It’s not easy carrying around a dark relationship history. When you’ve been put through the wringer from relationship to relationship, harboring your own mistakes and those of the ones you once cared for, it’s hard to move forward. They say you need to leave the past behind, but that’s not always completely possible. The truth is you’re always going to have those lessons in the back of your mind. If you’ve been really hurt too many times or faced a really devastating blow when you were in love, it’s unavoidable that you’re going to have walls up. That’s how I ended up as the damaged single girl.
Then you meet someone new, and those insecurities start to come out. You wish you could date with a clean canvas — no baggage, no quiet voices whispering your fears — but the paint has been laid down thick. You can’t help yourself, but you try anyway. Fortunately, you’re not alone. These are the confessions everyone like me wishes they could say out loud.
- We’re not perfect. You meet us, and you get excited about the woman you think we are. We begin to fear letting you see the parts of us that are complicated – the parts where we spin out because you’ve done something that reminds us of a time before. We want to trust you, and we know we should be more secure, but we aren’t and that’s the byproduct of being screwed over. No one’s perfect and there’s a price tag attached to everything these days, people included.
- We spin out. Whether you didn’t text us back or didn’t call us after an amazing date, we spin out and we psychoanalyze things. We stress and worry about what’s coming next not because we’re eager, but because we’re on guard like a queen protecting her kingdom, which is already partially in shambles.
- We’re afraid. If not terrified. When we meet you and you’re so wonderful upfront, it scares the hell out of us because we know our feelings will soon come rushing in, and when it happens, we’re only used to disastrous outcomes. When we act distant, or maybe even a bit clingy, it’s not because we’re defective people, it’s because the moment we figure out we actually like you, we’ve lost all control, and control over ourselves is the only reason we’ve been keeping our crap together.
- We’re working on it. For some reason, this is looked at so negatively. Why is a person who owns up to their struggles and is taking steps to resolve them considered a red flag, or someone not worth the effort? We know we’re worth the effort, which is why we’re working on it. And we promise that you’ll feel the same, so long as you stick around long enough to find out.
- We’re sorry. We know this isn’t your problem; we’re not asking you to fix us, we’re just asking for some patience. Nothing worth having in life comes easy, and maybe we don’t play silly cliché dating games with you and instead present you with a little dose of truth. We’ve been through some crap. We like you, but it’s going to take a little bit of time to feel at complete ease with a new adventure.
- We’re worth it. Above anything else, we know if you’re willing to stand by as we figure out how to ease into something new, through the spin-outs, the fear, the effort to heal, and the apologies, we will rock your world. We might not know exactly how to get past our initial worries, and it might even continue to trickle in later down the road, but like everything in life and with every challenge, we figure it out. Because the damaged single girl knows how to love and she knows how to put her heart into things and that’s precisely why she’s damaged. She trusted, she loved, she fought and she failed, but there she is in front of you, trying it all over again. Through it all and although it’s tough, the damaged single girl will love you like no other.
