emotional investment Archives - Baggage Reclaim with Natalie Lue

We’ve Got To Stop Trying To Recoup Our Sunk Costs In Our Relationships

November 21, 2016 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

“He/she made such a good effort at the start.”
“It seemed so promising.”
“I’ve given up so much.”

These are common reasons that are used to justify remaining in a relationship that’s no longer working and they all neglect to take something critical into account:

Anything that’s considered to be a contribution is the cost of getting involved.

It’s what’s known in business and decision-making terms as a sunk cost. It means that the cost has already been incurred and it can’t be undone or recovered. That might be investing in equipment, research, or advertising or from a decision-making perspective, it’s what’s invested before having to make the decision.

We cannot date someone or enter into a relationship with them without investing time, energy, effort and emotion.

Granted we can be wise with our investment by doing our due diligence (as opposed to cost cutting and trying to skate by on the bare minimum) but whichever way you slice it, relationships including the ones that never see the light of day because they go bust before they take flight and the ones wheee it becomes clear that each party wants different things, take investment.

We can’t keep score with an itemised bill of everything we think we’ve been and done that we think obliges us the relationship we want.

Keep in mind as well that it’s all relative because what feels like passing a kidney stone for some is something others give and receive freely.

What so many of us fall into the trap of doing is conflating the decision to invest with the potential of the relationship, when in truth they’re unrelated.

We’ve got to stop procrastinating in unavailable relationships

April 15, 2015 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

Over the years, many a reader has claimed that they’ve been emotionally available to an emotionally unavailable partner. Here’s the thing:

If we are truly emotionally available and want to keep our integrity and basically not be met with tumbleweeds or the equivalent of, “What? What was that? You’re breaking up…” or even a ‘dead ringtone’, why are we choosing to be emotionally available to somebody who is afraid of intimacy, commitment, progression, balance, and consistency?

Why are we claiming to be emotionally available to somebody who doesn’t want to ‘hear’ us and ‘feel’ us to the level of which we’re claiming that we’re available?

One of the things I’ve learned from experience and also through the stories of BR readers, is that when we habitually engage with an emotionally unavailable person, even if we started out available, in the context of this involvement, we adjust ourselves. It may be conscious, it might be unconscious, but we do.

We can pick up on cues that indicate that certain subjects or situations are not a good idea.

We edit ourselves.

Let’s be real: If we’ve been raised in an environment with a lot of tension or where feelings or discussions were a no-no, or where we’ve gotten into the habit of being a pleaser, we can be pretty damn adept at reading a room or reading for what we feel are signs of tension, and then adjusting ourselves.

What do you do when you feel as if you’re putting yourself out there with somebody who at one point, was all over you like a rash or certainly giving the impression of availability, and now they seem to be stepping back by quietly or even aggressively putting up walls? You become more guarded and stop being as honest and vulnerable as you were before.

You can’t date or forge a relationship without chipping in – it’s the cost of participation

July 8, 2013 By NATALIE Reading Time: 4 Minutes

When I overheard a friend advising a business associate to stop solely focusing on the initial money spent on a business venture and to address the real issues and decisions at hand first, I thought of the many stories readers share with me. One of the reasons that can keep you holding on tight to someone, a relationship, an idea, or situation that you really need to either let go of or to reconsider your course of action based on how things are, is this idea that you have to recoup your investment or even make it pay. Like the initial investment in a business ( ‘sunk cost’) is the cost of participation, so is your perceived ‘investment’. The cost has been and done.

I can assure you that if you keep chasing down people for what you think you’re ‘owed’ like a bailiff trying to collect goods to the amount of the debt, it will cost you far more than anything you’ve put in so far, including your dignity. The Justifying Zone isn’t a good place to be.

Expending some time, energy and yes, a little emotion (or possibly a lot), is the cost of getting involved. It comes with the territory. We have to be vulnerable and we can’t wave an invoice at people when we’re disappointed. I hear from so many people who are very stressed by online dating. It’s the chatting with someone on the phone or via text/email and feeling as if there was the beginnings of something even though they hadn’t met this person yet. They feel robbed because their hopes and expectations had begun to build and then, shazam!, the person is never to be heard of again or claiming that they’ve suddenly realised that they’re not over their ex on the eve of meeting up. Some people are so devastated, it’s as if they played the lottery, they thought that their numbers were definitely going to come up and had begun mentally spending the winnings without checking the numbers.

When You Hang Around Or Keep Engaging To Confirm That They Haven’t Changed

March 6, 2013 By NATALIE Reading Time: 3 Minutes

One of the biggest fears people in unhealthy relationships have, is that if they call it as they see it and opt out, that maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon or possibly in 2025, this person may become a better person in a better relationship, with somebody else. This scares the beejaysus out of them because they’re afraid that what they experienced was particular to them hence if this person ‘changes’, it’s perceived as rejection and/or being ‘wrong’ and a ‘failure’.

“I wasn’t good enough to make him/her change. Why this person and not me? I gave my all. I put up with all sorts of crazy sh*t and they had X years of my life – if anybody deserves this change it’s me!”

This is why some people ‘protect their investment’ and reject that it’s not working by remaining in the situation even if it makes them utterly miserable.

Often when readers share their stories with me about why they’re remaining in a relationship or why they’re continuing to engage with an ex even though this person may have moved on to someone else, what becomes apparent is that sometimes we prioritise our need to be right over our need and desire to be happy.

Sometimes we prioritise our need to be right over our need and desire to be happy.

If you’re in this situation where you’re continuing to engage, the fact that it is continuing and they’re participating no matter what the capacity, communicates to you that they haven’t changed and so you can breathe easier in your uncomfortable comfort zone.

It’s like, “Well if I’m going to continue being unhappy, I can at least rest assured that they’re not out there having a better life as a changed person because they’re still texting / sexting / emailing / trying to sleep with me / sleeping with me / borrowing money / making the same BS promises etc.” If you’re No Contact and they stop making attempts, you panic and reach out just to make sure that they haven’t changed.

In the relationship it’s, “We could break up but if we don’t then nothing really has to change and I can stick to dodgy solutions in my people pleasing repertoire and focus on them. If we broke up, I’d have to change but more importantly they might change.”

You’d rather be right about how effed up it is but not so right that you’d act upon the information. Even a little bit of doubt is enough to keep you hooked in.

You know that things don’t look or feel right but you’re blinded because you’re making it about your worth or what you think you might have done to ‘provoke’ their behaviour.

It may feel personal to you, like a special performance of their character for the undeserving, especially if you’ve accepted the unacceptable as a means to ‘get’ their love and validation and so are feeling more than a little ‘owed’.

You want it to be 100% awful / 100% wrong because even 99% in your mind means ‘reasonable doubt’.

And so the cycle continues and you keep engaging and it’s as if you’d rather suffer now and not make a firm decision for fear that some time in the future, this person will change and that even if that time is in ten years time and you’ve actually moved on, you can’t bear the thought of being ‘wrong’. You might even hate the idea that somebody else will come along and recoup the return on your investment. It’s this reason alone why so many people fall for the Returning Childhood Not-Such-a-Sweetheart fantasy.

Continuing to engage with somebody because you’re comforted by the fact that at least you know that they haven’t changed isn’t a healthy reason to remain.

You’re being territorial even though you can’t actually accept this person as they are and forge a healthy, mutual relationship with them. It’s like “Yeah you’re not over your ex / can’t be trusted / an assclown but you’re my rebounder / liar / assclown.” You have to be careful of feeling entitled due to some ‘debt’ that you think you’re owed – it would be better to have standards and boundaries by not accepting shady behaviour or just flat out recognising when you’re no longer compatible.

Hanging around because you want to be doubly sure that they really are effed up and haven’t changed is really effed up not least because you are becoming the barrier to your own happiness and growth. The funny thing is that you may well be confirming that they haven’t changed but they’re also confirming that you haven’t either. They know that you’ve changed when you stop engaging or match your words and actions.

If you’re truly intent on doing right by you, it doesn’t matter about not being around to reap the ‘reward’ of their change because you will benefit from your own. Sure you can make your life about being right, but it’s better to learn from the feedback whether you’re ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and apply it so that you can be happy.

Your thoughts?

The Trouble With Feeling Owed After a Relationship ‘Investment’ Goes Sour

October 31, 2011 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

I’ve heard from more than a few readers recently who are feeling resentful after being in a relationship where they feel that they gave and gave and gave and that they got nothing or very little ‘back’. Leaving more than a sour taste in their mouthes, they feel ‘owed’ and even lose sleep ruminating over whether someone else will reap the benefit of their ‘investment’.

In truth, the area of investment into relationships is very shady territory. Just like in my last post where I explained how when people are confronted with what they know to be at best inappropriate, and at worst downright dangerous carry-on in their relationship, that they increase their trust, you will step up your level of investment when it feels like you’re on a crumb relationship diet.

It’s like “Hmmm, this relationship isn’t panning out how I expected. I could fold but instead I’m going to ramp up the level of my investment so that when they realise how much I love them and that I’m more than good enough, that they’ll match me.”

The trouble with working hard at a greatly imbalanced relationship is that of course it’s going to feel like incredibly hard work and a huge investment of your energy, because it’s like putting your bucket down an empty well repeatedly and hoping that water will come back up. Or trying to break concrete with a plastic shovel. At its worst when you’re actually in a relationship where the person is busting up your boundaries left, right, and centre, it’s like peeing into the wind – it all comes back at you in a rather unpleasant manner.

Relationships are 100:100 – you never have to feel like you’ve busted up your back, contorted yourself into a pretzel, or sold yourself down the river if you 1) arrive to your relationships as an equal and if you 2) only remain in your relationships when it’s mutual. If you feel ‘owed’ it’s because someone left some of their effort on the table.

Once you start ‘topping up’ the other party like a Pay As You Go Relationship, or doing things with a view to triggering their fountain of love, or even doing all of their effort for them, of course you’re going to feel like you’re ‘owed’ because in recognising that there’s supposed to be two of you in this, when all is said and done, it looks like the other party has reaped the benefit of your over investment.

When people tell me that they’ve given someone a roof over their head, money out of their back pocket, cooked, cleaned, turned a blind eye, taken them back repeatedly, ‘overlooked’ what they shouldn’t, and basically been incredibly indispensable across the board, I hear where they’re coming from, not least because I’ve been there…but, and there is a but…aside from some of these things being silent contracts with uncommunicated expectations, sometimes we do this stuff to substitute for really stretching ourselves.

Excerpt from Mr Unavailable & the Fallback Girl: Renovators & Florences

October 19, 2011 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

In this excerpt from the new edition of Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl, I explain the very tricky territory of fixing, healing and helping and how your need to be needed and trying to be the solution to problems that aren’t yours to fix, backfire and leave you feeling anything but loved.

Right now there are millions of women dating and in relationships with men that they 1) weren’t that interested in to begin with but thought they could change them, 2) were interested but had to turn a blind eye to some stuff and thought they could change them, and 3) were mostly interested in the purpose of fixing/healing/helping them. What this tells you straight off the bat is that many women end up in unsatisfactory relationships because they knowingly choose partners they deem as having ‘faults’ or ‘issues’. They believe that if they ‘give’ and ‘love’ that this will give them the power to change their inadequate partners and be rewarded with their love.

Unfortunately, believing that you have superhuman powers is what has you repeatedly returning to the same relationship crime scene, going out with the same guy in a different package, and taking on fixer-upper projects that leave you hungry and hurt. I’m a big fan of TV shows like Property Ladder, Grand Designs, and Location, Location, Location, which deliver an important message that you should remember throughout this chapter and the rest of this book: it’s all fruitless unless you get Return On Investment (ROI). You cannot take any man with any problems and treat him like a blank canvas and magic up the relationship you want, because it’s like trying to turn a pig’s ear into a silk purse – a very bad bet.

What’s the difference between the woman that ditches men because they don’t meet her stringent criteria and the woman that instead of ditching, focuses on fixing and healing? A slippery slope.

When you choose men that you believe need fixing and a makeover, you’re a Renovator. Relationships where you secretly or even openly put yourself on a pedestal are your preference because underneath your critical eye and controlling ways, lurks low self-esteem. You figure that he’s not right for now, but that if you give and fix, that you’ll be rewarded with a committed relationship. Disillusioned with dating and scared to put yourself out there with the type of men you’d prefer, you think you’re playing it safe and then Mr Unavailable turns the tables on you.

When you’re afraid they’ll become a better person in a better relationship, without you

April 20, 2011 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

If you’ve ever stayed in a relationship long past its sell by date, you’ll have worried about what you’ve ‘put in’ and become focused on getting a return on investment. Instead of thinking about who they consistently are and the present, you think about the good ‘ole days and wish they’d change back. Or you look to the future and practically squeeze your eyes shut and cross your fingers and toes that they’ll realise the potential you’ve envisioned for them and the relationship.

These thoughts and images rattle around in your head trapping you in indecision and when you think about leaving you’re seized by that perennial fear that could keep you awake at night and even worse, caught in a bad romance – What if they become a better person in a better relationship?

Potential in relationships is about consistently having or showing (via actions) the capacity to become or develop into something more serious – commitment and a shared future.

Capacities are individual and independent of one another – you can’t make them have a capacity they don’t possess anyway. It doesn’t come from the intensity of your feelings or your hopes, prayers, or even demands for them to change.

If you’ve read this blog for long enough and my ebook Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl, you’ll know I’ve warned of the perils of Betting On Potential which is essentially gambling at the relationship casino, only you’re an inexperienced gambler that hangs at the wrong tables, has no exit strategy and will go for broke before taking a hint. You don’t know when to fold.

You think that if they do ‘improve’, that it must mean that the problem wasn’t anything to do with them or the relationship; it was about you. That’s why so many women in particular get stuck on ‘Why her and not me?‘ and ‘Is he giving her the relationship that I wanted?’.

Are You Still Trying To Be The Exception To The Rule? Maybe It’s Time You KNOW The Rule

February 28, 2011 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

Last year I wrote about when we try to get people to make us the exception to their rule of behaviour, which is in essence the foundation of every relationship where you stay with someone who has shown and told you, whether it’s directly or indirectly, who they really are, and yet you stay anyway. Since then, it’s one of my most frequently emailed about subjects because many now recognise that they’re trying to be the exception…but don’t seem to want to stop.

Why do people continue being involved with unavailable people or even assclowns?

Because they hope that even if it’s not today, even if it’s not tomorrow, but soon, this person will see something in them or value their dedication enough to change.

Why do people keep carrying the same beliefs, baggage, and behaviours, choosing the same types of people, different package and expecting different results?

Because rather than address any of these factors, they expect to continue to make the same choices and carry the same mentality and then ‘miraculously’, without having to stretch themselves, one of those exact same or very similar situations will be the exception to their rule and shazam, happy ever after.

Relationship insanity is doing all of those things and continuing to expect to get a different result – that is looking to be the exception.

Even though I’ve gone back several times, I’m going back again because surely this time they will be different.

100 Tips & Thoughts for Better Self-Esteem – A Guide To Happiness & Improved Sense of Self

August 16, 2010 By NATALIE Reading Time: 20 Minutes

1. If you can’t date with self-esteem, boundaries, and values, don’t date until you can because not only will you feel fleeting highs and plenty of lows, but the absence of these things makes for damaging relationships. Give yourself a dating and sex hiatus and deal with these issues as you will be far more relationship ready when you do. You cannot short-cut to healthy relationships and self-esteem by just ‘bagging’ someone to do the job for you – you’ll find yourself with someone and still being unhappy.

2. There is no instant fix for your self-esteem. It’s doing lots of small stuff every day that builds your confidence. All of those little things add up and just like in relationships where we often treasure the small stuff that they do, it’s doing small, simple, sometimes hard to quantify stuff that makes a difference.

3. If you’ve been doing stuff in a similar way and generating limited results, it’s time to accept that for you to feel good, you’re going to have to make some changes. To continue the relationship or life insanity (doing the same things and expecting different results) will only diminish your self-esteem further.

4. You will build your self-esteem and confidence by acting with love, care, trust, and respect to yourself first and foremost. When you do this, you will recognise when others don’t and opt out.

5. If loving someone means that you can’t love you, always, without a doubt, choose you.

6. Don’t get into bargaining with yourself which is where you let fundamental stuff like boundaries and values slide in the name of getting the relationship you want. It’s a deal that will go sour and potentially leave you in ‘negative equity’.

7. If you don’t know how to make you feel good, how can you expect to find happiness in others? If you don’t know what makes you feel good outside of another person, it is time to start discovering this.

8. You have to take care of yourself every single day. Looking out for you is a job that you should not offload the responsibility of to someone else.

9. If you make someone or something the sole source of your happiness, you will feel unhappy if you don’t have that someone or something and feel dependent on them when you do.

10. We often think that out happiness lies in something external yet we don’t realise that we cannot enjoy these external things until we feel happy internally.

11. You are the only common denominator to your relationships and anything else where there is a pattern that you don’t like. People taking advantage of you? Stop giving so much and put some boundaries in. Involved with emotionally unavailable people? Address your own emotional unavailability. Keep getting with people who disappear and cater to your fear of being abandoned? Address your fears and beliefs about being abandoned so you don’t seek out fear reflections.

12. Address your beliefs about love, sex, and relationships one by one because if these are negative, they affect your mentality and the reflecting behaviour. What do you believe and why do you believe it? Is it an absolute truth? If it’s not the truth, this in itself makes it questionable and gives you room to believe something else. How is this belief playing out in your personal life? What can you do to change that belief?

13. Understand what’s really bugging you. It’s very easy to say ‘I’m very pissed off’ or ‘I’m very unhappy because he won’t commit’ but dig deeper and ask yourself what it is about the situation that is angering/frustrating/disappointing you and tackle it at that level because the top level is too broad.

14. Break down your frustration: ‘I’m really unhappy because he won’t commit. This makes me so angry because I have been trying so hard in this relationship and he doesn’t appreciate my efforts and I feel unlovable and unworthy.’ This person then learns that she is directly correlating his lack of commitment to her worth as a person but also learns that another reason she is getting angry is that she keeps doing the same thing and getting the same result and that to get to a happier her, she needs to accept that he is not going to commit in this way. This means she either needs to step back and validate her own sense of self-worth and have her own personal security that is not shaken by his actions. In doing this, he may become more receptive or by her being more secure, she may realise that she actually doesn’t want him.

15. A life lived in fear is a half life. While having a little fear about stuff is healthy and can motivate us, doing stuff primarily out of fear creates drama for ourselves and within our relationships and invites negative reflections of our fear into lives. Fear, as a Baggage Reclaim reader said many moons ago, is just a feeling.

16. One great way to improve your self-esteem is resisting the urge to take things that happen to Dynasty level with lots of drama and instead realising that we have a lot of control over how much we let stuff impact us. You can make, for example, the fact that your ex attempted to get in touch with you, as big or as small as you want it to be. If you opt for the former, you’ll let it derail you. If you opt for the latter, you’ll see it for what it is – a test to see if the door is open.

17. Break your routine. You don’t get happier doing the same thing over and over again.

18. Keep trying new things. Fear of change or meeting people can make this a little scary but staying at home wallowing or working yourself into the ground is a comfortable scary too. If you try something and you don’t like it try something else!

19. Immediate self-esteem comes from knowing not only what your boundaries are but by living them. Don’t make exceptions for boundary crossing behaviour. You’ll thank me for it when you have better self-esteem and improved relationships based on healthy, respectful common ground.

20. If you don’t know what your boundaries are, you shouldn’t be dating. Some is obvious and some is subtle but if you have no limits and you haven’t the vaguest idea, start with the stuff that in hindsight you recognise was unacceptable and inappropriate for a healthy relationship.

21. Listen to yourself as your body and your reactions tell you how you feel about the situation. Recognise when you feel anxious, afraid, wary, cautious, disappointed, quietly angry, reserved, happy, sad. If you ignore how you feel, you’re ignoring your self.

Is He Going to Leave His Wife/Girlfriend For Me? Part Two

March 8, 2010 By NATALIE Reading Time: 7 Minutes

Yesterday in part one, I explained why wondering or questioning whether a man is going to leave his wife or girlfriend for you can put you in a precarious position because it means that the way that the ‘affair’ is playing out is not giving you enough confidence to believe that he will leave her and be with you. This is especially the case if you have to keep wondering and keep asking – it suggests that whatever is being said and happening is not enough. It suggests he’s not leaving…

Last week I wrote about Lovenomics: Managing your desire to be the exception, which was about how we choose to get caught up in illusions and believe that our relationships are being governed by exceptions and anomalies because we desperately want to be believe that our situation is different; that we are exceptions to the rule. There is no greater example of this than in the cheating situation.

Now I want to say – It is not the case that men never leave their wives or girlfriends to be with the ‘Other Woman’ but they are the exception, not the rule.

There are a few key assumptions that I believe women who go into ‘relationships’ with the cheater work off that I talk about extensively in my ebook Mr Unavailable and the Fallback Girl and these fuel the question and desire for him to leave:

1) If a man is prepared to risk his existing relationship in order to be with you, he must be crazy about you.

A lot of cheaters get off on taking risks and playing truant on their relationships. They don’t like the normality that comes with the steadiness of a relationship or the wants, needs, and expectations that arise from it, so they seek their thrills elsewhere. Sometimes you’re like something they’ve just got to have but they haven’t really thought past winning you over to the bit where you expect them to follow through on their ardent pursuit – read my post about what you can learn about cheating and cheaters from the Tiger Woods saga.

Is He Going To Leave His Wife/Girlfriend For Me? Part One

March 7, 2010 By NATALIE Reading Time: 5 Minutes

Right now, there are thousands of ‘ladies in waiting’ in relationships; women who are willing, waiting, and hoping that the guy they’re with, will leave their girlfriend or wife. ‘Is he going to leave her for me?’;’When is he going to leave her?’ and ‘Why hasn’t he left her yet?’ are just some of the questions that come flooding in via email, especially since I wrote a post ages ago about how to cope with being the other woman (also see the original), with many hoping their relationship is the exception.

It’s tough; you want to know that the pain and effort of effectively playing second fiddle, hanging on the sidelines, and having to operate on marginalised terms in your relationship with a married or attached man, is worth it. I should know…I spent about 18 months being the other woman to a guy with a girlfriend several years ago. I asked those questions frequently and many more.

For the many women who find themselves involved with an attached man (read: the cheater), even though they start out feeling that they can handle things and can be ‘patient’ or may not even want anything more, as time progresses, feelings progress, and so does the desire for the ultimate validation in this situation – to have a man leave another woman to be with you. In fact, I’d argue that part of the ‘feelings’ that arise in this situation, do so because playing second best screws with your self-esteem – BIG time – and so sometimes, you want them, not really because you want them but because you want to be validated in and feel the ‘love’ that comes from getting a man through exceptional circumstances.

I remember seeing myself as a smart, independent career girl who was just out of relationship (broken off engagement) and yet, it took a few short months before I was pressing the repeat button on the never-ending discussing and questioning of exactly when he was going to leave her and getting confirmation that it was indeed me he loved. Of course he’d say he loved me, but he didn’t do the necessaries to make that ‘real’ in my eyes.

And let’s not forget that some of the women who find themselves with the cheater, didn’t actually know that there was a third party until they had been involved for a period of time. Somehow (it normally has to be dragged out of them after ‘evidence’ comes to light) they make the discovery and then often, no matter how mad they are, they feel like they’ve come so far down the road, they want to get a ‘return on their emotional investment’ – the struggle in this scenario is reconciling the reality of the fact that he’s involved with someone else with the image of the man they thought they knew.

But there is a problem with 1) wondering if he’s going to leave ‘her’ for you and 2) having to ask.

I appreciate that life throws some curve balls and you don’t know when you might meet the person who you genuinely feel like there could be something pretty big with, and that sometimes when it happens, that person is involved with someone else.

However (and it is a big however), people who genuinely love, care, trust, and respect you and want to be with you in a committed way, are not going to engage in an ongoing deception.

If you have to wonder or ask if someone is going to leave someone else for you, it says the following:

Whatever you both have going on between the two of you, he has not given you enough (or even any) security and assurance that you and him are going to have a bonafide relationship.