Three Reasons You May Be Causing Imbalance in Your Dating Life

Imbalance in relationships occur when you start to notice that you are doing all the work in the relationship, initiating dates, thinking of nice things to do etc and you feel the other person is not ‘pulling their weight’ – you start to wonder whether they are invested in getting to know you and want a relationship. Or you worry that you need to work harder to win their affection.

Either of these experiences is an indication that you may be tipping the balance of the dating to your disadvantage. You either end in a relationship where you do all the work and feel taken for granted or the relationship ends because you have not allowed it to form naturally.

There are a number of reasons why you may inadvertently tip the (im)balance in dating, essentially sabotaging the relationship. By relationship, I mean the early days of dating where you are establishing a relationship ‘tbc’ (to be confirmed).

You let the eager and excited about your new person take over

It is not uncommon that when we get excited about someone, we turn the majority of our energy towards getting to know them. Our fantasies of the potential relationship fuels the excitement as we dream about how it may turn out. And so naturally we think about them, respond quickly to them, and feel eager to know when to see them again, even foregoing plans with friends in order to spend time with them.

While this excitement is natural and wonderful, if you allow your excitement to run away with you, you risk giving your new person the wrong impression of you. They may think you are always available to them and flexible, yet when ‘reality returns’ and you want to hang out with your friends or continue with your football or Spanish classes, you get a disappointed partner and this also will fuel imbalance.

Pensive woman in front of the window

You are being too nice

Usually we want to portray ourselves as nice people. We put our best foot forward and pull out the stops to show how nice, kind and understanding we are. Because that’s want partners want right? To date someone nice.

As a way of showing our worth, we might go the extra mile for our date. We will allow ourselves to be inconvenienced to make them happy. Accept a late evening date despite knowing we’ll be exhausted after a long day at work, fitting a date in when it’s really not that convenient or always paying for meals and tickets to show our affection for them. As long as they are happy, we don’t mind. We may even have the expectation that that is what they would do for us in return.

This behaviour risks setting you up for failure (and causing imbalance), in that in all likelihood your date has no clue how inconvenienced you are and when you start to expect similar actions in return, they are likely to be stumped and think you are being unreasonable.

You worry that asking for what you want and need will make your partner reject you

Quite often we don’t want to rock the dating-boat. If things seem to be going well, we don’t want to be demanding and unreasonable, lest that puts them off us. So we hold back on sharing what we truly want to do, or worse, we don’t share how we feel when they do things we don’t like.

For example, they take you kayaking and you go along despite having a fear of water. Perhaps you don’t enjoy late nights out, and worry that you come across as boring if you ask to stay in. Perhaps you feel the need to spend more alone time with your date, but won’t ask in case they see you as needy, which you think will surely make them reject you.

The risk of not sharing one’s thoughts and feelings is that the other person doesn’t fully get to know you and you may end up feeling resentful later in the relationship. Furthermore, you don’t get to experience whether your date is capable of being caring and supportive when you need it, and you run the risk of dating someone who won’t be there for you when you need it the most. And lastly, you risk the other person not fully realising how much you do actually need and want them, and they disengage with you because they think they are not wanted.

If you recognise yourself in the above and feel an imbalance in your relationship and want to know what to do about it, I can help.