Please forgive me if this post gives off misogynistic douchebag vibes, but I truthfully am confused as to why I keep only attracting dates whom have so much past baggage and emotional trauma.
For context I’m an early thirties straight male living in the PNW states. My luck while dating has been less than stellar and to date, I have no idea what it’s like nor have I ever been in a stable healthy relationship before.
All the women I seem to attract have some crazy amounts of emotional baggage where I’m the first ‘nice guy’ they’ve met and so they latch on like a mouse to a mouse trap and just overwhelm me. For example, this last woman I had two in-person dates with and couple FaceTime calls, she was already telling me I’m the first guy who’s ever treated her to real romantic ‘dates’ instead of just hookups before and was already having moving in with her talks… 😅
I’m not going to air out all her information that she confided in me, but that always seems to be the the ongoing theme…every…single…time. I’m not even speaking in hyperbole, almost every woman I’ve gone out with treats me as a stepping stone because they’ve been treated like crap in past relationships.
Looking into myself for a moment, I have no idea what kind of bad energy I could be giving off to where I cannot for the life of me attract a normal woman who wants to take the time to get to know each other and build towards a healthy relationship.
I’m realistic and definitely understand that no one is perfect and most people around my age at this point have baggage. What’s baffling is that I’m someone who actually has their crap together: lots of friends, social hobbies, good career, live alone, workout consistently and I’m fit, I travel, no kids or crazy secrets. I even can have those difficult intellectual conversations without issue.
idk what else to do.
EDIT: My standards aren’t high at all. I’m just looking for a normal gal who wants to go on fun dates and laugh together and build something. I’m not looking to be someone’s therapists where they just vent about how shitty their exes were to them 😫
30 comments
Where are you finding people?
That’s just a lot of what you encounter in your 30s.
As Bill Burr would say, you’re no longer drafting in the first round.
Try putting on the app that you’re looking for a confident woman (e.g., on one of the prompts on bumble and hinge). Women with baggage do latch on the second they’re treated well, so perhaps trying to head them off is best.
Most women have emotional baggage.
Welcome to post pandemic dating my friend.
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What type of women are you going after? In general if you are consistently getting the same results then a change has to be made because changing nothing won’t change your results.
>living in the PNW states.
This is an awful market for men, move if you can location plays a giant role in success.
>almost every woman I’ve gone out with treats me as a stepping stone because they’ve been treated like crap in past relationships
Don’t be a bad person but also don’t be a doormat it’s a tight balance.
>What’s baffling is that I’m someone who actually has their crap together: lots of friends, social hobbies, good career, live alone, workout consistently and I’m fit, I travel, no kids or crazy secrets. I even can have those difficult intellectual conversations without issue.
You continue to build this and in a better dating market location you can have more success.
You have weak boundaries. And low standards.
When you have weak boundaries, people can feel it. And they will overstep them. It’s like a thief casing houses. They look for houses that offer the least security. Ones that leave windows open. Ones off the main road. Obscured by trees. No security cameras etc.
You make them feel like they can encroach on you, so they do. It’s that black and white. People do not inherently respect others boundaries. They subconsciously overstep them.
If you want to start deflecting these people, get stronger boundaries.
You the moment they have a quality you absolutely don’t like stop talking to them. You owe them nothing.
Also unpopular opinion:
Stop dating people that are eager to confess their “trauma” and “toxic past” in the first few meetings. Its a red flag that the person likes / willingly participates in drama to a big degree.
Trauma is a big buzzword these days. Just like how “I have OCD” or “I have anxiety” was overused a few years ago. People who overuse serious words and conditions are red flags IMO.
People with real trauma aren’t going around just revealing it to complete strangers they just met. I am cautious of anyone who tries to get sympathy with their trauma. I also don’t trust how vague everyone’s trauma is.
Shit reminds me over some anti-love bombing behavior. It seeks to get empathy, and distance them from accountability so you overlook their own toxic behavior.
I’d drop anyone who pulled the trauma card early on, personally.
It’s the Online Dating effect, the most attractive guys get all the girls, those guys have a lot of girls to date, so they play with them and after a while girls get tired of these guys because they don’t commit,lower their standards and start meeting men that actually want something serious with them (you in this case)
Well I’m single too and on the apps on and off so I can empathize. You seem like a great guy with your shit together. I don’t think you are doing anything wrong necessarily. I think you may naturally seek out women who don’t mirror that strength and stability. I definitely agree with trying to go for women you wouldn’t normally go for. Expand your search or age has a lot to do with it I have discovered. At least for me, most men my age don’t have a solid foundation and definitely can’t have tough talks. Good luck in your search!
That’s what happens when the majority of women have been mistreated for the past x number years by men. You are looking for the minority of women who don’t have emotional baggage. It’s that 5% of people who have thriving careers, healthy relationships with family, strong boundaries in past romantic relationships (it only takes one toxic ex to mess you up), and actively goes to therapy to sort out their internal monologue regardless of their experiences.
This is just the dating options now because of age and experiences.
That’s because all of them have emotional baggage and past trauma.
To me it feels like most these ladies dated the same ten douchebags named Jim and Duane. Who met them for booty calls refused to date them seriously and when called out for it ghosted them. So here you are picking up the pieces for the trauma these assholes left behind.
That’s where we are today. The dating market is catastrophe. 50% of marriages are ending in divorce. The only reason the divorce rate isn’t higher is because the vast majority of couples out there are not getting married. They are hooking up and the some of the guys are leaving because the woman hid that she had 4 kids with three baby daddy’s or the lady is leaving because the guy pretended to be some big shot but instead didn’t have a drivers license and lived in his moms basement.
In either case the trauma is scaring people from trusting members of the opposite gender.
Gosh I wish there was a Reddit algorithm that would put all of these posts from ppl having the same problem together in one chat room so you can find yourselves a partner. Cause this has to be the 20th post I’ve seen with this topic just this week…
It 100% the types of women you’re drawn too. You should figure out what they all have in common because you seem to have “a type” 😊
You said you’ve never been in a stable and healthy relationship before and I’m just curious about that. I’m not trying to sound judgemental at all, I’m just wondering, do you mean you’ve never been in a relationship or do you mean the ones you’ve had were all unstable, unhealthy relationships? Sometimes there’s an underlying reason for attracting the same type of person and it might require reflection outside of listing your good qualities
Are you using dating apps? Because that is the likely the experience for both men and women using apps. The online dating pool is filled with more emotional baggage people than in person. You should also consider dating academics if you’re educated, not only will they have their life in a spot similar to yours but will also carry less baggage from previous relationships but may lack experience all together in those areas if they were focused on education and career.
My sister got the advice at 30 “you’re too old to not be dating nice guys”. 30 is that time when a lot of women reconfigure their standards. In terms of the speed, the more experienced you are at the dating the more data you have on what you want don’t want. Since you said you’re inexperienced you probably need more time to feel them out than they do for you.
I fully admit I was ready for you to be a misogynistic douchebag after the opening, but you seem upstanding and decently self-aware. Though the problem is you need to raise your standards to include not using you as a therapist. Hells, from this post, I’d go on a date with you if you came to the East Coast. Promise not to make you my therapist. Lol
I struggle to think that there are people who *dont* have emotional baggage and emotional trauma of some sort. I think that just comes with the territory of dealing with people.
Read ‘Reinventing Your Life’ by Jeffrey Young to understand and change the patterns you’re seeing. Seriously – you want to understand why you’re attracting the same people – you have to dig into what they’re attracted to in you. This is the book.
I dated for two and a half years struggling with the same issue (also in PNW) – now have an AMAZING relationship that I found on Tinder (seriously). You have to know what you’re looking for and change how you’re going about getting it.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but this is the world we live in. Best advice I can give you is to self reflect on the ways that you’re carrying emotional baggage and then do your best to forgive yourself and others of the emotional baggage we all carry. Hopefully you can find someone that can sustain a healthy relationship.
As a rule, trauma attracts trauma. You are the common denominator here. You may not know it, but you probably have some work to do.
Also in the PNW and only manage to find emotionally unavailable men who lie about wanting relationships. Online dating sucks.
Yup, I finally decided that I was the common denominator and took myself to therapy. I thought I was an awesome girlfriend and that was confirmed in therapy. How? I had an unhealthy dependence on relationships, even at my own cost. AKA, doormat, they got more from me than I got from them and I prolonged my time in a relationships that were depleting me emotionally and financially. So that was my fault, my responsibility, not theirs.
I learned about boundaries and taking accountability for me. I make no excuses for bad behavior and don’t date men whose values don’t align with mine. Downside to this is, that if you master this, you can’t blame bad partners for anything ever again…..if you stay around for second helping of bad behavior, it becomes your responsibility.
It is mostly your frame bro and the context that creates. You are talking a lot about your qualities, and that probably transpires on how you setup your dates, the topics you cover, etc.
What you want is to actually dumb yourself a lot and be basic. Just for the start. Do basic, dumb and fun conversation. That way you set the tone of the relationship to be one where you have fun and girls don’t think about you in terms of how does this guy compares with his qualities with the trash i’ve dated before, but rather you are just a guy who she has a good time with.
In a nutshell: generate emotions, not rationalizations at first.
As times goes by, slowly draw her into your world so she now can rationalize your good qualities.
It’s funny but a lot of times it doesn’t have to do with the person, it is mostly the context and setup of the relationship itself. One girl can be a sweetheart to a guy, and ghost and insult another one. People can be anything, you just need to know how to create the conditions where they can be what you are looking for.
OP, you say you’ve *never* been in a stable, healthy relationship before.
It’s good that you don’t want to be your girlfriend’s therapist! It *should* be a red-to-orange flag if someone is doing hurt emotional venting on an early date. If they’re talking about moving in by then, that flag is scarlet! So, it sounds like you’re having pretty decent instincts about healthy dating boundaries with new people. But, not even one healthy and stable relationship? Sounds like you need to figure out what’s attracting you to unstable and unhealed people, even if it’s only initially.
No one has perfect insight into dates and strangers. Anyone can end up on a date (or more than one date) with a creep or a weirdo or a toxic person— or a person who’s in a toxic place in their life.
However, if you’re *constantly* finding yourself on dates with people who are emotionally dumping, have unhealed trauma, and are idealizing you or telling you they’ve never dated a nice person, your screening methods are failing you (if not actively seeking these people out inadvertently).
I also mostly meet people on OLD, and don’t usually text for a super long time. But, my (picky) swiping and a bit of messaging to feel things out is all it takes for me to get overwhelmingly neutral-to-positive date experiences by the time we’re grabbing coffee or lunch together. Yes, I’ve had dates have given off pretentious/clingy/asshole vibes, but they had all different kinds of red flags— and the majority of my DOA-dates were due to a lack of chemistry, not a particular type of toxicity I kept attracting.
So, while I don’t mean this judgmentally, it’s time to examine *who you’re attracted to* and *what things attract you to them*. If this happens as often as you say, it seems like your “screening heuristics” are actually *selecting for* people who want a boyfriend-therapist rather than healthy partnership. We all have things that hook us into our worst habits, feel risky but familiar, or that we put too much stock in that can cloud our judgement of other people, especially in dating. But, we have to learn our particular issues and correct for them.
It sounds like you haven’t corrected for this yet and aren’t even sure why it’s happening. Did you have a traumatic or toxic early relationship? Issues forming healthy relationships in other areas? Emotional attachment issues? Issues with self-esteem or boundaries? Therapy can be good for this, and another thing to do is to open up and try dating people your instincts might not normally go for.
If you’re consistently pulling these people, then something about them is within your comfort zone, and you’ll need to branch out to change this pattern. It might not feel “right” at first, and you may have to tolerate a bunch of dates that feel unfamiliar, low-chemistry, or boring.
Luckily, if you work on unpacking what’s driving your dating history and keep working on yourself and branching out in who you date? You will find healthier matches out there eventually! A good and healthy partner can be hard to find but they exist!
What is baffling to me is that despite having a big social circle and corresponding hobbies that you don’t have any success meeting woman at these things. Of course tinder sluts that have lost their glory years aren’t going to be able to provide anything meaningful. Stop going for them.
I hate to say this but if she is single in her 30s there is often a reason. This can be true for men too but I don’t think it’s as true because good men get passed up by women when they are in their 20s for all sorts of reasons. Money, status, too nice, not good looking enough, not tall enough, minor little things that annoyed the woman like he said hehe on a text and creeped you out.
Very rarely does a good woman get passed up in her 20s. She will get sought after by literally hundreds of men.
Even an average to below average woman will have men fighting over her.
So there can be plenty of great catches with men in their 30s whereas with women you had 100s of suitors after you in your 20s and if you are still single in your 30s there might be a reason.
Obviously some exceptions but from my experience not that many.
If there are women who are still attractive, fit, smart, great personality, funny, no kids, no baggage, who is in her 30s the competition is so extremely high to get her that most men don’t even have a chance haha.
Everyone has baggage it comes with experiences and being alive. It can be overwhelming for anyone when someone comes on really strong when you haven’t known each other very long
You do however need to be a rock for a woman to lean on sometimes. This is part of our masculine role as protector and confidant. Its also part of any healthy relationship.
If you are negelecting this aspect of dating and relationships then this could be why your luck is down.
Try being supportive when this happens it is a positive thing when a girl tells you you are treating her in a better way than anyone else ever has.
Take this as a sign that you are doing something right…..
– depending on where you are, certain areas have higher amounts of people who are victims of rape or sexual misconduct (I’m in the Midwest and allll my more stable guy friends are having similar experiences. Plus a lot of girls I’ve met have told me their stories. It’s happened to a lot of guys I know too but they just don’t talk about it)
– you should know that about 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 5 boys have been abused before they’re 18 – and if it’s not sexual misconduct, a lot of shit goes down in the world
– so almost everyone has baggage – especially by the age of 30 – and if you want someone with NO baggage, you’re kinda asking for something unfair – and frankly, people who have had baggage and are working through it often make fantastic partners – people who have gone through NOTHING often make selfish or impatient partners who are harder to be honest with
– if you keep choosing people who look/talk/act similar, it’s time to be more open-minded and get to know different women who may not be your typical type but who may be less needy and who will open up your mind more
If I am being honest, I have been in the exact same situation. In fact, I still am. I might just be a few years younger than you (turned 25 today) and I am also located in the PNW area.
I used to have the exact same ongoing thought that you are currently having — “Am I doing something wrong? What energy am I putting out there that’s attracting such women?” I would attract all sorts of unhappy women; manipulative, emotional baggage, who want to friendzone you while look out for others while constantly comparing every guy to you saying “Why can’t more men be like you? I’m attracted to you but I don’t wanna date and lose you”, etc.
Just like you, I feel like I am someone who has his shit together (or at least for most part). Good job, athletic build, stellar social circle, well-rounded personality and what not. Heck, I even see a therapist to help me keep in touch with my emotions and discuss emerging patterns in life.
Now that exact same therapist was the one who helped me see this situation from a different lens. When I shared this thought with her, she said the following:
“It’s not that you are only attracting such women because of who you are as an individual. It’s the energy you are putting out there. You are being too nice. You are subconsciously inviting these women a haven to help rebuild themselves and the reason why you’re doing this is because it feels familiar. In your case, it’s because of your relationship with your parents (goes to explain how my childhood might be the reason why I feel the need to help such women even though I do not want to). You wanna break the pattern? STOP LOWERING YOUR STANDARDS! If someone shares their sob story with you, especially someone you met recently or do not have any sort of emotional connection, define a boundary and let them not cross it. The moment you start doing that, and focus on your journey, someone right is bound to fall for you.” Obviously, I’m paraphrasing but this was her intention. I hope you understand what I mean.
P.S. you might want to do what I did and just get off OLD for a while (I left due to work commitments and also… this). I don’t have a strong bar approach game as I have never done that. Been kinda used to women approaching me so it’s tricky but I guess that’s something I need to work on and fix.
Good luck with your journey, brother! Merry Christmas and happy holidays 🙂