A coaching-style YouTube video by Danielle Thornton (anxiety and OCD recovery coach) explaining why people often struggle with attraction in dating and relationships — framing it as a fear/anxiety response that causes the brain to hyper-focus on negatives and exaggerate flaws. The speaker offers eight concrete tips (four for dating, four for people in relationships): for daters — choose five core must-have qualities, avoid judging too quickly, look for behavioral patterns rather than single moments, and list 3 deal-breakers; for partnered people — focus on positives, accept partner and self flaws, avoid trying to change someone, and move toward intimacy despite discomfort. The video also references relationship anxiety/ROCD and points viewers to recovery programs linked in the description.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, helping people live life free of anxiety and OCD so they can love and be happy. So today we're going to talk about attraction. And a lot of people struggle with this issue. I know for me, I really struggled with it for about 6, 17 years. Didn't really realize it, but I was always finding myself not attracted to people I was dating, or my brain was always finding things wrong with them. And I often had that sense of, I'm just not attracted, I'm not feeling it. I'm not feeling the connection or the spark. Now, this can also happen when you're in a relationship. It can happen from the very beginning. It could also happen in the middle, where somebody might be feeling like they're not attracted to their partner. And it's common not to be attracted to everybody, but this is actually a very common fear response. The brain is very interesting and works in interesting ways. And when you have discomfort with relationships, that may be a lot of anxiety. It may be a very low level of discomfort where you just find yourself avoiding relationships. You might find that you struggle with attraction, even to people who are good looking, even to people who other people find attractive or to somebody that you once found attractive and now you're struggling with that attraction. What happens is that the brain really starts to hyper focus on negatives, and it starts to look for certain feelings when it feels like it needs to protect you. Sometimes the brain finds that relationships are scary, they're uncomfortable, we might get hurt. So our brain starts to try to protect us. And when it does this, it shifts our perspective. It changes. It starts to scan for danger. So back during the period of time where I was single for a very long time, I didn't realize my brain was doing this at that time, but. But it was hyper focusing and judging people in a very negative way. It was seeing more of the negatives than it was the positives, and it was making very small negative things big. Right. Fear exaggerates things. So it will seek perfection either in the way that somebody looks or compatibility, or it will think that we need all of these checkboxes ticked off our list in order to be happy. It will hyper focus on people's flaws. It will hyper focus on our flaws and think that we need to be perfect before we can get into a relationship. It judges way too quickly. Now, what do you do when you notice that this is a pattern in your life? Either if you're dating or you're in a relationship and that you're struggling with attraction. So I'm going to give you eight tips. Four if you're dating, four if you're in a relationship. And then we'll explore a little bit further after that. Now, first, if you are dating, I want you to pick five qualities that you absolutely have to have in a partner. Things that are important at your core. Right. For me, that would have been emotional availability, kindness, outgoing, financially stable, and somebody who wants a family. The reason why I want you to pick five is because I want you to. When you're dating, I want you to use these five must haves to guide you in who you're looking for. And then the rest of it, you're going to let go. You're going to pick the five most important things that you are looking for. And that way your brain can't focus so much on those negatives. If you're focused on those five important traits that you're looking for in a partner now, your brain is going to tell you that, nope, there's 10, there's 15. If you want to go to 6, that's fine, but stick to that because we want to narrow it down to the most important things and everything else is icing on the cake. And you're also going to get some things that you don't want. Right. That's everybody. Nobody finds a perfect partner. The next thing I want you to work on is not judging too quickly. So as you are getting to know somebody, when you notice your brain judging them, I want you to stop it. Stop the judgment and just keep talking. Be in the present moment, focus on the date. You can decide whether you like them or not later. But don't spend the whole date judging what they say, what they do, what they're wearing. Right. We want to look at the big picture and not judge every little moment and thing that you notice during that date. I want you to look for patterns of behavior and not just one thing that you determine is a red flag when it may not be right. Anxiety will cause us to hyper focus on one thing and think that, oh my gosh, because they did this, there's something wrong. There may or may not be, but oftentimes when we're anxious, we judge a moment or a situation and it may or may not be true. So I want you to make sure that you are. Put that thing in your back pocket is okay, well, this guy, you know, hasn't been in a relationship in 10 years. Is that a red flag? I don't know. Maybe. Let Me put that in my back pocket and just get to know more about him instead of saying, oh well, if he hasn't been in a relationship in 10 years, there's something wrong with him. There's a lot of factors there. So don't take one thing and make it mean something. You want to look at the big picture? What? Or a pattern of behaviors. Next, I want you to write down your three, maybe five at the most, but three deal breakers, okay? And these are the things that even if you met the best looking person and most charming person on the earth, these three, maybe five things are deal breakers for you. Maybe that's drug use, maybe that's addiction. Those are both pretty good deal breakers, right? Criminal history, maybe it doesn't mean that we can't forgive or overlook things, but for a lot of us, these are common deal breakers. Marriage would be another one, right? So I want you to use your must haves and your deal breakers as a guide and the rest is going to be flexible. Now if you are in a relationship or tips that I want to give you, number one, focus on what you like about your partner, not what you don't like. Again, the anxious brain will hyper focus on the negative. You can train your brain not to do this. I want you to start focusing on what you do like about your partner a lot more than what you don't. It's okay if you notice something that you don't like, but I don't want you to hyper focus on that. I want you to start to practice and be grateful for what you do like about your partner. Accepting them for who they are is very important. Number two, you're going to practice also accepting your partner's flaws and their shortcomings. Everybody is going to have them, okay? So we need to allow our partners to be imperfect because number three, we're not perfect either, right? So it's important that we accept our own shortcomings and we don't beat ourselves up for it. The same is true with our partner. We have have to accept that they have flaws and it's okay to express needs and express boundaries, but we have to be careful about trying to change somebody into who we want them to be. Because that's just not going to happen. Nobody's ever going to be exactly who they want, that who we want them to be. People can, we can express our needs, right? We can have needs. But you want to choose carefully which needs that you're asking for and that you're not expecting perfection. Asking somebody to completely change so Number two, accepting your partner's flaws and number three, accepting that we have flaws as well and that everyone and all relationships are imperfect. And then number four, I want you to move towards intimacy even when it's uncomfortable. Now this doesn't go for a brand new relationship where you've just met two weeks ago. I'm not saying go have sex with this person, right? And I'm not saying if the person has done something that you need to be intimate with them. What I'm saying is discomfort, fear and anxiety will often cause us to avoid intimacy and our brain's going to come up with all kinds of excuses as why we shouldn't do it. What we need to do is push ourselves towards the discomforts and the fears that we have so that they will eventually become comfortable. Because the more you avoid, the more you're going to reinforce the discomfort and fear. Believe me, I avoided relationships for about 17 years of my life and it just made that anxiety worse. When I decided to get into a relationship, I worked through it, but I wish I wouldn't have avoided for so long because avoidance always reinforces that fear and discomfort. Now if any of you are experiencing anxiety in relationships or even relationship ocd, which consists of obsessions about relationships, so constantly thinking about them, followed by compulsions to get rid of the discomfort or gain certainty. Things like reassurance seeking, checking, ruminating, comparing, there's a bunch of them. You can check out the description below for recovery programs. I have personally fully recovered from relationship anxiety, relationship ocd, fearful avoidant, attachment style, whatever you want to call it, it's all kind of coming from the same place. OCD is a bit of a different animal, but it's all fear and anxiety based. I am here to help you with this. I hope these tips were really helpful. Stay tuned for more videos. Make sure you subscribe and comment if you enjoyed this material and we'll talk to you very soon.
