Love, and the self fulfilling prophecy

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Do you sabotage relationships before they have even begun? Do you enter into a new relationship already fearful that it will fail? It could be that you are actually creating your own self fulfilling prophecy with self defeating thoughts and actions.

Insecurity is NOT attractive.

You meet someone that you are very attracted to. You date a few times. Things go VERY well and you start to fall for this person. They tell you that they are feeling the same and you begin to make plans to spend more time together. It feels like a dream come true. The initial stages of any new relationship are full of excitement and hope. You are both making a huge effort to impress one another and seal the deal. This takes a LOT of energy but you are on a natural high so it doesn’t feel like effort at all.

This stage is wonderful but it can’t last. Gradually things settle into a routine. Day to day life and demands – things that you had been pushing aside while you were having so much fun – come to the forefront and the relationship dynamic shifts slightly. This is normal, but its also the point where a choice is made. Do you become a permanent couple, or do you realise that while this has been fun, its not what you want long term and its time to part?

We generally put forth a mammoth effort in the early stages of a new relationship, but in reality, the REAL bonding takes place when the initial rush has passed. This shift in energy can trigger all sorts of insecurities and send us into a self fulfilling prophecy. We find ourselves at a fork in the road. Do we pick a path and walk it together or do we go our separate ways?

The key to passing this stage with your relationship intact is to relax, trust, communicate. NOT to react to the change in pace by comparing it to what your ex did when he was cheating. THAT is the start of a self fulfilling prophecy.

A male friend of mine once complained that his girlfriend was using his fat to fry someone else’s bacon. What he meant by this was that she had been betrayed in the past, someone had hurt her badly, cheated, lied and eventually left her for another woman. She then carried all that pain and doubt into her relationship with him. When they reached that fork in the road, when day to day life meant that he didn’t call her quite as often, didn’t see her as frequently, she assumed that this was history repeating itself and he was obviously cheating – because the last time a guy stopped calling so often that is exactly what was going on.

She then set about calling him non stop, checking up on him, doubting everything he told her, accusing him of cheating. So there they were, at this crucial stage in the relationship, where it was time to decide which path to take, and she appeared to turn into a totally different person to the one he had been having so much fun with. He then pulled away FURTHER because he had no idea how to handle this situation. HE was not doing anything wrong!

This is often the stage where I get a call from the lady in this scenario asking me why he changed and if he is indeed cheating on her – but thats a subject for another article!

The bottom line here is that she FEARED losing him. She REACTED to what she PERCEIVED as him losing interest, because she was comparing his actions to those of someone in her past. This resulted in HER behaviour towards him changing. She went from being a happy, carefree, loving, fun companion, to being an insecure, needy, jealous, STALKER. This is the very behaviour that will have any emotionally healthy person heading for the hills.

If someone is going to cheat then they are going to cheat. You cannot control what they do, the choices they make, the people they see. If you really think that this person is going to abandon you, cheat on you, betray you in some way, then the only sensible option open to you is to detach. Insecurity is poison to relationships. If you feel insecure and project that on to your partner you are running the risk of creating a self fulfilling prophecy. You are behaving this way because you fear they will leave you and this behaviour will ultimately result in just that.