While women with incredible luck in love are hard not to hate, they’re typically the exception and the rest of us can sympathize with each other’s crappy experiences. If you’re part of the suffering majority with the rest of us, you’ve definitely earned some of the following complexes.
- It becomes really, really hard to trust guys. Going through the same disappointing situation time and time again really doesn’t make you want to open yourself up to be very trusting. When you’ve been let down enough, you learn to be suspicious of guys’ intentions and it gets really difficult to break down all those walls you’ve built up. Besides, how many times can you let down your walls only to get burned?
- You start to doubt yourself and wonder if you’re the problem. After a series of dates that don’t lead anywhere or meeting guys who just end up being jerks, you probably start wondering if it’s you and something you’re doing wrong. You literally can’t decide if you’re just in a total dating rut and meeting a bunch of duds, or if there’s something you’re doing to chase them away.
- You become hyper-vigilant about looking for any sign things aren’t okay. Being aware of your situation is good, but being hyper aware to the point that you almost look for trouble isn’t. If you’ve been burned enough times, you learn to look for red flags, but when you literally seek them out, you’re going overboard. It’s super hard to relax and let things unfold when you desperately don’t want to get hurt again.
- You overanalyze every little thing to death. Overthinking is literally as torturous as it is destructive, but when you’ve faced little other than disappointment, it becomes a way of life. Whether he seemed off on the phone or he canceled your plans for the night, the tiniest thing can set you off into an overanalyzing tailspin. Even when there aren’t any real issues, your perception will cause you to complicate the little things.
- When things are going well, you’re just waiting for it to fall apart. Historically speaking, when things have gone smoothly, something catastrophic is waiting just around the corner. It gets hard to simply relax, be happy, and let things unfold. Let’s face it—the last ten times you thought things would be different, they ended up being a different version of the same.
- Any confidence you had goes straight out the window. No matter how confident you start out, dating a series of crappy men will always drain you. It’s impossible to stay the same self-assured girl when you feel constantly let down by repeated dating disappointments. Even when your friends assure you that he was a jerk and you weren’t the problem, it’s still easy to feel beaten down when you don’t understand why things just won’t go right.
- Dating starts to seem like the worst thing in the world. Seriously, why put yourself through more of the same BS? You wonder how many times can you put yourself out there only to be let down and upset all over again. Dating starts to seem like a total waste of time, and being single and counting on yourself becomes the only way of life you can imagine.
- You get sick of having to tell your friends that it didn’t work out again. There’s nothing more annoying than telling you’re friends you’ve met a great new guy only to have to tell them it all went to pot two weeks later…once again. It totally gets to the point where you keep it all to yourself because it gets a little bit embarrassing to admit to the same crap ending over and over.
- You get just a little bit cynical about romance and love. Being burned in relationships can make the best of us skeptical, but having constant bad luck can totally kill the idea of love for you altogether. As happy as you are for your friends in relationships, it also secretly makes you feel a little bit nauseous. After all, true love is just something from fairytales, right?
- When people tell you that you’re time is coming, you want to punch them. There’s nothing more frustrating than having happily coupled up people tell you that you just need to be patient and you’ll find what you’re looking for. It goes from sweet to insulting getting advice from people who really can’t relate. Sure, they’re just trying to help, but you’ve been patient, dammit, and they have no idea what the dating scene is like.
