when i was first working through relationship and attachment stuff a big obstacle i kept running into was that people kept telling me things that i interpreted as “stop caring about whether women like you” and i was like 🧐🧐🧐 what 🧐🧐🧐 how 🧐🧐🧐 why
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i think i get it a bit more now. among other things i was conflating two different meanings of “caring” that i had never really distinguished: on the one hand “valuing,” and on the other hand “clinging to,” “grasping for,” “being hung up on,” “being addicted to” etc.
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someone finally explained it to me as “women don’t want to be responsible for whether or not you’re fundamentally okay” and i still didn’t quite understand at the time but it’s increasingly made more and more sense. like... yeah, damn, that does sound like a lot of pressure
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it’s very telling that i used to be deeply confused on a gut level that someone could be in a relationship and still... have problems? like i was really out there for over a decade believing that a woman liking me would make all my problems go away, apparently
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it feels a little foreign to me to describe it now. i’m actually not sure how it happened but something shifted about this in the last two months without me doing anything in particular. pretty convenient. i was very unhappy in december but for totally different reasons
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hard relate
Richard Schwartz is blindingly on the nose about this in You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For.
I credit that book with my similar shift, rad that it just kinda unfolded for you tho!
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you're telling me these are questions, and not just facts of life?
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tho if anyone else poking around in this thread wants an ELI5 version, I vouch for this book as a great place to look 🙏
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