Smelling desperate on July 13, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

What do you do when you have been single for a long time (seven years), steadily dating the entire time, yet are begining to think that you have “REBOUND” tattooed on your forehead!!

That’s exactly how I feel. I can’t seem to attract anyone that’s semi-secure in who they are!! Just a bunch of boys looking for a mother to give them encouragement and pep-talks!!! I don’t think that I have the “stench of desperation,” as one of my friends once put it, but you can only say “it must be everyone else” so many times before you start to ask yourself “IS IT REALLY?”..

So I guess what I want to know is, How is it that now that everything else in my life is going so well and I now have the time and energy to invest into finding that someone special, that it seems I can only find guys that are messed up from previous relationships and seem to want ME to pay for their last girlfriends’ mistakes??

Help!! I refuse to think that its hopeless, but after probably eight guys in seven months (only two were sexual) I’m begining to wonder — ??

Please hurry!!

— Single and Not Willing to Give Up Hope

Dear Single,

We all think we’re really special and unique. Or, other side of the same coin, we all think we inhabit a private hell that no one else could imagine or understand. At least ’til we show up here at breakupgirl.net. Then we think: “Wait, you mean I’m not the only one who’s really sad after a breakup!? Thanks, Breakup Girl!”

Where am I going with this? Well, it’s kind of like what I told our buddy Corwin not long ago. I have a funny little hunch that you’re pathologizing, “It’s all about me”-izing, a phenomenon that may actually be universal. In other words — within reason, of course — who doesn’t look to relationship R to somehow “fix” relationship R-1?

So in your situation, it is “everyone else” — as in, eeeeeeeeveryone else — and it is also you. Sorta like that hearing the tree fall in the woods thing: maybe there’s no pattern unless someone sees one. I mean, sure, if you come across, personality-wise, as someone sturdy and supportive — which I think you probably do — then yes, guys who need a little rah-rah now and then will be attracted to you. But. If you’re already so convinced that this is a pattern, then here’s what happens: the first time some one new says, “I need you…” you think, “Here we go again!” Even if he was actually saying, ” … to not act like my mom.”

So keep looking. At yourself in the mirror, also. You might see that what it says on your forehead is actually, “I’M OKAY, YOU’RE NOT AS OKAY AS ME.” You might want to get that removed.

Love,
Breakup Girl