Don’t Text Your Ex Happy Birthday

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

This whole book is about being honest with yourself. Despite the title, this book is not really about trying to understand other people—this book is really about understanding yourself, and understanding your choices. It’s about getting the outcome that you want in the long term, avoiding the outcome you don’t want, and not feeling bad about yourself unnecessarily in the short term. Most of the things I talk about are really just about controlling the things you can control, not giving away the power you do have, and not wasting your mental energy or your time.

Why am I even writing this book? Where am I coming from? I’m always careful to make it very clear that I’m obviously not a trained expert in this type of thing, I am not a therapist or relationship counselor, and I’m not an anthropology professor—I didn’t take classes for this. I’m just some guy giving his point of view, which, luckily for me, a lot of people seem to find helpful and interesting.

Everybody knows my dating history from my thirties: I was on TV, pretty obviously totally invested in dating and finding someone, in finding a serious relationship. Since my stint in front of the camera ended, there’s a series I do on a weekly basis on Instagram where I get questions from my followers. They’re relationship-type questions, and my answers vary from funny one-liners to short explanations. Over the years that evolved into a podcast, where people call in and we talk, and it’s more of a long-form advice situation.

A lot of people might wonder—why is this guy talking about dating? Since I’ve been on dating shows, there’s this perception out there about the type of relationships I’ve been in, or that this dating thing might not ever be a challenging thing for me at all. But I’ve been engaged twice, been horribly ghosted through lots of breakups that felt like the end of the world, been cheated on by a fiancée, moved in with partners, and moved them out. And I’ve felt pain and rejection and confusion, I’ve felt powerless and frustrated, and I’ve also felt love, real love, healthy love. That’s the point of view I’m coming from now—I don’t think a lot of people know that. I relate to heartache—and if you don’t believe me, skip ahead and check out the whole story of my first terrible heartache on this page. I want you to know that I understand, and that I really have been through this stuff too.

A lot of other people might also think, why is this straight, white dude telling me how I should act or think? And I recognize that too—there are plenty of people who might feel that way, and to a certain degree, I can’t help that, but I do want to talk about it.

Obviously, there are always critics on the internet. When you put stuff out there, it’s open for criticism—and that’s okay. One person, you know, they referred to me as a reformed fuckboy, just because of the perception of me on TV. They wrote, “Why is this reformed fuckboy telling women and anyone else what they should do better, or how they should act?” She followed that up with, “Why don’t you talk to men and tell them to act better?”

And, my response to that is: Well, I don’t have access to the person who’s doing you wrong, and I don’t know why they’re doing it. But I do think I can offer you a couple bits of advice and tools to help control your situation—either you can do something differently and improve the situation you choose to be in, or you can remove yourself from the situation. I can try to help you understand your situation a little bit more honestly.

Literally, every time someone calls or writes in, all I’m doing is trying to get a more honest interpretation of their situation—and I’ve said this one line all the time—because no one will lie to you more than you will lie to yourself. We all know the biggest liars we will ever meet are ourselves. We’re in our heads all the time, lying to ourselves constantly, right? We’re rewriting narratives and events because we have egos, and we’re often afraid of the truth, or because we’re invested in one outcome. And that gets us into these situations, or makes us stay in situations that maybe aren’t the best for us. And I’m just trying to give the people asking for my help a very honest point of view.

Many of the questions submitted to me are from women—not exclusively, but that’s the majority of my audience. But honestly, I generally believe that most of my advice is really applicable to anyone regardless of your gender or sexual identity. I do want to address the people who read that last sentence with some skepticism: Whoever you are reading this book, I am sure there are many differences between you and me. I can’t begin to understand all your struggles, but when it comes to love, dating, and heartbreak, I have experienced many of the fears and disappointments. I have worried about ending up alone, I have been insecure about not being enough, and I have wasted a ton of my time and energy on people who didn’t give the same back to me.

In my own life, I ultimately realized that maybe I didn’t deserve what happened to me in the past, but I did give that power to other people. I chose to give it to them. I chose to give them the opportunity to hurt or confuse me over and over. I chose to do all that. And I’ve learned that I need to stop doing that, regardless of what they do, because I can’t control what they do. I can only control what I do. I spent a lot of energy trying to figure out how I could change their minds or change their perspectives and change their actions. And I realized that it’s a losing battle, and one that also made me feel very powerless. Understanding how to be more honest with yourself and feel more powerful in dating is generally the overall theme of what I talk about online, and in my podcast, and in this book.

A lot of what I’ll talk about is very simple in theory, you know—logically, it’s not overly complicated, it’s that emotional piece that so often messes us up. It might be hard to implement this kind of honesty at first, because it’s changing your behavior, and holding yourself accountable to do what you know is best for you—it requires being vulnerable, and opening yourself up to rejection or confrontation. All of those are hard things to do.

Everything I talk about in this book is something that I had to learn the hard way. It took a lot of years and a lot of conversations with myself and my friends—and tears—to figure out what I am sharing with you here. If you’re reading this book, chances are you have some kind of struggle with love, relationships, or dating. My hope is that you find a few things that might help make the challenges of love and heartbreak just a little easier.

What follows are the really big concepts that are important to consider in your dating life and when reading this book, and I talk about them over and over in anything I do. Taken together, they’ll help make dating less stressful for yourself. And remember that none of this should be taken as a strict set of rules, that you must do exactly this to get exactly that. So much of dating depends on your own situation—so use this book as a guide, not a manual. Like I said, it’s all about getting the outcome that you want in the long term, avoiding the outcome you don’t want, and learning to stop feeling bad about yourself unnecessarily in the short term.

THE NINE BIG CONCEPTS IN THIS BOOK

Remember that you’re only looking for one, not many.

I talk to people all the time about dating, and I just hear the frustrations, and those frustrations turn into excuses and reasons to give up, like the belief that there must be something wrong with them, or that all the good ones are taken.

Let’s say you are going to build a house: When you’re eighteen, you have to start building the house that you’re going to live in for the rest of your life. And you can take all the time in the world to build the house. But no matter what, this is your house, and this is the house you have to live in for the rest of your life.

Would you take two weeks to build the house? No, you’d take the time you need to make it the best house, because that’s your house. Now just replace the words “your house” with “your relationship.” And yet, some people want to find love at first sight, and they don’t want to work for it, and they don’t want it to be hard, and they want it to just happen. They want people to just show up with an amazing house that’s pretty and safe and sturdy. But the more time we put into making sure the foundation’s good and the bones are good and the wiring, electricity, and plumbing are good, the safer and prettier and sturdier it’ll be.

Dating can be fun. It can be enjoyable if you have the right mindset. You can have some unexpected adventures while dating that you honestly don’t fully appreciate until you’re not doing it anymore. But, if I’m being honest, it’s a bit of a grind and often it’s more like working out than having fun. At the gym you can get tired and worn out and fatigued, and sometimes you just need to take a breather and rest. Dating can be the same way, because you’re sifting through all the different personalities and people and options that you have, and most of us are trying to find a single person to spend the rest of our lives with, so it can get exhausting. Even those of us who want non-monogamous relationships or even polyamorous ones—we’re still usually looking for one or two people with whom to have that core connection.

When you think about it in those terms, dating should be somewhat of a challenge. You should honestly want to put in the work, take your time, and do it right. Being in a relationship is not the definition of success when it comes to your love life. It’s being in a relationship with the right person for you.

Set your expectations and enforce your boundaries.

In this book I use the terms “expectations” and “boundaries” frequently. Expectations are essentially what you assume you’ll get from the other person and the relationship: Are you exclusive? Do you only have casual sex? Do you anticipate hearing from them at least once a day? Is this a one-time thing and if neither of you ever hear from the other person again, that’s fine? Those definitions can change over the lifespan of a relationship, but ideally, you’d discuss and define them with the person you’re dating or sleeping with. (As I mention in nearly every chapter of this book.)

Boundaries, on the other hand, are the rules you set up for yourself about relationships. Do you not want to be in a sexual relationship with someone who is sleeping with other people? Do you not want to date people who aren’t interested in having a serious relationship? Then those are boundaries—you need to set them with yourself, discuss them with the people you date, and then enforce them. And a lot of times, enforcing the boundary means walking away. If a person you’re dating says, “Well, I don’t do long distance” and you want it to be serious, then you two figure out how to close the distance or you don’t keep dating.

Be honest.

The underlying theme of this book, in every interaction, is about being more honest. About who we are, and what we want. And we have to try to be honest with ourselves first, in part so that we can get more honest answers from other people about their intentions and the things that they want. The more honest we are with ourselves about what we really want, the more likely we will get it, or at least not waste time trying to get what won’t be given. Do we want to just have sex and watch a movie with someone every once in a while? Do we know we want a long-term relationship and probably shouldn’t accept the above?

Being honest with ourselves doesn’t mean we’ll get everything we want—but there will be less disappointment on both sides, less time spent with people you don’t really like, and more likelihood you’ll get what you want eventually. Talk through your expectations and boundaries with the person you’re dating or hooking up with whenever you’re confused or need clarity or wonder if you’re on the same page with the feelings. And also look to people’s actions versus their words as a gauge of whether or not they’re being honest with you when you ask these questions. The goal is just that everyone out there dating be self-aware and accountable. That way, everyone is more honest, so people get hurt less often and enjoy dating more—or at least hate dating less.

Go for grateful over hopeful.

I have realized in recent years that one very helpful way to figure out if any relationship you’re in is healthy or toxic—or just worth the effort—is to reflect on two important feelings: gratitude and hope. Figure out how much hope you have for the relationship compared to how much gratitude you have for what you’re receiving from the relationship. This is a great way to get the answer of whether you should stay, go, or open up the channels of communication to try to get more of what you want and less of what you don’t want.

I began to apply this idea to dating not long ago after my buddy told me to listen to a podcast where a sports writer named Wright Thompson talked about the concept of gratitude—that was the first time I’d heard the idea that gratitude is the only feeling that can’t turn toxic. Because gratitude is feeling thankful for what someone or something has given you when they expected nothing in return—like making you feel loved, or listened to. I thought that was a really interesting idea to apply to dating, and the more I thought about it, the more relevant it seemed to be. The basic concept was this idea that most of these emotions we think of as being totally positive in our relationships with other people all have this counter feeling if things don’t go the way we want. And when that happens, they turn toxic, and they have a toxic opposite. Love’s ugly cousin is hate, enjoyment’s ugly cousin is boredom, and hope’s ugly cousin is disappointment. Happiness—its toxic cousin is sadness. The toxic cousin of joy: sorrow.

In this way of thinking, true gratitude is being grateful for something that was given without any expectation of something in return—which shouldn’t turn into a negative thing. When you’re truly grateful for something, it is usually a positive influence on your life. You’re grateful that someone makes you feel special and loved, that they make you a priority. These are positive, healthy things.

This stuck with me even more because when people are in relationships, they always talk about their hopes—which are things they wish they could change about their partner or behaviors they could fix, many of which rarely come to fruition. I believe that keeping a grateful versus hopeful list in mind is a good way to keep track of what’s important to us in our relationships, and what’s really the best for us in the long run.

Know the difference between emotions and an emotional connection.

When you meet someone for the first time and you’re attracted to them, there’s all kinds of things you like about them. You think they’re funny. You like how tall they are. You like that they’re polite—you know, she opened the door for me. He paid attention to me. He laughed at my jokes, whatever it is. While all of those things are nice, they’re not really an emotional connection.

A real emotional connection can take months or maybe longer, because it begins only when you have built some level of trust, and when you have a level of comfort with how this other person is going to behave around you. A real emotional connection is not wondering how they really feel about you. It’s not wondering if they’re going to call the next day or worrying that you won’t ever hear from them again because you feel like you said something weird. It’s knowing they have learned about some of your weaknesses and you still feel connected and safe with them.

A lot of people might say, “What do you mean there’s no connection? I feel connected.” A lot of people will think, Oh, I have a connection with someone because I’ve been dating them consistently for two months. That’s chemistry, that’s excitement, and I am sure that’s all kinds of emotions, but it’s not yet an emotional connection—and I want to make sure you understand the distinction.

Know the difference between pet peeves and non-negotiables.

The difference between pet peeves and non-negotiables is something I learned about when I talked to a behavioral scientist named Logan Ury on my podcast. Logan also wrote a book about relationships and dating—How to Not Die Alone—and she had a big chapter about non-negotiables and pet peeves. Logan did not create these concepts, but the way she articulated them with respect to each other really shifted my perspective. Ever since that conversation, I’ve been using that language myself to describe the difference between annoying things you should be able to live with in an otherwise good relationship (pet peeves), and the things you wouldn’t want to live with in any relationship at all (non-negotiables), and I bring both terms up often in this book.

Examples of non-negotiables are not speaking to you with disrespect, anger, or violence. Maybe it’s refusing to meet your family, stop sleeping with other people, or move to the city where you live. Some people talk themselves into believing those are annoyances, but they’re actually real reasons to leave a relationship.

Examples of pet peeves are that your partner really hates horror movies and won’t let you watch them when you’re together. That can be annoying. But I always say, “Remember that everyone is annoying.” There isn’t a single person that doesn’t get on someone else’s nerves from time to time. Even greatness can be annoying. Hell, that sometimes feels really fucking annoying. For most of us though, our annoying habits aren’t tied to greatness; they’re just run-of-the-mill everyday stupid shit that we do that gets on other people’s nerves. We all have annoying habits. Maybe we all try to hide them as much as we can, but we are who we are. Those are usually just pet peeves.

Instead of panicking when you come across behaviors you don’t like, you have to figure out what’s really important to you in a relationship. When someone annoys you, is that a non-negotiable or a pet peeve? It’s an exercise in trying to figure out how much of a big deal someone’s undesirable behavior is to you. If you’re thinking, I really like a lot of other things about this person beyond this annoying thing they do, that’s okay. Or maybe you make a list of things you hope to change and things you’re grateful for and you realize that annoying thing is on a long list of things you hope to change, next to a short list of things about the person you’re grateful for.

Take me for example: I leave cupboard doors open. I leave clean laundry piled up. In other words, I’m slightly messy. And I know it’s super irritating to live with someone like that. Most of the time it’s something my girlfriend, Natalie, teases me about, and we laugh, and sometimes it actually gets annoying for her. I hate that I do it, and I try to remember not to do it because I don’t want to be a nuisance to her, but whatever, sometimes I can’t help it. It’s not a non-negotiable for her because there’s a difference between accidentally being messy and not feeling loved or appreciated.

Messy is one thing, but let’s pay more attention to how someone treats you and how they communicate and how they deal with disappointment. That deserves more weight than how good they are at folding laundry.

Get comfortable with being single.

This might sound corny or like a cliché, but maybe the most important thing of all is that you need to be comfortable with being single—maybe even more to the point, you need to be comfortable being alone. And part of that is being confident that “single” is not some bad word, some sort of scarlet letter you need to explain or justify to your friends and family. There’s a challenge there, not just because of your own feelings or insecurities, but because in almost every culture and in our society, you get to a certain age, and your family members will start asking, “Why are you still single?” As if you’re doing something wrong. Facing those expectations can be a challenge—and I know women deal with it even more than men do.

Getting comfortable with being single was not an easy concept for me, not at first.

My twenties, for the most part, consisted of three long and serious monogamous relationships with women I thought I would marry, and I didn’t do a lot of dating in between. When I was single, I felt like I was incomplete, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to have a partner. I had these expectations in my twenties of having a relationship just like my parents—who still love each other, and who met in their early twenties and started having kids right away, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

When my first relationship didn’t work out and I found myself at the age my parents were when they met and married, I made a bad situation worse by thinking less of myself for this perceived failure. I had never been in love before that first relationship. I really didn’t know how to get over her, even though my first relationship was one of those youthful, toxic-type relationships where we broke up and got back together over and over and over. No matter what, it’s kind of scary after your first real breakup—how do you get over your first love? You literally don’t know that you can love someone else when you’re at that stage in your life—you’ve never even felt love before this. So you don’t know if you’ll ever feel that kind of love again.

As a result, I was desperate to find someone, anyone. I can tell you from experience that you’re more prone to jumping into relationships that aren’t healthy when you’re desperate to find someone. When I met a girl who was just so different than my previous girlfriend, that was the part I fell in love with. That’s a common story—we do that a lot, right? I fell in love with the idea of a person, because she was the opposite of someone who had hurt me. It was purely reactionary.

When we started dating, I just ignored that everything I was learning about her was evidence of just how incompatible we really were. I was determined to make it work, because in my mind, I was like, I can’t have this not work—I have to find a person now. We got engaged—and then she cheated on me.

When my first serious relationship ended, I didn’t know if I could get over it. When my second serious girlfriend cheated on me, it was so painful, I couldn’t help but feel like I was somehow inadequate. But after my third serious relationship ended—she was great, but we were just incompatible for the long haul—I finally realized that the breakup wasn’t proof that I was somehow less than. I knew I would get over it. In fact, I was the one who broke it off.

After that, I didn’t get another serious girlfriend for years. I dated a ton, and I met a lot of great women. I was okay with being single. I met more people and I took more risks—I moved to a different city, I invested more in myself and my career. And so the next time I met somebody I sparked with, instead of shying away from potential disappointment, I found myself asking more important questions about who they were and what they wanted in life and a relationship, because I genuinely wanted to find out. I was finally comfortable being myself and taking things slowly.

But what had also happened was that I had a talk with my grandma after the second of my first two big breakups. I was about twenty-eight at that point, and as I said, I thought I would marry each of those girlfriends, so I wasn’t where I thought I would be. I was heartbroken. My friends tried to make me feel better, talk me out of my despair, and my parents were worried. But I remember it was my grandma Phyllis who sat me down and taught me something I’ve never forgotten.

She said to me, “You know what your problem is? You have no perspective. You’re so young, you have so much to learn.” Looking back, that’s obvious, of course! But at that time, I thought to myself, Oh my God, why? Why do I have to learn any more? I didn’t agree with her. But how could I tell my eighty-year-old grandma she didn’t know what she was talking about? So instead, I listened. And then she talked about all the things that happened in her own life at various stages, and how she lived through them, including getting divorced from my grandpa in the 1970s when that was still rare, when she still had five kids to raise as a single mother. So yeah, she had perspective that I didn’t have.

She was the first person who told me that I would grow, learn, live, have other loves, and someday look back and see how what I thought was the end of the world wasn’t even the beginning. That eventually I’d also get some perspective about my heartbreak. The thought that I’d one day look back on that point from a place of happiness never crossed my mind as a young man with a bruised ego—at that age you kind of just think the world revolves around you, and you can’t imagine what it is like to be any older.

Have you ever heard the saying that every day you wake up and it’s the oldest you’ve ever been? Think about that for a minute. When you’re really young, you lack any perspective at all—you don’t have a lot of dating experience to look back on, like you do when you’re thirty or forty-five or even twenty-nine. When you’re a teen, twenty-five seems like a big deal. It’s old. Thinking about what I know now versus what I knew when I was sixteen or seventeen—that’s really hard for a young person to imagine. But as you get older, you develop the self-awareness to say, “You know, one day I’ll be thirty or forty-five or sixty, and there’s a whole lot more I have left to do and see and learn.”

Essentially, my grandma Phyllis taught me that one day I’d meet the right person, and I’d be fine, however long it took. At twenty-five, I was thinking, Well, I don’t want to wait too long to find somebody. I want it now. But she taught me to approach my love life, my romantic life, like I had time, a lot of life left to live. That I had time to be patient for the right person.

And I think that is relatable for a lot of young people. Those first heartbreaks were my first real loves. I even proposed to one of those women. With your early loves, you often talk about your future a lot, you play house a lot. You think, Oh, we love each other. I guess we should talk about questions like: What if we want to get married? Do we want to have kids? Thinking about love, thinking about marriage, talking about weddings, and talking about who we’d invite and what we’d do.

And then, you know, the relationship doesn’t work out. But just as my grandmother told me, I made my peace with that. I finally got to a point where I thought, Wow, I’m thankful it didn’t work out. I went from being sad and heartbroken that the relationship ended to being thankful it did. I got that perspective. I got okay with being single—I embraced the waiting, and I started to enjoy my time.

When you’re single, you don’t have to worry about sacrifices. You can be selfish with your time, you can meet multiple people. You can be spontaneous and do things on the spur of the moment without taking anyone else into account. You don’t have to check in. You can randomly DM someone, and there’s a lot of freedom in that. Try to embrace it and stop worrying about why your friends are asking why you haven’t found someone yet, and stop worrying about the societal pressures from your family or even the pressure in your own head. Now, when someone asks why haven’t you found your person yet, you can just say, “I just haven’t found anyone worthy of my time.”

Don’t sweat the timeline.

By the time I got into my thirties, I was so happy being single, I remember there was a little bit of a pivot from my parents. At first, my parents were more worried about me being sad and heartbroken. They’d say to me, “You’ll be okay. It’s okay to be single. Enjoy this time in your life.” They had to try to convince me of that. But then I could tell that there was some anxiousness on their part as I approached and then passed age thirty. Then it became, “Oh, Nick, when are you going to settle down?” Because I was totally single there for a couple of years, and totally comfortable with my single life.

At a certain point my mom was like, “You know, Nick, maybe start thinking about getting a girlfriend again?” And I just remember saying to her: “Mom, look, I’ve had these big breakups and big relationships, and now I’m just really comfortable with being patient.” And then I said, “You know, I don’t know when I’m going to find my person, but I would rather find them when I’m forty-two and be with them and have a great marriage for as long as I live—which hopefully might be another thirty, forty years—than be married and divorced at thirty-nine after a three-year marriage that failed.”

Like I said, you have to remember that you’re only looking for one, not many.

I don’t want to wait till I’m forty-five to get married, but I’m willing to wait till I’m forty-five—and not panic and not force it, because I have the rest of my life to enjoy that person. That’s why I want to make sure that I’m with the right person, rather than be so impatient that I put an arbitrary timeline on my dating life.

It starts with someone saying something like, “Well, he gets really mad and he calls me terrible names that make me cry, but I know he doesn’t mean it”—because what is really in the back of your mind is, If I break up with this person, I have to start over. This time will all have been wasted. Time I can’t get back. That person will stay in that relationship because they’ve told themselves they have to be married by thirty, and they’re twenty-nine, and this relationship is already three years old. They’ll think to themselves, I just don’t have it in me to start all over again. Most of the time people will tell themselves, You know what? I’m just going to lean into this thing.

But someone who makes you feel bad about yourself is a non-negotiable—being talked to in a demeaning way that you’re not okay with is a non-negotiable. Maybe you’ve tried to talk to them about it. Maybe they say they’re going to work on it. But they never do, and you realize that’s just who they are. It sucks that it took that long to figure it out, but isn’t that better than sticking around and dealing with that for forty more years? Hopefully you’ll live until you are eighty or ninety—think about what it would be like to be in a marriage that long with someone that you’ve already realized doesn’t make you feel good about yourself.

It is kind of nuts when you spell it out like that, yet so many people do that. So many people will knowingly commit to something that will give them a lifetime of pain, just for the fleeting feeling of having “succeeded” at love.

I do realize that, as a man, I haven’t had to face the ticking of my biological clock the way women who want children do, and I can only imagine that it must be a powerful force. But I do believe the bigger picture is that both men and women—everyone—put these deadlines in our heads. We’ll think only about the timeline, and then we’ll start compromising on what we’re looking for in a relationship that should be the best thing in our lives. True success in love is found by refusing to settle.

Meet your ego.

The heart of this book is about being able to better control what you can control in dating and relationships—and often in dating situations it’s really our ego making the decisions. Once we’re aware, we can stop letting that happen. The first time I met my ego was when I was cheated on in my early twenties by my fiancée. I had all these negative thoughts when I first found out, all this pride and indignation—I couldn’t believe that I would be cheated on, and I couldn’t believe I got engaged only to get cheated on; I never imagined this for myself. All of which I came to realize were ego-driven feelings, not the feelings of getting over an actual heartbreak. That moment in my life is me meeting my ego for the first time, acknowledging that I had one, and recognizing the role my ego played in my actions.

Up until that point, I didn’t have any self-awareness about my ego; in fact I am pretty sure that if someone had told me, “Oh, you have an ego,” I probably would have been defensive, “No way!” Because I would have been thinking of it in terms of somebody with the biggest ego in the world. But after that breakup, I thought to myself, Of course I have an ego. We all have egos. I spent a lot of time thinking about what that meant and how many of my choices, especially when it came to that specific heartbreak, weren’t about my feelings toward her or the relationship, but what this breakup or being cheated on said about me —and also what other people would think about me.

I remember a moment—so vividly—of being out at this bar at that time in my life. I was finally getting back out there, but I still wasn’t totally healed. I remember someone asking me, “What happened? Why did you break up?” And I was just like, “Oh, you know, it just ended.” I was really ashamed. I was embarrassed about acknowledging that I got cheated on, because I felt like it said something about me. Which is, I think, a very common feeling that many people deal with in relationships when the other person does something that hurt us. We spend a lot of time trying to not feel less than, which is essentially fighting with our egos.

I was thinking those exact thoughts, and then I had this realization: Wait, why am I embarrassed about this? What did I do? The next time I went out and someone asked me that question—“What happened?”—I just said, very matter factly, “Oh, she cheated on me.” And the response I got was, “Well, that was shitty of her.” I didn’t feel embarrassed, and the person I talked to didn’t look upon me with any judgment, either.

With many relationship decisions, we’re thinking about what society is going to think about us, or what people are going to say about us. That’s ego, and ego can lead us to bad decisions. Ego gets in the way of our ability to heal, and to move on from bad or hurtful situations. Our egos also often delay the process of removing ourselves from a relationship that we know deep down isn’t where it should be, and even can be what make us chase people that we already know aren’t good for us.

Just the other day I was asked, “Why do I keep making the same mistakes over and over by dating jerks? What’s the best way to meet a nice person?” And my answer was: “By not chasing validation.” What I meant was, it’s not that you’re only attracting jerks. It’s that your ego is searching for validation, and that feeling of being special. Your ego says, “I want to find the person who treated everyone else with disrespect, but treated me like a queen, because I was the special one.”

Ego is often what’s at play when we give so many second chances to people who give us so many reasons why they don’t deserve our time. Whether it’s the fuckboy or the player I talk about later in the book (this page), they are the people who constantly shower us with disappointments. Why do we keep giving these people so many chances? It’s not because they’re sophisticated narcissists who could teach a master class in manipulation and we’re at the mercy of their mind control. That’s not the reason—it’s often because our egos want to feel special and validated.

That’s why I want anyone reading this book to take some time and meet their ego, and really think about their ego in every choice they make in dating and in a relationship. Am I doing this because it’s going to make my heart happy, and make me feel loved and cared for—or am I doing this for my ego? And if you choose to prioritize being happy with every decision you make about your relationships, and even in life in general, you’re going to be far better off.