When I look back on my early dating life it’s kinda comical.
I mean sure, on the outside I could be smooth. I certainly had a way with boys and men - they loved me and I loved their company.
By my early 20s, I could pretty much attract dates on command. This superpower gave me validation, free dinners, romantic gifts and men who wanted to lock me down. All great fun for my ego.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a sociopath. I wasn’t trying to use people. I just found it relatively easy to attract them and enjoyed being worshipped - I mean who doesn’t - until they wanted more and I had to tell them, I’m sorry I’m just not feeling it.
Which was true by the way. Yes I had some avoidant tendencies, but I also knew that if I were to choose someone to love, I’d go all in and I hadn’t really met anyone who had demonstrated they were a good match for me in that sense.
But I still craved true love, indulged in the fantasy of it, and in my lonelier moments, began to wonder if it even existed… because I hadn’t yet experienced anything close to what was written about in fairy tales and love songs.
In many cases I felt like a trophy girlfriend instead of a cherished partner. These guys fell hard and fast.
They treated me like a Queen because I would accept no less. And yet the reason why it felt so empty was because I sensed they hadn’t really taken the time to get to know me. They were just “in love” with the fantasy of me. And instead of building a real connection they seemed a bit caught up with trying to impress me.
That was one aspect of it anyway.
Another came with the very sobering realisation, that for so many years I had been caught in a battle of the sexes, and this perspective had been ruling my unconscious mind and keeping me from experiencing the kind of love my soul craved.
On one level I had studied seduction to feel powerful and in control. I refused to be used (or so I liked to think).
I was a strong, worldly, single woman who had learned to become fiercely independent. So I learned to keep men at arm’s length, intoxicated by the power that comes with being wanted yet unobtainable.
But underneath all this bravado, I was still yearning for something deeper: a man who fascinated me as much as I fascinated him.
Someone who I could grow old and enjoy a 50-year-conversation kind of love story with.
A couple times, I thought I had found him…
But annoyingly, those men seemed to look right past me.
Suddenly my seduction strategies didn’t seem to work. These guys were grounded in themselves and saw through my tricks and illusions. And thank god they did because they became the catalyst I needed to look a bit deeper into myself and the way I was relating to men, love and eros.
I fell in love. I fell out of love. I chased love. I renounced love. I confused lust for love. I ignored love for lust. Sometimes I broke hearts. Other times my heart got broken. Still, I soldiered on, seeking a loving connection that could weather my storm…
The truth, like a punch in the guts.
In this life, Ayahuasca has been one of my greatest teachers. Its fucking rough stuff sometimes though - believe me. And certainly not for everyone. But especially in my early 20s I was seeking the most extreme experiences, and boy did it deliver!
So when I’d had my heart painfully broken by the one guy I actually thought could be my soul mate, I packed my bags and bought a one-way ticket to Peru to figure my shit out with the help of Mama Aya.
There was one ceremony in particular where I saw it all so clearly…
How I had been harboring an inferiority/superiority complex (because you can’t have one without the other). Unconsciously I saw men as the better, more capable sex and was trying to be that myself… overcompensating really.
Meanwhile consciously I loved making men and “the patriarchy” BAD and by contrast, I romanticised women and the matriarchy as GOOD. (The mind can be so black and white sometimes lol).
This insight was jaw dropping to me because before that moment of clarity I would have denied it. But I had to see it to really overcome it and understand how it was holding me back from the good, soul-deep love I told myself I wanted.
I mean, how can you really cultivate a great relationship if you’re secretly thinking of your partner (and their whole sex) as beneath you?
Suddenly I could see all the stupid little things I did (without even thinking) to put men down.
I also saw how I was protecting my heart by playing it cool - keeping men at arm’s length and making myself feel superior so I could stay in control.
There were times when it felt easier to roll my eyes, to act like they didn’t get it...
To cast men as emotionally unavailable, lazy or clueless - instead of really seeing the good in them and calling forth their humanity. Because that would have meant opening my heart, letting go of the upper hand, and admitting how much I truly wanted to be met.
And while this old strategy gave me a sense of control… It also left me stuck with men I didn’t fully respect and pushed away the ones who could have met me fully.
What I really wanted was a partner I could trust to stand by me, support me and even take the lead sometimes (because God, that feels good).
Someone who would challenge me in the best of ways and invite me to expand into a higher standard of love.
But the truth was, I was cockblocking myself from this kind of reality.
As this realisation landed I gradually began to heal this. After all, the insight is just the beginning; the integration is the real medicine.
I started to see men differently: not as adversaries, but as allies. I finally began to let go of the mindset that had kept me avoidant and stuck, flitting from one relationship to the next as if the problem were not within me all along.
That’s when I started to see the deeper dynamics at play and how cookie-cutter seduction strategies actually repel whole-hearted men.
Lo and behold, when I shifted from performing and trying to control the outcome… To learning how to bring out the best in a man – with openness, warmth, and respect, everything changed.
That time when I almost dismissed my husband as another wannabe lover
I met my now husband about a year after this revelation. I’d just moved to Melbourne ready to finally lay down some roots after 7 years travelling.
I was 25 years old and ready to embark on my next chapter, so send me my man please, universe I’d think to myself.
Yet whenever I took the time to really declare that intention I felt fear creep in and my mind would try to backtrack, like: Maybe I’m not really ready yet. Maybe I should just play the field a bit more. Maybe it would be fun to have a few more wild experiences before settling down.
I sat with that inner tension for months.
And yet it was just 3 weeks after moving to Melbourne that I synchronistically met Joe, on the 86 Tram (of course, he’d just missed the tram before it).
He caught my eye. I caught his. I giggled. He smiled back. And after a couple more rounds of this, he finally came over to talk to me, just before my stop.
It was a quick chat. I’d seen him hop on the tram with his guitar so I told him “I’m a musician too” and gave him a download card for my music. A minute later, I stepped off the tram and out into the night. Power move, right?
I wasn’t really expecting to ever see him again, especially because this download card had none of my personal information on it - just my band name and a link to a third party website (it was 2016). But good on him, he tracked me down on Facebook and asked me out on a date.
I still remember our first hug. It was kind, warm and he felt like home. The cafe I had chosen was closing but it was walking distance from my house so we wandered back there to play some music together.
On the floor of my bedroom he strummed my guitar and I started to get a sense of him through his lyrics.
We started hanging out regularly after that, and I clearly enjoyed his company but still didn’t want to admit that he might be my person. In fact, a few times I went as far as to say “I really enjoy you as a friend, but I don’t think there's anything romantic here.”
The truth is my body knew this could be something special long before my mind did. But old habits die hard and I guess I expected true love to come in the form of fireworks and obsession.
With him things were easy. Comfortable. Safe.
Until we eventually fell into bed together and discovered the most incredible chemistry. Like seriously the best sex I’d ever had, first time! Probably in part because we’d spent so much time building a connection outside of the bedroom, it actually felt erotically freeing to have this man I deeply trusted claim me in this way.
The reason why I share this is because I speak to women all the time who are confused about true love. Just like I was, they’re often looking for fireworks from the get go.
But what I can tell you after coaching in this space for over a decade is that great partners often come in unexpected packaging. And the best partners will usually feel more like “home” than immediately setting fire to your loins. It’s an unpopular opinion I know!
Here’s the part of the story that often gets glossed over:
Joe was courting me for 5 months until I truly saw him. Meanwhile I was also dating other guys. My avoidant tendencies were still running the show (told you it takes time to integrate) and he was just so secure, it was weird to my nervous system.
In fact, he was so secure it pushed my ‘not safe’ button and made me want to run away. He was so unashamedly himself whereas I had learned to be cool, coy and curated after being bullied in primary school. Honestly I used to spend so much mental energy censoring myself, trying to be this sexy, unobtainable muse - I’m glad that chapter of my life is over and I’m still connected to my hotness in other ways.
I have since reflected on how healing his presence has been for me. In my mind I wanted a certain type of suave, polished guy (though I had dated guys like that before and it was BORING!).
My husband is a cool guy, though he never tries to be cool - he’s what we call goofy secure i.e. secure in himself enough to allow himself to be a total goof ball. Over time, he’s taught me how to be goofy secure too and as a result we have a lot more fun together - still do!
It wasn’t until the 11th hour when he was ready to let me go once and for all that I did a 180 and finally chose him. And when I chose him, I went all in and have never looked back.
If you ask him, I put him through hell during those 5 months of courtship and I don’t mean to be flippant about his feelings (thanks for sticking through it babe!). I’m just writing this in an effort to capture the whole raw picture for you because I think we need more of that in the online world.
We’re now 10 years deep into the most fulfilling love story of my life. Joe is my best friend and my life partner. We married in 2021 and now have a daughter. We’ve also built a business together.
Over the years we have lived through many seasons of life from the joys of adopting a puppy, through to navigating the pain of multiple miscarriages, facing the uncertainty of redundancy, along with embodying new identity shifts.
Today I look back and laugh at the misguided dating advice I used to follow and how off-base I was because I hadn’t yet experienced a truly committed relationship.
Now that I understand these nuances more deeply, I cringe at how so much dating advice spouted on the internet today is still engaged in a battle of the sexes and it reminds me of the popular maxim: only take advice from people who have actually achieved the specific results you want.
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