Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between dating anxiety and your needs not being met. If you know your insecurity can lead your thoughts down irrational pathways, how can you figure out if something you’re stressing about is a real concern?
Instead of feeling insecure and waiting for someone to come to you and meet your unspoken needs, watch this week’s video and break free from the self-doubt and anxiety cycle.
Unlock the 67 Counterintuitive Text Messages That Create
Real Momentum in Your Love Life . . .
TAP HERE
Matthew:
A confident mindset has us asking the question, “Is this enough for me?” Not simply, “Do I need to work on myself because this affects me?” “Is this enough for me?”
Someone recently asked me a question. She said, “In the early stages of dating when you’re exclusive with someone, if someone doesn’t text me for a couple of days, should I be okay with that?” What she said was, “I read somewhere that if someone doesn’t text you for a couple of days and you have a problem with it, then you need to do some inner work. You need to work on your anxiety.” Have you ever been in a situation like this where maybe you’re in one right now, someone’s not texting you as much as you would like? Maybe there’s been a period of time where you haven’t heard from them, and you find yourself asking, “Is my anxiety the problem here? Am I asking too much? Am I just acting out of my own trauma, my own fears? Do I need to do work on myself so that this doesn’t affect me? Or is it legitimate that this is affecting me?”
I want to make a key distinction here that I made to her. There is a big difference between anxiety and needs. Anxiety is when our thoughts go in all sorts of sometimes irrational and mutated directions. Someone doesn’t text us for a couple of hours and all of a sudden we think they’re cheating. We message someone and they don’t text back within five minutes and we go, “They don’t love me as much as I love them.” We go in all of these directions that may not necessarily be true, may have no basis in reality, but that’s what anxiety does. It makes things that are often improbable or irrational, seem like they’re vivid and real. Anxiety has to be separated from our core needs. Our needs in a relationship are what’s the base level of affection or communication or love that I need and need to feel in order to be happy.
So from that point of view, instead of asking yourself, do I need to work on myself because I want texts more frequently than every 48 hours, ask yourself, what do I actually need from my intimate relationship? Would I like someone who texts me every day? And of course, there are limits, and that’s where we have to explore where is anxiety playing a part? Because if I’m expecting someone to text me every five minutes, then my anxiety is probably playing a massive part here. But in the average relationship, connecting each day is not abnormal. And if you speak to many people in healthy relationships, they will tell you that’s not abnormal. Now, are there some healthy relationships where people go longer periods of time without speaking? Of course, there are, but this is where you have to ask the question when it comes to your needs, what’s right for me? Self-awareness, know thyself, what’s right for me?
I know that for me, my partner, not texting for 48 hours wouldn’t be enough. I know that I like more communication than that. So for me, that would not be right. But I don’t think of that through the lens of anxiety. I think of it through the lens of how connected I want to be to someone. So I want us to start to make that distinction: anxiety and needs. And when it comes to our needs in life, we all have to make decisions about where to put our time and energy. In a relationship, we’re going to put a lot of time and energy into one person, and that one person is going to be responsible, perhaps solely for meeting our needs for that romantic intimacy. We’re not going to get them from anywhere else because that would be a betrayal, at least within the context of a monogamous relationship. This one relationship needs to meet those needs. Otherwise, why are we going to put so much energy and time into it? The stakes are pretty high.
A confident mindset has us asking the question, “Is this enough for me?” Not simply, “Do I need to work on myself because this affects me?” “Is this enough for me?” See, if we’re in a place of anxiety and someone doesn’t text us for two days, our thoughts go to, “I’m not enough.” But if we’re coming from a confident place and someone doesn’t text us for two days, we say, “Oh, this person might not be my person. This person might not be right for me because they have such a radically different style of communication to me. It doesn’t make them wrong, but it might make them wrong for me.”
And by the way, confidence goes one step further than asking the question, are they enough for me? Is their behavior what I need in my life? Confidence is creating the culture where that’s possible. Insecurity goes into every relationship, following the lead of somebody else. Confidence goes into every relationship attempting to create the culture that you actually want. So if you’re coming from a confident place, you don’t sit there for 48 hours waiting for someone to text you and then being anxious that they didn’t. Confidence is, I’m going to reach out to you because I want to teach that culture that that’s what I want in this relationship. And if I find that it’s always me who’s leading, then sooner or later, I’m going to get out. But right now, I’m going to be bold and create the culture that I want. And if we’re confidently reaching out to someone, we of course want to do it in a way that gives value.
Anxious communication is: “I’m going to reach out to you to try to get value from you. I’m going to reach out to you to get approval, to get validation, to get reassurance, to feel whole again.” Confident communication is: “I’m going to reach out to you to create value.”
Now, I know when you’re coming from an anxious place, it can be very hard to create that value. And for many of us who have never learned what that actually looks like, we’ve got no model, no examples for doing it. I put together 67 different ways that you can reach out to someone that create value, that don’t come from an anxious place, but a confident place, that creates the culture of communication that you want to have. It’s called the Momentum Texts, and it’s only $7, but it gives you the 67 messages that create value and create momentum and the culture that you want to have in your relationship. It practically shows you how to do what I’m talking about here in this video.
But no matter what, don’t just ask the question, “Am I being too much? Or do I need to work on myself?” “Do I need to work on myself?” is a valuable question. But there’s another valuable question to be asking. “Is this person right for me?” Because one way to be miserable and anxious your whole life is to stay with someone who can’t actually give you what you need. And it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them having a style that is not compatible with yours. So go check out the Momentum Texts when you get a chance, momentumtexts.com is the link. I will see you over there and thank you as always for watching the video.
