How do I stop dating and sleeping with toxic partners?
Stop giving people a chance to challenge love's existence. Come Home: The Advice Column.
I want to qualify here, before you read - there is absolutely nothing about you that encourages abuse - which I find to be much more challenging to label than “toxicity,” but is often what is being described when we refer to a relationship as toxic. If there is any situation in which toxic turns into something more violent, more sinister, and unsafe - please seek help.
When concerts were still a thing, I saw Lizzo perform on her Cuz I Love You tour. The whole show was something to marvel at, but my favorite part was her performance of Jerome. Of all the hits, that song had our voices melting in unison as we screamed with our chests, “JEROOOOME TAKE YOUR ASS HOOOOME.” In that moment, I realized some of the people in the audience probably had a toxic ex 10 years ago, 10 months ago, and 10 days ago, but we belted like our own personal Jerome was right there in the room because we still had some choice words for that motherfucker.
In the current dating climate, toxicity is water and we are fish. Toxic seems to be one of those words, like “normalize,” which we have rendered absolutely meaningless. This is unfortunate for those of us open to true love in a scene that, in short, has normalized toxicity. We choose to accept cynicism. We chase after walking red flags and emotional unavailability. We desire distractions and works-in-progress instead of whole, evolved human beings. We let other people decide whether we are worthy of being chosen rather than choosing. We keep telling people to “love themselves,” as though loving oneself and desiring love from another are A. the same kind of love and B. mutually exclusive. It’s a fucking mess.
Women are given a false choice to either accept casual to severe emotional erasure in our own relationships in order to receive bootleg romance, or to scam ourselves into believing love is in inherent opposition to personal growth. Meanwhile, men are emotionally sterilized since birth, and feel inadequate to show up for love. We as humans, regardless of gender or sexuality, imagine dating as a version of combat, seeking to decode the enemy’s secret language, using self-deprecation or grandiosity as armor, and playing “how long should I wait to text back?” as preemptive strike, fully expecting to build something other than a situation that makes our blood pressure rise and our hearts shatter explosively. Everyone is suffering without the tools and resources to interrogate why they can’t seem to find connection that feels good.
Ultimately, we’re all just trying to find connection that feels good: where we feel stable but not complacent, where we can traverse the challenges of transformation and feel supported in growth, where we can return back to nakedness in every way, and like a baby, be reborn in love. Instead, we listen to other people’s hot takes about what dating should and shouldn’t be, not daring to remember what our heart tells us it could and would be if we believed it were possible and available to us.
You know how termites lurk within the walls of homes long before you know you have a pest problem? It’s not until you feel suffocated by creepy crawlers, like they’re burrowed beneath your skin, and you basically want to just burn the whole house down that you have to handle it. That’s how I view toxic relationships; they enter through cracks in the foundation and eat their way through you until you can’t ignore them. The cracks in the foundation could be learned codependency, helplessness and the inclination to look for a savior, learned tolerance of inconsistency and lack of stability, literally anything you’ve learned in childhood and relationships. Whatever hurt you’ve endured in the past is not your fault, but it is your work to seek what you know to be true. Something healthy, pure, and formidable.
I’m proud of you for being able to identify these habits as toxic - to recognize maybe the folks you’ve invited into your sacred space did not bring an offering to a house of worship. I pity them on your behalf, and am sorry for any grief they have caused you. But perhaps, you’ve even started to identify yourself as someone who dates toxic partners, and therein lies your problem. Alchemy - creating magic in our lives - requires mastery of every element within you. Your thoughts, your feelings, your desires, and your energetic and physical body have to be aligned. Believing you are someone who always dates people who create toxic situations in your life, and desiring someone who is safe, healthy, and as amazing as you are signifies a lack of alignment.
Relationships, situationships, and flings are opportunities for mastery, for gathering energy and transmuting it into what you want longterm - to kiss some frogs to get to the royal as they say. But once you’ve identified so deeply with relationship failure to conclude you are somehow broken - you’re not pretty enough, not interesting enough, not financially sound enough, not ambitious enough, not healed enough, or simply incapable of having healthy relationships - you continue to face that exact part of yourself in other people. The cycle continues not because of anything magic or mystical, but because the mind works very hard to affirm our beliefs. Nevertheless, thoughts are spells, and your beliefs about love and the kinds of relationships you are capable of grounding are manifesting each day. For you or against you is up to you.
I’m thinking of a couple years ago when I had grown weary of being an emotional support girlfriend. I was tired of feeling like I was only seen for parts of myself, like I had to sacrifice my emotional wellbeing in order to be loved, and embarrassed for not holding myself in higher regard. Fuckboys, cheaters, and flakes were my MO.
My estranged father is an Aries, and the universe decided they would be my divine lesson for a decade. I didn’t know what I wanted or deserved, but I felt familiarity with someone exciting, hedonistic, and quick with passion, but challenged with commitment. Then two Januarys ago, I demanded the Universe send me a Capricorn. Specifically - “If I don’t marry a Capricorn, I will die,” so there’s that.
Anyway!
What I was really asking the Universe for was reliability, ambition, a lil’ daddy energy, the kind of person who eats a balanced breakfast, pays their taxes, thinks about building an empire every waking hour of the day, plans a date and simply drops a pin and a reservation time, but I waited to learn my lesson to hammer out those details. About 4 months later, my Capricorn appeared, and so commenced 1.5 years of my own personal hell. Every day I was in fight or flight mode. I was constantly stepping on egg shells to avoid another argument in asking for my needs to be met. He was everywhere but where he said he was going to be, and at least an hour of my day was spent checking his IG followers in case he was cheating on me (he was.) He was exciting, hedonistic, and quick with passion, but challenged with commitment - sound familiar?
By the end of that relationship, I was desperately piecing together exactly how I got here with my roommate at the time, "I just feel like I keep getting treated like I’m disposable because men assume I’m one way by how I look.” If you want to figure out how you’re holding yourself back in love, listen to what you say about yourself post-breakup. I suspected part of why my relationships failed was because my appearance as curvy, Black woman who loves a good crop top kept me in the violent cycle of being hyper-sexualized, and attracting people who just sought conquest - physical, spiritual, mental - and didn’t care enough to discover the rest. Then my roommate asked, “You’ve been saying that for years, and nothing’s changed. Do you think that’s true, or do you think that’s how you feel about yourself?”
At first I was defensive, but then it occurred to me. Plenty of people like me are in healthy relationships, and it was most likely because they weren’t telling themselves what I was telling myself. There was an eensy, teensy chance I was inflexible in my views on love, but I was flexible on my values in order to experience some version of love. And I was certainly concerned with being chosen, with how I was viewed and whether or not someone would see my truth, my heart, and my joy - instead of choosing someone based on my truth, my heart, and my joy.
I guess what I’m saying is: get specific about what feels good. Don’t just ask for a Capricorn - or a nice person, or someone who makes you laugh since this places the bar in hell, and suggests there’s scarcity where there is not. Paint a picture for the Universe of what it feels like to be with someone who is safe. Stop limiting yourself to what you think you’re attracting. Stop resigning yourself to a future of what you’ve seen with your two eyes, and instead make choices for yourself based on what magic feels like. Have some courage; you already know what the alternative is.
The crux of this issue - struggling to abandon patterns that make us feel abandoned - is a fear of what happens when we let go (loneliness), and the ways we approach dating to avoid it. The scariest part of owning our habits is recognizing that when we cut people out, we will find only ourselves in their place. Are you afraid of who that person is now? You have to ask yourself why you prefer the company of people who are unkind, disregarding, inconsiderate, manipulative, or even mean to you over being alone. And then you need to ask yourself if you really feel any less lonely with them around.
As a result of loneliness, there are opposing forces in the dating realm. There are people who date to find a long term partner, and people who date for fun. Dating for fun in theory could be casual sex with clear boundaries, but it can also function as a version of avoidance from the responsibility of being in a relationship, and often operates without boundaries at all. Dating to marry seems to be an excuse to tolerate mistreatment or dynamics you don’t particularly enjoy in order to be guaranteed a future with a fake version of the person you’re dating. I feel there is an alternative - I want you to consider what it would be like to date to witness. Fully witness who your partners are, what their values are, who they say they are, what they believe about love, and what they think and feel of you. Let yourself discover presence in relationships, versus attaching to projections of what you think they will be, or setting limits on what the relationship should be to begin with. Dare I say - restore some fun in your dating life again.
I used to say “I didn’t know they were toxic.” But I did. The signs are always there right at the beginning, and had I been willing to witness, to not already prescribe a meaning to the connection before it revealed itself, to let someone reveal themselves to me before I made my judgments - I would’ve cut my losses a lot sooner and spared myself a lot of money in cognitive behavioral therapy. It is good news the signs are always there, because when you quiet the voice screaming at you for choosing to not see the signs the first, second and third time; you can hear the moments when those losers negged you, challenged you to prove yourself, and made you feel small. You’ll identify the exact moment when you chose to trust those their voices over your own. Right now, you don’t believe what you want exists so you’re settling for what you don’t. That’s not your forever. I’m learning it’s not my forever either.
Stop giving people a chance to challenge love’s existence. You are love, so you know it exists.
"If I don't marry a capricorn, I will die" is an exact type of energy I entirely relate to lol. Thank you for this - I am so sharing this with all my girlfriends who need to hear this! I'm so grateful to receive your words in my inbox each week :)