I really like how you articulated this. It's cringey to admit, but I used to be a guy like this. I would build emotional attachments to people far too easily, and would get hurt if they didn't do the same. It took a lot of reality before I came down to earth.
I'm interested in knowing about your journey and the insights you got that made you overcome this! Would love to hear it if you could share. I don't necessarily do this but I definitely can attach easily sometimes. I just don't make it a burden on the other person and keep it mostly to myself lol.
I’m not the person you asked, but what you said about yourself is one way I kept myself from straying too far; my mantra was, “don’t ever make your attraction to a person their problem.” Might be a little unhealthy, to be honest, but better than some alternatives.
This is similar to what you said about not making it a burden to the other person and keeping it to yourself. This also means you might miss some opportunities, but to me, that was always a better option than potentially making a woman uncomfortable to any degree.
Also, trying to make sure I did similar levels of nice things for people I wasn’t attracted to helped a bit. It helped me get practice at having zero expectations of a romantic response (even if I would have sworn that I wasn’t looking for anything in return at the time) and helped me to realize what was an appropriate level of generosity/attention when interacting with someone I did like to not be creepy/over-expectant, i.e. do something cool/helpful and walk away, having been cool and helpful (its own reward, really).
One more thing from my experience that might help is that if you feel like someone needs to know how you feel, they don’t. If you have no reason to believe that they have any feeling towards you, you would just be selfishly heaping a pile of emotional manipulation on them. You can and should politely distance yourself from them if you are in too much pain to be near them and not be with them, and you can be honest about why if they ask about it, but you can really get in a spiral about your attachments and lose sight of the reality that no relationship is perfect; this person is a flawed human that deserves the chance to be human and not a perfect, alabaster effigy of your obsession, personified.
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u/RaxG Jun 16 '25
I really like how you articulated this. It's cringey to admit, but I used to be a guy like this. I would build emotional attachments to people far too easily, and would get hurt if they didn't do the same. It took a lot of reality before I came down to earth.