Changing This Will Help You Stop Sabotaging Relationships

Have you ever sent one of those "if you aren't interested anymore, you can just say that", texts?

You probably have. Don't worry, me too. The most recent time, that I can recall, was in 2020 when the guy I was speaking to at the time hadn't replied to the WhatsApp message I'd sent to him the night before.

The first thing I did when I woke up was check my phone to see if he'd responded. He hadn’t. It had been nearly 12 hours and he hadn’t responded. I made up countless stories of how he probably met someone else and wasn't interested in me.

I thought long and hard about what I should do. The best thing I could come up with was telling him that he could just let me know if he was no longer interested. I questioned whether I should even be sending a message like that, considering we had only been speaking for a week. Fuck it. I sent it anyway.

On my walk to work, a WhatsApp notification popped up. It was him. He’d sent me a nearly two-minute-long voice note. What the hell could he possibly be saying for two minutes? In the voice note he asked for patience. He said that I wasn’t the first woman to say something like this to him. He even said that sometimes his friends complain about how distant he could be. He asked me to bear with him and said that if I couldn’t he would understand. I should have noted his distance as a red flag. But I was just happy he had responded.

When you send the, "if you aren't interested anymore, you can just say that" text, its not because you want them to end things. Your likely feeling neglected. You want them to come closer, to make a bit more effort. To make you feel desired.

One way people with anxious-attachment style sabotage relationships is by acting on their feelings instead of communicating them. We don’t know how to communicate healthily. The lack of healthy communication skills usually causes us to resort to protest behaviour. Protest behaviour, while done to create closeness, often makes things worse. Here are four steps to help you start communicating how you feel.