“How do I know if I’m ready to date? I don’t want to get hurt.”
If you are stepping into the dating arena in 2023 as a person in recovery, I want to go ahead and hit you with the news that you getting hurt is a guarantee.
Someone will disappoint you, piss you off, or trigger some age-old insecurities about yourself you may have thought you got over. This truth isn’t limited to the idiots you may encounter. Even people with the best intentions for you who may be a good fit for you will, at a certain point, cause an emotional disturbance for you.
So, if you want companionship, step one is to accept that there will be pain in seeking it.
When I dated in early recovery, I made two mistakes.
- I falsely believed the person I was with would never hurt me.
- I was too early on in this recovery work and too unsteady to handle the pain that eventually did come. So when my heart broke, my attempts at sobriety shattered right along with it, leaving me to do a hell of a ton of picking up the pieces.
So, if you want to ask yourself if you’re ready to jump into the dating arena and look for companionship, first, you must accept that there WILL be times when connecting with others romantically will challenge you. Dating can be fun, AND you will still get your feelings hurt. If you have decided you want a partner, you have to be ready to take the risks that come with it.
Hurt, sadness, disappointment, and anger are all part of the human experience. Welcome to your human life.
So, what happens when you take the risk and get ghosted, or someone tells you they had a drunk mom and aren’t looking for someone with a prior complicated past with alcohol?
You might question everything about you, including your sobriety. The inner critic inside your head might say, No one is EVER going to want to be with you now that you’re sober. If you haven’t built a strong foundation for yourself or adopted tools to help you through hard moments like these, you may start to believe that inner critic to the point you drink to quiet the voice. To drown it out.
After the heartbreak after the loss of my prior partner, I committed to not dating seriously until I could trust myself to handle pain and not drink over it.
Once I started looking for a partner, however, I suited up and showed up, knowing that disappointment wouldn’t kill me, neither could rejection nor mixed messages. Would these feelings hurt? Hell yea. But they couldn’t harm me. I was safe.
I am safe.
Do I know that my current partner will never break my heart? No. I have no guarantee of that. What I do know, however, is that anything could happen with him, and I don’t have to drink over it.
My work on myself, the tools I utilize to cope, and the people in my circle have given me a safe place to land. So, if I ever were to hit a place of emotional devastation, drinking doesn’t have to be my way to handle it.
In closing, if you’re thinking about dating, ask yourself these questions:
- Am I ready to feel the discomfort of a range of challenging emotions because people are not perfect and dating requires me to meet new imperfect people?
- Am I equipped to handle the range of challenging emotions that may accompany this journey without drinking?
If your answer is yes, happy dating AND you should check out life coaching with me so I can work you to navigate that lovely journey I’m all too familiar with. You can schedule a free coaching consultation here!
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