Dating coach Anwar White breaks down three relationship traps for successful women: performing, perfectionism, and taking on too much emotional labor. She draws on the show Unprisoned and her own experience with parental incarceration to explain how to ask for help, set boundaries, and let go of needing to be perfect.
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Girl, dating as a smart and successful woman is, like, one of the hardest things that you're gonna have to do. Now, I just finished watching season two of Unprisoned on Hulu, and it was amazing. I loved it. Now, obviously, we have our girl, Kerry Washington, legend Delroy Lindo, and hott hot John Stamos. Yes, girl, yes. Look. I partnered with Hulu and the Onyx Collective to share my insights as a dating and relationship coach in terms of how to navigate those relationships as a smart and successful woman. Here's the thing. The protagonist, Paige Alexander, she's a messy, perfectionist relationship therapist whose dad has come back from prison and is living with her now. And there are some certain challenges that are involved when you are smart and successful. And I want to share those with you and how to overcome them so that you can thrive in your relationships. Now, this series is amazing, but it holds a special place in my heart because my dad was also incarcerated. And I think that watching this show can really help you because if you've had an emotionally or physically absent parent, you will also resonate with this show. So, so much like I was saying before, smart women often have relationship challenges because of what I call the three P's. And I'll talk about them right now. Now, the first P is all about performance. And performance is when you grow up and you get good grades or you do well in sports or you do things around the house because you want to be liked. You teach yourself that I have to do things for another person to get affection and love and be cherished, and that's not the case. And so what I want you to do instead is I want you to ask for help as much as possible, and I want you to set boundaries when you start to feel like I don't like what I'm doing and you're doing things based on obligation versus pleasure. Secondly, perfectionism. So you know those girls who always give all of their friends really great advice because they just have a lot of knowledge and they're smart, but they never, like, live their lives to actually need the advice that they're giving. This is often the case for perfectionist individuals. And perfectionism is really wanting to be obviously perfect but really sensitive to criticism and only do things that they're really good at, and they never take chances. And so what I want, if you consider yourself a perfectionist, I want you to do the things that you're not necessarily good at. Be a little messy. And I think Paige does an amazing job of this, because when you are perfectly, imperfectly human. You will actually relate to others much better than if you are perfect. You will never. You'll be admired. You'll never be truly loved, loved and related to. And this is important if you want to have a certain level of deep connection and intimacy in your relationships. The third p is all about parentification, and this is where you've had to take care of your parents as a child and ignore some of your own feelings and needs. Now, what I love about this show is that it has certain scenes of how to exactly speak to your inner child and engage her in a way that is soft and gentle. Now, I always think it's important to think about the time that you are between the ages of 8 and 13 and start to engage in those sorts of activities so that you can start to explore this totality of who you are versus just being responsible all day, every day as a smart and successful individual. This is how, again, you will deeply connect with other people and level up your relationships.
Watch Unprison Season 2 now it's out on Hulu. I know that when you do this, you're going to love it as much as I did, and I think that you're going to learn something while being entertained.
