Which completely negates any idea of placing ‘wants over needs’, and puts both parties on equal ground. To go back to the examples from an earlier post, it’s not rare for one person to demand/request/insist/etc that the other person cut contact with an ex- because the new partner wants it, but to phras
The second is that people you have ‘some sort of relationship’ also don’t automatically have a legitimate interest in what you’re doing. Deciding that you’re going to stay in contact with the ex- you left on good terms even if someone you started dating doesn’t want you to is not being a jerk, for example. Neither is telling someone you’re dating or married to ‘I go out to the bar with the boys on Tuesday, I’m not stopping that just because you decided to tell me to’ (to use an example from another thread on here). Or dating a black person if you have racist parents who object to you mixing blood like that. But in all of them you’re putting your own wants and needs ahead of someone who’s in a relationship with you.
It can be incredibly healthy or incredibly unhealthy, but it’s important to remember that people can have wants that align, or don’t conflict - the idea either he gets what he wants or she gets what she wants with no middle ground is common (especially in the ‘nice guy’ mindset) but doesn’t match reality and leads to flawed analysis. One of the problems nice guys run into
No one ever literally gets what he/she wants all the time, obviously, so I’m taking the phrase as figurative above, but I want to point out that ‘all or nothing’ thinking is generally not healthy, especially in a relationship. I make a point of deliberately avoiding such phrasing
I may be off base here, but I often felt that part of my trouble with dating when I lived in the rural south was refusing to be either dominant or a doormat. I’m not saying all women there in the eighties were like that, it seemed to be the case in the small sample size I encountered.
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I think the problem is that you probably never had a good model for taking the middle ground. You don’t normally see other people when they have a serious talk and sort out issues in a healthy way, because sane people don’t usually have those conversations with an audience. You only see other couples when they agree on something (or defer to talk about it later), or when they’re the ‘lets have a big shouting match in front of the guests’ type of people. So if you don’t luck into a relationship where it works, have someone teach you about it, do couples therapy, read books about it, etc., you don’t have any idea that there’s anything but dominant or doormat, or any idea how to be anything but the extremes. And if you don’t know how to find the middle ground, then someone who’s used to trying to find it will find you either being overbearing or wimpy when they’re expecting give and take.
There’s definitely things that change with age - from what I’ve read, generally women feel their dating peak is 18-25, while men have a better time dating in the late 20s to 30s. In case you’re wondering how that works with an equal population, men tend to find women around 20 most attractive at all ages, while women tend to find men their age and a bit older most attractive, so women tend to date older while men look for younger. (here’s a graph from OKC illustrating it, and it’s turned up in more rigorous studies At what age do members of the opposite sex look best to men and women - Imgur ) .
OTOH, it can also be that you simply hit a point in your life where “I’m sick of being alone” overcame “It’s scary and uncomfortable meeting new people”. That’s pretty much what happened for me, though at late 30s instead of late 20s.