I doubt that there is anyone on this earth that can claim to have no emotional baggage, but there’s baggage and there’s baggage. 

When you’re a Fallback Girl, Mr (or Miss) Unavailable’s complicit partner, not only do you inadvertently love partners that scream ‘Help me!’ or ‘I’m really f*cked up!’, but you end up ‘loving’ these people putting their baggage ahead of you.

So, when he has a girlfriend, a wife, a gazillion kids, a babymother, an ex-girlfriend that he is still secretly or even openly pining for, something in your brain goes, ‘Ping!’ and you’re all over him like a rash.

When men put us down their list of priorities, it caters to that voice that follows millions of women with, ‘You’re not good enough’ and you then make it your vocation to get him to prove that you are good enough by moving you up the chain and throwing off some of his baggage.

The trouble with taking on men with baggage is that you go into overload mode because you are already carrying far too much baggage of your own.

However his baggage detracts from your baggage so you don’t have to look too closely at yourself, but baggage does attract baggage. It doesn’t have to be like for like but you have to have some issues of your own to be willing to take on a crash landing waiting to happen.

The modern dating world is a lot more complex than olden times. We rack up a lot more relationships before we settle down, there are a lot more single parents dating, plenty more divorcees, and things like online dating to complicate matters. It is great to have a lot of relationships. It’s not a bad thing to be a single parent. Some marriages do end, and while I personally don’t like online dating, it certainly has its place. But it is how we choose to handle our baggage that poses the issue.

Children are not baggage and you can’t change the fact that you are divorced or have had a messy breakup, but emotional baggage of the unresolved kind is highly unattractive and a surefire way to drag yourself down to a level that can be difficult to climb back from when your self-esteem is walking off down the street in his hand.

We seem to have been conditioned to believe that we can fix whatever baggage he comes with and it’s time to wake up and learn that we can’t fix everything and mold men and the relationship into what we want, especially when we haven’t got such healthy ideas about relationships ourselves.

Carrying an unhealthy amount of baggage is a diversionary tactic. It’s clear we are already carrying our own baggage and that is an issue in itself, but our willingness to load up on other people’s baggage is about distracting ourselves from our own issues.

It’s a bit of a ‘His baggage is bigger than mine’ scenario. It’s easy to think that you don’t have issues when you’re comparing, but the combination of the types of baggage that we carry can end up being quite explosive and every time we end a relationship with these overloaded Mr Unavailables, they leave the gift of some luggage behind for you.

Baggage is meant to be unpacked, dealt with, put away or given away (resolved). It is not meant to sit there like the white elephant in the room cluttering up your relationship, and from the moment that it becomes an obstacle to your personal happiness or your relationship, you’ve got more than baggage. You’ve got problems.”

In the meantime, I want to know what your thoughts on excess baggage are and how much baggage you have been prepared to take on.

Your thoughts?

In part two, I am going to show you just how bad baggage can be and give you a way to find out how much baggage you are carrying…

If you want to find out more about why we make some our relationship choices and get to understand Mr Unavailables, you should be reading my book, Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl. Find out more and buy and download.

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