It’s often said there is nothing more attractive than confidence. The opposite of confidence is insecurity. There is nothing more unattractive than insecurity. If you spend more time thinking about your abs or how you look in your clothes than you do thinking about your insecurity vs your self-esteem, you’re going to have a very bumpy road in your future relationships.
If you’re not ready, then you’re not ready. So instead of wasting your time with this, you’d be better off going out and making the same mistakes over and over, being emotionally destroyed over and over, until you get it. You have to come to the point where you hit rock bottom, admit you have a problem and stop putting the blame on others. Then we can begin.
What do I mean by blaming others? When you look on social media, you’re likely to see memes with slogans about letting go of people who don’t care, not because you don’t care about them but because they don’t care about you. Some will point out that it’s better to suffer the heartache of walking away forever than it is to stay with someone and have your heart broken every single day—because even though you’d give them everything, they don’t give a rat’s ass about you.
So you’re the victim in this narrative, the one who cares too much about selfish distant people who don’t know how love and seem to be just fine with shattering your heart day after day.
But in some Twilight Zone reality where you were to actually take one of these meme’s advice and end things with the person who never seems to appreciate your devotion, something shocking would then happen. The ‘don’t know what you got until it’s gone’ or the ‘we only want what we can’t have’ phenomenon would kick in and start working.
All of a sudden that emotionally unavailable partner who was breaking your heart daily by ignoring you? That partner who couldn’t be bothered to learn let alone honor your boundaries, that cold cruel lover who if not full on cheating with others was at least pushing you away constantly?
Remember that douche-canoe who was always taking you for granted, who found you so uninteresting and barely ever listened? They now care. In fact they are chasing you. The moment you gave up on them you suddenly were the most attractive most important person in all of existence.
Did you ever wonder why? WHY? You made this person your entire life. You would give them your world. You lived for them totally and completely. You’d go anywhere for them, do anything for them, if they would only care about you the way you care about them.
When you had finally had enough of their shit and you walked away, tada! Just like magic you’re endlessly fascinating now, loved, adored, chased and wanted. It’s possible that you put the blame on your partner for this fact of nature, as if it’s their fault—when you could have been making use of this natural law rather than cursing it.
What is this law? It is as fundamental, factual and predictable as gravity. When you have no life and you make your romantic partner your entire life, you become pathetic, desperate, of low worth, boring. You will not be valued.
So this is what I mean by blaming others. Most people assume that it is their romantic partner who is broken, who doesn’t know how to love properly, when the truth is really that you were breaking the law and suffering the inevitable consequences of breaking the law.
I once had a friend that could not keep a relationship for more than several weeks, and those relationships were full of drama. If that were me, rather than assuming that every partner I had had, several dozen of them, were all bizarrely selfish sociopathic narcissists who lacked empathy, I would have at some point wondered if maybe it was me who was doing something to bring about those consequences over and over again.
What would be my alternative? To fill myself with hate for the opposite sex? Does a woman who ‘hates men’ or a man who decides to hate women and go his own way stand a chance of ending up in a lasting, happy and loving relationship?
So my choice is to hate and put the blame on all those partners, or admit that I have a pattern of letting my own desperation and fear destroy my relationships. If I admit I am the one doing something wrong, then it becomes possible for me to learn what natural laws I am violating and actually do something to end the painful pattern.
So if you want to be a man-hater, or a woman-hater, if you want to say your repeated patterns in relationships which got you rejected were always because you just keep picking mentally-ill abusive partners who don’t know how to love—then you have no use for me or this book. You should stop reading now and devote your life to being a misogynist or a man-hater. Be content with going your own way and give up on any chance of any romantic relationship. You’re not ready.
You have the chance to fix this. But it’s going to require you to give up some of your beliefs about how things work in relationships, and about who was to blame for your failed relationships of the past.
Still with me? Great. So if the real WHY is not that men all suck, or women all suck, what is the real reason? If the real why is not that every single partner you got in a relationship with in your adult life happened to suffer from a rare psychological condition where they lack all human empathy (I get that some of you are highly invested in this narrative. This book isn’t for you.) then what’s the real reason?
The real reason is your fear. It’s your own insecurity and your desperate anxiety that repeatedly shows up as this pattern of romantic partners either backing away and distancing themselves emotionally, or dumping you completely.
“Wait,” you say. Some of the partners I have had were guilty of the same fear and insecurity at times. I remember being in bed while they refused to even face my direction. But that was not them backing away from me because I was afraid. It was because they were the one who was afraid!”
Yes. The reason I’m telling you to stop blaming others is because there is nothing you can do to change anyone who doesn’t want to change. But you can take responsibility for your own side of the street and you can make massive changes in your own patterns of insecurity.
You can’t do that, however, if your ego wants to put the blame, justified or not, onto former partners. If you want to break these patterns, you need to cut loose the blame game and take responsibility for all of it.
Once you become willing to do that, we can work on your own insecurity. The result of working on your own fear will be that you will not settle for a romantic relationship with someone so insecure and desperate that they become controlling and abusive. As if by magic, when you are no longer willing to put up with that, when you are no longer codependent but instead enforce your boundaries by instantly walking out when you are violated, something amazing will happen.
What will happen that’s so amazing? People will grow in your presence. Partners will stop disrespecting your boundaries and you’ll see people who could and would have otherwise been discarded, resented, hated and blamed for their controlling ways, actually become kind, decent respectful loving people. Their long lost empathy remarkably returns when you no longer allow them to walk on you.
The ones you cannot help? You will not tolerate them or suffer from them at all when needy insecurity is replaced by a loving confidence. You will simply lovingly and kindly—AND INSTANTLY— enforce your boundaries by kicking to the curb those who sneer and disrespect your relationship standards. You’ll stick to your guns without needing to hate, without needing to blame, and without the least bit of drama.
The reason you’ll do this is because something has become far more important to you than who comes or goes or who likes you or doesn’t like you. You and I are going to discuss in detail what that ‘more important’ thing is later on. For now I’ll just say that successful relationships require that you do not make your romantic partner the most important thing in your life. You have to have boundaries that you are willing to kick them to the curb over, or else they will walk all over you.
When your partner finds he or she can walk all over your dreams, walk all over your principles, walk all over every position you hold dear, they will stop respecting you. The reason they stop respecting you is that you are a spineless worm so afraid of losing your relationship, that you will agree to absolutely anything. You’re too desperate and insecure to risk losing this partner who you’ve made into your entire life, the object of your worship.
This willingness to betray anything if they command it, to stand for nothing at all but your romantic partner’s approval? It’s makes you ugly to the core to them. It makes you seem repulsive. They are holding back their vomit and can’t get away from the disgusting filth of your pathetic neediness fast enough.
“OMG. How come nobody ever warned me about this?” some of you are saying.
They were taught Trig. They learned calculus. But hardly anybody knows this relationship stuff. So most people were never taught. So they could never teach you. We are left to fumble through broken relationships until we are so sick of the pain, drama and insanity that we seek out someone who has found the way out so they can then show us the way out.
So we are not the only one who screwed it up and let insecurity cause us to mistreat people. That’s very true. It’s also true that we have been the victim of abuse rather than the abuser. We had someone else get so insecure that they treated us unkindly. In their panic they tried to control us and when they couldn’t control us there was rage and drama that came from them, not us.
It’s true. But that truth only serves the ego. It is of no use on this journey from the darkness of anxiety and insecurity, and the need to control, to the light of self-respect, confidence and peace.
If I only worry about cleaning up my own yard, it is going to transform my life. If I concern myself with everyone else’s yard without cleaning mine, my ego will be satisfied, but nothing will really change for me in the future.
Therefore, in answering this question, WHY was I rejected, I see that taking 100% responsibility for these patterns of fear, pain, drama and rejection is the right thing to do from a utilitarian perspective. It works. To fix this mess, I need to go with what works. My ego wants it to be all their fault. The truth is we all have a lot to learn.
But what works in ending these negative patterns and getting the love life I want is for me to take all the blame, to worry only about the yard I have control over, and leave it at that.
If you are still in a place where blaming and hating your exes is of the utmost importance to your ego and you simply can’t let it go yet, and you have to hold yourself 100% perfect and blameless, identifying as the victim, not responsible in the least, you’re not ready for this book.
If you can see there is plenty of blame to go around and you understand what I explained about concerning yourself with your own yard being the useful and effective way to proceed, then let’s proceed.
So, it’s all your fault. WHY? You let your fear and insecurity turn you into a controller, a game player, a manipulator. You stopped relating from a place of love, and began relating from a place of insecurity, jealousy and possessiveness.
Whatever your partner’s insensitivities and faults, however his or her yard looked, this is why you got dumped, your own insecurity and desperation, and the drama that flows from it. This is why your lover needs time apart. This is why you got demoted to the friend zone.
Before we move on to chapter two, we need to be on the same page about the WHY. If you want to instead put all the blame at your ex’s feet and talk to your friends about how self-absorbed and cruel your ex was? You should probably go talk a friend’s ear off about that. Forget about me for now and come back to this book when you are ready to do the work it takes to end these painful patterns. Then we can get about the business of examining your fear, and finding your confidence.
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