157: Why You Keep Attracting Men Who Will Never Commit To You

(soft music) Jessica, hi, you need this video, because in today's episode, I wanna talk about the thought that lives in the back of a lot of women's minds, and you are one of them. One that you don't wanna admit to yourself, you don't wanna even admit it to your friends, okay? It is the idea that if you keep ending up in the same kind of relationship that something is wrong with you, yeah? Because you keep selecting the same type of person. You think that you're broken, that you didn't choose correctly, and that you have bad taste in men, and the past is just following you around, like a bad smell, I get it, I've been there. And I wanna tell you right now, before you get really amped up about it, that none of that is true, which is exactly why I'm making this episode today for you, to show you that what is actually driving your relationship patterns and the guys you choose, why the healthy option feels wrong when you make it, and what it actually takes to break the cycle so you can finally experience a love that is healthy. And I know that sounds weird, but stay with me. Also, for the women who are done sitting with this pattern and are ready to finally break it for good, I have officially opened the doors to unbothered women. My transformational five week program, the link is in the description, as always, but I'll tell you more about it at the end because that is not what you're here for right now. Let's get into the actual reason why you keep choosing the same type of guy. And a clue is, it's not your taste, it's the template that you've set up. So, okay, I wanna start with a question that I think a lot of you are thinking, and you're thinking, why do I keep attracting the wrong type of man into my life? Because notice what the question actually does when you ask it, it puts you in the position of the one doing their attracting, of the one doing something wrong, the one like with the bad radar and the one who's not doing it right. And today I wanna flip that for you 'cause the real question is not what are you attracting, it is what are you recognizing? You see what I'm saying? What you're recognizing in that person. And here's what I mean, every single one of us grows up with a relationship template, a blueprint of what we think a relationship feels like. Like a deeply embedded picture of what love, connection, intimacy, and all of that good stuff looks like and feels like. And this template was not built from what you were told, yeah? Not from what you read, not from the conversations your mum had, not from Disney and all that stuff. This is a template of what you believe a relationship is supposed to feel like. It was built from what you actually lived, what you watched with your eyeballs, what your nervous system had to learn to navigate as a wee child, the dynamic between who, your parents Jessica, whether love in your house felt safe or unpredictable, whether affection was freely given out or had to be earned or whether you had to spend a lot of your childhood reading the room like I know I had to because I was raised by a single mother, for example, and my dad wasn't around. Because here is what happens when you grow up in their environment where love is maybe inconsistent, where you can run hot and cold and you never know where you stand or somebody can be a little bit unhinged. Your nervous system files that as a warning, right? It files it away as a definition of intimacy that that is how you get to intimacy, not because it's healthy or good or because it feels good but because it was what you knew and what we know actually feels like our model of love even though it is not. So when you walk into a dynamic as an adult, right? You met someone say Jerry and that mirror is that template that you've got to walk on axials around him too because his attention comes and goes or he isn't sure about you in the relationship or whatever or there's just, you can't breathe around him because you have to be careful. You go, wow, this actually feels familiar. Something in you recognizes it. It feels like home. So for me, it was the fact that my mom was busy and my dad wasn't around. So if I met someone super busy not around, hey, Presto, it doesn't feel like peaceful or lovely but it feels like if I can win this person's attention, then I can win and I see you in this and some of you already bracing and you're thinking, oh my god, how am I going to fix my daddy issues? I don't know how to fix all of those and it's not about that. This is a conditioning conversation. Full stop. You can change how you see the blueprint, the nervous system, it doesn't judge you and I'm not judging you, is just how you gravitate and how it's like a navigational system and it's like an up and down dynamic, a push and pull with the guy who keeps you slightly off-center and you recognize your childhood and that and you're there trying to replay your childhood. You register as a familiar, you register it as something you know and you register it as something that you think you can change now in this current new relationship. Even as your counseling plans to wait for a call that may or may not come with this guy, even as you're like changing yourself, changing what you do, changing your likes and interests, lying awake at 2am, over analyzing text messages, looking up every ancient piece of artifact and scripture that's ever been written in order to try and understand them. And I think that's the most painful part for a lot of people. That's the part that keeps a lot of women's stock for longer outside of anything else is that none of this feels a capatten from the inside. It feels like a genuinely attracted to someone. It actually feels like chemistry and it feels intense to be able to recognize that pattern and you think that it's attractive and it works for you because based on everything your nervous system learned, this is it. You're like, wow, I found it. So when people just say, choose better or like have higher standards or yes, queen, whatever, go off, ignore him, they don't understand the entire point of attraction and the blueprint of your nervous system. You cannot choose just to change your template within that second and find something attractive that isn't naturally attractive. You were never really choosing freely to begin with. Where are you Jessica? You were choosing from a blueprint. You did not write that you got logged into your head like a microchip when you were a kid. And that's let it land, changes everything about how you understand your own history and you have to understand everything that you came from because it's not just about why you keep choosing the dynamic. Yeah, it's not just about that. It's about why the man who is actually good for you feels like a bit wrong, like a bit boring, like a bit stale. And that's what I hear a lot. Should I be with him despite it being really boring? And that's the part a lot of people don't voice honestly, but you voice it to me on my DMs. And I think the reason so many women end up in the same place over and over again, despite knowing better, hence the title of this video, is when your template is built around inconsistency and hot and cold, anything that's consistent and actually nice reads as flatness. And like something is a bit off, like there's no chemistry. So when he texts back or plans dates or says he's going to be somewhere and actually shows up and he's like a normal person, yeah, you're like, oh, I don't feel it. He does not produce the same response in your body, in your nervous system as that push and pull dynamic. You're like, wow, I don't feel the abusive nature that I had in my childhood. There is no spike. There is no like rush of relief. There's no low grade anxiety humming in the background, keeping you hooked is there, babe. And that is a problem. And because your nervous system has spent years learning how to associate that spike of attraction with whatever level of absence or whatever it is that you felt as a child with one of your parents. You know who it is. I don't know, but you know, when you go on a date with a person who you say you want, when he's kind and present and all those things, you come home and you think, right, okay, so he's lovely, but I'm just not feeling the spark. What you're not feeling is not the spark. You're not feeling the anxiety. And three days later, you're back texting someone who responds and he feels like it and he keeps you guessing and then he's just not around and he's just completely ridiculous. And all your friends tell you him to leave. But you are like, ooh, I feel that spark again. You feel that energy, but what you're feeling is just your nervous system recognizing a pattern. That's not a spark. That's anxiety. That's quarters or your literary feeling quarters or you know you can feel it. And you're nervous system that low grade threat like there's a tiger coming, but it's kind of not coming. And it's there and the familiarity is what you like. You like to know that there it is, it's familiar and I can change the pattern. Let me say that again, because I think it's the one of the most important things I will say to you today that will change a lot of how you feel. The feeling you've been chasing your whole life is not love and chemistry. It's the familiar feeling of anxiety you had as a child and labeled as attraction. Yeah? That is the thing. That is why you cannot just decide you want someone different and stable because you're not choosing with your logical mind. That's not how we choose. You're choosing with your nervous system in your body and your nervous system has been running a program since the dinosaurs were around and you don't know how to change it. So that's what we're here to do today. And I think we can. I want to talk about the slow burn as well, because I think the slow burn is the most underrated concept in all of modern dating and nobody gives it enough credit. Healthy attraction between two people, two emotionally available people that don't run away, does not arrive immediately like this overwhelming spiky intensity. It does not feel like fireworks. Yeah, you might be attracted to them physically, but it's not that kind of stomach-dropping, obsessive cyclical limmerance that you think is attraction. It can start as being comfortable around someone's ease, like having the same sense of humour, being able to be yourself, the feeling of coming away from them and feeling not drained but replenished. And I know you have it with friendships, too. That is what a love can actually develop into and feel like. Not this spiky, grabby, attention-seeking love, yeah. But if you've never felt that, and I'm trying to describe it to you, you will not even recognise it as love. You will recognise it as maybe friendship or a bit boring, a bit bland. And there is another thing that I want to name as well when we're talking about it, because I think it's a real common that anyone admits it, that in that some women find steady love a bit underwhelming, because it's not what's described in, I don't know, romance, non-volts films or whatever it is you guys watch. If you grew up somewhere that warmth had to be earned, we're being too much, of course, people to pull away and being yourself an authentic and love felt conditional, receiving it openly and warmly without conditions can feel genuinely odd and destabilising. It feels like suspicious, like, 'why is this person so normal and nice to me?' Like, the shoe is about to drop and it can actually push you away from a dynamic, so you jeopardise it, right? You create distance, you become the avoidant, you find reasons, it won't work, you self-sabotage, you do all of these things, right? Not because you do not want to have a loving relationship. You want it, right? But because your nervous system does not yet know how to receive it, so you keep going for that guy who reminds you again, of the pattern that you used to have. So here is what the cycle actually looks like from the inside. She tries. She generally tries to choose differently. That's Eugenica. She goes on the date. She gives it a chance. She tells herself that this time, I'm going to do it differently and I'm going to look for other things. But the whole time, her body's sending her quite signals of like, something's off, this doesn't feel right. He looked weird. He's got a velcro wallet, which I know people have issues with online. And those signals are all not some intuition that he's not a good person. They're not your gut feeling telling you that something is wrong. They're just your nervous system going, oh, I'm not used to this. So a little bit unfamiliar. I don't feel safe around here. It's a bit odd because safety isn't safety. It's actually like familiarity. So because she, that's you, has spent her whole time learning to trust feelings. She listens to them because to listen to your feelings, girl. She walks away from the man. She goes back and she chooses the same thing that has worked for her. And the next morning she wakes up and thinks, see, there is just never anyone out there where all the men, this always happens. There are no good men, Margarita. I can't find them. But the truth is, she left before she could even find out. She didn't give it a chance. She's not self-sabotaging because she does not want good things. We all want good things. She's self-sabotaging because her internal compass has been set to find bullshit. Yeah. And until that compass is actually recalibrated, not managed, not like white knuckled and forced yourself to go out with someone, you don't actually find attractive. You will keep following the bullshit compass. No matter how many podcasts you listen to, thanks for listening, but no matter what, right? It is what it is now that you understand why the pattern keeps repeating and why the healthy option keeps feeling so foreign and a little bit yucky. If you want my actual help in breaking the cycle in a WhatsApp group, not just understanding it, but doing the work to change it together. The link, my friend, for unbothered women is below. If you're listening to this, I'll put it in the description box as well. It's five weeks ago, all the way into the nervous system, the link is in the description, like I said. But let's keep going. I hope to see you in there because we start now in March. Now, you know where the pattern comes from. We've talked about it to a blue in the face. You understand the template. Cool. You understand why the wrong one feels right and the why the right one feels wrong. And you all just can be populated. We get it. And now, what some of your thinking is like, okay, I get it, Margarita. So now, now I know, now I know I'm just screwed. So what? And I'm going to be honest with you because that would be the easy answer just to say you deserve the real thing and just go for the real thing. And here's your little backpack off. You go into the forest with no hat. Knowing does not fix it though. Does it? Because we know a lot of things. I will say that again because I think it's the most important and most frustrating thing I can tell you. You invest the time watching this video, but knowing does not fix it. That's why we're living in the time of information and information. It does not fix it. You can understand your attachment cycle perfectly. You can explain your own patterns to a therapist, to your friends, to your mom, to your cat, to your dog. You can know exactly what you're doing and why and still do it. So understanding it does not mean changing it. Template is not stored in the part of the brain that processes information. It is stored in the part of the brain that runs automatically like a lizard brain. The part that acts before you have time to think is just doing it. And changing it requires more than knowledge and insight. It requires repetition. Regulation and building an entire new reference point of what safety actually feels like. Hence why affirmations feel stupid, but they work. Think of it like this. If you have eaten the same food your whole life and someone puts something completely different on the plate, I have a toddler I know. Your first reaction is not going to be delight at this new thing. It's going to be weariness, maybe even rejection like what is that? Not because the new food is bad, right? But because your palate was built on something else completely different and this food is foreign to you. So you're like, I don't want to try it. But if you keep showing up and keep giving it a genuine chance, keep exposing yourself to a new environment, it's going to start to feel what Jessica, that's right, safe. Eventually the palate adjusts. Eventually what was unfamiliar starts to feel familiar and sometimes something that you couldn't even imagine wanting or craving, like that foreign food becomes something you love. That is what recalibrating a template feels like, like anything in life, right? And I want to be very clear about what it is not because I think a lot of well-meaning advice gets this wrong. It is not about learning to tolerate healthy options, right? Like, yeah, it's so healthy. It's not about like gritting your teeth and white knuckling your way through the guy you don't find attractive and through healthy food. You have to change your actual identity and how you perceive yourself, like the girl who actually likes healthy food or likes men that are good for her. You want your nervousness and genuinely want calm consistency instead, you love. And that's not going to feel right straight away. It's going to feel right after you expose yourself and give it a chance. And that only happens through identity level work. Not information, identity level shifts through rebuilding your relationship with yourself at the root. And so what you are naturally drawn to changes much like the menu. And here's what it looks like when you start to actually make the shift. The first sign is not that you suddenly meet the right man. Like tomorrow you watch this and you meet the right man. The first sign is that the wrong ones start to feel different. And I had that happen with my ex like when I changed my calibration, I didn't find him attractive anymore. That dynamic that used to feel like amazing and electric. You look at him and you're like, what is that? Have you seen those memes where you go, wow, what your ex-boyfriend starts to look like after you don't find him attractive anymore? And it's like the rat from Rathaturi. That's literally it. You start to catch yourself less interested in chasing him. And you're like, what even is happening? And more interested in like yourself and your friends and what you want to do. And what is actually worthy of your time. And you start to shift from chasing this random Rathaturi to discerning whether you actually want to or not. And it sounds small, but it is enormous. And when I see a woman make that shift, I know, I know the claws are out of her. And she is free, right? Her man who's consistent then stops feeling so boring. And he starts to feel like something, you know, you're allowed to get to know or maybe have a chat to and all these things. And you literally start to recalibrate at the base. And that feeling at first is so unfamiliar. And you will want to run away from it. You'll be like, why is he like messaging me back? You have to consistently decide to stay to let it be real. And if anything, you might be like, yeah, but I'm not attracted to him. But it's nice to be around people who are nice to you and that all it really changed your life. And over time, I promise you this, it starts to feel normal that people are nice to you. Like the thing you are always looking for, you were looking for just people who are effing normal, you know what I mean? And here they are. And they're treating you normally. That even if he's not the one for you, it's fine. Just let people be around you who are nice. So now you understand what the shift actually requires. And what it starts to feel like when it's happening, that kind of like disinterest in retituary and interest in your life, I want to show you the woman on the other side of this. Because I think you need to see where you're going in order to like, understand it, like to really understand what it's like to be done. the woman on the other side of the blueprint that you've been following around. She still feels a lot of things deeply like you still have emotions, and I want to say that first because detachment often gets reputation of being like a really cold because I know some of you are scared to do the work because you're really attached to being like a lovely feeling person as you should be. Becoming one of those women who is protected that she essentially closes and has no friends because she's so healed, she's like some Buddha on a mountain like is not what we want to be. That's not who I'm trying to lead you to being. I want you to be warm and open and all that good stuff and and I want you to be the person that feels happy in yourself in the moment. It's just someone who has simply learnt the difference between depth and intensity. You want a deep relationship, not an intense one because love and anxiety are different. So you're going to want to be in a relationship that is deep and connected that you can relax around and not one that gives you quarters all face. Have you seen quarters all face? Look it up, you don't want that. And the one you can feel different in your body and then actually, you know, if when you're in a relationship that you can relax in, you can achieve a lot in life. Like you can have goals and ambitions because you're not always focused on a guy. You no longer need to chase him for connection and ask him where he's going and micromanage him and do all his garbage that you've been wasting your time doing with uncertainty. You know how much time you're wasting, how much life you're wasting. I don't see your lifeline down to your elbow, okay? You only have a certain amount of time. And if you have something steady and something amazing and somebody who actually wants you back, you're not going to waste a lot of your time and energy and effort trying to see if you ever wants to get married trying to see if you ever want to have kids trying to see all these things. You actually find something more compelling and exciting and in that boring relationship, you're going to have a life that is so exciting. There is a kind of peace in that that I think is very hard to explain to someone who has not felt it yet. So let me try. It is the piece of not checking your phone every 10 minutes of having a conversation with someone and coming away feeling like yourself and not wondering if you said something wrong. It's like being in a relationship and actually being able to be present in the rest of your life because you're not spending all your energy managing this person. It sounds simple, but it's revolutionary, but I'm telling you. And in the end, you need to realize that there is nothing wrong with you, as I said in the beginning, you are not broken. You don't have some fundamental floor of liking bad boys. Yuck, I don't know what that even means. It's just that you're choosing a blueprint that feels familiar and that you were operating on it and you were doing what you thought was right and you were picking what you thought was right. So now that you understand that, that it's not just a concept but a truth, it's not just an information and there is a shame around it, you can stop seeing the past as evidence of you being any kind of wrong way. You just need to forget it and start a new today, okay? And start seeing it as the very thing that gave you the capacity to be who you are, but you are allowed to change and you're going to change as of today. Because if you do the work and you remove this template, you have the power to actually become a more amazing person than people before that because you have a gift and being a little bit angiously attached, I see you, I know. And that is you can understand people. You have a level of empathy. A lot of people don't understand. But now that you've acquired it through your background, you can choose to be different. One day you're going to look at back at yourself and you're going to wonder how you ever mistook the chaos that you're experiencing as anything, but that. And you will wonder how long you spent waiting for someone to actually choose you or contact you back when the whole work was learning to actually just choose yourself. That's the whole concept. Just choose yourself, give yourself people who want to be around you and who know your worth. Now, before I close this video or podcast, if you're listening, I need you to understand something. You are not here because you are, there's anything wrong with you, as I've said, you're not here because you had bad taste or there is something unhealthy about your choices or this is the car you're dealt. So you have to be with the guy you don't like anymore. You're here because your nervous system learnt something a long time ago about what a relationship feels like. And it's been loyally following that map ever since, even when the map leads you somewhere painful. And that is okay. That means there's nothing wrong with that. A woman on the other side of it is not a different person. She is still you with just an nervous system that finally knows what safety feels like, who can have a life that is different, who can sit across from a guy she genuinely likes and feels it, and she's relaxed in it. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in and listening or watching and lending me your eyes, ears and whatever else time. If you want to join me for unbothered woman, we start on the 20th March. If you're watching this after, we are still probably working through it. So join through the links in bio. And I'm so happy that you are on this journey because you clicked on this video for a reason. Didn't you? And if you've made it here, I am so happy that you're enjoying the good sound and the good views and like that you can actually hear me and all of that stuff. But I'm working on the unhingedness. It's going to come in the next episode. I'll show you Dan if you want to stick around who is behind the camera. behind the camera. (laughs) Love you lots, like Jenny Todd's. Bye.