is your perfectionism a deactivating strategy that’s keeping you from love?

Expecting perfection and completely smooth sailing from dating and relationships can be a deactivating strategy to avoid intimacy.

And be compassionate to yourself as you read this, because these strategies can be shifted in healthier directions.

Deactivating strategies are used to keep people at a distance that feels emotionally safe to you and protects you from vulnerability, emotional closeness and the emotional risk that comes with intimacy (for example, rejection or disappointment or even conflict).

Just like expecting perfection from yourself or potential partners can keep you from being vulnerable, being seen and forming healthy interdependent relationships, so can expecting perfection from the dating process. There are other strategies besides deactivation that prevent intimacy as well, such as putting dates on pedestals.

Intimacy avoidance can show up in some of the following ways:

1) Not venturing out to date as you feel you aren't good enough (a big factor in intimacy avoidance)

Not dating because you believe others aren't good enough for you or the one who was "got away" (can be a deactivating strategy)

2) Making your dates the focus of your efforts to please them (perfecting anticipating and meeting their needs instead of getting to know them and vet them) so you can avoid being intimate yourself (being seen with all your needs, vulnerabilities and desires)

3) Expecting perfection from others so you reject them for innocuous things that have no bearing on relationship fulfillment. (Deactivating strategy)

4) Another way this shows up is when you expect perfection from dating itself as a way of avoiding vulnerability and intimacy. (Deactivating startegy)

I see this all too frequently.

I see folks going into dating expecting too much from themselves (be perfectly charming, perfectly successful, perfectly put together, perfectly pleasing), expecting too much of relationships and the dating process (fairytale romances, oddly specific ideal dates or immediately meeting best-fit matches) or expecting perfection from dates and partners, where there is hardly any room for grace or growth.

A hair out of place, somewhat shorter than ideal height or a slightly exhausted tone at the end of a bad day can disqualify people.

One boring exchange on a dating app or one date with a boring/self-absorbed person who won't shut up about themselves, will sometimes have folks swearing off dating and love altogether.

We have to remind ourselves those are not meaningful or substantive objections to dating and love. Those are extremely common, human *things* that show up in dating, like anywhere else in life, including friendship.

I have talked about dating burnout in the past, and how it leads to cynicism in dating and loving, but another very important consideration is asking yourself if you are approaching dating realistically or expecting perfection or unrealistic smooth sailing from the process, making no room for your human messiness or that of other people.

Yes, dating is often unsafe for many of us, as are relationships because multiply marginalized people have a lot stacked against us.

And what we need to remember, based on one big lesson I've learned, is that the developmental task of being an adult involves developing a more solid loving self-relationship as well as forming mutually respectful, reciprocal, safe connections with others.

Here, safety does NOT mean absence of discomfort but a deep consistent respect and care for our humanity and well being demonstrated through words and actions.

In order to form these connections with aligned, compatible, trustworthy, emotionally skilled people, we need an internal locus of control. It means we believe we have some control over the outcomes of our actions.

We need to receive the support necessary to heal, so we can start believing in our agency again, and our ability to learn we can trust ourselves to vet for trustworthiness, goodness and compatibility, also trust ourselves to recover from setbacks.

We need to trust that we have and can recover from disappointment and rejection or even pain when that comes up, because inevitably we will all experience some level of hurt (not referring to abuse) in dating and love, even with our most beloved long term partners.

Let dating be a practice and a playground where you grow and hone your skills for vetting, connectedness, having realistic healthy expectations from yourself and others.

Dating is not an arena where you have to perform perfection or perform anything, for that matter, or a process that needs to embody quick results or be entirely without discomfort.

That is a great way to avoid intimacy and love, but it's a pretty ineffective way to actually find the healthy connectedness and relationships we seek inside and long for, romantically or otherwise.

In short, release the expectation that you, dating itself and other people be perfect or without messiness, vulnerabilities, rough spots/edges.

Seek the support needed to return you to your own self-belief and agency.

You are at nobody's mercy.

You can gain the skills, capacity and trauma informed mindset shifts to find and co-create healthy love. This is a part of our common humanity.

If dating and relationships were all smooth sailing, we wouldn't deeply learn what needs healing inside us, how to be vulnerable and gain discernment (yes a skill, often challenging for folks with histories of neglect or abuse, which can make folks hypervigilant or make it hard for them to see red flags) and emotional attunement skills, also how to implement them long term.

Healing, skills-based, trauma sensitive dating prepare us for healing, attuned, highly compatible and fulfilling relationships.

Love is abundant. It is accessible, and it is accessible to YOU.