When dating a good guy triggers fears your toxic EX created
Make it make sense. Dating a good guy who treats you right still leaves you anticipating the worst. Stability somehow feels more terrifying than the familiar emotional uncertainty and safe, healthy Love can make you more anxious than past toxic relationships.
Listen, the fear is valid. But breathe easy when I say you can safely work through that fear. It won’t be easy and it’ll even seem unnatural at first, but that’s because peace and security in a healthy relationship may not be your normal or familiar experience.
Gone are the days you wake up and wonder how they will treat you today versus yesterday, or if they’ll even acknowledge you exist. A drama-free, loving, mature, and genuine relationship is all new, and it may not be totally welcomed with open arms – be more conscious of that.
If you come from a history of bad relationships, you may be carrying over any protective habits and survival patterns you that taught you to trust peace and safety.
Not to worry because any unresolved fear is going to show you what needs to be healed so that you can bask in the warmth a healthy relationship can provide. And if there’s one thing a genuine, consistent, loving relationship will show you over the bad ones is that a good guy will show you that you don’t need to be clinging onto those old relationship wounds – he’ll even graciously help you unpack your bags for as long as you’re willing!
Dating a good guy will feel foreign to you
Literally, it will be like learning a new language. Or, rather, like trying to understand someone that speaks a different language and putting your faith and trust in them.
There’s no doubt you will experience discomfort, resistance, and even denial. This may trigger self-inflicted feelings of anxiousness, doubt, and emotional exhaustion at times – a mirror to the very things you experienced throughout your toxic relationships. These are familiar feelings, except this time these feelings may only be serving to falsely protect you.
First date red flags to STOP sweeping under the rug
This may get me in trouble, I don’t care, but I’m not into “following my heart”. The heart is deceptive, delusional, depraved and often fleeting. Following my heart has often led me to chaos and destruction. Following my heart made me essentially blind to dating red flags I didn’t see coming or that I was already aware of.
It will be hard to unsee the baggage from your toxic relationships
There it is, the, “Is it me? Am I the problem?“
If you’ve been dealt the string of bad relationships and crappy men, it’s almost inevitable you will also drag along some of that dirty laundry with you – stench included. Even if you’ve taken all the needed time in singlehood to unpack your suitcase, when you finally do rise out of the shadows and stumble onto the rare gem of a healthy partner, there’s still the chance you forgot to change out of the very clothes on your back.
This could attribute to the question many women have often asked: “Why do I end up ruining ‘a good thing’ when I finally found it?“
Not everything you learn or take away from unhealthy relationships are bad – some make you stronger than you were before and teach you lessons. But it’s no secret that toxic relationships can leave you with an array of wounds from a history of crappy treatment as well as repeated cycles of unhealthy habits and behaviors. Consequently, you may have also taken part in some of it, too.
Therefore, much of what you have learned, accepted, tolerated and been conditioned to became normal over time – some wounds cut that deep. This could be poor communication (gaslighting, verbal abuse, or the inability to express your needs and feelings), distrust or turpitude (infidelity, deceit, control, neglect, and secrecy), and a lack of self-worth.
This normality becomes a repetitive cycle – from the kind of attention you seek, the partners you choose, as well as those you attract into your life having similar wounds. This repetitive pattern affects you long-term, showing up like a parasite in areas of your life where it doesn’t belong and risk being carried over into healthy relationships.
Breaking these cycles are a tough pill to swallow because it requires you to become aware of the unhealthy patterns that lead to the same unhealthy results. And when you’re dating someone who makes you feel safe, it will be incredibly difficult to unsee the damage carried over from your previous toxic relationships.
You will confuse a lot of healthy qualities with toxic ones
You may also find that healthy relationship qualities surface your innermost insecurities (or unresolved/unhealed wounds), such as trust, control, infidelity, self-confidence, and codependency. As a way of dealing with or processing those deep-rooted struggles, you may end up projecting those insecurities onto a healthy relationship.
In the beginning of my relationship with my husband, I used to make smart remarks (and assumptions) that he would suck at communicating and get defensive about everything since that is exactly what I previously experienced most often in my past relationships. I was trying to paint myself as the victim in conflict or confrontation when he hadn’t done anything wrong.
In this confusion, it’s also fairly common to create, imagine, assume, or anticipate problems that don’t really exist. I did this, too. Dating a guy who was stable and consistent still had me believing things like, “he’s too busy for me, he won’t make time for me, I’m not as important, he won’t put me first, he’d rather work than spend time with me, he doesn’t want to connect with me as much as I do with him,” and so on when those things were not evident to be true.
Those insecurities were not my reality. Whereas in my previous toxic relationships I would have to throw myself at them and fight endlessly for time, effort and attention because the source of my insecurity was that I was not a priority.
That said, when dating a good guy, it can be easy to confuse healthy qualities with unhealthy ones. For example,
- You might experience some discomfort when he doesn’t question your every move or that he freely keeps you up to speed on his
- You may see his respect for upholding boundaries (his and yours) as callous and patronizing
- His higher level of emotional maturity may somehow convince you he’s not interested, unavailable or non-committal
- Steady consistency may translate as low-effort compared to the highs and lows of Love-bombing
5 Reasons why “grabbing coffee” is a healthy first date
Despite the growing cringe and lack of appeal, I think grabbing coffee on a first date is actually practical and perfectly acceptable, and its simplicity can be a healthy choice when meeting someone for the first time.
Worse off, dating a good guy may even bore you
If you’re someone with a bad boy type, this is especially for you. And I see this so often, especially as someone active in Reddit dating subs, the number of people who share their toxic relationship history meanwhile battle with healthy relationships seeming undesirable. Moreover, there always seems to be a lack of a *spark* or chemistry.
Basically, dating an emotionally safe and consistent partner is just not sexy. When, really, the ‘not sexy‘ part is simply because the nervous system isn’t triggered. A nervous system that’s in a constant, active state becomes intoxicating. It’s somehow much more desirable to be with the guy who is drop-dead hot, where the sex is outer-worldly, yet goes hot and cold at the drop of a dime versus the guy who is stable, consistent, and decent-looking.
You could think of it like this: dating a good guy is like having a glass of wine with dinner when you’re used to already being drunk when dinner arrives. For many people, the latter is harder to break.
Your gut reaction when things get hard is to cut the cord
If you were in previous relationships that ended abruptly without notice, and ceasing the relationship was commonly used as a threat – to spark a reaction or even get attention – then calling it quits at the sign of a quarrel or any minor inconvenience will almost seem second nature.
I find that those in unhealthy relationships use breaking up as a means to add fuel to an already destructive fire. And that fire is unruly due to ongoing, unresolved issues.
You may have learned from your toxic relationships that ending a relationship that leads to getting back together somehow means the connection is real, meaningful and worthy of coming back to. And in many unhealthy relationships couples do this over and over again, except usually without actually absolving their relationship problems.
So, in a healthy relationship, your knee-jerk reaction may be to cut the cord from a singular, unpleasant situation or when things get icky and hard. Why? For one thing, you’re used to chaotic relationships with turmoil being an ongoing cycle but that breaking it off has become easier than going through the motions of actually working through something. Or, well, because oftentimes breaking up was a way to test relationship chemistry and desire as well as an individual’s feelings and loyalty.
Every relationship will endure hardship and unexpected obstacles, even when you’re dating a good guy. But when you’re in a healthy relationship, these hardships and obstacles are not something you work through on your own. It’s important to confront your triggers rather than avoiding conflict or confrontation and not letting past fears dictate the outcome of every situation moving forward.
What you can do when healthy Love feels uncomfortable
- Notice the difference between intuition (i.e., “This doesn’t sit right with me,”) and anxiety (i.e., “What if…”).
- Give trust time to develop through consistency of words and actions instead of demanding instant certainty.
- Communicate your fears without making your partner responsible for healing or fixing everything.
- Pay attention to consistent actions, not just intense feelings (and chemistry).
- Allow calm to feel unfamiliar without assuming it is boring.
- Continue personal healing while participating in the relationship.