for answers and as to why we were the ones who were wrong.
We were the ones who were different. We were the one who couldn't make this person happy or couldn't fit in. A consequence of that is that we believe that we must be the ones who have to change or who have to adapt in order to be accepted. So there was a 2000 study that found that the more rejection you experience, the more you actually do begin to cope through avoidant strategies.
So this was actually a study done on academics, university academics, who were told that their papers and manuscripts had either been rejected or not. And they found in the experimental condition where, you know, certain participants were having papers rejected left, right and center. The more rejections they received, fake rejections, the more they withdrew, the more they became quite hostile.
But in general, the more they actually began to doubt themselves. Now, obviously, this was an experiment. These rejections actually had nothing to do with the quality of their work. But they ended up really believing that just because this random person told them that their paper was terrible or that they didn't deserve some kind of accolade, it must be true.
And very few of them said, oh, I don't actually think you're right. I think your criticisms of me are wrong. It's so bizarre how we as humans are so quick to trust other people's approval or judgments of us, but we are so ready to dismiss or not even think about our own, not even think about what we think. And rejection will do that to you.
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Chapter 5: What are the consequences of losing power in relationships?
The second reason we may have lost our power in dating is because of a really unfortunate and painful experience of relationship trauma. This is going to come in a lot of forms, but some examples of relationship trauma include being cheated on.
Even repeated instances of micro cheating, being in quite an emotionally volatile relationship where you never knew where you stood, being betrayed, a traumatic breakup, just some examples. Something that many of us don't know is that relationship trauma in our late teens and our early 20s does actually have the ability to reshape our attachment style.
We often tend to think that our attachment style is somewhat locked in after childhood and that the only thing that influences attachment style is our parental relationships and our attachment to them. That is not true. A 2017 paper titled Adult Attachment, Stress and Romantic Relationships. I actually discovered this piece of research when I was researching my book and
But it found that there are three types of negative events in adulthood that can actually rewire your attachment style. So there's negative external events. This has nothing to do with your relationship, but still makes you feel unsteady. So may have been the death of a loved one or the death of a partner or an injury or a really traumatic, dangerous situation you went through with someone.
Then we have negative relational events. So conflict, separation, abandonment, breakup. And then cognitive or emotional events. So this may be that your attachment style has been rewired because you as a person have started experiencing heightened levels of anxiety due to some biological change, due to some cognitive change. You start seeing everything with anxiety, including your relationship.
The biggest one, though, is the second. Relational events, specifically negative relational events. So much trust and vulnerability goes into caring for someone and goes into loving someone. And when someone takes that trust and vulnerability and treats it like it's nothing, that does leave permanent damage.
And it may explain why we can enter a relationship entirely secure and in an entirely healthy place only to leave it anxious or avoidant or insecure and with a whole new perspective on love. So finally, the third reason we lose our power in dating is because we begin to adopt a scarcity mindset.
In other words, we let whoever it may be, the media, our married friends, our parents, we let them convince us that we are running out of time to find a quote unquote good one. The scarcity mindset, it's actually an economics term and it refers to the belief that a resource is limited and that results in us making irrational decisions.
It's why, say you're at the grocery store and you're trying to buy your favorite yogurt and suddenly there's only two of these yogurts left, like it's almost sold out. You only need one yogurt, but you're going to buy two because this idea of scarcity is making you make irrational decisions.
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Chapter 6: How can you reclaim your power in dating?
I don't think that's the healthiest decision for you right now and I always say you would much rather be single for another 10 years and find your person at 35 or 39 or 32 than spend the next 10 years with someone that you settled for and have to break up anyways and be back in the same spot but now just with more emotional damage.
So we lose our power because of rejection, relationship trauma and a scarcity mindset to name the big three. What are the consequences of this? Well, we've already spoken about a few. I think the biggest one is self-abandonment, abandoning what you need in a relationship, ignoring your needs just for the idea and the promise of love. This can mean that we often let others make decisions for us.
We ignore what we need from a situation. We ruminate constantly about whether this other person likes us rather than whether we like ourselves or whether we even like them. And we also begin to tolerate behavior that we never imagined for ourself and we never imagined would be part of our love story.
Another consequence of abandoning ourselves or lowering our standards, losing our power, is that I actually think we begin to feel alone.
feel it in our body feel a lot of discomfort distress and emotional pain when you're dating someone or when you know you're in the process of courting people who are treating you poorly where you feel like you have no agency you have no control i often find that that creates a lot of bodily tension it creates real signs physical signs of emotional distress like crying a lot like feeling sore in parts of your body feeling nauseous
There's a really fascinating paper that was published in 2014 and it attempted to map where we feel emotions in our body. Because typically we do feel emotions physically before we feel them consciously and mentally physically. We just don't realize it.
And what this paper found was that when we feel discomfort, stress, anxiety, emotional tension, we tend to feel it first in our face, behind our eyes, in our throat, in our stomach. When you lose your power in dating and you are dating people who make you feel terrible, you are going to feel terrible. Your body is going to let you know that it's not happy with these emotional circumstances.
I remember a friend telling me how... She went through this period of dating the wrong person and she felt nauseous and ill the entire time. She went to the doctor, she thought she may have an ulcer, she thought it was something serious, maybe like a really bad bacteria. When she left the relationship, that illness cleared within weeks.
And I know that sounds quite I don't know serendipitous or convenient or like a coincidence. I promise you it's not. The emotional and social interactions that you're having specifically ones that feel so intimate and vulnerable if they are not right if they don't sit right with you mentally they're not going to sit right with you physically.
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