Hello, my loves. Today, I want to talk about fantasies…and I don’t mean the sexy kind.

Today, I want to talk about fantasy dating: when a relationship ends in the early days, but it leaves you completely heartbroken. You feel like you can’t get over them because you are hanging on to the fantasy of what could have been.

Fantasy dating was once a huge pattern of mine. I would project this massive fantasy onto people early on in the relationship, then be devastated when it didn’t work out.

My clients also engage in this kind of fantasy dating all the time. I’ve had so many one-to-one clients who have this happen and go, “Oh, but he was everything I ever wanted.”

Like…you’ve known him for two weeks, babe. How can you possibly know that?

While I don’t believe that the timeframe of a relationship necessarily equates to  the depth of feelings, I do believe that you can’t possibly know this person well enough to know if they were “the one” after two weeks.

You’re not grieving the relationship of your dreams. You’re grieving a dream—period.

The Fantasy Dating Phenomenon

So, let’s recap.

You’re in this phase where these little relationships don’t work out, and you end up heartbroken over them.

Here’s the deal: you’re not actually heartbroken over them. You’re heartbroken over the fantasy that you have stitched over them in your head.

It’s fantasy dating because even though you were actually dating, you didn’t have the relationship you thought you did. It was a fantasy—meaning, it was never real. This fantasy dating relationship was just an image you projected onto this person.

How do I know? Because you were dating for a month. You can’t possibly have seen all the shades of this person within a month.

The Reality Check

Listen…even in my own relationship, I had to give myself this reality check about fantasy dating. My partner and I met at a tantra retreat, and we spent 24/7 together for a week.

We saw many, many, many sides of each other. He saw so many aspects of myself, and  that was all well and good…but I truly thought, “Oh my gosh, he’s seen everything.”

He, in fact, had not.

The projections of fantasy dating don’t always end early on. If the relationship goes on, those fantasies might crash and burn much, much later.

About nine months into our relationship, we started having some friction, because we were no longer in the honeymoon period. We were seeing each other’s true colors without the projections and filters we’d thrown over them.

When the relationship ends early on, you haven’t gotten to that place on your own—the filters are still up for you. You’re still wearing the rose-colored glasses. So when it ends, you end up grieving this dream man and dream relationship…that was never actually real. You just never got to the part where you started seeing the whole picture.

Girl, You Don’t Even Know Him

I want you to hear me on this one.

I want you to take off the rosy lenses of fantasy dating for a moment and realize something: when you are deeply grieving someone that you were with for a short amount of time…you really didn’t know him.

I say that with love, truly. I am not superior here—I understand exactly how it feels. This is a conversation I have had to have with myself soooo many times.

“My heart might be so caught up in this man, but also—use your brain for a second, Michelle—you don’t know him.”

There’s no possible way in hell that in two weeks, a month, two months, three months, whatever it might be, that I could have seen every aspect of that man. We hadn’t gone on a long trip together. We hadn’t been sick together. We hadn’t made a meal together. We hadn’t split bills or bought a house or even kept our toothbrushes together, for fuck’s sake. We weren’t even together long enough to have an argument, let alone go through the trials and tribulations long-term relationships will eventually endure.

In order to break the fantasy dating filter, you have to understand that you haven’t fallen in love with the person in front of you.

You’ve fallen in love with potential. You’ve fallen in love with the person you’ve projected them to be. You’ve fallen in love with the fantasy of how life was going to be with them.

And maybe…just maybe…you’ve also fallen in love with who you get to be when you’re with him.

Maybe when you’re with this person, you are very playful or confident or charismatic or  easygoing. Maybe traits come out in you that you haven’t gotten to explore through other avenues.

So is it actually that you “fell in love” with this person…or did you actually fall in love with these exciting new aspects of yourself?

Breaking the Fantasy

Now, going all the way to the other end of the spectrum isn’t the way to go about shaking off this fantasy dating filter.

It’s not about swinging the pendulum and hyper-focusing on this guy’s flaws instead of all the things you “loved” about him. You could sit there and list off all the reasons he actually sucked—“He was such an asshole, he couldn’t commit, he wasn’t emotionally available,” and blah, blah, blah, blah—but that’s not actually going to help you.

Fantasizing over his bad qualities isn’t going to help you move on from your fantasy dating fixation—it’s just going to feel like throwing glitter on shit. It might cover it up, but at the end of the day, it’s still shit. It’s still a pattern that you haven’t owned.

Instead, you need to make yourself look at it objectively. You need to use your brain and regulate yourself so that you can come down from that heightened state of obsessing over what could have been, come back down into your body, and realize that you were falling in love with an idea of a person. You were falling for the idea of a relationship.

Chemistry Isn’t Rare

When we’re in love—or we think we’re in love—it’s easy to slap some “Dream Partner”  bumper stickers on this man. It’s easy to turn the dial up on someone who’s actually not what you want and make them much more appealing in your imagination.

Sure, you had so much fun together. Of course you did. You went out and you got cocktails together. I could have fun with fucking anyone if we were getting cocktails. That’s not hard to do, right?

Yeah, maybe you had chemistry. Having chemistry with someone is not rare, contrary to what people might think.  I’ve had and could have chemistry with many, many, many, many, many people.

If I went to the gym on a Monday morning—let’s say there’s roughly fifty people there at the same time—I would imagine that I would have some sort of sexual chemistry  with at least five of them.  Probably more. But that doesn’t mean I’m missing out by not engaging with them. I don’t fucking know them.

Chemistry is not rare. And if you’re telling yourself the story that it’s so rare, then of course you’re never going to want to let go of this guy. You’ve painted out this fantasy dating world where chemistry only comes around once in a lifetime.

Frankly, I hate that narrative. And honestly, I don’t know how I feel about the idea of soulmates at all.

I think it’s a really romantic way of saying “We’re meant to be,” but it can also cause a major scarcity mindset that just isn’t healthy.

Any one of you would be able to have a healthy, stable, beautiful relationship with about 500,000 different people.

I’m not even being funny when I say that. There’s what, eight billion people on the planet? Let’s say half of them are men, so that’s four billion men. Let’s take out really old people and kids; we’ll call it two billion men.

You really don’t think that 500,000 men out of two billion could probably have a healthy relationship with you? I think they could.

You want to get out of this mindset that if this man doesn’t want you, you’re never going to find anyone. That’s just not true.

So I want you to sit and ask yourself: was it actually rare, or am I telling myself that story so that I can continue to play in this fantasy dating dynamic?

Go All In

So let’s stop focusing on what we lost, shall we?

You didn’t lose the love of your life.  You lost the illusion of who you thought they were.  You lost the fantasy of the future,  and that’s painful. Absolutely. You are allowed to grieve that…but i also want you to recognize it for what it is.

Once you’ve done that, you can redirect that energy to building yourself the fuck back up.

Do the actual work—don’t just passively listen or read things (hint hint), but actually start doing the work. Take the time that you were spending ruminating on why things didn’t work out and committing to this fantasy dating story and pour it into you.

So much can happen when you actually decide to go all in on you.

In fact, I was on a call for The Experience (my year-long group mentorship program) last week, and one of the girls is finishing up her year this week.  We were both fucking sobbing on the call, and she was like, “You’ve literally changed my fucking life. I don’t even know the person who came in here anymore.”

I love this girl. I’m so fucking proud of her, because she decided to go all in. She committed with her finances, with her time, with her energy, and with her mind. She was open. She was curious. She was ready and willing to take feedback. And now her life is completely fucking different.

When you go all in, everything changes. But if you are choosing to stay stuck and ruminate on this man you never even knew, nothing’s going to shift. You’ll get into the same fucking relationship with a different person, and the cycle starts all over again.

You get to decide: you can continue to play into this fantasy dating pattern and be the victim of what could have been, or you can take the ending of this connection as a fucking wake-up call.

The person who left isn’t here. They’re not coming back.  But you’re here. What are you going to do?

You’re the one who gets to decide what happens next.  The future is in your hands. But no one’s going to come and save you. No one’s going to come make your life better. You’re the one who gets to decide, “You know what? It’s been real. It’s been fun obsessing over this man. (Not.) But I’m ready to do something else with my life.”

If you’re ready to make the next move, I invite you to come join The Connected Woman, or The Experience to get a full year of working with me.

I’m ready and waiting when you are.  Let’s turn that heartbreak into your biggest fucking glow up, babe. 

WORK WITH MICHELLE: 

Join THE CONNECTED WOMAN, a shadow-work course for women who want to go from feeling anxious AF about their love lives to feeling confident, secure and having unfuckwithable self-worth: https://michellepanning.com/the-connected-woman

Join The EXPERIENCE, a year-long mentorship for the woman who wants to play in the frequency of big love, epic sex and mind-blowing relationships with men…and herself: https://michellepanning.com/the-experience 

Ready to stop obsessing over texts, chasing unavailable men, and feeling like you’re always one step away from being abandoned? Sign up for my FREE masterclass, CLINGY TO CONFIDENT: https://michellepanning.thrivecart.com/clingy-to-confident/ 

CONNECT WITH MICHELLE:

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Website: http://www.michellepanning.com