Since she separated from her partner five years ago, Sarah has been on two dates. “Every time I think about it, I recoil at the idea of trusting someone like I did before,” she says. On the rare occasion she looks at a dating app – the last time, she deleted it after 24 hours – she scours the profiles for warning signs. “It’s very hard for me to see positives in people’s profiles. Would I like to meet someone again? Absolutely. But I think my trust levels are damaged. I struggle trying to make any sort of connection.”
Sarah, 44, and her partner had been together for eight years. They had agreed they would try for children in the future, but, over the years, she says, her partner became selfish and used her financially. When they finally broke up, he told her he had never had any intention of starting a family. “When that imploded, everything felt like it had ended, because I’d lost my sense of self during that time. It was a catastrophic change for me, even though I needed to be out of that relationship.” At the time, it felt as if she had “failed as a human being”, she says. “It’s not just trusting other people; it’s trusting myself. I let myself get into a situation before and now I don’t trust my own judgment; will I see it next time?”
When the Guardian asked readers to get in touch about relationships that had made them lose faith in love, the responses covered a huge range of experiences, from surviving abuse to discovering affairs to simply feeling let down after being ghosted.
One woman, who is black, realised that she was being “fetishised by white men”. On her last date, in which she met a man for the second time, he tried to kiss and touch her; when she asked him not to, he told her he wasn’t going to see her again. “All these experiences reinforce my belief that men get physical quickly,” she wrote – and they are quick to reject her when they don’t get what they want.
One man, 54, has spent almost his entire adult life single after a negative experience with a girlfriend at university: “I’ve never come to terms with the loss and have been unable to move on with my life,” he wrote. A 47-year-old woman wrote: “I’m tired. Tired of all the history of failure and emotional damage. I can’t face trying anew for absolute fear of being blinded by love.”
“The pain of being in a toxic relationship doesn’t leave you and you wonder if you are going to go back to the same thing again,” says Jo Hemmings, a behavioural psychologist and relationship coach. “It makes people reluctant and fearful of patterns repeating themselves.”
Hemmings says you need time to think about what happened and whether there were clues that you missed or chose to disregard. It can help you realise what you don’t want, “even if it doesn’t give you a great deal of information about what you do want”. A therapist can help with impartiality and with identifying what you could learn from your experiences, she says: “It’s comforting to have friends who all say: ‘I hated them anyway,’ but it’s not always that helpful.”
There is nothing wrong with being single, stresses Hemmings, but if you would like to be in a relationship again, taking your time will pay off. How long it takes differs for everyone, but one sign that you may be ready is when it doesn’t feel like the odds are against you. “Am I ready to go for it, take that risk, use what I’ve learned from previous poor relationships and put them into effect?” says Hemmings. “Or do I still think it’s probably not going to pan out well? Do I not trust men, or women?”
There is always a risk that you will be disappointed or heartbroken again, she says: “You’ve got to be aware that any relationship could unravel for whatever reason.” But by taking the time to learn from previous relationships, rather than jumping into another, “you get better at spotting the signs”.
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Many of us “tend to see relationships in terms of pass or fail,” says Cate Campbell, a sex, relationships and trauma psychotherapist. “If you think of them in terms of self-development, then it’s more difficult to pass or fail: this is what happened, this is what was successful about it, this is what I want in the future, this is what I don’t want.” Campbell asks: if you are scared to restart your love life, what is it that you are scared of? “Repeating the pattern? If you know what it is, you can be alert to it. Often, it is the fear of rejection. In that case, think about what you actually want. Do you want this to be a lifelong relationship, or are you just looking for some fun? What form should that fun take? Go into the relationship knowing that and not thinking: ‘I’ll only be validated if this person wants to be with me for ever.’”
Of course, recovering from a bad relationship depends on how bad it was. It can take years if the relationship was abusive – and some people don’t realise that was the case, “which makes them at risk of a similar situation next time”, says Campbell. Consequently, it makes sense not to rush into another relationship, but to allow time to recover from what has happened.
Having been in an abusive relationship actually makes it more likely that someone will get involved again too quickly, says Campbell, often as a way of trying to expunge the past. “Early red flags include love-bombing and excessive attention, especially when the new partner wants to spend time with you alone rather than with a group of friends,” she says. “Another would be a new partner’s early stories about their heartbreak or a ‘crazy ex’. It’s always wise to consider that the ex may have a very different version and to remain cautious initially.”
When we talk about losing faith in love, “what it really means is losing faith in our own lovability”, says Hilda Burke, a psychotherapist and couples counsellor. “A lot of people come into therapy when they’ve had a bad relationship experience or breakup, and often the first step is training them to believe that they are lovable, that all of us are worthy of love. That starts with being more loving towards ourselves. When you’re in that frame of mind, you think: ‘Why wouldn’t someone like me and love me?’”
Instead, for many people who have been hurt or feel rejected, the kneejerk reaction is to go on dating apps. “We have something in our hands that offers a promise of love, or sex: ‘I could just swipe and find someone who finds me attractive.’ We can get an increase of dopamine, it can take the pain away in the moment,” says Burke. But this is not helpful – especially when many people’s experiences of apps comes with more rejection. “My new clients are often in that cycle of being hurt, feeling unlovable, going back to somewhere that offers this mirage of connection, but ultimately feeling more rejected, disappointed and disillusioned.”
When you are ready to date again, especially if you are using apps, Burke recommends meeting in person before long. “I think messaging for a long time builds up a fantasy of what that person might be and might offer you, and it can lead to a disappointment when you meet,” she says. (She recommends a short daytime date, to temper the pressure and expectations.) “There’s disappointment and rejection, even though there hasn’t actually been a relationship, but there has been an attachment. Do you want a fantasy, or do you want a real-life connection with someone?”
After her marriage ended, Lauren threw herself into dating within months. “In retrospect, I recognise that I was brittle and defensive. I was probably exactly the kind of person I was trying to avoid dating: somebody that wasn’t ready and shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” she says. It was a distraction from the pain of her marriage breakdown, which had ended when she discovered her husband was having an affair when their baby was two weeks old. “It was an excuse to dress up. All my friends wanted to talk about was my divorce and how awful it was, how badly I’d been treated, and I just wanted something completely different.”
For months, she says, her ex-husband had gaslighted her, making her think her suspicions were unfounded. She came out of the relationship “feeling very unsteady, with that sense of: ‘I don’t know what was real.’ And that’s very unsettling.” It wasn’t until last year, 13 years after the end of her marriage, that she felt able to look for a new relationship. “I think it was a gradual mellowing over time,” she says.
Her son made her question the feelings she had towards men in general. “He talked to me about how it’s quite hard to grow up surrounded by the narrative of toxic masculinity. I realised that it wasn’t just society he was getting that from; he was getting it from me at home as well. It really made me reflect on how ingrained my cynicism had become.” She looked at her son. “Obviously, I’m biased – I’m his mother – but he’s a really big-hearted, generous, lovely young man. So there’s probably others out there.”
She met her boyfriend on a dating app after putting up an honest profile. “He’s one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met,” she says. “A man overflowing with kindness and curiosity and fun. He has completely restored my faith in men. Whatever happens to our relationship, it feels so joyful to have healed my heart enough to be able to open it up completely to someone, to know that I might get hurt again, but feel strong and optimistic enough to take a chance.”
Some names have been changed
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