Sometimes a woman will have an extremely interesting, fun, bubbly, engaging personality, but struggle to meet a man who matches it. She cannot find someone who meets her at her level of energy and plays off it. So she settles for a man she can project herself onto. She’ll meet a bland, stale, white-bread, personality-less saltine cracker of a man, and unknowingly use him as a vessel to date herself through. The man has nothing to say, so the woman has an engaging conversation with herself. She asks him questions, he gives short answers, and she finds layers and layers of interest to explore within those answers. She sets up jokes she finds funny and allows him to participate. She gets him to join her activities, enter her world, and keep her company within it. She might take the lead sexually, too, creating the experience she wants to have with him. Women like this are usually tops, anyway, and take the lead easily. In theory, this could work. A man without much of a personality and a woman with a lot of personality join forces. She helps him stay engaged without having to work very hard at it; he holds space for her personality. No harm in it. Ah, but there is room for harm in it. And always for the woman. See, the issue with a woman not knowing that she’s dating herself, is that she begins giving the man credit. And this does a number of things. For one, the man begins thinking a little too highly of himself. He comes into the relationship with some level of awareness that he’s not very interesting or engaging. Perhaps, before meeting her, he struggled to date. Perhaps he had some awareness that other women didn’t find him especially interesting or engaging. Initially, he’s excited to finally meet someone who does. But as the relationship progresses, and the woman assigns him credit for her own personality, his opinion of himself builds. And as his opinion of himself builds, so does the illusion that he could, potentially, aim higher. A second issue adds to this. The woman begins talking him up to the people around her. By assigning him her personality and giving him credit, she builds his reputation. He becomes known as funny, interesting, fun to talk to. He might even start adopting her characteristics, jokes, and interests, then showing them off at functions, seemingly proving her endorsement. And if she’s also more conventionally attractive than he is - which is usually the case - that can add another layer. People may see his ability to attract her, and begin thinking that there must be something special about him. He may begin seeing it that way, too. All of these things compound to the building idea in the man’s mind that he might, perhaps, be settling. And typically, he cheats. And if he doesn’t, he starts treating her as though she should be grateful that he isn’t. And the relationship ends. And the woman cries at the hands of a man with no personality to speak of. The woman leaves the relationship humiliated and mistreated by a salt-free saltine cracker that she picked up on the side of the road. Divas, (a word I now use thanks to my beloved girlfriend @sapphire_sloan), if you’re gonna date yourselves, do it without a crusty seasonless chicken breast of a man to weigh you down. You don’t need, or deserve, the humiliation of this man using you as a stepping stone. And if this has already happened to you, believe-me-you, his self aggrandizing will not last for long. There are only so many jokes he can reuse from you before he runs out. There’s only so much he can say about interests he doesn’t actually have before every woman he courts realizes he’s not actually all that interesting. And in about two years, he’ll text you. And if you take him back, he’ll cheat on you again. A second time. That’s right. He is not going to learn. This is an entry from my blog! #Relationship #dating #wlw #women #relationships #netflix - @spence.and.sensibility