Why is my anxiety about dating worse than dating itself?

I swear I'm not usually like this.

Dear friend,

I try not to hang out on single girl TikTok. In fact, I avoid TikTok at all costs. I don’t even have an account. But the internet being what it is, single girl TikTok has found me. And there’s this one trend I’ve been seeing lately that I need to talk about. It’s called “Guys right before they ghost you.” Here’s an example:

In these videos, a guy with a sweet smile and fuckboy energy gazes lovingly at the camera. He says things like “My parents are going to love you,” and “I wonder what our kids will look like.” The idea is that no matter how far you get with a guy or where you think a relationship is headed, there’s always a chance that he will just stop texting you back. #relatable amirite?

These videos both fascinate and terrify me.

One of the things about dating that I’ve struggled with the most is the feeling that I’m never on totally solid ground. I could connect with a guy who checks all my boxes and yet there will always been a sneaking suspicion that something must be up. What if he asks me out and then the day of, after I’ve already shaved my legs and gone to the office in a perfect weeknight date outfit, he messages to say, “Actually I’m just getting out of something and I don’t think I’m ready to date yet”? What if he doesn’t cancel the date but then when I arrive, I find out he’s invited a friend and this is actually just a weird non-sexual hang sesh now? What if we go on a couple of dates and he tells me he really likes me a lot, but also that he’s already dating someone else?

To be fair, these worries are legitimate because all of these things have happened to me before. But those kinds of experiences—the ones that make people say “Girl, this could only happen to you”—have left me in a constant state of high-alert. Even when I meet someone and things seem alright, I always feel like I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I tell myself this is irrational. That there’s no cosmic pattern to my dating misfortune and that this is all in my head. But then single girl TikTok hunts me down in my own home and tells me that these demonic thoughts I have are real. That even if I were to meet a great guy and date him for long enough that he starts saying shit like “we should move in together” he could STILL ghost me. Is this really a common experience? What are y’all playing at?!

Can I ever feel safe in a relationship or do I have to spend my whole life sleeping with one eye open, knowing that even if I meet the love of my life and buy the house and get married, there may come a day when I find out he has a second family?

I have brought these fears up to my therapist. She asked me how these thoughts make me feel and I replied, “Anxious.” And then she followed up with some therapist thing like “And what does that anxiety feel like?” And I said “I don’t know, bad? I don’t think I’m used to feeling anxious.”

Despite whatever you may be thinking right now, it’s true—I am not an anxious person. I may have a lot of reasons to need therapy, but anxiety isn’t one of them. I have only had one panic attack in my life and it was because I had to do calculus homework once. However, dating makes me feel extremely anxious. In fact, it might be the only thing that makes me anxious.

A few months ago, I was talking to a friend about this phenomenon over drinks. She told me that she had recently read a self-help book about attachment theory and it sounded like I was a textbook example of anxious attachment style. Later that week, she gave me the book to read for myself so that I could learn how to feel more secure in my romantic attachments.

Let me tell you: reading this book was a mistake.

I started reading about the three attachment styles and then took a cute little quiz that asked me to agree or disagree with statements like “I believe most people are essentially honest and dependable” (LOL SURE, JAN) and “I think about my relationships a lot” (who doesn’t?) I tallied my responses and found out that according to this book, I am the anxiously-attached problem child my friend said I was. I quickly flipped through the next few chapters, trying to speed-read what this meant, why my dating brain was broken, and how I was going to fix it.

But before I got far, I had an absolute meltdown. What did it mean to be anxiously attached? Is this the reason why my previous relationships didn’t work out? Am I scaring away dates by being too clingy? Does my anxiety make me less lovable? Am I doomed to never have a secure relationship?

I spiraled for a solid week before my next therapy session. As soon as my therapist logged on, I blurted out that I had read a book about attachment styles and that I needed to unpack this horrible new diagnosis. She sighed deeply and then just said, “Which book?” I told her the title. Of course she knew the book. She probably knows all of these books. And I’m 100% certain that I was not the first of her patients who had an anxiety attack because a book told them they might be anxious.

Here’s where we landed after that conversation. As I previously, suspected, I am *not* an anxious person. I have *not* been cursed to spend my life fighting the demons in my brain that tell me no one will ever like me as much as I like them. What I am is a person who is dating and dating is an anxious situation, not a personality type.

I would argue that dating, especially dating well, is a process that requires intense vulnerability. You have to meet new people and try to open yourself up to someone you don’t really know. You have to be soft, curious, and brave. As Carly Rae Jepsen, the patron saint of this blog advises, you have to surrender your heart. Building intimacy means putting yourself in someone else’s hands without knowing if they can hold you with care. Dating is risky and anxiety is the body’s natural response to any kind of risk.

But let’s go back to single girl TikTok for a moment. Because it is my belief that society has taken a very human response to a very normal phenomenon and used it for evil. Social media is insisting that dating can never be anything but a crazy-making experience because toxicity is the norm. We’ve gotten so deep into the upside-down that straight men are now making videos about how chaotic dating straight men can be. Straight men who I am NOT dating are infiltrating MY algorithm to tell me that dating straight men is an exercise in futility. And I’m just supposed to reshare this content and say, “LOL SAME” and continue on with my life without having a mental breakdown? Excuse me?

And here’s the plot twist. If I think too much about the endless shenanigans that straight men are apparently capable of pulling, I create a sure-fire way to sabotage any date. Giving voice to the demons in my brain can sink an early romance faster than a guy can say, “This has been really great, but I’m actually moving to Australia tomorrow.” No one wants to date someone whose entire personality is Prophet of the Apocalypse.

So what’s a girl to do?

Well, I’m trying a few things. Instead of letting my anxious thoughts roam around freely (or god forbid voicing them to the person who is the subject of such thoughts) I’ve started having conversations with them. If I have a chaotic thought like, “What if that guy you’re talking to just is leading you on?” I say things like “Is that realistic?” or “If that were to happen, then what?” or “Do I have any actual evidence here?” And usually my rational brain can beat that tiny demon voice into submission.

I’ve also started framing anxiety as simply my brain’s way of asking for more information. If I start spiraling because someone isn’t texting me back, I take a beat to ask what my brain is actually trying to say, which in this case is “I don’t know enough about this person’s communication style.” And then I try to think about what I do know. Are they busy at work? Do they spend less time on their phone than I do? Was my last text actually urgent? And if the answers to those questions aren’t satisfactory, I start thinking about tactful ways I might bring it up to this person the next time I see them.

Finally, I’ve started taking stock of the ways in which a lot of what I *think* I know about dating is just random shit I’ve picked up from friends, family, or strangers on the internet. Most dating “advice” that’s out there is not specific to me, my current dating goals, or the person I’m trying to date. A lot of it is just stories of other people’s trauma. It feels really important to figure out which of my fears are actually warranted because they're based on my previous experiences and which are crazy thoughts I never had until someone on TikTok told me I should have them.

I’m not pretending that no man can ever hurt me, but I am trying to suspend my disbelief long enough to see if an alternative scenario could even be possible.

And I’ve stopped reading that goddamned self-help book.

Sincerely,
Still Single 💖

PS: The friend who lent me the book has no remorse.)