Month: August 2020

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To chase or not to chase?

As women we’re always told ‘never chase a man‘ but the issue with this advice is the fact that it’s almost discouraging women from pursuing the man she wants, and what’s wrong with a bit of effort?

Does a runner win a race by standing still? Absolutely not.

If you’ve managed to go out and get the job you want, the pay rise you dreamt of, the car you’ve aspired to drive ….. you can’t say you managed to get all of those things by turning in the opposite direction and acting as if you didn’t want them. The odds are, you probably went after them with determination and perseverance.

So why treat the person we want any differently?

And I know what you’re going to say, people are different to material objects, they can make their own conscious decisions and yes I agree, however …. If effort is being reciprocated then you shouldn’t be scared to chase after what you want.

I also believe that making a man constantly chase you is a dangerous game, because if we think of it like a cat playing with a piece of string …. the longer you make the game last the less satisfied the cat is once the string is dropped, because the effort in trying to get it was more rewarding than actually having it and no one wants to feel like a piece of dropped string.

But maybe the chase is how we feel wanted? Maybe someone putting in unrequited effort for us is what makes us feel fully secure with the fact that they want us and only us?

At what point do we stop chasing or being chased and make the person we like feel wanted and appreciated with consistency? Because honestly, I can’t think of a bigger turn on when dating someone than that person showing you consistency.

If you’re like me, you’ll be worried that when you let people stop chasing you and give them your full attention, they’ll run off and won’t want you anymore, but maybe we need to let our walls down and give up on the idea of the chase for a while.

Maybe being honest with our feelings is the way forward, if you like the fact someone is chasing you, tell them ….. if you’re chasing after someone you like, TELL THEM!

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That Narcissistic Lover Broke Her

The Vampire Diaries discovered by Tay on We Heart It

When she fell in love with a narcissist she sadly lost a part of herself that will never come back. And while you’ll never meet the old her, the one that fell in love without caution and wasn’t afraid of being hurt, the version of her that stands in front of you now is wiser and more well rounded when it comes to life, but you need to understand why she does things in ways that maybe you won’t always understand.

All those times when you’ve found her difficult to read or confusing to deal with, just remember at one point she had her own self worth shattered into a million pieces by the one person she thought loved her more than anything.

When she hears you call her beautiful there’s always going to be a small part of her that thinks you’re only saying it because you know it’s what she wants to hear. I know you’re wondering why your compliments always partly fall on deaf ears, or when she does acknowledge them they’re greeted with more of a shrug and a laugh, but it’s because she’s used to compliments always being followed with a ‘but‘ things that should have made her feel like a princess were always tinted by comparing her to others and making her feel like she could be better, prettier and smarter ‘Your hair looks so beautiful when you have it straight‘ he would whisper in her ear ‘but don’t you think it would look better how that woman over there has hers, when women have a slight wave in their hair it looks so effortless‘ so from that point on, she maybe straighten her hair once or twice a year.

He changed her, he convinced her that she never looked as good with light hair and that the only colour she should have on her nails was red. He picked out what was and wasn’t appropriate for her to wear, so if you see her pulling at her skirt when you’re together it’s probably because she’s worried you think its too short or ‘not appropriate‘. In the back of her mind her appearance and how she comes across to others is always going to play on her mind. She knows she needs to look elegant and well put together to qualify as ‘girlfriend material’.

She needs that physical closeness, she needs lots of contact with you to feel wanted, her heightened sexual appetite is partly fuelled by her past, a past that taught her that sex was how you create a connection with someone. She learned that you didn’t need endless conversations and to really get to know the good and bad in someone. As long as he wanted her body it meant that she was wanted. She isn’t used to someone wanting to hear about her passions and what makes her tick, what she’s used to is someone telling her that her ambitions are ‘ridiculous‘ and she should aim for something more ‘realistic‘. She’s not used to being around someone who sees life in technicolour like she does, someone who embraces imagination and creativity and encourages her to go after the shit she wants because of course she can achieve it if she sets her mind to it.

She knows it’s annoying how badly she deals with confrontation, if something annoys her she’ll spend days trying to figure out a way to bring it up to you without sounding ‘crazy‘ a word she’s heard so many times before when she’s bought up things that made her uncomfortable, so now …. she stresses about it instead of talking about it, she’s used to bottling her feelings because expressing them was never met by calmness and understanding. But she hates how scared she gets to talk to you about things you wouldn’t even stress about.

You won’t understand why she pushed you away so hard at the start, but her fear of letting someone in as much as she’d done before triggered her avoidant dismissive attachment style and she needed to show that she didn’t need anyone.

She’s used to being chased relentlessly, but she’s also used to being told that she isn’t enough once the chase is over.

When she fell in love with a narcissist she never knew how much long term damage it would do, and if she did …. she would never have let the years of turbulence play out until she became so dependant on one person that she totally lost her own identity.

When you encourage her to go away and do her own things, it scares her, she won’t ever admit that to you because she’s so fiercely independent, but it triggers a deep set anxious side of her that only comes out when she’s dating. When you encourage her to not need you, she thinks it’s because you’re getting ready to leave her.

While she never wants to need you, if she falls for you, she will need you and thats because of past experiences.

She’s not as fierce and scary as you may think, but the shield she’s put up to protect herself from people like the ones in her past, makes her seem like she’s made from steel.

Her past broke her, but she’s spent a very long time rebuilding her own little castle. It’s important you understand that after she’s fallen in love with a narcissist, she’s always going to be a bit trickier to understand. But if she loves you, you’ll never experience a love like it again, because after that kind of trauma …. she will forever go to the end of the earth for the right person she finds to be deserving of her and her heart.

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Attachment Styles & Relationship Hurdles

Writing about first hand experiences is nerve wracking enough, let alone when it comes to openly admitting your flaws because of your attachment style.

People seem to think that we all have one kind of attachment style and until we own it and recognise what one we have, we aren’t able to change it and develop more meaningful relationships, but what about us strange and complicated individuals who’s attachment styles seem to be as fluid as the tea we’re spilling to our friends about our tragic relationship paths?

What if, some of us will experience different levels of attachment depending on how the person were with is making us feel within the relationship we’re developing with them?

Speaking as someone who always initially starts a relationship in a dismissive avoidant attachment style – which is basically a ‘I don’t need you or anyone else, all I need is my freedom to do what I want and when I want it so please don’t crowd my space and expect too much from me‘ kind of vibe, it’s hard to create an initial bond with someone. I know what you’re thinking … if you recognise this, then why not do something about it?

The key part to this story is that to me, if someone pushes through the emotionally shut down version of myself then when they get through to the caring side of me that would do anything in the world for them, then they really see what they’ve worked for.

Except this just isn’t ever the case, what tends to happen is when people eventually break through the ‘I don’t need you and can look after myself‘ attitude and are greeted with the ‘I want you in my life forever and will show you that in any way I can‘ well they don’t tend to want it anymore.

My experience with toxic narcissistic relationships has bought out a fearful dismissive attachment style in me that I never thought I’d have, but it’s the side of me that turns into a clingy mess when I don’t feel secure in my relationship (ugh god I hate my clingy phase more than anything!). I know that I crave stability and I look for that in my relationships, I want someone to come into my life with the intention to stay and when I’m not sure where I stand, a side of me comes out that I don’t even recognise.

I can see myself behaving in a weird clingy way that I would never do with someone new who I had no emotional attachment to. But this seems to be where the problem lies …. it takes me such a long time to realise I like someone that once I do, all the emotional attachment seems to hit me at once. What I need is for the person I’m dating to tell me that everything is ok and I immediately go back to being myself again and jump straight back into a secure attachment style. For me, when I hit my fearful dismissive phase all I need is some reassurance which generally tends to be the last thing someone wants to give you when you’re behaving weird and clingy!

But hey …. that’s past trauma rearing its ugly head for you!

When the person you’re dating starts acting even a little bit differently, you typically jump into a head space of thinking they don’t want you anymore and you get so badly triggered by your fear of rejection that its the only thing you can seem to concentrate on, especially first thing in the morning and last thing at night (but meditation seriously helps me during this little phase by the way).

And instead of pushing that person anyway, you try to pull them closer and hold on for dear life, because we can’t stand the thought of them going anywhere, when in reality they might just need a little breathing room and that’s totally fine.

But if you’re dating someone with a fearful avoidant attachment style and you need some space, a simple ‘I know we’re going through a bit of a phase at the moment, but I want you to know I’m not going anywhere’ kind of text will save you both A LOT of stress, trust me!

So maybe we don’t have control over our attachment styles, but maybe if we can recognise what phase we’re in and try to understand why we feel the way that we do, we’ll be able to cope with our rollercoaster of emotions a lot better and we can advise the person we’re dating on how to help us deal with them too!

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No one will tick all of your boxes

100% My Type on Paper!

We all do it, sit there and create this formulated list of what we’re looking for in our ‘perfect‘ partner … but there’s the catch. A perfect person doesn’t exist, so you’re already setting yourself up for failure and a stream of disappointment when people don’t live up to the standards that you’ve set.

We need to steer away from creating an extensive criteria of what we want and don’t want in someone, while also getting out the habit of giving up on someone as soon as they take a step wrong, most things are fixable and don’t need to be thrown away or given up on all together just because someone has shown that they maybe aren’t as ‘perfect‘ as you first thought.

Even custom made things that come from factories sometimes aren’t even perfect, and as human beings we all come with prewired quirks that will make us more or less appealing to certain people, life is all about finding the person who’s quirks we find endearing, because lets face it, dating someone who was made in a factory would be bloody boring.

When we start dating someone it’s important to gain an understanding of their background, because this will give you an insight into how they’ve become the person that they are when you’ve met them. Don’t be scared to talk about their parents and how they’ve formulated ideas of family units, ask what their future look like to them. Never assume someone is imagining their future the same way you’re imagining yours, so ask the bigger questions!

You can’t expect someone to walk in and tick every single one of your boxes, if they tick 7/10 you’ve already found someone worth fighting for as long as you can let go of your ‘but I wanted someone who fitted this exact mould‘ kind of mentality. Unfortunately love doesn’t usually work alongside perfection, love is messy and confusing and it pushes us out of our comfort zone, but you know what is in our comfort zone? The list of what we think makes up the ‘prefect partner‘, so already we should know that our list isn’t going to work 100% and that’s ok.

The most important questions to ask yourself are these, how do you feel around them? Do they make you feel listened to and cared about? Do you feel like you can be yourself around them? Because if the answer to all of those questions is yes …. maybe you should show away your list with all of the silly tick boxes and maybe you should just cherish the fact that you’ve found someone who makes you happy?

There are a few things that make sense to look for in a partner, for example, if you’re super family orientated and want someone who’s the same way, thats something which makes sense.

If you want to be with someone who has the same passion and ambition that you do (for whatever it is they care about) cool, thats a basic requirement too.

But when we get down to things like, age, location, job titles, family set up, etc etc, we’re stating to include things that don’t necessarily make someone into the person that they are. Which, if we’re looking for our forever person, should be what we’re focusing on. You should want to know the core details of what drives them and how they see their future and be willing to take less notice of the smaller things that they don’t even have control over.

So that list you’ve created for what makes up your ‘perfect‘ partner, yeah throw that away and focus on making yourself as perfect as you think you can be, because if you’re brining greatness to the table then you can expect the same level back.

Life isn’t just about getting to that final destination, it’s also about the journey and sometimes our route never actually looks how we expected it too, but thats what makes it more beautiful.

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Friends with all the benefits (kind of)

gif love Black and White mila kunis friends with benefits Justin ...

Let’s be friends ….. we could go for a coffee and spend time doing all the things we both love doing.

Let’s go to all our favourite restaurants and cater to our ‘foodie’ personalities while we talk about everything and anything, I’ll listen to you while you tell me about what’s bothering you and I won’t do it because I want to give an opinion, I’ll do it because I want to listen to you talk. I want to hear you talk about everything that scares you until it feels like it isn’t scary anymore.

Let me calm your chaotic mind while we sit in a quiet coffee shop watching the world go by, creating imaginary lives for the people who walk past us.

I want to get wrapped up in silly moments that turn into hours, which accidentally turn into days, because time fly’s when you’re having fun right?

Let’s go and lose ourselves in a stupidly competitive game of Mario Kart and then maybe catch a film so we can enjoy sitting near each other while not having to say a word.

I can see all the benefits to this friendship.

Let me talk to you about all the things I’m excited to do and about all the visions I have for my business, while you sit and admire my ambitious personality.

Let’s walk the city streets together and find all the hidden gin bars that no one else knows about because then they can be ‘our’ drinking spots, maybe we can sit and drink while day fades into night.

Or how about, Netflix … but it’s my choice of course, because my taste in shows and films has always been better.

Let’s lay on the couch together at the end of a long day or in the middle of a lazy Sunday afternoon and flick something on that can play in the background while we both drift in and out of sleep in the comfort of each other’s company.

Because we can do that and be friends, right?