Approach Dating in 2025 With Radical Self-Honesty and Self-Love
Our ability to practice self-honesty and self-love in da
Our ability to practice self-honesty and self-love in dating is paramount to making good choices that lead to good relationships.
Self-honesty in dating is an overarching awareness and mindfulness of who we are, our values wants/needs, and our moment-to-moment experience with others.
Self-love, on the other hand, is the grace we give ourselves to act on that awareness. It means setting appropriate boundaries before dating or during dating to honour what our body and mind are telling us.
When either of these fall: self-honesty or self-love, we set the stage for potentially unfulfilling dating experiences and long-term incompatibilities with the people we end up with.
Both also complement each other.
If we are aware of how we feel but lack the self-love to act on, we become complicit people-pleasers. We put up with things we wouldn’t normally put up with, lower our standards, and show up to dating inauthentically. Whilst it can seem self-loving to avoid the discomfort of setting a boundary for temporary safety, the long-term implications of putting up with mistreatment are not.
Self-honesty is also self-loving. Hiding the truth of how you feel and what you authentically want is anything but loving. You have to ignore it like a friend trying to tell you something is wrong. Whether we are consciously aware of the impact or not there will be one.
If you’re like me, then you’re likely someone who struggles with either two camps: being self-honest and being self-loving. Situationships leading nowhere, relationships that are misaligned or involve mistreatment, chase and hot/cold dynamics: they all thrive on a lack of self-honesty and self-love.
The problem with approaching dating lacking self-love or self-honesty is that once the foundation of a relationship is built, it can be very difficult to break free from it.
Without self-honesty, we’ll ignore our truth for someone else’s truth (prioritising their thoughts/feelings, wants & needs at best and being successfully gaslighted at worst) and without self-love we’ll be reliant on someone else’s version of love, leading to anxiously attached qualities and the acceptance of breadcrumbing (in some cases).
1. Get Clear On What You Want and Need
Dating without clarity of what it is you want or need is like going to the shop without a list: you’ll come back with things you don’t want and forget things you do. Suddenly you’re eating a pack of sweets at 5 pm because you got distracted by the colourful packets in the sweet isle, and how they’ll taste, despite the fact you’re on a diet and are trying to avoid sugar.
So, ask yourself some questions:
What is it you want out of a relationship next year?
How do you want to be treated by someone else?
What are the qualities you would like to see in someone else?
What are the qualities YOU would like to present in a relationship?
If you have trouble thinking about what you want, then the next tip may help.
2. Get clear on what hasn’t worked for you
When we don’t know what we want we can instead recognise what hasn’t worked for us.
Reflect: What was it about your past dating experience that you did not like? What left you feeling icky, sad, anxious, and unworthy? What behaviours, exhibited by someone else, left you feeling this way? What dynamics were at play that you did not like?
This exercise should not all be about someone else. That wouldn’t be us being honest: it takes two to tango. What is it about you that you did not like? Were you honest? Did you show up authentically? Did you say what you wanted or needed?
Here we are setting the groundwork for self-honesty, which requires a self-awareness of who we’ve been, how we’ve felt, and who we want to be.
The truth may hurt, too. I remember many hard truths that I had to face and then accept in my growth journey — like how I had difficulty being intimate and would distract myself with non-intimate partners (and then blame them, even though I was complicit and couldn’t express my needs).
3. Question Whether you Truly Want or Need a Relationship Right Now
Going into 2025 I’m pretty certain I don’t want to date anyone, at least for the first half of the year.
I recognise that I am still processing my last relationship, and without time alone to reflect and learn lessons, I’ll only risk falling into the same problems again in my next relationship.
This is where the self-love component comes in. Dating (or at least good dating) requires us to be vulnerable. Do you feel ready for it? Do you think you have the qualities you’d like to see in others, right now? Have you fully processed your last relationship?
The thing about self-love is that the best thing for us isn’t always our preferred choice or safest choice. True self-love is being able to say no when a part of us says yes, for the greater good of our overall wellbeing.
For example, a self-honest judgement may be realising that you haven’t been showing yourself love and relying on the validations of others to fill the gap. Here, you might know (through self-awareness) that the best thing for you is to work on yourself, outside of a relationship. Is that an easy path to take? No, you could just bulldoze into the next relationship as you may always have. Is it a self-loving choice to make? In my experience, yes.
4. Applying Self-Love to Truths that Contradict
Not to complicate this article further, but notice how two things can be true at once:
For example, on the one hand, a part of you might secretly like the chaotic, hot/cold dynamics. This part of you might find the more consistent and secure relationships boring.
On the other hand, another part may long for a deeper connection. This part might want consistency and to be chosen. It might look at others in perceived “secure” relationships and think, “I’d love that, too”.
Here we have a contradiction with self-honesty: what do we do when two parts of us are grappling at once? If we follow the first, we’ll likely fall into unpredictable and unstable dynamics (situationships, chase dynamics, etc). If we follow the latter, we’ll get consistency but might find the experience initially boring.
What do we do here? How to we move forward with two truths?
We apply self-love to each.
Which would be the loving act, here? If you’ve felt the brunt of following a desire to engage in unpredictable dynamics like I have, then you’ll know that following this desire is far from a loving act. It’s self-harming.
There are still times I have to restrict myself from things I want to do that aren’t necessarily good in the long run for my mental health. It’s taken building a healthy dose of self-love to stop myself when I do.
So, with a commitment to consistent awareness and self-honesty in 2025, ask yourself what would someone who loved themself do and watch your relationship with yourself and others change.
Thank you for checking out this article. Let me know your approaches to dating in 2025 and how 2024 has shaped your year. You can catch me via my newsletter or on Medium.
Joe Gibson — Above The Middle.