What Do You Call It When You Stop Liking The Person You’re Dating?
By Gabe Delahaye and Jane Marie
Illustration by Lale Westvind
Let me describe my situation: I keep finding myself in dating situations where I am making a bunch of concessions (bad sex, different long term goals, etc.) about the person because they’re being so nice, sweet, etc. But, of course, when they stop being so nice, sweet, etc., all these things I’ve been ignoring start bothering me a lot. So my questions are two: 1) What, if any, advice would you have for me besides don’t date people that you have to make concessions for? And more importantly, 2) what should this phenomenon be called?! I’m not sure “deal-breakers” covers it.
As someone who was painfully single for a very long time, I’ve been really careful now that I am in a serious relationship to avoid doing that thing where someone who was unlucky in love finally finds themselves on the other side of the curtain and immediately starts doling out relationship advice like they’re Patti Stanger giving the keynote address at a Tinder shareholders meeting. These people, and I was one of these people in my horrible youth, always smugly lecture their single friends on how easy it is. “You just need to find the love of your life, and then let the rest of life fall into place, because isn’t it all just one grand adventure?” All with a disgustingly blissed out smile on their big cow faces.
But since you asked, I definitely have something to say about it: Decide what you would like your life to look like, like in your most idealized George Clooney in Tomorrowland vision of the future, and then when you meet people, try to figure out if it would be fun to create that future together. When I was single, a lot of people told me to make a list of the things I wanted in a significant other, and I think that can be a fun exercise, but also this isn’t Weird Science. It’s good to have a sense of what you are looking for, but ultimately you are meeting people, not spreadsheets (and sometimes the person who, on paper, is vegetarian and loves to paint water colors turns out to be Hitler).
If you are focused on building the life that YOU want for YOURSELF, then it becomes clearer more quickly how and if the people you meet will fit into that or not (this can apply to friends, too, by the way). I would worry less about making compromises, since compromises are a prettttty big part of relationships, and think more about what you want and whether or not a person you are interested in can help you get it.
All of that being said, I have been criticized in the past for being too “goal oriented,” so take this with a grain of salt. Jane, you’re post-dating. How did you crack the code?
That truly was great advice, Gabe. I’m happy to answer that, but first I would like to dig in to the “phenomenon” she’s talking about a little deeper. Does everyone she dates really start out so nice and sweet and then suddenly turn into a jerk? I kind of doubt that and I think something else is at play — something inside her brain. It’s a thing that we all do: idealize our new partner. It’s not that they’re being so nice, it’s that our glasses are so rose-colored in the beginning that it’s hard to tell the person is even capable of being a normal human. At first, they are perfect, a relief, a gift. All of their body parts work just the way you want them to every single time. Each dinner date is better than the last because you’ve never been to that restaurant, at least not with them, before. Their jokes are so fresh! Their wounds so novel.
What (hopefully) (eventually) happens in all (good) relationships is that the veil falls away and you look at each other one day, or several times a week over the course of decades and go: “Who the FUCK are YOU and why are you in my bed!? I still like you, but seriously, you are an alien.” Our president even has this experience.
“…what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings.”
So, now for some advice: Go slowly, and when the person loses their luster, slow down even further. If, in the beginning, when you mistakenly thought they were “perfect,” you could picture yourself living with them in your hometown forever, but now that they’re a real, flawed human you find the prospect daunting, then yes, you need to do exactly what Gabe said. What do you want?
Thank you, Jane, and thank YOU, Barack Obama. Jane, I feel like your very adult definition of what it’s like to be in a long-term meaningful relationship is insightful and correct, that as the initial endorphin rush wears off and you find out what you are actually left with, that there is a great opportunity for even deeper intimacy and, for lack of a better term, the excitement of discovery, as long as you are with someone that you actually love (or, depending on where you’re at with things, at least like a lot). What you are describing is what it is like to date an Actual Human Being, with all of their flaws and complications and blind spots. I do love how Barack Obama’s description of his adult human relationship with his wife is lyrical and romantic, and yours is “WHO the FUCK are YOU?” But I guess that’s why he’s president. Because he’s full of shit, am I right?!
I think you answered the phenomenon question best at the beginning, though. All of the stuff about what it is like and how it feels to be in a real adult relationship is cool or whatever, but I feel like the problem our client (Is that the right term for the people we are writing to? Clients? Penpals?) raises is more basic and fundamental. It doesn’t sound like she’s wearing rose colored glasses so much as just smudged-lens Warby Parkers with the wrong prescription. She isn’t meeting Ryan Goslings who turn into John Mayers when the magic wears off. She is meeting John Mayers and thinking “Well, maybe I can deal with this hat,” until one day she is like “I was already struggling to manage this stupid hat situation and now he’s going to also wear this fucking vest?!”
To your point, though, something is definitely up if she finds that every guy starts out nice and then stops being nice. Here is some advice: only date people who are nice to you! Even all that poetry junk that Jane was saying about waking up in bed next to a swamp creature, they should at the very least be a VERY KIND AND SWEET SWAMP CREATURE WHO LOVES YOU FOR BEING THE CAVE GOBLIN THAT YOU ARE. (This, of course, is a very heteronormative view. There is no reason that swamp creatures cannot love other swamp creatures, or cave goblins lay with cave goblins.) My guess is that it goes back to this idea of her needing to figure out what she wants. The John Mayers of the world aren’t going to change, so you have to decide before you even meet them if a John Mayer is really who you want in your life.
I just got chills at the thought of dating John Mayer or anyone like John Mayer. Can you imagine?
So, I want to give her some really practical advice now. I’m willing to bet that the things she keeps overlooking, the deal breakers for lack of a better word, that we were asked to come up with but haven’t yet, contain a common thread. Just as we seek out certain positive attributes in a partner, we also tend to gravitate toward the same negative qualities in people. For me, I just love it when someone has a tattoo on their face, but face tattoos on exceptionally decent people are hard to come by so I had to add that to my “cons” column. I would urge her to make a list of the deal breakers she’s encountered and see if there’s a common thread, for starters. And then I’d encourage her to be very up front about these things with the next person she becomes interested in. This is a dumb example, but if she finds it irritating when dudes never pick up the tab, have a conversation about that in the beginning and see where your prospective lover stands on the issue. Once you decide what you really want in a hypothetical partner, you should feel no shame in sussing it out IRL.
It’s funny that everyone always talks about their “type” in physical terms when usually it’s something so much more complicated. Like, if people were actually just into brunettes like they say, the world would be a much simpler and more content place. Get a brunette! Case closed! The reality is that what people are actually into are surrogate mother/father figures, or people who treat them badly to reinforce their idea that they are undeserving, or any other number of sophomore year single credit survey course armchair psychological notions.
I think the trick here is to stop seeing dating as something that happens TO you. It takes two to tango, as they say, so if you find yourself always dancing with dudes with face tattoos, you have to stop and think about the choices you are making. There are perfectly pleasant dudes without any face tattoos standing by the punch bowl wishing they were out there cutting it up. I’m not saying that you have to dance with them, either. Everyone gets to dance with whomever they want! But if you always want to do the Charleston and they always want to mosh, maybe it’s time to stop going to the Face Tattoo Lovers of America Convention midnight mixer.
Amen. And to answer her other question, let’s call this phenomenon “dating.” It’s important to remember what dating is for. It’s for this! This exact thing. It’s for finding out all the shitty stuff about the person you thought you might like. The hard part is the deciding what to do about it, especially when they make you super horny. Run?
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