How Can I Be Confident When I Have Relationship Anxiety?

Hey Doc, 

Last March, I sent you a letter for the Ask Dr. NerdLove section (I’m LW 1 here) and now I’ve got a few more questions. At the time, I had never been in a relationship despite almost being 30 years old. Since then, I have been in two officially defined relationships, the first of which started shortly after I wrote the letter to you. (And also several first, or occasionally second or third, dates that either didn’t go anywhere, or where communication fizzled out, or they didn’t have enough free time, and so on.) Both of my relationships progressed to the relationship stage relatively quickly, all things considered, but the first one ended after about six months together, though it was an amicable split, and we’re still friendly today. The second relationship, which only lasted about two months, ended just last week, and while things started well, her behavior eventually become fairly toxic and unpredictable, red flags started popping up, and she ended things. While I’m glad I found this out negative side of her sooner rather than later, I’ve still been feeling increased anxiety since then, which, in the past, I’ve noticed seems to manifest itself mostly if I think something is wrong in whatever relationship I’m in. Now, it’s mainly anxiety about the future and the circumstances of the breakup. I have started seeing a therapist, however, and I’ll see a psychiatrist as well, because I strongly suspect that I have rejection sensitive dysphoria as part of ADHD, as I’ve always been very sensitive to rejection in general. While I’m sure this’ll help, as it did for you, I still have a few concerns.

I plan on taking some time off the dating scene, while I start seeing my therapist and taking care of myself in other ways, as well as doing new things to keep my schedule busy and keep my mind off of this. However, I keep having irrational thoughts that as a 31-year-old without much dating experience, and one who wants to eventually get married and maybe have kids, that time is not on my side. (And yes, I’m aware that 31-year-old women who want to have kids are biologically under more pressure than men, and men are more likely to date younger women than vice versa, but it’s still an irrational thought that I need to shake.) I do know that I can find love, but obviously I don’t know when that’ll happen, and I can’t just keep waiting for it with bated breath as the expense of everything else in my life. With that having been said, what’s the best way to be fully content with being single, besides the obvious things like having a wide variety of hobbies and activities to do, and continuing to meet new people?

Also, I don’t want to lose the mojo I had (for lack of a better word) in meeting people and forming relationships. Considering my lack of dating experience, which I described in the previous letter I linked to, I feel like I did a good job in developing my dating skills over the past few years; however, my most recent breakup was painful, and looking back, it was more painful than the first one, mainly because it wasn’t on good terms. And of course, because of the negativity and recency bias, I mainly remember how my last relationship ended, as opposed to the better earlier parts of it. In the past, I’ve unconsciously lived my life like a Homer Simpson quote: “You tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.” Which, even though it’s meant to be funny, it’s obviously terrible advice to follow in real life, because if you never try, you’ll never get to experience things like love, and I don’t want this negative experience to make me return to these thoughts.

I also have a question about confidence. I know you’ve said time and time again that confidence is sexy, almost as much as you say $_INSERT_NAME_OF_CONVENTIONALLY_UNATTRACTIVE_LOOKING_MALE_CELEBRITY_HERE_IS_MARRIED. That said, how do you reconcile having anxiety with being confident, especially considering that I might have to go on medication for it? I occasionally felt anxiety in previous relationships, or periods where I was dating a woman but it didn’t progress to the relationship stage, especially if I felt she was getting less attracted to me. Since the breakup, anxiety has become a bigger issue, and at this point, a lot of it is related to potentially seeing my ex in public. We live about two miles away in a densely populated city of about 50,000, but it’s been a concern on mine, and I’m also anxious about potentially running into her on a date once I’m on the dating scene again, since there are lots of nice date spots around where I live. Anyway, my anxiety is something that I’ll work on, but it just seems like a contradiction that if a guy has anxiety, he can be confident (or at least confident enough to the point where he can attract numerous women.)

So, a lot of stuff here, but basically, the main questions I have are, how can I be fully content with being single, how can I regain some of the past mojo I had in meeting women and forming relationships, and how can I remain confident with women despite dealing with anxiety?

Now an Occasional Lover

Hey, congratulations on your progress, NOL! You should be proud of how far you’ve come and what you’ve achieved in a relatively short period of time. While I know it can feel a little disheartening when these relationships didn’t last – especially when you’re new and relatively inexperienced – the most important thing is to see how far you’ve come and what you’ve accomplished, compared to what you’ve had before. That says a lot about the effort you’ve put in and how much you’ve improved, as well as how much you can achieve going forward.

It’s also good that you recognized red flags and toxic behavior in one of your former partners, especially early on in the relationship. While I understand how it can sometimes feel like any relationship is better than no relationship – particularly when you have had few or any relationships in the past – trust me when I tell you: being single is infinitely preferable to being stuck in a toxic relationship. Been there, done that, printed the t-shirts myself.

And yeah, some of what you’re describing – the fear and anxiety surrounding the possibility of being dumped or the relationship falling apart – could well be aspects of rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Hopefully talking with a therapist and psychiatrist will allow you to get this under control.

So, let’s tackle some of the questions you have.

First and foremost: the idea that time isn’t “on your side” is a self-imposed limitation. While what you’re feeling is understandable, it’s not rational. This is a subject that I see come up fairly frequently: men who’re worried that because they didn’t start dating, get into relationships or get married by a certain age, they’re at a disadvantage and will “never” achieve some particular goal – especially having kids. The most common rationale for this belief is that women they meet will either already have children or not be interested in having any which… well, I’ll just say that this is “problematic”, for a number of reasons. One of the biggest issues with this outlook, of course, is that it positions the idea that a parent doesn’t truly “love” their children if there’s not a biological connection. This, needless to say, is a rather profound slap in the face to parents who adopt, step parents and people who may not be biological or legal parents but fill the role of parents for others. I know plenty of people who married single parents and couldn’t love their stepchildren (and vice-versa) any more than if they were related by blood.

Similarly, the fact that someone may have children already doesn’t necessarily preclude them from wanting more. God knows there are plenty of people – and again, this includes people I know personally – whose spouses had children from previous marriages, and who then went on to have children together. This isn’t rare or even unusual. And, honestly, the people I see who complain the most about this tend to be folks with profoundly retrograde ideas about family, sexuality and lineage; the idea that their spouse might have had children before somehow “diminishes” the purity of their bloodline or some other horseshit.

The thing to realize, NOL, is that this concern is just borrowing trouble from the future. You’re getting preemptively upset about something that not only hasn’t happened, but may never happen. You are letting yourself get upset about an imagined future – the relationship equivalent of “making up someone to get mad at”. But what makes it more pernicious, especially in cases like yours, is that you’re assuming that your future can only unfold one of two ways: either you find someone who’s never had kids before so you can have children with them, or you’re SOL. But the truth is that, even if things were to proceed exactly as you’d hope – you find someone age appropriate who doesn’t have kids, you start a relationship and even get married – there’s no guarantee that the rest will play out the way you expect. You could still end up not having children through no fault of your own… or theirs, for that matter. “Always in motion, the future is,” as the sage once said.

We have far less control of the future than we believe, and our attempts to force it to go one specific way or another often only serve to make it that much harder to appreciate where we are. To quote the sage again: “All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing.”

All that focus on potential, imagined futures does is rob you of your happiness in the present. It’s impossible to enjoy your life and what you’ve achieved if you’re continually looking ahead because you feel like this is the only way to ward off disaster. This is why part of learning to be happy being single is to live in the present and realize that the future will take care of itself. The better you are able to have a present that you enjoy – a well-rounded life full of purpose, satisfaction and meaning – the more likely you are to have a future you will also enjoy.

And part of this is to recognize that your past relationships are things to learn from, not auguries of the future. The fact that a relationship didn’t end on good terms – hardly surprising, considering the toxic behavior you mentioned – doesn’t mean that you lost your mojo or that you’ve somehow failed. What it means is that this specific relationship didn’t work. If you can understand why it didn’t work, why it ended in rancor, then you can learn from it and apply those lessons to the future. Especially if those lessons, for example, are about learning how to spot red flags before they become full-fledged emergencies.

It’s very much like the man who survives three sinking ships; is he unlucky because those ships sunk, or is he profoundly lucky because he escaped every time? It’s all in how you choose to look at it.

And as for your final question: being confident doesn’t mean never having doubts, nor does it mean never experiencing fear or uncertainty or anxiety. Confidence is simply the knowledge that you can handle things. Being confident, for example, doesn’t mean that you believe that you’re going to get a phone number every time you approach some sexy single at the bar. It simply means that you know yourself, you trust yourself and your abilities and that no matter how it turns out, you’ll be fine. If, for example, she turns out to have a boyfriend? Cool, you know you can disengage or pivot to making friends instead of trying to get a date. If she rejects you? Ok, well it may sting your ego – rejection is never fun – but it won’t actually harm you; you recognize that she wasn’t right for you and move on to someone else who will be.

But let’s choose one of your specific scenarios: running into an ex while on a date. This is a thing that happens on occasion. It’s happened to me a number of times, in fact. Confidence, in this case, means knowing that this isn’t something to fear. 9 times out of 10, nothing is likely to happen. You know that seeing them may cause some sort of momentary emotional jolt, but that’s it; you don’t need to even acknowledge them. If you do have reason to acknowledge them – they make a point of seeking you out – then you can be civil, polite and brief. You can keep it to “Well, nice seeing you, hope you’re doing well, I’ll let you get back to your dinner,” and return to your own date. If, for whatever reason, she chooses to make a scene, then that’s a her problem, not a you problem. Being polite but unreactive makes it clear who is causing trouble; refusing to engage when it’s not necessary is far more indicative of confidence than letting the encounter cause you to fall to pieces.

Like Patrick Swayze says in Roadhouse: keep your cool and be nice. Until it’s time to not be nice. And if your date asks what that was about? “Ex girlfriend, it didn’t end well.” That’s all she needs to know at that point in time.

Again: it’s just a matter of understanding that while this could be unpleasant, you know you can handle it.

Oh, and one more thing: needing medication doesn’t mean that you’re not confident or that you’re somehow broken. Medication isn’t a sign of weakness; medication is a tool, something that helps you. If you broke your foot, would you think that wearing a cast or using a crutch somehow makes you less? Do you think that people would look down on you for using something that should be unnecessary? Or are those the things that make it possible for you to function and get around while your bones knit? If you wouldn’t look down on someone for using a mobility device to get around, why would you look down on yourself for using something that makes your life better and more manageable?

Don’t rob yourself of happiness in the now by focusing so hard on imaginary futures, NOL. Live a great life now, one that brings satisfaction and fulfillment. That helps set the stage for an even brighter, better future than living in fear of what may never come to pass.

Good luck.