Ruth L. Schwartz explains why lesbian relationships often hit a wall around three months: each partner's attachment style emerges once the honeymoon phase fades. One becomes clingy, the other withdraws. These push-pull cycles create blame and often end in breakups by six to eight months.
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So I want to talk to you right now about a painful topic, which is why dating can get so crazy between women. I hear a lot of stories about 2 women starting to date and it feeling really, really good, and then some freakout happens. Sometimes one of the women gets super jealous and clingy, and the other woman is like, what's up with this? You know, like, all of a sudden you're jealous of me talking to the neighbor, you're jealous of my friends, you're jealous of my dog. And, and then the relationship falls apart. Or on the other side of it, the 2 women are dating and it's going great. Or at least it seems to be going great for a while, and then one woman finds that the other woman is like pulling away and getting more and more distant. And all of a sudden she doesn't answer your texts, or she takes hours and hours or days and days. And, you know, you're just kind of feeling like she's going like this, and you don't understand what happened. Have you ever had either one of these experiences? So I'm Ruth Schwartz. I'm the director of the Conscious Girlfriend Academy, which is the leading global resource for lesbians and queer women and all women who love women or want to, offering classes and resources around how to date in ways that are smart for our hearts so that we can have the happy, healthy lesbian relationships that we want and deserve. So we do classes on dating, relationships, and sexuality. So I get to actually hear from thousands of lesbians and queer women all around the world on these topics. And what I see happening oftentimes that, that people don't understand is that we each have an inbuilt template for attachment. And attachment is the psychological term for bonding, which is what starts happening when We get all into each other, you know, and, and you get to that point where all you can think about is the other person, and you want to kiss her and touch her and text her and talk about her and gaze into her eyes. We go into a state called limerence, which is a brain drug state where the other person for a while looks absolutely amazing and perfect for you in every way. And all those problems that you had in past relationships You know you will not have with this person because you finally met the right one for you, right? Well, I've been there, I've done that, I've gotten the t-shirt so many times. I don't teach Conscious Girlfriend Academy classes because lesbian love has been easy for me. Quite the contrary. I teach because I've been obsessed with trying to understand how to make love Finally work out well. I mean, I have had some very happy, healthy, long-term relationships, but I've also had a lot of shorter relationships that started in a blaze of passion and good feeling and lust for sure, and what we thought was love. And then quickly went bad, and oftentimes it went bad on one of those 2 routes where either the other person became so clingy I remember one time somebody I'd been dating a couple months and she was coming to my house for dinner. We were actually going to have dinner with another couple. And I called her and said, you know, looking forward to seeing you and just wanted to let you know, I don't think I'm going to want you to spend the night tonight. And she freaked out. She was like, how can you be so cruel? You know, so that happened and— So we could put her in the kind of, oh my God, why'd she get so clingy category. Of course, she would tell you a different story. And, and I could tell you a different story from the times that I have been on the other side of that kind of dynamic. So for instance, I was dating another woman. I was so into her. And, and she would leave my house and she'd say, I'll call you when I get home. And then hours and hours and hours and hours would go by, and I knew when she would have gotten home. No call, no call, no call. And that really hurt. And I would feel like, well, why did she say she would call me when she got home? I didn't even actually need her to do that, but then I'm expecting her to do that. She doesn't do that. So what's up with that? And sometimes I have also dated women who would seem to go back and forth between this kind of behavior, where some of the time— I had this one amazing girlfriend who was super sensitive to any sign of rejection on the one hand. Like, again, if I didn't want to see her on a particular day, or if I didn't want to see her every day, she would get really upset. upset. But then she also would really need time for herself and didn't know how to ask me for it. And so sometimes she would do these real kind of distancing behaviors. Like, she— we were a long-distance relationship, and I had been visiting her for— well, I rented an Airbnb, but I was there for a month. And then I flew home. And, and then she didn't want to talk to me for a week, but she didn't communicate upfront about that. So again, it really hurt. So why do we do these kinds of things? You know, again, it goes back to our attachment style, our bonding style, and in the first few months of a relationship, oftentimes these kinds of differences or issues don't come up because we're in this kind of magical honeymoon period with these brain drugs that make us feel, you know, all smoothed out. Like our jagged edges that we all have don't show up at first. But then usually just a few months in— sometimes it happens even faster, sometimes it happens just a few weeks in— but usually by the time you get to 3 months or so, I see between women These kinds of differences will often emerge, and if you don't understand what you're dealing with, it can completely destroy the relationship. And oftentimes we don't necessarily break up right away at that 3-month mark. Sometimes we do. But I've had a number of relationships that more like around the 6 to 8-month mark We just couldn't do it anymore. And oftentimes the seed of the problem started earlier around the 3-month mark where the other person or I fell into that kind of pattern where it was either like me wanting more and her backing away, or her wanting more and me backing away. So there are actually reasons. If this has happened to you on either side, or again with a girlfriend that kind of gave you mixed signals in both directions, it's not because you're crazy. It's not because she's crazy. It's not because there's anything wrong with either one of us, either one of you. But it is because these attachment style differences can start to loom really large in our brains and start giving us danger signals. And some of us are more prone to the danger signals when it feels like the other person is too far away. And some of us are more prone when it feels like the other person is too close. And some of us actually, you know, some of our childhoods predisposed us to Getting scared in both directions, if she's too close or if she's too far away. But most of the time we don't even necessarily know that this is what's happening, and so we will blame the other person, like, you're just scared of intimacy. Well, you're just too dependent on me. I know what intimacy really is, and you know, you're not doing it right. Well, You know, I know what it is to be a healthy, independent human being, and you're not doing it right. So when we get into these kinds of blame cycles, that really destroys that beautiful intimacy and love that we started out with. So what's the solution? Visit us at consciousgirlfriend.com— consciousgirlfriendacademy.com and check out our classes on attachment healing. Because that's really what's at the root of this issue. So again, consciousgirlfriendacademy.com, attachment healing. It will make a world of difference in your life when you really understand more about how this attachment stuff works. It's these kinds of struggles, which I sometimes call push-pull dynamics, are actually the Number one cause of lesbian relationship problems and breakups, and we don't have to suffer the way we've been suffering. You don't have to suffer the way you might have been suffering with this. There really is an alternative. So check it out. I'm I'm here to help you and me and all of us women who love women have the happy, healthy love. We want and deserve.
