Dating After Divorce

196. Expectations of Dating Failure

• Sade Curry

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On this episode of the podcast, I unravel the cycle of fear, shame, and the expectation of failure in dating and how it holds women back from experiencing true success in relationships.

Feelings of despair, resignation, and avoidance can hinder your dating progress. This is why it's important to channel your feelings to make wiser decisions. It's time to stop comparing ourselves to others and confront emotional barriers that keep you from taking the confident steps you should be taking in your dating journey.

Whether it's about understanding your emotions during the dating process, observing your reactions, or dealing with the fear of staying single, this episode has got you covered.

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Sade Curry:

Hey everyone, welcome to the dating after divorce podcast. Okay, so today I wanna talk about expectations of dating failure. Now, this one came out of just some deep dive work I've been doing with some of my clients. So there, everyone comes to me like at a different place in their journey different stages of healing, different stages of dating, different skill levels, different experiences and sometimes you can have someone who's on the same journey and outwardly they're doing all the same things as everybody else around them and it looks like things are harder or things are not working for them. And so I believe that you know like every one can create what they want. But sometimes we have to go a little deeper just to see okay, if it's not working, if you're not getting what you want, why? A lot of people will just throw up, throw their hands up and be like I'm done, it's not working for me, it's not gonna work for you, or there's something wrong with you and we're gonna get into that a little bit around. Shame, because this really shame is at the core of expecting to fail at dating. But I wanna start like, if you are dating, or if you're in the middle of dating, or if you're on a dating journey or you're thinking about dating. Are there parts of this picture of this journey that you have some like a negative expectation of right Now? I did a podcast episode prior called Fair or Failure, and I talk about the Fair or Failure a lot but as I've been working with some of my clients on the Fair or Failure embedded in that Fair or Failure is actually an expectation of failure. So it goes beyond just being afraid of failure, because if you're afraid of failure, you can kind of be like okay, I'm gonna overcome that fear, I'm gonna work on my mindset, I'm going to sort of titrate my steps so that I'm not afraid of the little steps, and that works for most people. So I would say 95% of my clients, if they do have a Fair or Failure, just the regular mindset work will work for them. And then there's this tiny subset who have the Fair or Failure, but embedded in that, fair or Failure is actually an expectation of failure and it can create this catch 22, this vicious cycle that they're doing all the things but it's not working. So that's what I'm gonna delve into today is a fear or failure, but I really wanna rename it an expectation of dating failure.

Sade Curry:

So let's start with the two things that people have expectations of failure around. One is the outcome. So a lot of people will have an expectation that they will not meet a person. Right, sometimes that's couched in well if I meet the person, it might not be the right person, I'm gonna make a mistake or nobody will want me, but the truth is embedded in that fear that I might not meet someone is the expectation, the true belief, that because of something about you, you actually are not going to meet someone. It goes beyond just being afraid of it. You're actually expecting it.

Sade Curry:

Then the other area is the expectation that the journey, that the process, is going to be awful, that the process of meeting someone is going to be awful, that not only will you not meet someone, but you're also then gonna go through this very difficult, very painful process to try to meet someone, and then you won't meet someone. So if you've had thoughts around oh, the process is gonna be hard, dating is gonna be hard, I won't be able to figure it out, and then I won't meet someone, I will have wasted time doing this that I should have been doing using for something else. I would have wasted money. I will fail and feel shame again. So if the edge of your thoughts, the negative thinking, kind of feels like again, like it's almost like it's so familiar, the failure feels familiar. The projects that you started that you didn't finish feel familiar. The coaching programs that you signed up for that you didn't complete, the money spent on books and therapy that didn't pan out Just so many little things. The relationships you had that didn't work there's so many again.

Sade Curry:

So there's a little bit of an edge of not only will I fail, but I'll fail again. I'll feel that shame again. I will fizzle out. I won't show up for this, I won't be good at it, I won't do it well. What makes me think I can do it this time? So you can hear in those statements it goes beyond just the oh no good man out there, blah, blah, blah. It goes beyond just the regular mindset stuff to an expectation based on who you are, a negative expectation of the outcome based on who you are right. So the expectation, the negative expectation that you're not gonna do it well or you're not gonna get the outcome feeds how you see yourself in the dating journey and then how you see yourself feeds the expectation and kind of goes round and round and round. And the edge that I really want to point out is if the negative outcome or the negative feelings about the process has an edge of just like all the times before, just like it happened before, if it has any of those feelings to it, then you really want to take your time For sure.

Sade Curry:

Do not compare yourself to anyone, do not compare yourself to others, because it just means that you have certain triggers that some other people that you see you may see having success faster than you may not have. It means that you have to confront shame, because shame is the deepest emotion below all of these. Shame is that emotion that is holding you back. For some people and I've talked about this before if you listen to my podcast episode why dating feels terrible and what you can do about it women are socialized to attach their value to their relationships, to being in a relationship, to being with someone, and so if you are divorced or single, or single again, whatever the version is, chances are, if you attach your value to being with someone, you feel some shame around that already, because and I don't know that most people can avoid that shame because it's just in the air we breathe. It's just in the society, it's just in the way these things are talked about. So if you have that, you already feel bad about being single. You already feel bad about being divorced.

Sade Curry:

Then you're in this dating process so stay with me here, because this is like layers of stuff and then you're in this dating process that you hope you will resolve the shame of being divorced, the shame of being single, like you'll finally be in a relationship again and then you can be happy and then you'll be a proper adult, you'll be in a proper situation so that you can have respect and have status in society and people will stop shakwaking their heads and feeling sorry for you because you're divorced or because you're single. So you're hoping this dating process will help with that. But then you're in the dating process and you're looking at it and then there are all these things you need to do. You need to swipe, you need to talk to people, you need to field off the statements that get made, things that people say, and all of those things come together on top of however you feel about yourself and you create this expectation of failure. So think about it.

Sade Curry:

You already have this trigger of shame around not being partnered and now there's the shame that's being triggered over and over and over again in the process. Like, literally, you're being triggered by the very process you hope will eliminate the shame you already carry. It's not, that's not going to work. Like, imagine if you had a traumatic experience and I really don't want to give an example because, like, I just don't want to trigger anyone but say you had a traumatic experience that involved another human right and then you went to therapy for it. Or you went to a doctor and then that doctor looked exactly like the person that created the trauma, like this is the person that's supposed to help me, but then they look, smell, feel like the other person that hurt me. It's really hard to make progress in that situation. It's really hard to engage, it's really hard to open up yourself and be vulnerable and learn. Like your body or nervous system, your mind is just going to be in fight or flight. And so there's a very small subset of my clients the women I work with who experienced this, who experienced this like just continuous triggering around the dating process. And now what some of them do?

Sade Curry:

Some people will cover up that trigger by wanting to just hustle past it, like if you find yourself being super impatient about the dating process, if you're often frustrated, you feel a lot of annoyance, you burn out, you spend a lot of time blaming the man out there. You may be trying to override this shame and override this trigger by just hustling past, like if I can just go on a hundred dates, just barrel past it, I can succeed and then I'll be fine. But it doesn't work. It leads to burnout. Then there's my fairy tale, ladies right, there's a lot of spiritual bypassing, a lot of positive thinking, hope, fantasy, fantasizing, forced belief, denial, minimizing the people who experience this. They don't want to say that they're experiencing, they don't want to, or they don't know that they're experiencing this. They have a very positive, they believe in being very positive and very optimistic, which is good. It's a good thing.

Sade Curry:

However, the same person maybe will tends to be in denial, tends to not see clearly what's happening. So they might go on an app on Monday for like 10 minutes and then not show up again on the app for like seven days, and then it's like oh, it's not, it's something like they tell themselves I'm doing it, it's like I'm doing it, I'm doing it, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. I'm doing it. But then when you actually sit down and look at the actual numbers and the actual actions, it's not enough. There's not enough energy in it to create the result. Like this kind of person might go on one date every four months, but they're at peace with it and they're good with it Great.

Sade Curry:

And then the third cover up that I tend to see. This one's not so much of a cover up I think this one is more the people who they see it, they see the pain, they see the triggers, they see what they're experiencing and they're like no, this is not for me. So these people tend to be in avoidance, a lot of despair. So they're single and they're staying single or they're not dating, but they're not happy with that either they actually want to do it. There's some despair, there's some sadness, there's a lot of grief around it. There's a lot of like resignation that I want this thing but I can't have it. It's very difficult. There's some giving up. There's some like settling for less than what you really want out of life. Now, this doesn't mean that everybody should date and everyone should want a partner. But for those who do despair, hiding, giving up, avoiding it. It's too hard, can't do it sort of giving into that, giving in into the expectation of failure. I expect the failure, I expect I'm gonna fail. I have evidence that I failed before, so I'm just going to like resign myself to that. And that's the third path that I see people taking.

Sade Curry:

Now I want to offer that there is a fourth solution. There is a place that you can be that's different from those three places. It often requires a different tactic of coaching than maybe my pair at first on the surface. So with a lot of my clients my clients come in I always start from the practical side. Okay, let's get the practical parts. Are you swiping? Are you on the app side? Are you going out Like what's that? And then when we hit the first roadblock, then I see what's going on. I can start to like channel them. I mean, okay, you need mindset work and you need to overcome social anxiety. You need like emotional processing kind of a thing. Anyway, so for this particular situation, what tends to be needed? Now I'm talking you're talking two, three layers deep into like, oh wow, I have this really deep expectation of failure that looks like the fear of failure, but it's actually an expectation of failure, and it comes with all the other triggers around.

Sade Curry:

It Comes with a lot of shame, and that shame is not just in dating but tends to also show up in other areas of the person's life. The solution I tend to offer with this person or this kind of person is usually around processing emotions. It's usually around processing how they feel, getting them in touch with their emotions, getting them to recognize the common emotions that have been triggered by the process, and dealing with that emotion everywhere it shows up, whether it shows up in business, whether it shows up in dating, whether it shows up with their children, whether it shows up with their memories of the past and how they're thinking about the past. Where does this show up? Because we tend to have very well-practiced emotional states, especially by the time you're in midlife. Listen, our brains know exactly where it's gonna go when it's triggered a certain way, and so the solution is usually around releasing and processing the emotion, not just for that day, but overall. Where else does shame show up?

Sade Curry:

What are the memories that trigger shame? When you're walking down the street and you remember something that happened in your past and just cringe and you're just like you hate that emotion and you wish it would go away and you hate that memory and you wish it would go away. Where are all those things showing up so that we can just process and work through there? And a lot of it looks like observing yourself in the dating process, observing yourself day to day. What are you thinking, feeling, doing, what are you avoiding doing? Looking at the steps for some people it works to see, okay, when you open the app, what's your first feeling? What do you feel when you open the app, what's the first thing that comes to your mind, right? So sometimes that kind of observation helps. Or even just going down the steps, listening to all the steps in the process.

Sade Curry:

The day after a divorce academy, we generally have like, okay, this is the path you need to take. Where is the first place that gives you, like the, a little catch, a little contraction, a little bit of fear or anxiety, and then check in with each one how do you feel about it, what are you thinking about it, what comes up for you when you're getting ready to do it? Like we really go line by line, moment by moment, so that we can find that little space where the clients can make a different decision than the one they would normally make. How do you feel about yourself within the dating process Is another way of thinking about it. When you think about you, when you think about the dating process, what are your thoughts about you? How do you feel about you? How do you feel about the outcome of the process? How do you feel about remaining single the rest of your life? What comes up?

Sade Curry:

A lot of people don't wanna think about that because they're like, well then, I'm just like being negative and I'm believing that I won't have a partner. But you already don't believe that you'll have a partner, probably If we're coaching at this point and I ask you how do you feel about staying single forever? The reason I'm asking that question is because I can tell that you already don't believe it. So I wanna go there. I wanna figure out what's lying underneath, what are the thoughts and feelings that are lying underneath that? So how do you feel about the outcome of remaining single, even like if, say, you go through the process and you don't meet a partner? How do you feel about that? Like what comes up? Not because that's what's gonna happen, but because if you're in this deep fear and expectation of failure at the beginning. We need to deal with that, otherwise that's exactly what's going to happen. How do you feel about the outcome of finding a partner? Some people, the expectation of failure is not even in the dating process, it's in the relationship. Like I'm gonna find someone, I'm gonna be in the relationship and it's gonna be terrible. And I'm gonna deal with that.

Sade Curry:

Like, where do those negative emotions come up? What thoughts, what images, what scenarios are in your mind that are bringing up those feelings of dread, even if they're slight, even if you haven't engaged with them? I always encourage my clients like engage with the emotions. They're there. Hiding from them does not help. Repressing them does not help. We have to engage with them. They are part of your experience, they are part of the engine that is driving the bus. So we've got to go there, we've got to engage.

Sade Curry:

And when you do this work of becoming aware of what the thoughts and feelings are, when you do that deep dive and then go through whatever techniques we need to use to have you release them so that you're freer and lighter and those thoughts and emotions and memories and triggers don't have such like a grip on you, what happens is you shift to, not this mindless, fantastical belief, but you shift to a true, positive expectation about the work that you were doing in the dating process. It's just, it's not this like oh my God, it's not raw, raw, it's just a calm, positive expectation. I believe this is gonna work out. I believe there's somebody out there for me. It's calm. You're able to be present with the tasks that you have to do, with the things you have to do to date. You're able to be present. You're able to open the app and not like get triggered the minute you see something, just like, oh yeah, yeah, this happened. Okay, yeah, this person goes to me. Oh, that's sad, I'm disappointed, but I have this positive expectation that's like a solid deposit down inside of me, not something that comes and goes every like three seconds, depending on what happens on the app.

Sade Curry:

You have more energy. You have more emotional energy to actually tackle the process of dating, to go out, to talk to people, to learn the new skills you might need to learn in the process. You're not triggered by the process of dating. You might even enjoy it. You might even get to the point where you're like you know it's kind of fun. This is kind of cool, I am having fun, I'm okay with being in the process, knowing that it's going to end up where I need to be. You're more certain about the outcome and you're patient right. But it's not the patients where it's like, oh, I did it one person the last two years, but I know it's gonna happen for me and they're gonna come find me. It's not that. It's like this steady, step by step, one step at a time, movement through the process to get there.

Sade Curry:

So we started this conversation really talking about having a negative expectation about dating failure, expecting to fail.

Sade Curry:

But it might not show up like that when you think about it, like in your mind. You probably don't think you expect to fail. We have to go a couple of layers deeper. So think about where you really are when you truly sit with yourself you guess I have 10 minutes turn on a timer and ask yourself where am I really with dating? What's really going on inside me? What am I really thinking about? What am I really feeling? Feeling is the big thing here. You might think all the right things, but if you're not feeling the matching emotion to go with it, you've got to work on that disconnect.

Sade Curry:

So if you have what you think is a fair failure, or dating anxiety can also be a pointer to this deeper expectation. Or if you just recognize, hey, I expect to fail at dating, that's why I'm not doing it, that's why I'm procrastinating, that's why I keep deleting the apps, that's why I keep going out with my girlfriends instead of going on dates, that's why I keep avoiding it, then I want you to take some time to start getting aware, and if you want to do this work with someone you can reach out. Just send me a message or click one of my links and contact me, and we can talk about what this work might look for you. All right, thank you, guys for your time and attention. I appreciate it and I will see you next time.