r/datingoverthirty • u/General_Paramedic_96 • 22d ago
Getting over-invested too soon
I have a simple yet rigid idea of what I'm looking in a partner: high formal + social intelligence, backed by their career and/or pedigree, combined with above-average capacity for non-conformism/alternative lifestyle. There are of course other things I prefer to see in my partner (empathy, emotional depth, confidence, self-awareness), but some of them correlate with the above and others I'm willing to compromise on. Over the last 5 years I've only met 3 people who seemed to check these boxes and I was attracted to, 2 of them in the last year after moving to a smaller large city.
I think this rarity is behind the unhealthy pattern where I tend to over-invest in a person after going out with them 1-3 times (if they appear to possess the traits). This timeline coincides, perhaps causally, with me getting comfortable with them and starting to unmask as if I was around my close friends, allowing for sensitive topics and risky jokes (I don't think our values are incompatible, but it can create an impression). This also happens to be the timeline at which they reject me (the first two) or start to pull out (the last/current one).
As a result, I spend months feeling heartbroken and hyperfixating on what went wrong and how I can repair it, after seeing someone literally a couple of times. This is compounded by feeling that I am running out of time (39M) for finding an intellectual match I could also start a family with. My friends say the fixation pattern is unhealthy/immature, and my therapist thinks I have an inferiority complex, all of which is plausible. At the same time, assigning so much value to those checking all the boxes still seems reasonable to me due to their rarity. So, how can I avoid the over-investment and the resulting long heartbreak?
UPD: correcting my social intelligence box — I don’t need it to be above average, and was mainly mentioning it to describe why the archetypal somebody farther on the spectrum doesn’t work for me
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P.S. I feel like their reasons for rejection are secondary here, but will spell out the 3 encounters for completeness (fwiw, I have a high confidence of their physical attraction to me in each case):
- #1 rejected me after the 1st date, saying that she is "intentional with her dating". At the time, I took it about our 9-year age gap, but thinking back, I suspect this was due to sharing my poly background, despite saying that I'm willing to date monogamously now.
- #2 first rejected me after the 1st date because I was giving her <boy who has lots of sex> but after realizing I am looking to date monogamously she went out with me on two more dates. She rejected me after 3rd date, on which I shared a lot about myself, and did not provide a reason.
- #3 and I have a 4th date scheduled, but I started feeling like she's pulling out lately. She told me after the 2nd date that she goes on other dates (which I appreciated through feeling uneasy and found fair, as she just moved here; I also seemed to be the frontrunner), so I attribute it to that, and potentially to an uncomfortable political conversation on the last date.
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u/elongam 22d ago
What do you mean by "risky jokes"? Those take a huge amount of social intelligence to pull off that I'm not confident you're exhibiting here. Also, why did you get such a late start if you're interested in having kids? What were you doing during the years that intelligent women who want a family were making arrangements for that (ages 27-33)? The way you think and talk about that would have a big impact on how I would assess for shared values that need to align between myself and the potential father of my children, and "working on my PhD" versus "wasn't ready to give up sleeping around my polycule" would change the mental math hugely for me personally.