#25 - Are you actually ready to be dating?

Well folks, this one came out of nowhere!

I sat down to record something completely different and ended up talking about something I have spent a lot of time thinking about recently…which is that a lot of people are dating before they’re actually ready…

We talk about how it feels to call something connection when it’s actually coming from a place you haven’t faced yet, why it feels different every time even when it isn’t, and why you keep ending up in the same patterns.

This isn’t about avoiding relationships, it’s about understanding where you’re choosing from, because we loooooooove accountability over here at TMG 

Thanks for tuning into That Makeup Gal! If you loved what you heard, be sure to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re feeling generous, drop a review—it helps more people find the show. Connect with me on Instagram @thatmakeupgal.pod for more behind-the-scenes moments, tips, and all the good vibes. Until next time, keep being unapologetically you bb!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

G'day folks and welcome back to that makeup gal. Oh, that felt weird adding another word in there. I'm Stevie and I'm that makeup gal. I have like a weird virus at the moment, so my laugh sounds like I am a hard-out pack-a-day smoker. Please forgive that. I'm just gonna jump right in. I was actually planning on having an episode about something entirely different, and this feels appropriate. So I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about my strong belief in not dating until you have your shit together. And how a lot of people actually have this uh I was gonna say twisted, but perhaps that's not right. Maybe I should just say it's more common that people have uh the polar opposite uh advice to give in this scenario. Usually you hear it'll happen when you least expect it. Um you just put yourself out there and you never know, like it's not gonna turn up at your doorstep, blah blah fucking blah. But I think all this does is encourage people to expand into a space that they're not yet ready to expand into. And I think it's really quite the opposite where people should be um focusing more on the pullback instead of the absolute throwback in to society or life or whatever it is. I just think that relationships aren't something to fill a void, and um somewhere along the way we all got a bit fucking muddled with that, and it almost is the narrative that someone will come into your life and fill the missing piece or is the final piece to your puzzle, and cute, but that's really not what this is all about. Isn't it about having you know complete certainty or as much certainty as you can in that point in your life that you've completed your own puzzle, and that anybody that comes into your life is going to be an expansion of your already complete or work in progress puzzle? It's gotta be done by us, it's gotta be us at the centre of it all, and I think what happens is a lot of people throw themselves into the dating pool and aren't honest for starters about why they're there and are in particular sort of avoiding or just doing the typical post-breakup um dance, and it means that the the lines get really, really blurred because people are experiencing feelings and situations and encounters with people when intentions are really fucking blurry and yark, and that could be yours and it could be the other person's, it could be both. But yeah, what happens is I think when you um expand into let's say dating specifically. Oops, that's gonna be annoying. Sorry, I just fucked up the microphone cord. Yeah, what's gonna happen when you expand into the dating scene before you're ready is not only are you going to be putting forward a version of yourself that isn't probably as authentic authentic as it should be, you're going to be in a different frame of mind in terms of what you'll accept as well. And that often means that we miss signs, we miss red flags, we miss fucking all the things that we wouldn't ordinarily miss had we been in a more healed chapter in terms of relationships, romance, fucking connections, communication, all of those things that should be on their way to being healed before you try and seek a relationship. I don't think enough people fucking talk about this. I don't know why. Is it uncomfortable? Like, obviously, you know, we're all work in progress. It's fucking 24-7-365. So it's not about getting yourself to a healed place, but like when it comes to relationship wounds, at least being aware of your own toxic patterns and tendencies and you know, be in a pattern or a place of alright, I really want to expand into relationships and consider inviting somebody into my life. Um, that's gonna be the topic of conversation with my therapist now in terms of seeking healthy relationships or connections, blah blah blah. Like, as long as you are in a place where you are actively uh navigating and exploring that chapter, then cool. But if it is laced with anything like avoidance or pain, anger, resentment, um what's the other one? Fucking when they want to get back at you. Revenge. Um, yeah, it's just a recipe for disaster. And you know, the the the conversations that we hear in any scenario are always gonna be on either end of the spectrum in terms of full drama or full devastation. Not a lot of people talk about the in-between, the normal. That's why there's so much talk about, well I believe, there's so much talk about the patterns and the toxicities and the whatever it might be in terms of communication expectations in dating fucking 2026. Um it's not actually the norm. Like I said, it's just the most communicated about because it's the most dramatic. So yeah, I think they're the troubles that we sort of fall into when we are externally searching for someone or something to to fill a void or to help us not face the thing that's hurting us, so we can um avoid that thing with you know, a cute little romance. And the truth is, you're only ever gonna meet someone where you're at. That's one thing that I think I'm gonna digress for a second, unlike me. Um, that's one thing that I learned through grief, and I've now learned is a pretty common thing for grievers, because you experience this thing that you to an extent think that you have an understanding of, and you know, if you haven't experienced lost people around you have, you you're like, Oh, I think I've got a pretty decent understanding of what happened, I saw my friend go through it, whatever. And then it happens to you, and you're like, Oh my fucking god, nothing in the world could have prepared me for this. And I remember going through a certain um chapter in the early days of grief where I actually messaged my friends and family who had lost people that they loved, in particular parents, and said, Like, I know we've shared stories about your loss, but I just want to say how sorry I am that I didn't understand the gravity of what you could have come like what you were feeling. Um, I couldn't comprehend it, obviously, but I had I known that you were in this much pain and that it hurt this much, um, I would have shown up differently. And I love you, whatever. And of course, everybody fucking replied and was like, Don't be stupid, you can't comprehend this until you experience it. They know that as well, because it's truly one of those experiences in life that you can only comprehend once it's happened. Like childbirth, I imagine. You're not gonna fucking have a converse conversation with somebody who hasn't given birth about giving birth. You'd be like, you truly have no concept of this conversation, please. Um, clearly different conversations, but same same sort of thing. Yeah. So looping back, that is what made me realize that you truly can only ever comprehend things that you have comprehended within your life. And relationships is one of those things. And if you haven't addressed or faced parts of relationships or connections or um what comes like with being in that kind of relationship, then chances are you're gonna be caught off guard at some stage, and that's gonna happen anyway, obviously. Like, that's a whole fucking other conversation, but it is just so important that we have faced and understood all parts of ourselves to the best that we can before we leap in. That's how we end up in the same cycles, that's how we end up in the same patterns and scenarios, you know. Like, I only ever pick the fuckheads, and I don't know why I continually find myself in this scenario. Why did this happen again? And it's like, at what stage do we go? Something's gotta give here because why the fuck am I finding myself in these same scenarios? As my dad would have said, there's a common denominator here, and it's nobody but you. You are the common denominator, figure it out, and then maybe the next chapter will feel different, of course it will. So that's the same, obviously, um, in this scenario with um relationships and making sure that you get yourself on or towards the path of the healthiest connection um that you can possibly have. And that's never gonna change if you don't become conscious of actions, responses, uh, expectations, boundaries, all of those things that are in place in your own life, um, and kind of go, what do we need to change here? What what what do I need to undo, unlearn, um learn, fucking whatever it is, so that I don't continually find myself in this scenario because yeah, those short-term kind of gains feel good initially, but rarely do they feel good in the long run. Going back to what I was talking about with the fucking puzzle analogy, you know, sure, it sounds sweet in theory to have somebody be the final piece of your puzzle and to be the missing link and whatever other fucking analogy you want to use in terms of let's call a spade a spade, referring to yourself as incomplete and only complete once you meet that other person. And I don't want to get all fucking you know preachy, but let me get preachy. That ain't it. Like I said, you need to expand from something that is fully formed that you've set up yourself. We can learn from other people and we can um expand and gain knowledge and understanding, and we can unlearn through other people as well, but we can't allow another person to fill a void, even if they offer us the opportunity to understand that void, it's still onto us to fill that ourselves, and we find that by looking at the other surrounding scenarios, and we patch it up ourselves, and that's how we get the healthiest connections and outcomes and communications and everything, and you don't find yourself in the same scenarios that you know looped in the same cycles, you just literally don't find yourself there. You get to this point in your life or in your journey where you just don't find yourself in the same rooms anymore because the ones that you would once enter and feel uncomfortable in, you then get to a place where you're like, I don't even want to go fucking near it, mate. Like it I'm not giving it my time. And the same thing goes, and that is actually so fucking important. If you are one of the people that has had that ingrained in you fucking generationally, or whatever it was, that that's a a bad thing to sort of be self-centered and to put yourself there, then please, for the love of fucking god, unlearn that because we ain't doing that anymore. So it always feels weird to kind of um personalize this, but you know, fuck, what are we if we aren't using our lived experiences as uh potential learning opportunities for other people and especially ourselves? So I found myself in a scenario that ate me alive, and the only reason that it ate me alive, this was in terms of a relationship, was because of all the external things that it brought up for me. I've spoken about this in regards to grief before and the fact that grief isn't actually the whole loss of the thing or the person, uh, which is actually the narrative that we get sold. You know, grief is the death of the person, and it's just not. Grief is that, um, but grief is also the fucking uprising of every other thing in your life, because when grief or the loss happens, your walls fall completely down that everything's exposed. And this was one of those scenarios where uh the absolute heartache that came from the scenario again had nothing to do with the scenario, but everything that it brought up and exposed, and uh yeah, relationship wounds and all of those things became alarmingly loud to me, and all the things that I thought that I had neatly fucking put together and put away and healed and dealt with was like you are not even close. Uh and that was confronting, and I feel like I lost a lot of time um due to that, which was odd because I'm not usually that person. Uh I am the person that brutally gives advice that says, you know, what the fuck are you doing, wasting time on another human creton? Like, wake the fuck up to yourself, and then here's me feeling like I'm losing eight months of my life to something that you know I reach the other side of it and I look at and go, what can't? And that's where the whole realization of why it's so important to try and go into things as healed as possible. Like, you know, you want your dream job. Obviously, if your dream job comes up and you're not in that scenario and you can fake it well enough to make it, then fucking go for gold. But ideally, your dream job comes up when you have polished all the other things that are gonna get in your way to make that scenario the best possible. Do you know what I mean? Like that's the aim of the game. There's that fucking winny gold laugh, yuck. But yeah, you want yourself, you want to be in a place where it's as healed as possible so that you don't lose six to eight months of your life trying to patch things up only to re to learn the lesson that should have been clear from the beginning. And you know, all of the things that I have now learnt, um, sure as fuck won't make their way up in the the next connection. So, you know, lesson learned and job j job done, I guess, because I did learn the lessons, but I guess that's why it's important that you speak about these things because there is a potential that people can learn the lessons before they have to experience something like this, and yeah, we need people to speak about it and to to encourage people to explore their emotional um capacities, and especially if that's an area of their life that they want to expand in, like you want a partner, you want to whatever, you're ready to step into that, then you need to be polishing that particular place. Yeah, so when I found myself, oops, just knocked the microphone, don't know if that's gonna have sounded like something. When I found myself in that scenario, the one thing that I found the most confronting was how humiliating it feels when you learn all the lessons and come out the other side and look back at the scenario that you were in and go, what are you doing? What was that all about? Um, and yeah, like I said, you certainly don't miss those signals from the get-go, and perhaps you won't invest time in gaining a connection that's only going to end in heartache anyway, because you see the signs and go, no thanks. Like I said earlier, you might fill a void temporarily, but once that void's filled, and I get sick of that because I want to keep going and realise that every other part of your puzzle doesn't align with mine, and I'm like, you know, would you rather invest that time in yourself than experience a half-lived connection with somebody that's gonna result in the same amount of time spent anyway? So yeah, I'm one of the ones that has dedicated and chosen to spend my time going within and learning the lessons, and sometimes the conversations that are sort of more popular in society aren't actually the ones that should be being had. Like this one in particular, like keeping yourself off the shelf while you go through a particular chapter of your life instead of get yourself out there, put yourself out there, you never know, you've got to be in it to win it. It just doesn't result in um commonly, it doesn't result in complete alignment because you gotta process that shit. You've got to take time to get to know yourself after those sorts of losses and grieve those things. Grief is a big part of um relationship loss, it's not just something that follows death, and and that is really fucking odd to be honest, that it's a general part of the conversation with life cycles but not relationship cycles. It's an ending. And grieving that is important, and part of grieving that is not avoidance and throwing yourself back in the dating pool, it's kind of the total opposite and dating yourself and getting to know yourself in those chapters of your life and healing the wounds that maybe came up in that last chapter, so that when you do eventually step into the dating pool or the relationship or connection pool, whether they that could even be friendships, um it's gonna be built on healthy boundaries and foundations because as far as you know, you've addressed the things that actively hurt, and even if they're not healed, like I said, you're working on them and you're aware of them, and that's when you find alignment. Yeah. Anyway, I feel like that's that's it. This is a short one again. Um, I'm trying to encourage myself to sort of step in front of the microphone and talk about things before I think about them too much. Um, I know that sounds controversial, but uh sometimes I get caught in a bit of a procrastination loop where I feel like I need to structure things out, and in doing that, I dissect things and I try to put a fucking uh script in front of me and put prompts and it just doesn't work. It doesn't work. Yeah, that's what I'm encouraging myself to do because progress over perfection. I also said uh to myself that I would remove my earrings because they click in the microphone, but silly me, just thought about how I would look in the camera, and I've been clicking away this whole time. So yeah, that's gonna be an interesting one because I can't edit that out. Anyway, thanks for being here as always. I am grateful for any set of ears that want to listen to me, and I think it's really cool that we are all stepping into places where we want to learn more about ourselves and um improve parts of ourselves and understand parts of ourselves, and none of that can happen if people like myself aren't having conversations that even one person can relate to. So, yeah. Thanks for listening, as I said, uh until next time. Bye.