'Why Am I Always the Girl Before the Girlfriend?'

Stop repeating this myth and show some respect for your brilliant, savage, ravenous spirit.

Untitled (1926), Yves Tanguy

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: The Ask Polly Book Club is reading Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler this month. It’s a weird book! I want us to read smart, strange stuff with sharp and pointy characters, because these books instruct us on how to allow ourselves to be SHARP and POINTY in a world that wants to form us into wishy-washy, codependent addicts who can’t look big challenges straight in the eyes and say ‘I GOT THIS, MOTHERFUCKERS. WATCH AND LEARN!' This column is free because you need this one. If you agree with that assessment after reading, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Ask Polly is hitting a new high this year and you truly do not want to miss a single post. Oh, you doubt me? WATCH AND LEARN!

Dear Polly,

I am turning 23 in a few days, and I am terrified that my romantic life has already revealed something permanent about me.

Three times I have been involved with women who wanted my attention, affection, body, and emotional availability but did not want to call me their girlfriend. Each told me they were not ready for a relationship. Then, shortly after me, became ready... with someone else.

Suddenly there were labels, photographs, holidays, birthdays, and public affection: all the ordinary things I had been made to feel unreasonable for wanting. There is something so uniquely brutal about being hidden in the wings and then watching the next woman walk into the spotlight wearing the role you had been told did not exist.

It feels like proof that the relationship was possible. The door was real. It simply never opened for me.

The first time, I abandoned myself completely trying to be chosen. I made a religion out of her mixed signals and treated every small moment of tenderness like a life raft.

After that, I did all the right things. I went to therapy, read about attachment and codependency, and learned to recognize emotional unavailability.

The second time, I recognized the trap sooner but still stayed too long.

The third time, when she said she could not be my partner, I believed her and ended things. I did exactly what all the books and therapists had taught me to do. I chose myself before she could finish unchoosing me.

Within weeks, she was back with her ex-girlfriend.

I know leaving was progress. My behavior changed even though the ending did not. But it is difficult to feel proud of escaping the burning house when you are still outside in your nightclothes, watching someone else move into it after the smoke clears.

I do not think there is anything obviously wrong with me. I have close friends. People care about me. I do not believe I am unattractive or secretly unbearable.

That almost makes it worse. If there were a visible crack running through me, perhaps I could point to it, repair it and understand why everything keeps breaking in the same place. Instead, I am left with a pattern that has repeated enough times to feel less like coincidence and more like a prophecy, a curse even.

Almost all my friends are in relationships. They seem to meet someone, go on a few dates and simply become a couple.

Meanwhile, I crave things they barely think to be grateful for: holding hands in public, taking stupid pictures, traveling together, being introduced as somebody’s girlfriend. I want the soft, boring evidence of being chosen.

I am also a lesbian, and the pool of women who are queer, single, compatible, interested in me, and attractive to me feels impossibly small. When people tell me to “meet someone else,” I wonder where this endless city of available women is supposed to be hiding.

The worst part is not simply being single. It is watching everyone move forward while I remain stuck, still sweeping up glass from rooms other people barely remember entering.

How do you heal when you’ve already tried everything?

Never The Girlfriend

Dear NTG,

Stop trying anything. You’re tired of trying. You have much bigger fish to fry than finding the right girlfriend at this moment. Isn’t that true?

You’re a good writer, which tells me that you write in journals a lot, which tells me that you have a lot of strong emotions splashing around inside you at all times. These are all gifts, not deficits, and they will fill your life with endless new adventures and possibilities.

The key to enjoying who you are is also the key to finding love that works for you — and work that works for you, and a life that works for you. You must respect who you are. Your primary focus every morning needs to be this. Every morning you must ask yourself:

How will I honor and respect myself as I am today?

Sorry for shouting but I want every single person reading this to eat those words. In particular, I want you all to eat and digest the words as I am today.

Because every human changes all the time, and sometimes those changes are hard to detect. Sometimes we shift under the surface, invisibly, quietly, but we keep insisting on the employing the same structures and rules and stories and morals that applied last month or last year or five years ago. Sometimes the textures and sounds and nutrients that made sense five years ago are better replaced by the sensations and images and paradigms that brought us to life seven or fifteen or twenty years before that!

But we don’t pay close, emotional attention to where we are! We live inside our heads instead, and we stubbornly tell old stories about what we need! We insist on outdated schedules and demand expired attitudes from ourselves! We refuse to attune ourselves to who we are today. We fail to show respect to our bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits as they are in this moment.

So I want to ask you: Who are you today, and how can you respect that person?

This is what I’m noticing from your letter: You could hang with a lot of bad things before. You put up with bullshit. Then you decided to say no to that, but you also tried to be realistic in assessing that you should probably go with the flow even when you met someone who said they didn’t want a relationship right now.

Now your body and mind and heart and spirit are yelling “WE HATE THIS!” They don’t want you to date anyone unless that person is crystal clear that they want YOU.

Tell me if that’s true or not without telling me HOW IT WORKS OUT THERE. If it’s true that you don’t want to be involved in wishy-washy non-relationships where you stand in the shadows hoping that it will turn official someday, then SAY NO TO THAT.

I don’t give a fuck if that’s how everyone else does it. If you don’t want that, don’t do that. Because love comes and goes, but RESPECTING AND HONORING YOURSELF is a superpower that makes every single thing in your life better instantly.

I know you’ve been working hard and revising your story about yourself carefully. But the fact remains that your story about yourself is disrespectful to you.

Do you feel despair when you wake up in the morning? Is that before or after you start telling this possibly outdated story about how you’re just a set of training wheels on a bicycle that’s more agile and free without it? Moreover, are you feeding yourself plans and schedules that suit a version of yourself that existed last year instead of respecting your intelligence, curiosity, and deep need for novelty, which manifested itself at the age of 4?

I think you want more than this. You don’t even want love right now, even though your compulsive mind keeps returning to that puzzle. You want to love and honor and respect yourself enough to return to the smart, adventurous self you were as a kid. That kid wants to come out to play.

Lots of people want to fall in love at the age of 23. Many young humans find their perfect match at that age. Many others discover that their perfect match isn’t so perfect exactly two years later. While it’s challenging to witness all of these pairings and unpairings at close range, particularly when it involves your exes, particularly when you’re aching to find someone sweet and real and true who’ll hold your hand and travel with you and take pictures of you two together, you must resist the urge to stigmatize, panic, and discourage yourself simply because you’re in the company of people who are managing to pull off something you also want.

Wanting something that other people have doesn’t make you a broken thing that needs to be cleaned up. Failing at love never, ever, ever means that you’re permanently fucked. There is no crack, there is no “same exact thing.” Your skills of pattern recognition are playing tricks on you. Your brain is telling lies.

I want to move past this, but first I want to blow this “curse” theory out of the water. Many, many people are rendered jumpy and dissatisfied around human beings who are EXACTLY AS SENSITIVE AND INTELLIGENT AND LOVING as they themselves are. I’ve experiences it many times. I have met my match and lost that squirrelly motherfucker more than once. I have experienced rejection at the hands of men who seemed perfectly aligned with me in every way, only to discover that they married the next woman they dated.

Typically, the next woman was nothing like me at all. Many times, what I could see (from a great distance!) of the next woman was not exciting, impressive, or even that interesting to me (which is good because I love to get obsessed with my own perceived failures!). This was before the internet offered countless full-color sleuthing possibilities, but even if I had the internet’s help, I would’ve been underwhelmed with what I found. In a few cases, friends met the next woman and they reported back TOTAL CONFUSION AND BEWILDERMENT, like DUDE, HOW DOES THIS MAKE SENSE?

I offer you this incredibly egocentric worldview (the BRATTY impression that I WAS MORE SPECIAL THAN ALL OF THEM!) in order to demonstrate exactly how invested and upset and obnoxiously ego-driven my processing of these rejections could be. I’m showing you that embarrassing side of me because I want you to see that this kind of processing sprang forth from A RECURRING INABILITY TO HONOR AND RESPECT MYSELF AS I WAS BACK THEN.

Asking “Why don’t you love me the way you love her?” is absolutely understandable, but it’s also disrespectful to you as you are today — which naturally includes disrespecting who your ex is today and who your ex’s new love is today. Because you have turned yourself and them into a math problem. You’re pretending that you have a clear and obvious value to everyone that should stay constant. As long as you feel like you’re in love, the other person should also be in love or else… THERE’S PROBABLY SOMETHING FUCKED UP ABOUT YOU! OR THE UNIVERSE IS AGAINST YOU IN SOME WAY!

Even when you assure me that there is truly nothing terrible about you, you assert that there is a pattern here and it means that you’re cursed. You’re reducing the mysteries inside you and everyone else to simple math, and you’re saying that the math means you’re fucked.

I know all about that math. I know that despair, too. I know how hard it is. I know how much it hurts. I am holding your hand right now! I am! Truly! Feel it! I think you’re amazing and I love the way you are and I FEEL FOR YOU. I feel your heartbreak and I am here for it.

That’s why I want you to stop doing weird, random math that disrespects your body and spirit. When you use the word “curse” to describe where you are, you refuse to honor your heart, which will love what it loves no matter what you do to tame it. Feeling love is never a mistake. Let your heart be its powerful, savage self and honor it no matter what! Stop turning away from this pain and this love and the RAW POWER that lives inside your burning desires in order to “solve” a “puzzle” that is absolutely unsolvable, has no solution at all, and exists as a kind of ADDICTIVE WASTE OF TIME that only makes you increasingly neurotic and increasingly disrespectful to yourself.

Instead, get out of your head and live inside your heart. Honor your heart and be gentle to it. Show up for it. Let your vulnerability guide you, and leave all of these analytical acts of procrastination and entanglement behind.

What does your heart say?

My heart says “I want to show myself” and it also says “Protect me from people who don’t love me or don’t get it.”

Because I honor my heart, the only real curses in my life spring forth from NEUROTIC ENTANGLEMENT.

Neurotic entanglement is very, very common today, to the point where it’s practically inescapable for EVERY LAST ONE OF US! I mean, it’s a real motherfucker! These times are eating us alive, my girl! So it’s very VERY important that you see that side of your picture clearly. Our lives are currently structured to make us LOSE OUR MINDS.

If you want to be happy in this world, you have to fight tooth and nail against the addictive, corrosive, self-hatred-inducing structures and sensations of this world. You have to fight every day. You have to notice when you’re falling down a dark, neurotic rabbit hole — that’s absolutely natural and understandable because it’s a means of giving you the illusion of control!

Right now, your rabbit hole is this ANALYSIS OF YOUR SO-CALLED CURSE and also this compulsion you have to MATCH HOW OTHER PEOPLE DO THINGS. But there is no curse. Other people’s choices and behaviors can’t be your guide. So your constant analysis will only make you crazy, like stopping for a second to keep up your end of CROSSPLAY (“Used all my letters, yet again! HERO!) and then falling into an endless tunnel of playing against the fucking computer, which… WHY?!!!

Analyzing your curse (and analyzing how other people GET things) is disrespectful to your body, your heart, and most of all your spirit. Delineating what you did wrong and how you can fix it, how you can become more appealing to the next SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE disregards the mysterious and joyful forces moving within you.

Honor those forces instead by asking what you need today, what you’re craving this month, what you truly desire the most this year, and what purpose you are trying to serve on this planet without necessarily being fully aware of it. Ask yourself what structures and limits your body REQUIRES in order to feel good (including green leafy things, exercise, sleep, and honesty with others!). Ask yourself how you can physically or emotionally limit the hours you spend tumbling down rabbit holes, either alone or with other people.

When you feed yourself and your heart, when you respect your body, when you are gentle with your mind and your spirit, do you know what kinds of things you do? You do things like say “You don’t look ready to be involved, so I can’t get involved with you.” You protect yourself from wishy-washy people, and they move on, and you respect their paths even when they look MUCH less wishy-washy milliseconds later.

When you’re kind to your cells and you honor your desires, you remind yourself, “When someone comes to me wanting a relationship, I will listen. The rest is noise. I will not slow down for someone who appears uncertain.”

Saying no to rabbit holes changes the entire structure of your life. It rearranges your priorities.

In contrast, when you fall down rabbit holes a lot, whether that means staring at bullshit on your phone or going on a fourth date with someone who still seems like they might be on the fence about you, you naturally disrespect not just your own body but the bodies of people around you. When you obsess and problem-solve about what you’re like to other people, how you seem, why you don’t matter more, you naturally ignore or simplify or stigmatize other complex and mysterious human beings in your life and in the world.

The remedy is unlatching from this CURSE paradigm. You do that by saying to yourself, over and over:

SHOW SOME RESPECT FOR WHAT IS UNKNOWABLE.

When you respect the unknowable, you admit that you only have the tiniest pinhole view of the full, rich , delightful magnitude of all that you are and how you fit in the wide, volatile universe around you.

When you arrive in a physical place of understanding just how bright and brilliant and vast and mysterious you are, when you feel that under your skin, when you honor that by allowing a tidal wave of sadness and fear and love come rushing out of you as needed, something wild happens: You start to accept and love the fact that you’re so intense and wild that people have strong reactions to you even when you’re half fucking asleep.

It’s beautiful and scary and it deserves your respect.

You also start to accept and love the fact that you can’t know what’s happening beneath your ex’s skin, what mysteries and strange needs are bubbling away inside her heart. You don’t know what odd forces take hold of her in the company of her new girlfriend or in your company. The most important and vital undercurrents of your spirit might cause her heart to lock up in fear. This means being with her will slowly but surely erode your spirt AND hers! And over time, the softest and most delicate parts of you might dry up and float away when she’s around, and you might not notice until you feel less capable, less alive, less free.

Now that your body and mind and heart have moved into this new (temporary, for now!) position of respecting your exes, all of them, and all of their new partners, you can move your focus back to yourself, and ask yourself: What powerful surges and sensations and deep, abiding desires are swirling around inside you at this moment in ways that mean your needs are changing rapidly?

I think you’re rigidly attached to solving a false “curse” because there are so many big and overwhelming challenges in your life at this moment. And right now, your buried and muted spirit is trying to tell you that the same formulas and structures and sensations and stories that applied two years ago don’t apply anymore.

You need more. You need more room to breathe, more ways of feeling strong and resilient, more routes to self-expression and connection. At this moment, I don’t think maximal joy would come from unlocking the key to that secret city of lesbians even if it existed! My gut tells me that a city of beautiful, charming, sensitive lesbians would drag you into a dark and terrible cave right now, because your soul wants to be honored and respected by YOU first and foremost.

Your soul is saying: YOU KNOW THE WORK WE NEED TO DO. WHY CAN WE DO THIS WORK NOW THAT YOUR TIME AND ENERGY ARE FREED UP, WOMAN? LET’S GET ON THIS! I’M READY!

And just to be clear, your soul isn’t pointing you down a path to getting something concrete, proof that you matter, something that will also bring you love. Your soul doesn’t give a fuck about GETTING STUFF, crossing finish lines, conforming to the sounds and sights around you that are driving you half-mad.

Your soul just wants to honor YOU TODAY. Right here, right now. Your soul wants to feed you something rich and brilliant and vibrant and real enough that you can eat and feel satisfied by, in a way that makes this “curse” narrative seem hilarious and OUTDATED.

The good news is that you don’t have to solve the puzzle of what your soul wants. Souls don’t offer us puzzles. Souls merely ask that we respect what we are right now. Souls ask that we honor the mysteries under our skin and under other people’s skin, too.

Respect what is unknowable.

Welcome what is vulnerable.

Relish what is real and true, even when it feels sad or scary.

Honor who you are in this moment.

This is the moment in your life when you learn that welcoming a supposed curse with an open mind will bring you blessings that you never could’ve predicted. I don’t mean “oh hey, this heartbreak is such a great lesson for you!” What I mean is inherently more murky and delicious and mysterious and vague than that. What I mean is that by inviting your body and heart and mind to FEEL your most vulnerable sensations around this invented, arbitrary puzzle that you’ve labeled “curse,” what you’ll find is that the dark, sick, anxious feelings lift, and brand new possibilities flood in.

That’s how it works every single goddamn day. We resist the stupid fucking math that this corrupt and poisoned world blasts into our eyeballs, we say no to the addictive bullshit (phones, distractions, media, depressing news that makes us anxious, Instagram photos of your ex on vacation) that floods our senses when we don’t guard against it, and we resolutely commit to RESPECTING AND HONORING AND FEEDING who we are today.

You are underfed. I understand that. I have landed there so many times without realizing it until I did a lot of damage to myself, with bad stories, bad habits, anxious and avoidant compulsions, and addictive escapes. I will fall down another rabbit hole, and so will you. We are human.

But when it comes to what we truly need? It’s a little mysterious! Because it changes all the fucking time! That’s why, when we try to SOLVE IT LIKE A PUZZLE, we get anxious!

Instead, we need to treat our true needs with respect, which means respecting that our truest desires and our truest selves are both mysterious and shifting and brilliant and wild. The question becomes: What can I do to feed my savage spirit today? What can I do to nurture someone else who is lonely and needs me badly and might benefit from a simple check-in? What can I do to remain alert to my most vulnerable emotions, while also supporting and strengthening my body and mind? Where does my curiosity take me, once I’m out from underneath the grip of this illusion-fueled “curse” narrative?

How can I proceed through this day in a new way? How can I start to off-gas all of this obsessive, anxious energy and rapaciously eat something much more alive and new and weird that suits my formidable appetite?

You’re a lush garden. You know that already, right? You’re wise beyond your years and you have a more vivid imagination than most rooms full of humans combined. Do you really think finding true love is your most important challenge at this exact moment in your life?

If that’s what your spirit says with a firm and resounding YES, then I respect that, and you should, too! If the answer is yes, all the more reason to say no to sexual attention that doesn’t feel pure or real enough, no matter how good you might be at keeping someone around longer.

But something in your words suggests to me that you have some ENORMOUS and exciting challenges on the horizon that you’re avoiding with everything you’ve got. It’s time to show up and dive into these big, scary adventures you’re resisting.

You’re meant to give so much to this world. That will take respect for your limits as well as your boundless imagination. That will demand that you honor what you are.

That’s how you heal when you’ve tried everything. You stop trying. You stop working so hard to fix things. You stop talking about puzzles and stop asking people what’s wrong with you and stop analyzing what was broken. You wake up in the morning and you whisper to yourself:

YOU ARE A LUSH GARDEN. HONOR WHAT YOU ARE.

I know you’re about to burst into bloom, too. I know it. Trust it. Breathe it in. Believe it. I’m on your side. We’re all on your side. No more rabbit holes, no more dark tunnels, no more neurotic puzzles. Be where you are and relish every second of it.

Love to you!!!

Polly

---

Thanks for being here! Are you showing your body respect these days? Are you honoring your savage heart and bright mind? Or do you tell stories about what might be wrong with you, day after day? Today, take a long walk, buy this crazy book, and attune yourself to the sensual delights of being exactly who you are, flaws and neurotic sinkholes and all, in this fucked up, beautiful world. Give yourself the big challenges and delicious rest that you require and stop apologizing for wanting more than you can stand.

Forward this column to a friend! Don’t let this shitty culture drag you under. Trust yourself and feed yourself. Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Sending you love love love love love love and MORE love. Real love, bitch. Feel it.