281. Reclaim your power in dating

Dating right now can feel like a minefield - in today's episode we break down exactly how to reclaim your power in today's dating climate, including: The 3 reasons we lose our power The consequences of becoming defeated with dating My 5 tips for reclaiming your agency Why we need to STOP playing games What to do when you get attached too quickly + so much more Listen now! PREORDER MY BOOK: https://www.psychologyofyour20s.com/general-clean https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/755841/person-in-progress-by-jemma-sbeg/ Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:03Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of our twenties. There is really no easy way to say this. Dating in your twenties is hard, especially right now. It feels like a bit of a minefield of people who won't commit, people who seem way too good to be true, and it turns out that they actually are. Incompatibility, getting ghosted, dates canceled last minute, just to name a few experiences that I'm sure a lot of us have currently been enduring. When this has kind of been going on for a while

• 1:48Jemma Sbeg?

  and these experiences definitely dominate our dating story or our dating narrative, we can become very detached and very defeated and very passive. And to put it simply, I think we lose our power and our agency in dating. We're no longer as picky as we would like to be. We don't call out disrespect or bad behavior. The whole activity becomes a lot more anxiety-inducing than it is fun.

• 2:19Jemma Sbeg?

  And I think we get into this really negative headspace of expecting people to disappoint us and then not being surprised when they actually do. I think the biggest way to counteract this mindset and this defeatist reality when it comes to dating is to really come back to ourselves and focus inwards, not just for the sake of our love life, but for the sake of actually loving our own life. And I was speaking about this on Mantra recently. Mantra, for those of you who don't know, is my other podcast. It's a lot more spiritual. We talk about a specific affirmation, grounding saying or mantra every single week. Recently, I did an episode on I nurture relationships that enrich my life.

• 3:00Jemma Sbeg?

  And I talked about how something I wish I had learnt sooner was that dating is meant to be A, enjoyable, and B, it's meant to be a selfish activity. Truly, dating is actually meant to be rather selfish. We are taught to always be ready to compromise and to be flexible and to be good and to meet everyone's needs. And that's great, fair enough, but I don't think that shouldn't be the case when it comes to trying to find your life partner. Very few decisions are as important. And I think compromise now in the early stages of dating is misery and frustration later on. I wish I'd known that at 21. I wish I'd known that maybe even at 23.

• 3:42Jemma Sbeg?

  But when we really do start to focus on what do I want? How do I want to be treated? What is my vision for love? And what would it take for that to be met? We experience such a huge and powerful shift that not only makes dating fun, it makes it intentional, and I think it makes it fruitful as well. So today, I want to give you my formula for reclaiming your power in dating and also talk about why it is that we do lose our agency, why repeated rejection and relationship trauma and a scarcity mindset are some of the reasons dating feels so personally hard. And I want to talk about some of the dating dilemmas that you guys have been facing as well, as people in their twenties.

• 4:27Jemma Sbeg?

  Some of you reached out with some pretty Epic stories, some pretty frustrating stories to read from my perspective. So I want to talk about exactly how you can bring back your own control, how you can be in control of those situations. So without further ado, my lovely, lovely listeners, let's get into my guide to reclaiming your power in dating in your twenties and beyond.

• 4:56Jemma Sbeg?

  I want to start out by talking about a time in my own life when I completely abandoned myself to who I was dating. Essentially because I thought that their approval and if they liked me and if I was good enough for them, that could turn into love and that could make me happy. And spoiler alert, in reality, it actually took me to a very low point. And I'm sure a lot of you could probably tell me a similar story. So back in twenty twenty one, I was dating like my first really serious boyfriend. And longtime listeners will know that that breakup is really what created the psychology of your twenties.

• 5:38Jemma Sbeg?

  But, you know, he was great. He was a nice guy. It just didn't work. We broke up and he moved on really, really quickly, like very quickly. And it was this whole story where I was still somewhat under the illusion slash delusion that we were going to get back together. And and one of my friends had to be like, hey, he actually has a new girlfriend. I think it just put me into the real painful part of relationship grief very, very quickly. I was like, oh, I thought that maybe I would have time, that maybe we could still have this shared experience of grieving and missing each other. And suddenly he's moved on, he's on the next, he's on to the next person.

• 6:22Jemma Sbeg?

  Like he's, he's all good and fine and dandy. I think that created a bit of a chain reaction in me where I looked at my own life and I was like, how come it was so hard for me to find someone else? I was very, very lonely. I'd been with this person for a while. It was still in Australia, COVID lockdowns. So. Uh you know, I didn't get to do all the fun things that you would normally do post breakup. I didn't get to go out and party with my friends. I didn't get to go out on these dates. I didn't get to, you know, just be alive and present and out and about. And so I was feeling very, very rejected. I was feeling very poorly about myself. I think my self-worth was definitely not an asset that I had at that time.

• 7:06Jemma Sbeg?

  And it was during this period where I thought, okay, maybe I should start dating again.

• 7:14Jemma Sbeg?

  Insane. It wa- it was an insane decision because I was four months out of a heartbreak, probably like my most significant one to date. I really had a support network, but it wasn't readily available to me. We had this like little break from lockdown where, you know, everything kind of went back to normal for a couple of months. And I went dating. I, it was almost like a sport for me. I was going on sometimes two dates a day, meeting all these people. And the thing was, none of them were particularly nice to me. And yet, I don't think there was a single date that I went on where I thought,

• 7:56Jemma Sbeg?

  oh, he's not interested. I should leave this. Every single one I was like, ah, potential. Potential, potential, potential. I, basically, I'm gonna say it as it is. I'd lost my power. And I met someone during that time, which really, any, any semblance of agency and control and autonomy I had in this process, any slither of it that I had left, that was finally taken away from me because basically, I fell in love with someone very quickly who had absolutely no interest in loving me back. And everything about, everything about our relationship became dictated by

• 8:40Jemma Sbeg?

  what he wanted. We would only hang out at his house. We would only do the dates that he wanted. We only had the label that he wanted to give the relationship, which was not the label that I wanted. And it was very, very painful. And I basically sat in that relationship that wasn't quite a relationship for six months. And it was like I was looking at myself from a high up place. Just losing who I was. I was just in this relationship and I I used to be such a forthright advocate for myself. You know, if someone didn't treat me right, I was gonna call it out. And in this situation, I just absolutely did not. I just sat there and I just let him say,

• 9:23Jemma Sbeg?

  you know, sometimes really mean things about me and I let him just be, do I just let him take control and get whatever he wanted out of the relationship whilst I was very clearly sitting there miserable, not getting what I wanted out of the relationship. And you best believe I was not going to advocate for myself because all I wanted in that moment was love. Really, I was not in the place to be dating and I was so fragile and I was so insecure. All I wanted was someone to just like hold me and say I was special or at least kind of treat me like I was special a couple of days a week. Needless to say, this relationship, if you can call it relation, call it a relationship,

• 10:06Jemma Sbeg?

  did not work out. It most certainly did not work out and we kind of ended things. And if I thought that I had been in a low place before, the six months post that relationship was so painful and almost like in psych, I think about it and I feel so bad for that girl. Because I've spoken about it on the show before, but I couldn't even like speak to someone. I'd just moved to Sydney at the time as well. And obviously I had to try and meet all these new people. I just didn't feel special at all. I was like, why would anyone wanna be my friend? Why would anyone wanna talk to me right now? I'm just wasting their time. I'm boring them.

• 10:48Jemma Sbeg?

  I I I have these distinct memories of being at parties that my friends had invited me to, like the two friends that I had in Sydney at the time. And just not being able to hold a conversation with someone and just being like, oh my god, they're bored, they're bored. They don't wanna talk to me anymore. And then leaving the conversation and self sabotaging and I just really felt absolutely terrible about myself. And it all stemmed back to the fact that I had let myself be.

• 11:17Jemma Sbeg?

  I don't wanna say taken advantage of, I let myself be treated badly. Now, I say that and I don't want people to take that out of context and think that I'm saying that anyone who's been through a terrible relationship or even an abusive relationship is responsible for their treatment. Really not the case, like, really not the case. But I can say in terms of my experience that I knew very clearly and I could feel it bubbling up that I was not being treated right, that I had lost my agency, that I was not happy, that I was not confident. And I continued to almost subject myself to that environment and to that emotional environment and situation because I did not feel like I deserved more.

• 12:03Jemma Sbeg?

  And the idea of having to go back out there and be single when I had no power as a person who was dating just felt absolutely terrible. Obviously, I made it through, I made it through. And now I'm with someone really, really amazing. Obviously, I've skipped an important chapter here and that's the chapter that we're talking about today. You know, how did I go from having that terrible relationship, which genuinely broke me? And which I still sometimes sit and think about and think, oof, ouch. To where I am now, I've been with my partner for two years. And he is wonderful and he is spectacular and he treats me so well. And he is just like genuinely,

• 12:48Jemma Sbeg?

  it it's like we are two complete people coming together, making each other more whole. Gemma, you know, five years ago would not have imagined that could have occurred. And it's because when it came to dating, I became incredibly selfish, I became independent. I became so focused on what I needed and what I wanted. Because I really realised after those experiences, no one else was going to advocate for me. You know, everyone else in the dating scheme, in the dating sphere, was putting themselves first. So I, it was my turn to put myself first and it was my turn to be bossy about what I wanted.

• 13:30Jemma Sbeg?

  And honestly, it's funny because I think I almost went a little bit too far. My current boyfriend, I almost didn't go on a date with him. It's like a funny story we tell now. Whereby um he like hadn't confirmed plans the day of. And I was texting my friends being like, no, a real man wouldn't treat me this way. My soulmate wouldn't treat me this way. I'm not gonna go on this date. But I gave him a second chance. I'm so glad that I did. And here we are now. So my experience aside, what is it that makes us lose our power in dating? I think the first reason why you may end up in a similar situation to me. Kind of dating losers with people that don't treat you right is because of repeated rejection.

• 14:13Jemma Sbeg?

  Being rejected by someone you like or admire, it stings on a very deep interpersonal level. A great deal of human emotion is going to come from rejection. And is going to emerge in the face of real anticipated, imagined, even remembered rejection by other people. We are socially primed to experience rejection as a painful experience, almost physically painful. And then, as a result of that, turn inwards, looking for answers as to why we were the ones who were wrong, we were the ones who were different, we were the one who couldn't make this person happy or couldn't fit in.

• 14:59Jemma Sbeg?

  A consequence of that is that we believe that we must be the ones who have to change or who have to adapt in order to be accepted. So there was a two thousand study that found that the more rejection you experience, the more you actually do begin to cope through avoidant strategies. So this was actually a study done on academics, university academics, who were told that their papers and manuscripts had either been rejected or not. And they found in the experimental condition where, you know, certain participants were having papers rejected left, right and centre. The more rejections they received, fake rejections, the more they withdrew, the more they became

• 15:43Jemma Sbeg?

  quite hostile, but in general, the more they actually began to doubt themselves. Now, obviously, this was an experiment. These rejections actually had nothing to do with the quality of their work. But they ended up really believing that just because this random person told them that their paper was terrible or that they didn't deserve some kind of accolade, it must be true. And very few of them said, oh, I don't actually think you're right. I think your criticisms of me are wrong. It's so bizarre how we as humans are so quick to trust other people's approval or judgements of us, but we are so ready to dismiss or not even think about our own,

• 16:27Jemma Sbeg?

  not even think about what we think. And rejection will do that to you. Another piece of research from the University of New South Wales, here in Australia, also found that, you know, repeated rejection is one thing. Sometimes, for some of us, all it takes is one really profound, emotionally salient rejection to change you. So according to this doctor who ran this study, Dr Zimmerman, if we experience a really unexpected romantic rejection early in life, this can actually be a catalyst event for a lot of trust issues. And it's very hard to understand why it's happened.

• 17:09Jemma Sbeg?

  But it's because this experience of really committing to someone and wanting them to like you and then feeling rejected is so painful that your brain almost promises to itself for that to never happen again. Now, if your self-worth has been depleted by a number of dates, not working out, a few instances of being ghosted or turned down, or just even a significant one-off, you may firstly try to avoid those feelings, but then you'll begin to change your attitudes and your actions. And one way that we do that, and one way that we respond to romantic rejection, is that we lower our standards and we settle. We do this because we have likely developed

• 17:53Jemma Sbeg?

  an actual fear of rejection at this point. So, we want to prevent it from happening again. And the way that we can prevent it from happening again is either, A, completely withdrawing, or B, shaping ourselves to constantly be what someone else wants, because that will ensure that no one will ever make us feel the way that we've already been made to feel. The second reason we may have lost our power in dating is because of a really unfortunate and painful experience of relationship trauma. This is gonna come in a lot of forms, but some examples of relationship trauma include being cheated on, even repeated instances of micro-cheating,

• 18:37Jemma Sbeg?

  being in quite an emotionally volatile relationship, where you never knew where you stood, being betrayed, a traumatic breakup, just some examples. Something that many of us don't know is that relationship trauma in our late teens and our early twenties does actually have the ability to reshape our attachment style. We often tend to think that our attachment style is somewhat locked in after childhood, and that the only thing that influences attachment style is our parental relationships and our attachment to them. That is not true. A 2017 paper titled "Adult Attachment, Stress, and Romantic Relationships",

• 19:21Jemma Sbeg?

  I actually discovered this piece of research when I was researching my book, but it found that there are three types of negative events in adulthood that can actually rewire- Your attachment style. So there's negative external events. This has nothing to do with your relationship, but still makes you feel unsteady. So may have been the death of a loved one, or the death of a partner, or an injury, or a really traumatic, dangerous situation you went through with someone. Then we have negative relational events, so conflict, separation, abandonment, breakup. And then cognitive or emotional events. So this may be that your attachment style has been rewired because

• 20:03Jemma Sbeg?

  you as a person have started experiencing heightened levels of anxiety due to some biological change, due to some cognitive change. You start seeing everything with anxiety, including your relationship. The biggest one, though, is the second. Relational events, specifically negative relational events. So much trust and vulnerability goes into caring for someone and goes into loving someone. And when someone takes that trust and vulnerability and treats it like it's nothing, that does leave permanent damage. And it may explain why we can enter a relationship entirely secure and in an entirely

• 20:48Jemma Sbeg?

  healthy place, only to leave it anxious or avoidant or insecure, and with a whole new perspective on love. So finally, the third reason we lose our power in dating is because we begin to adopt a scarcity mindset. In other words, we let whoever it may be, the media, our married friends, our parents, we let them convince us that we are running out of time to find a quote unquote good one. The scarcity mindset, it's actually an economics term. And it refers to the belief that a resource is limited, and that results in us making irrational decisions. It's why, say you're at the grocery store and you're trying to buy your favorite yogurt.

• 21:32Jemma Sbeg?

  And suddenly, there's only two of these yogurts left, like it's almost sold out. You only need one yogurt, but you're going to buy two because this idea of scarcity is making you make irrational decisions. It's the same reason why. If someone tells you that a bag is one of a kind or exclusive, you're more likely to wanna buy it because they've created scarcity within you. Where if something seems less available, it actually feels more worthwhile to have. Yes, the scarcity mindset usually refers to a consumer good. It can also refer to love.

• 22:14Jemma Sbeg?

  And why we feel that a good partner is becoming a lot harder to find. So the other important part of this concept is that it can actually be artificially altered. So basically, in economics, people can make you think that something is scarce and can make you think that something is less available. And they do that as a way to make you wanna buy it. There are a lot of ways that we are made to feel like a good relationship is quite scarce at the moment. Whether it's dating horror stories, whether it's, you know, how dating apps are structured, whether it's all the hit pieces people are writing in magazines that it's harder for millennials to find love, et cetera, et cetera. It's all making us very, very scared.

• 23:00Jemma Sbeg?

  I wanna remind you, people come on and off the market, the dating market, every single day. People move cities, people suddenly come back on the market and are ready to date again. People break up. There is someone perfect for you out there, thinking exactly what you were thinking right now. Oh my gosh, there's no good people left. And here you are thinking the same thing, and I think that's part of the story that you're going to tell each other one day of like, oh my god, I'd really given up hope and here you are. But in the meantime, don't let a scarcity mindset take over and cause you to miss out on meeting that person because you felt like you had to hurry up and settle down.

• 23:44Jemma Sbeg?

  I don't think that's, I don't think that's the healthiest decision for you right now. And I always say, you would much rather be single for another ten years and find your person at thirty-five, or thirty-nine, or thirty-two, than spend the next ten years with someone that you've settled for and have to break up anyways and be back in the same spot, but now just with more emotional damage. So, we lose our power because of rejection, relationship trauma, and a scarcity mindset, to name the big three. What are the consequences of this? Well, we've already spoken about a few. I think the biggest one is self-abandonment. Abandoning what you need in a relationship, ignoring your needs just for

• 24:28Jemma Sbeg?

  the idea and the promise of love. This can mean that we often let others make decisions for us. We ignore what we need from a situation. We ruminate constantly about whether this other person likes us, rather than whether we like ourselves, or whether we even like them. And we also begin to tolerate behaviour that we never imagined for ourself, and we never imagined would be part of our love story. Another consequence of abandoning ourselves, or lowering our standards, losing our power, is that I actually think we begin to feel, feel it in our body, feel a lot of discomfort, distress, and emotional pain.

• 25:12Jemma Sbeg?

  When you're dating someone, or when, you know, you're in the process of courting people who are treating you poorly, where you feel like you have no agency, you have no control. I often find that that creates a lot of bodily tension. It creates real signs, physical signs of emotional distress, like crying a lot, like feeling sore in parts of your body, feeling nauseous. There's a really fascinating paper that was published in two thousand and fourteen, and it attempted to map where we feel emotions in our body. Because typically, we do feel emotions physically before we feel them consciously and mentally. We just don't realise it.

• 25:55Jemma Sbeg?

  And what this paper found was that when we feel discomfort, stress, anxiety, emotional tension, we tend to feel it first in our face, behind our eyes, in our throat, in our stomach. When you lose your power in dating and you are dating people who make you feel terrible, you are going to feel terrible. Your body is going to let you know that it's not happy with these emotional circumstances. I remember a friend telling me how she went through this period of dating the wrong person and she felt nauseous and ill the entire time. She went to the doctor, she thought she may have an ulcer, she thought it was something

• 26:38Jemma Sbeg?

  serious, maybe like a really bad bacteria. When she left the relationship, that illness cleared within weeks. And I know that sounds quite, I don't know, serendipitous or convenient or like a coincidence. I promise you it's not. The emotional and social interactions that you're having, specifically ones that feel so intimate and vulnerable, if they are not right, if they don't sit right with you mentally, they're not going to sit right with you physically. And I think love and dating is not something that we can play games with, especially if you are someone who is rather sensitive and rather romantic, because it does influence

• 27:22Jemma Sbeg?

  you, it influences your mind, it influences your body, it influences your soul. Okay, so now to the juicy bit, what can we do about it? We're going to take a short break, but when we return, I've got my five biggest tips for you today, so stay tuned.

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• 28:50Jemma Sbeg?

  This is gonna sound so cliche and I'm sorry for it in advance, but it's not you, it's just dating. It's just the way that dating is working at the moment. It's a battlefield where the way we have been socialized to date in the 21st century and to treat others especially these days is in a very transactional way, a very flippant way. And also in a way that I think essentially assumes that someone better is always gonna come along. And it means that you have to have stronger boundaries and be a lot more intentional about what you want from a relationship. If this doesn't come naturally to you, it didn't come naturally to me.

• 29:35Jemma Sbeg?

  If it's been scared out of you, don't worry. I'm gonna give you the formula for how to really reapply agency and control when it comes to your dating experiences. Now, some of these may sound kind of obvious. You may have heard them before, but I think the reason I'm saying them again is because they are very, very important. So even if they're not new to you, I do hope that you still absorb them in the same way. Let's start with my first tip. My first tip is that you need to take a dating detox. You need to take a full, big step back from dating before you can dive in again. Half the reason I find we start cutting corners with dating or giving up control

• 30:19Jemma Sbeg?

  is because we are simply emotionally exhausted. And our ability to uphold our values has been slowly whittled away over time. If you are feeling more tired than excited to go on dates. If you are dragging yourself to dates, just wanting to get it over with, hoping to find someone good enough. So you don't have to be single anymore. Pause and just stop dating altogether because this is a very straight and narrow path to settling. You're probably experiencing dating burnout. And it's very similar to career or workplace or emotional burnout.

• 31:00Jemma Sbeg?

  And it's very similar in the sense that it's going to get progressively worse and worse. Until you do a full reset. Now, something I see with people who are experiencing dating burnout is that they'll take a step back for like a couple of weeks. That doesn't give them the chance to fully, to fully fill up their cup and to restore all their depleted emotional resources. I think you need six months minimum to get back to yourself post dating burnout before you are ready to date again. And I'm going to give this my most profound, big, personal endorsement ever. I actually did do a six month dating detox before I met my partner, Tom.

• 31:42Jemma Sbeg?

  And I'm not saying that it magically made the love of my life appear. What I am saying is that I was able to really see clearly when he showed up. And I was able to kind of push through all the garbage and the chaos of other people who weren't meant for me, but if I hadn't done a dating detox, I would have overly invested in them. My second tip, you need to have a list of non-negotiables. This list is going to be your best friend. And it will allow you to shift from seeking validation to seeking self-approval. It will allow you to stop asking yourself, oh, do they like me?

• 32:27Jemma Sbeg?

  Are they enjoying my company? Do they wanna go on a second date with me? To, do I like them? Did I have fun on that date? Is this someone I could see a future with? I think what it really does is it re-centers something that we've lost along the way. What it re-centers is our own opinion at the center of our life. This really is the judgment and the opinion that matters the most. Be as selfish as you want. I don't think we hear that a lot in life. I think there are very few instances where society is okay with telling us to be selfish. But I'm gonna tell it to you right now.

• 33:05Jemma Sbeg?

  Be selfish and assume that everyone else is dating with their own best interests at heart. Until they prove that they can be a good partner, until they prove that they are worthy of compromise or of selflessness, I think you need to keep the focus squarely on you and what you want. And this is where this list of non-negotiables becomes really, really important. Because if we just say, oh yeah, I'm not gonna compromise. And we don't have a list or we don't have some idea of what we don't wanna compromise on. Essentially, we just end up doing it anyways. It's like, imagine going to a financial planner and saying, I wanna be rich. But you don't know what you wanna spend that money on.

• 33:49Jemma Sbeg?

  And you don't know what you currently spend your money on. And you don't know what your essential financial needs are. Your financial planner is gonna sit there and say, so what exactly do you want from me? Like, you're not going to be able to achieve what you want in money, in life, in relationships, without already having a vision. I'm gonna give you actually my non-negotiable list. I pulled this out of my Notes app archives. I used to bring up this list after every single first date or sometimes second date that I'd had with someone. Just to be very clear with myself. Is this person matching my requirements or am I being delusional? So this was my list. They must be someone looking for monogamy.

• 34:32Jemma Sbeg?

  They must be someone who I respect and admire. They must have a career, job or hobby that they're passionate about. They must have time for me. They must openly communicate with me. They must wanna live overseas and they must wanna have a family one day. These were all things I knew I needed to feel emotionally secure and to have a future with someone. But they were also things that I knew that if I overlooked in the present, they would be relationship ending in the future. And I saw dating as something I couldn't just have exclusively have fun with anymore. I was still having fun, but I knew that I was someone who got carried away very, very easily.

• 35:15Jemma Sbeg?

  I got attached very, very easily. This was my insurance. You know, whose advice was I gonna take? Out of anyone's? I was probably gonna take my own. And so this was a way to say, hey, your past self thought this was important. Why are you neglecting it now? So make a list. It should have at least five things on your list. If you can't think of five, I think you need to be more picky. Because there are most certainly five things that you can think of that would make a relationship perhaps not work for you. So make sure you know what they are, you're clear about it. You reflect on past experiences and you use your list.

• 35:55Jemma Sbeg?

  My third tip for reclaiming your power in dating is to stop playing games. Stop playing games and set the example for how you wanna be treated. Dating is hard enough. You don't need to make it any more confusing for yourself. The kind of games I'm talking about include things like not texting them back for the same amount of time that they didn't text you. I'm guilty of doing that once or twice. Pretending not to be interested at parties or when you see them. Making them jealous deliberately. Ignoring them. Or expecting them to read your mind. Or testing them without them knowing it.

• 36:39Jemma Sbeg?

  All of this just puts up further barriers between you and the other person. In all honesty, I think that the games we play in the early stages of dating. They are a defense mechanism. I think it's a way of feeling more in control. Or of keeping people at a distance because of previous times that you have been hurt. Or you have been let down. And so pretending not to be interested. Keeps this nice buffer between you and them where you can pretend to yourself as well. Or ignoring them allows you to ignore the fact that you are actually really invested in them as a person. And you do really like them. And that's okay, even if it doesn't work out. It's really just a healthy.

• 37:23Jemma Sbeg?

  Sign that you know what you want and that you. Are brave enough to feel deeply about someone else that I think. Is, I just think that's a good sign for future relationship health. So don't wait to text them, don't pretend you're not interested. Show up the way that you would want someone else to show up for you without the games. I think in the same vein, if someone is playing games with you. I want you to remember that a mixed signal is still a signal. If they are making you feel anxious or uncomfortable. If they are causing you to doubt yourself. I need you to detach and. Pull all of your energy back. I need you to show them very clearly.

• 38:06Jemma Sbeg?

  This kind of behavior will not get my attention. And it will not get my respect. And it most certainly will not get me. And honestly, I actually don't think it's a bad thing to just say that to someone. To just say, I don't like these games. And I'll be honest, when I met my partner, when I met my boyfriend, Tom, he, he's a lawyer. I don't think I've said that before, but he's a lawyer. And so he's very, very busy. And when we first started dating, like we would text a lot and I, I wouldn't hear from him for like, you know, four hours and I'd be like, oh my God, he's playing games. And so I said to him, I was like, hey, I need you to text me back quicker. Because this makes me feel really insecure and it makes me feel like you're not interested.

• 38:47Jemma Sbeg?

  So if you're playing games with this, like, I'm not interested in it. And if it's something else that I need to understand about your communication style, let me know. And that's how I found out that my boyfriend actually has a really healthy relationship with his phone. And I perhaps do not. But yes, please prioritize self-respect over temporary feelings. If someone is disrespecting you, playing games, or they don't align, align with your standards, walk away. I don't think your self-worth is up for negotiation. The way they treat you in the beginning is the way they're going to treat you for the entire relationship. It's not going to get any better than the early days when they're trying to court you. Please remember that.

• 39:31Jemma Sbeg?

  If you're someone who does still find that they put the rose colored glasses on, this is my litmus test. This is the question I would ask myself. Is this the story that I would tell about my soulmate? If in the future, we had children and our children asked about how we first met and how we first started dating, would I want to tell them the truth about this story? Because if someone is not giving you a good story or a good narrative, or is not treating you in a way that you would be happy to tell your children or your parents or your friends how they were treating you. No, they're not the one. Okay, so my fourth tip is actually to to do with the first date and how to really

• 40:16Jemma Sbeg?

  make sure that you are stepping into the room, the bar, wherever you are meeting this person, feeling confident, feeling like you can advocate for what you want, feeling like you have the power. So before I would go on first dates, I used to have three or four affirmations that I would always tell myself. I would get ready, I would listen to a specific playlist that I had made fi- filled with like music that was over a hundred beats per minute, so like high energy, exciting, and then before I would leave, I would repeat these four affirmations, three to four affirmations to myself in the mirror. The first one, I already have everything I need in life. Love is just a bonus. That was my favorite.

• 41:00Jemma Sbeg?

  The second, I am enigmatic. The third, I am masterful. The fourth, I am confident. The words that you speak to yourself become reality. We see that time and time again in studies and research on positive self-talk. You can let yourself and your sense of self be dictated by external judgments and other people's opinions, or you can take all of that information and say, none of this is as important as what I have to say about myself, the judgments I have of myself, how well I feel in my own body. Right before I would go into the date, like I had done

• 41:41Jemma Sbeg?

  my positive self-talk, I had done my music, I had done all these little small things that made me feel like I was gonna have fun, I would do this like physical exercise where I would stand outside and I would, right before I would go in, put my chest up, shoulders back, and I would just like shake everything out. I do this like huge smile and I would just imagine all this energy lifting from my toes all the way to my head and I would just be ready to have a fun time and I would go in being like this could be the worst date I ever go on, but at least it's going to be a good story and at least there is nothing that this person can say or do that is gonna Make me feel bad about myself because I've already kind of put on this emotional armor.

• 42:23Jemma Sbeg?

  I used to call this like the high value person mindset. Basically, I was doing everything in my power to convince myself first and foremost. That I was valuable, I was deserving of love, respect, effort, that I was magnetic. I I needed to make sure I believed that about me before I was trying to convince someone else. Often because if you really do believe that about yourself, someone else is going to immediately feel drawn to you as humans. We love when other people, when we can see other people respect themselves. And when they are confident and when they know that they're the shit. So my final tip for reclaiming your power in dating is to reframe rejection.

• 43:09Jemma Sbeg?

  As filtering. Research on rejection sensitivity shows that we obviously personalize rejection. And we immediately assume that it's always coming down to something about us. Rather than about someone else's preferences. This is not a you problem. If someone doesn't like you, I need you to understand that. It is their way of doing exactly what I'm asking you to do, which is advocate for yourself. And the thing is, if they know that you're not the right match for them. It's actually a real gift that they have made that clear early on.

• 43:52Jemma Sbeg?

  Instead of convincing you and trying to convince themselves that this could work. This is all just a form of filtering. Rejection is a way of of weeding out incompatible partners before you invest. Too much, too soon, too early. And the fact that someone else has done it for you is great because eventually you would have found some reason to reject them. And you may have felt pretty awful about it. They've saved you the pain, they've saved you the stress. They've also saved you the cognitive and mental effort of having to figure that out for them. The right person is going to come along and all of those rejections are going to feel worth it. And I just want you to be someone that your soulmate.

• 44:38Jemma Sbeg?

  Would fall in love with. You know, I know this sounds bizarre, but when I went through that really terrible period, I remember saying to myself, I just don't think my soulmate would fall in love with me right now because I have no love for myself and because I'm not, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be in this situation, ready to see them for who they are. They could, anyone could give me the smallest amount of interest and I would confuse them as a soulmate. So I'm not actually able to delineate or tell. And most importantly, they could show me all the love in the world. And at some level I would crave it, but at another level, I would think I didn't deserve it.

• 45:19Jemma Sbeg?

  So seriously, the focus has to be on you at every single, every single stage until this person proves them to, proves themselves to be a partner. Like you will find so much more success in dating when you make it a completely selfish activity. When you focus on yourself and when you realize, once again, you already have everything you need in life, this is just a bonus. All right, we're going to take another little short break before we come back with our listener questions and our listener dilemmas around reclaiming power in dating. So stay with us.

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• 47:11Jemma Sbeg?

  So question one from a listener. I get attached way too quickly, but I like that I love people deeply. How do I balance those? I want to firstly say, I actually don't think that it's a bad thing to get attached too quickly. I know it can like feel kind of painful for us. But if the reason you don't like that you get attached too quickly is because other people shame you for it, or because you feel like people get scared off. I don't think they're the one. I don't think that they're the one if you put everything on the table and they go, ooh, that's awkward. So the shame around getting attached too quickly, I'll never understand. What I do understand is the difficulty that comes with

• 47:56Jemma Sbeg?

  seeing people for their potential and not for what they're actually going to give you, or for their actions, or for who they are. So I would say for the first month, if you get attached too quickly, just roll back the emotional investment. So you're not completely cutting them off. I've often had this problem in the past where I know I can get attached really, really quickly. So I kind of deny myself any access to that person, thinking that it's going to stop things. No, what we want is a balanced access. So limit how much you see them. Don't try and rush the timeline. In fact, create milestones for you now that you have to have to stick to. So basically create like a calendar for yourself.

• 48:41Jemma Sbeg?

  That, you know, this person isn't allowed to meet your friends before week six. No overnight stays before week four. No weekend trips before week eight. Don't meet the parents before month three. Basically, despite everything that you wanna do, I want you to commit to these previous limits that you have put on any relationship that you are in, such that you don't end up speeding down this road and it ends up being a dead end street and you crash at the end and you feel, you know, a bit embarrassed for having introduced them to family or having made such an investment of time and energy in them before they prove themselves to you.

• 49:22Jemma Sbeg?

  So spend as much time as you can getting to know them before you progress to that next stage of a relationship. All right, so question number two, should you hold off on sex to reclaim your power? This is an interesting one because I feel like this idea of holding off sex kind of comes from like a purity culture perspective, but I do also think that sometimes we use sex as a way to like make someone like us a little bit too soon. When I was single, I found that when you slept with someone didn't really matter because if they were going to respect you, they would regardless of when you chose to be intimate.

• 50:06Jemma Sbeg?

  If you slept with them on the first date versus the 10th date, if that person was real and if they really liked you, it it wouldn't scare them off. Also, they were involved as well, you know, it's not like they're thinking you're giving it up too early and that's a sign that like you're this impure person or like that you're loose because they are equally doing it. So that logic like never really made sense for me. For me, I think reclaiming my power was deciding that if I wanted to have sex on the first day, that was fine. If I wanted to have sex on the 20th date, that was also fine. My power came from deciding for myself. My power came from not being rushed into it and making sure that I examined my intentions

• 50:50Jemma Sbeg?

  so that the only reason I was doing it wasn't just to. You know, keep them for a little bit longer because I thought that's what they wanted from me. I just think properly evaluate what tone you wanna set, what you're after. And whether you feel like emotionally prepared for that vulnerability. Whether you would be okay with sleeping with them and not wanting anything serious. Whether you feel like you need to have sex with them just for them to like you. Like if that's your only reason, definitely don't have sex with them. But if it feels like a natural progression of the relationship and if you want to do it. You should totally, totally do it. I think again, it comes back to playing games. If someone isn't gonna respect you um or isn't gonna make you feel in control.

• 51:34Jemma Sbeg?

  Or you're not going to feel powerful if you have sex with them, don't do it. But yes, I don't think that, I don't know, I don't wanna say it doesn't really matter because it does matter. But I think that if it's going to change someone's opinion of you, then they're probably not the right person. All right, question number three, how to put yourself out there when you've never been in a relationship before? This is actually a question I get quite a lot. I think there are a lot more late bloomers in our twenties and in this decade than we imagine. There is a huge focus on dating and sex and having these romantic experiences as like a rite of passage. If you're not quite there yet, honestly, I'm excited for you.

• 52:16Jemma Sbeg?

  I'm really, I'm quite excited for you because there is so much really amazing stuff to come. And the experience of falling in love for the first time and having your first boyfriend or girlfriend or partner. Like it is actually, it's just a really fun experience. So don't feel like you've fallen behind. Feel like there is just so much opportunity ahead of you. I wish sometimes that I could go back and experience falling in love again for the first time all over again. Cause it is so beautiful. But in terms of dealing with the insecurity of going out there and feeling like, oh my god, everyone, like I've never dated before, this is a new thing. Shift your mindset to think of it like an experiment and it makes it feel less serious. So commit to like a three month experiment of asking people out,

• 53:02Jemma Sbeg?

  being forward, getting on the app, getting on the apps, making the first move, asking friends to set you up and just go on as many dates as you can, whether it's amazing, terrible, awful, it's all data, it's all research. Each experience is an important one, even if it's bad, because it's all about getting comfortable with being visible and being seen and building up those dating skills, because it really is such a skill to be able to talk to someone that you don't know and find out the information that you wanna know. And it is a real skill to be vulnerable and it is a real skill to have confidence in these situations and to be

• 53:42Jemma Sbeg?

  self-assured. So I think you just need to move past firstly, that mental barrier and then the social barrier and just get more experience up. Oh, I'm actually just so excited for people who are in this situation. I feel like not being in a relationship feels like a burden, especially if you're at a certain age, but actually it's kind of a blessing because you get to be more mature when you step into your first relationship and you've saved like such a beautiful thing to come a little bit later. So you have more time to really savor it. So I don't wanna be like toxic positivity on you. I do just want you to see like the grass is greener perspective, you know, as someone who's been in quite a few relationships,

• 54:26Jemma Sbeg?

  who started dating really early, like sometimes I do look at the experiences of people who have waited a bit longer and have just been like, wow, I'm really excited for you and it's quite a magical time. Alright, fourth and final question for today. How to come back from a horrible date that you feel completely defeated by? One word and one word only, it's humor. It's humor. Laugh about it with your friends. Treat it like a good story, even write like a funny story about it in your notes app, like almost in the sense of this is a story that could go in like your biography or whatever. And just remember that we've all been there. These are the stories that I think.

• 55:07Jemma Sbeg?

  Really exhaust us, right? We've all been through a really terrible date where we thought it was going to go really, really amazing. And this person has just been rude. They've not been what we expected. It just hasn't turned out right. It's all for the plot. And the first thing I would do is call your friends, laugh about it with them, write about it, post like a funny private Instagram story. Just anything so that you can turn away from despair and to laughter. Because I think if you let those bad dates really get you down, you're going to start expecting a bad date from every single person. And then you start acting like they've already disappointed you. And then you both end up disappointed. So keep it light, keep it fun, keep it airy.

• 55:49Jemma Sbeg?

  And remember that if this person has problems that they've projected on you, and if they've treated you poorly or just been like a dick, that all comes down to their insecurity. Please don't let them drag you down as well. Don't let them make you think that you don't deserve love and don't make them think that the next day isn't going to be better. Cause I promise that it will be. Sometimes it is just a numbers game. I don't know, there's so many theories about this. It's a numbers game. It happens when you least expect it. There's one soulmate for all of us.

• 56:24Jemma Sbeg?

  I think the defining theme of dating in your twenties and reclaiming your power during this period is just to go out there and have fun and be open to the opportunity of romance, even if you've been burnt before. So I want to thank you all for listening. If you made it this far, drop a little rose emoji down below. I love knowing how many of you listened to the full episode. It always makes me feel so, so special. If you have further like dating dilemmas or questions about reclaiming your power, also drop them in the comments. I'll be around answering some of them. Make sure that you are following us on Instagram so that if you have your own listener question for future episodes, you are around to ask them and you know when they are going up.

• 57:09Jemma Sbeg?

  If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube. We have video coming out very, very soon and follow. Follow along the podcast right here where you are now. Give us a five star review, join the community. We'd love to have you around and we'd love to let you know when we have new episodes dropping twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday. But until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself, especially in today's dating climate. And we will talk very, very soon.

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