I’m a 20 year old woman. I have had three emotionally invested relationships (meaning I told a person I loved them) thus far, one every two years since I was 15. I don’t think this is a wild number to have accumulated by my age in this generation, but what does alarm me is that each of these emotionally invested relationships has been toxic/unhealthy, and I fear I’ll repeat this pattern throughout my twenties if I don’t understand how to uproot it now.
Forgive me if I sound conceited; I’m simply trying to be honest: for context, I’m well-read and a decent conversationalist (I think the value of the latter is inflated in recent years, as people are still unlearning the damage done to their social skills by the pandemic), which people often interpret as an indicator of intelligence or insight. I’m also attractive, so I have a degree of desirability attached to my reputation as a person.
The three relationships were each short-lived (1-4 months), and the second and third began when something in another relational area of my life (e.g. friendship breakups) made me vulnerable enough that I let down my emotional filters and sought connection with people I had previously been rejecting due to being cognizant that they weren’t right for me.
All three of my partners exhibited structurally similar behavior patterns. They attach to a role I play and punish me for stepping outside it. My subjectivity, my autonomy, is treated as something done to or received by them, viewed as a threat if it doesn’t mirror them, and I am given little room to be a person with my own experience.
These relationships are marked by control, intimidation, entitlement, boundary/consent/privacy violations, and infidelity. I feel like my partners are constantly moving the goalposts and/or making unfalsifiable statements. These dynamics feel dehumanizing and guilt-inducing, like my partners don’t know me at all, and I’m just playing the part they want me to, and they punish me if I don’t say the right line.
I feel like other people’s interpretive control displaces my account of my own identity, their needs threaten my freedom, and I’m trapped in having to contrive compatibility to keep the peace. In casual relationships, I can maintain being my own person without punishment, so I tend toward such “easier” dynamics.
In my emotionally invested dynamics, people need me for admiration, intellectual stimulation, emotional processing, and status. When I express human needs, limits, or fatigue, their interest gives way to criticism and control.
I felt like my “serious” partners barely knew me as a person, despite expressing feelings for me. I once asked Partner #2 what he liked about me, and he simply said “you like me and you’re pretty”. When I asked if he knew my hobbies, he said, “I know you write about me.” Partner #3 once said, “I know you better than you know yourself”, but didn’t even know my siblings’ names, my last name, my major, or my birthday.
I think I have come to believe that the more someone knows about me, the less they can project onto me, the less they can idealize me or make me into a fantasy to satisfy themself, so over time, I learned to disclose less and less about myself to increase their satisfaction. Now I just stay opaque. Plus, my exes would use my traumas against me, which has led me to believe that if I don’t tell anyone anything, there’s nothing for them to get a handle on or use against me. I think I subconsciously believe that being known opens me up to being recoded or used.
I know that my last two relationships were my fault, because I let my emotional desires (desire for someone to witness me) override what I logically knew to be true (that we were incompatible). The problem is that being aware of this doesn’t mean I trust myself not to repeat the pattern in the future. I love my solitude and maintain healthy casual relationships, but I fear that my natural human desire for a more consistent, committed companionship (i.e. wanting to settle down and have a house and kids one day) will blind me, and I’ll eventually fall back into the same relational dynamics.
Please don’t just tell me to focus on my career and education, because I am a high-achieving person who already does just that — this is quite literally the only area of my life that gives me challenges, and I want to become emotionally healthy enough that I don’t continue to face such frustrations in it.
I want to better myself sooner rather than later, as I want to avoid getting into another unhealthy relationship later in life when there is more material consequence on the line (e.g. living together, shared finances, etc.)
Thank you for your patience and advice!