Six Signs You’re in Dating Aftershock

If you still feel traumatised long after a relationship is over and can’t stop thinking about the hurt, it could be a case of dating aftershock.

Six Signs that Dating Aftershock is Heading Your Way

1. You want to give up dating because it’s too much hassle
2. You’re always waiting for rejection
3. You constantly refer back to how other dates have treated you
4. Apparent lack of communication from your date sends you into freefall
5. You frequently jump to negative conclusions before hearing your date’s explanation
6. You’re beginning to think men/women are all the same

Unable to Move On

It’s never easy to accept that after a promising few dates, the object of your desire decides they don’t want to take things any further. Some of us accept it and move on, but there are others who find such rejection really hard to take, especially if they invested a lot of emotional energy in that other person.

How to Kill a Relationship

Tina is really into her new boyfriend Karl, and texts him several times a day, often messaging him even after they have just spent time together. Her friends joke she’s physically attached to her mobile phone; if she doesn’t get pretty much instant responses to her texts to him, she literally goes up the wall with anxiety.

After last weekend together, come the Sunday evening when they go their separate ways, she still wants to send him pictures and jokes. When Karl doesn’t reply straightaway, her texts get more and more stressy, until she’s convinced herself he’s in the process of breaking up with her. He is forced to make contact just to keep the peace.

Although he puts up with Tina’s constant need to message for a few weeks, Karl realises he just can’t take this pressure long term and finishes it. Tina is devastated because as far as she was concerned the relationship was the best thing she had ever had.

For Tina, this situation is a repeat of many of her other dating experiences, where the guy would be full on for a while then back off as things start to get more serious. She finds herself getting cynical and bitter about men in general and wonders if she will ever meet a genuinely nice guy. Men on the other hand complain Tina is too high maintenance and too full on.

Have Men Moved On?

Old fashioned as it is, men still like to be the chasers and initiators in a new relationship and if a woman is forever in touch first, he never gets the chance to check out his own feelings and desires, because she is so determined to be the one directing the relationship. Yet for women like Tina it is so hard, when you have been hurt in the past by mean behaviour, to relax, drop the need for control, and let things take their course.

How to Avoid Dating Aftershock

It’s much easier to act on emotions and let our feelings drive how we behave, rather than taking a deep breath and rationalising situations before speaking out or behaving in a way that damages both the relationship and ultimately ourselves.

Always looking for things to go wrong in a relationship will cause it to snap anyway and leave us feeling bruised and battered by a situation that in reality we have caused – or at least contributed to – ourselves.