Queer Girl Q&A: Expanding Your Type

Q: I dislike online dating. Technology has proliferated the possibilities to the point that we now have more options than ever—So it feels like it should be easier.

And yet, the women I feel sparks with always seem to end up hurting me, whereas the ones who seem wonderful on paper—steady, kind, and reliable—I feel nothing more than platonic kinship with. How can I expand my type? I want to feel euphorically attracted to partners who are healthy for me.

A:  I’ve been in your situation. Dating in my 20s often felt like marching through a battlefield, somewhere within which a gold mine lay hidden. Some are lucky to find it. Others keep getting hit in the face with the shrapnel of ghosters, bread-crumbers, false hopes, and trick candle relationships. The gold seems to repeatedly elude them. 

Like you, I was once also attracted to unavailables. Women I dated were hot and cold—dialed in and present one day, checked out and distant the next. A starkly noticeable contrast existed between the two states, lacking in any sort of gray. The common thread of ambivalence and emotional inconsistency tied many of these experiences loosely together.

I’ve also been on the other end of what you described, with my own defenses at times leading me to pass up seemingly healthy partners.

To feel a strong and immediate attraction to the people who don’t agitate our nervous systems… Wouldn’t we all love that? It would spare so much pain. It would make dating way less messy and confusing.

One belief I used to wholeheartedly subscribe to was, “If buzzy chemistry’s not there right from the start, it won’t magically show up later.” Swipe culture, I believe, encourages this black-and-white mentality. It’s one that in  recent years, I’ve begun to question.

The author Alain de Botton once penned a note of encouragement for passive tourists to adopt more of an “active traveler” approach: “We overlook certain places because nothing has ever prompted us to conceive of them as being worthy of appreciation,” he writes. “Our relationship to olive trees might be improved if we directed our attention towards the silver in their leaves or the structure of their branches. New associations might be created through my reawakened attention.”

You might consider applying a similar lens to dating. To behave less like bystanders acted upon by ingrained preferences and instinctual patterns, we can direct our focus onto qualities we might have previously overlooked or unconsciously downplayed the importance of. 

Attraction can shift or grow depending on so many variables, including the stories we’re telling ourselves about the person in front of us—which may or may not be accurate.

If a strong gut feeling is telling you no from the minute you meet someone, then by all means, listen to it. But if the feeling ebbs and flows, seek to understand why it’s there and what it’s really trying to tell you. Work with it a little. I’m not suggesting full-on conversion therapy, just a certain amount of CBT.

“Squinting” doesn’t mean disregarding red flags; it means fixating less on the potentially inconsequential. Our brains can sometimes take a single, isolated thing  a person did or said and run with it. The leap to a generalization closes us off from  further connection with them. Or we might immediately file away as “dealbreaker” what may have been more of a momentary and innocuous slip on the other’s person’s part—more indicative of nerves and apprehension than genuine character differences.

Perhaps this approach is too narrow though, or missing the forest for the trees. In that case, though you’ve probably heard this one before, I’ll say it anyway because its truth still holds: When we ourselves are more healed, we tend to find available people more attractive. The healthier and more self-confident we are, the less attracted we become to game playing, hot-and-cold behavior, and unavailability; those behaviors become turn-offs. 

If you haven’t yet, work with a therapist on healing some of your intimacy issues. If you already are, keep at it! You might find your attractions slowly starting to shift as a byproduct of that work. As Instagram influencer Kirstie Taylor put it, “If you want someone emotionally available, you have to show them emotional availability yourself.”

All of us, to some extent, carry our old lens with us into the “dating battlefield.” It’s up to us to wipe it off and re-attune it while also healing what led us to adopt that lens to begin with, so dating won’t look or feel like a battlefield anymore, and so commitment-available partners begin to look a little shinier.

You can follow Eleni on IG @eleni_steph_writer.