Stop Dating Your Issues

My dating history is a hot mess inside of a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck, swirled up in a tornado. All of the lessons that I needed to learn over the years have showed up in the form of my lovers. Like, oh yeah, I dated my family dynamic, my fear of commitment, my bad boundaries, my fear of commitment, my low sense of self-worth, my fear of commitment, my fear of commitment, my fear of commitment. Which all things considered is a little ironic. I never saw myself as someone who was like actually afraid of commitment. You know, I've always deeply yearned to be a wife and a mother and I joke that like cats are really great birth control until I find my person. But then sometimes I realize just how much I prefer cats to humans. Hey Anna, I have to re-home my cat because my baby is allergic. Well, you've known that cat for 11 years. No, I'm so torn up about it, but I was hoping you'd take her. You've known that baby what, like three weeks? It seems pretty easy, just re-home the baby. I'm not gonna give away my baby. That cat has been with you through every major adult moment of your entire life. Your marriage, your divorce, your second marriage. That cat is the longest standing relationship you have ever had. Just re-home the baby and then make another one. It's easy. It's fun. But I have finally accepted on a conscious level that subconsciously I have sought out people who are also afraid of commitment. Ensuring that our relationship will never go anywhere, but that I can feel superior like I'm trying to find what I want. And there's one event I remember in particular that's solidified this belief. I was maybe seven or eight and my mom had recently shaved her head when she was drunk. It was very Britney Spears. She looked very fierce bald. And she was crying on the stairs because she was raising three children alone while my dad was overseas fighting a war or whatever, which I'm sure we can agree is the easier of the two situations. And she said to me, I'm not, don't have children. Have a career. Don't make the mistake I made. Be ambitious. And you know, when I was a kid hearing these words from my distraught mom, you are such a loser mom. I laughed in her face and then ran outside to play basketball because kids are assholes. I was also the only girl on Juniper Berry street, clearly physically inferior when it came to sports ball. So I'd try to throw off the neighborhood kids by gaining a psychological advantage. I like your butts. What? Swish, swish, fish. Hey, that's cheating. I don't play the game. I play the players. Also your butts are ugly. But I digress. You know, for a lot of us, relationships are the way that we grow and gain insight into some of the most powerful lessons that are integral to our development. And we fall into the trap of dating those lessons. And sometimes the lessons are so obvious that everyone we love wants to eye roll into oblivion. Girl, put your phone down. Stop texting him. He didn't respond the last four times. He's not going to respond now. Delete his number. And look, our issues are never going away. Mine certainly aren't. But that's the nature of having this terrible disease called humanity. We are always going to have something that we're working through, but we can choose to work on our issues outside of any healthy romantic relationships that we're in. And I say this from 15 years of experience of doing the exact opposite. No, give me the phone. So if you feel attacked by this video and you want to know, well, what the hell do I do to stop dating my issues? The good news is there's several things you can do. Can you guess what the first one is? Therapy. Yes, you can work on your issues in therapy. Another thing you can do is become highly aware of your dating patterns and integrate lessons that you've been learning in those relationships as you move forward in your romantic life, which is easier said than done. I definitely have not been doing that. And finally, you can listen to trusted friends. So often my friends would call out my destructive choices and partners, but I'd say, you just don't know him like I do. I don't like the way he talks about women. He's really misunderstood. I don't like how dismissive he is of your friends. Okay, he has social anxiety. He's really better one-on-one. I know you don't want to hear this, but from my experience, I just want to say this seems like the beginning of something abusive. No, honey, you don't. You're addicted to emotional chaos and your subconscious is trying to right the wrongs of your past by seeking out similar dynamics and rewriting history. You're like a time traveler trying to fix the timeline, but you can't because the very nature of you time-traveling means that you caused the future to happen. I've been watching Dark on Netflix. It's a great show. It's making me think a lot. It's hard work thinking. You know, it's way easier to go through life unaware of why we think the things we think that influence the things we do. It's easier to go through life not trying to pinpoint patterns or things in the past that are no longer serving us and then attempting to change them to create a life of joy and happiness. It's hard work to reparent your inner child and be the adult observer all the time. It's mentally exhausting. Look, all of this may sound incredibly cheesy, but I'm a philosophy major dropout dressed as a fucking clown, so cheesy is the least of my problems. I'm Anna Akana and thank you to the patrons who supported this video and thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring today's existential crisis. 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