Dating as an Adult Child of Divorce, Part 1: Self-Worth
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Generally speaking, dating in the 21st century is an exercise in humility. That’s probably good for you in many ways, but oftentimes you wish you would have just stayed home and had a date with Netflix instead. Adding your Catholic faith to the mix makes it even trickier and more precarious. And if you come from a broken family, like many of us do, dating can become not just an exercise in humility, but misery as well. If you are fortunate enough to make it through the awkward first dates and start a relationship, an entirely new set of challenges present themselves. Emotional intimacy can be foreign territory for many adult children of divorce, and the way we traverse this territory can manifest in unhealthy ways — sometimes without us even realizing it.
For myself, a single, 31-year old adult child of divorce who would like to be married, the dating environment is usually a bundle of stress and anxiety. Between horrible dating apps, awkward young adult gatherings, getting set-up by friends, and well-meaning married friends saying “I’m so glad I don’t have to date in 2020… I couldn’t do it!”, I often wonder how I still have any hope. Add to that my insecurities and deep anxiety and often loathing of my own personality, and the perceived inability of those traits to mix with a good, stable, virtuous man, and some days I would rather lead a life akin to a desert hermit.
However, difficulties aside, dating as an adult child of divorce can also be an incredibly fruitful and healing experience. Though the litany of woes I listed above are very real practicalities that need to be worked through, it was nevertheless in and through the arduous process of serious dating that I discovered my own brokenness. And ultimately this painful process led me to uncover my own deeply buried self-worth.
When it comes to dating, as adult children of divorce the cards are already stacked against us. Dating is practice for marriage, so it is incredibly important to know how to date well. But because we do not have good examples of marriage in our own families, we must intentionally strive to orient ourselves correctly before we begin the process of dating. To help us do this, I surveyed some amazing adult children of divorce who were generous enough to share their insights with me, so we can all learn from their experiences and start on the right foot. I asked both married and single people this question: “If you could tell yourself two things before you started dating seriously (as an adult child of divorce) what would they be?”
Not surprisingly, I received so much excellent insight that I had to organize their answers into four categories, which will be discussed in a four-part series on different aspects of dating as adult children of divorce: self-worth, abandonment, conflict, and recurring patterns. My hope is that my own experience, coupled with insights from friends, will help us gain our bearings in the dating scene, increase our hope for the future, and rediscover the relationship we already have in Christ.
Self-Worth
Let us begin our series in the most vulnerable way possible: with ourselves. We cannot date properly, much less marry happily, if we do not have a strong sense of, and belief in, our own worth. Self-worth, then, is the very foundation for healthy dating. Adult children of divorce can tend to measure their self-worth by the perceived success of their relationships with other people. Many times, devoid of the security and self-confidence that comes from dual-parental affirmation, they search for these things elsewhere — through friendship, dating, and work relationships. Not feeling worthy or secure in the eyes of their parents, a vacuum is created, which can be dangerous if not directed appropriately.
When dating, for example, I got very caught up in being able to say “he and I” or “we” or “my boyfriend”. The security of belonging to someone started to affect how I thought about myself as a person. Thus, every minor roadblock to our harmony, or even a frustrated look from my significant other, would send me into a spiral: “I’m doing something wrong”, “he must be close to breaking up with me”, “I really need to work on myself”, “what can I do to be better?” Ultimately, the problem was that I was just happy that he accepted me at all! Because of this, I put the work and success of the relationship entirely on my shoulders, thinking that by accepting me, with all my “issues,” he had done enough already. A good friend recognized this in her own dating relationships and said the following: “A man’s (or woman’s) acceptance of you doesn’t define your worth. You don’t have to cling to someone just because they accepted you — you are far more worthy and deserve to be fought for and pursued.”
Acceptance versus being pursued. I believe a proper understanding of self-worth demands that we expect the latter and don’t just settle for the first person who shows us any interest. The fact is, seeing the two people in our lives that brought us into being do the opposite of accepting and pursuing—instead, rejecting and abandoning— can make us question whether the fruit of that fallen union — us— is even worth it. This is not a thought I think we necessarily verbalize in our minds, but I believe that when we enter the realm of dating, where we are willingly putting ourselves out there to be accepted or rejected by another person, the deep anxiety of being tied to a rejected martial covenant strongly influences how we view ourselves through the eyes of the other person. And so dating becomes more than just getting to know someone and testing to see if there is a compatibility there. Instead, it becomes wrapped up in insecurities about who we are at our core.
As I mentioned earlier, when I started dating someone seriously, my woundedness and brokenness hit me like a freight train: anxiety, stress, loss of sleep and appetite, second-guessing all of my interactions, wondering if I was ‘too much hassle’, wondering if they were annoyed, etc., etc. The list goes on. Once I became emotionally attached to this person, these issues poured out like water gushing from a broken dam. I wondered where it all came from! Every minor issue played out like a Shakespearean drama in my head. After much spiritual direction and therapy, these issues were all traced back to my parents’ divorce. Why wouldn’t I be anxious about being broken up with, when both of my parents have gotten two divorces?
But the real problems started happening when I was broken up with. I started to hate who I was. I started analyzing every aspect of my personality, wishing I were a different way (a struggle I still have), blaming myself for everything that went wrong (very common in adult children of divorce). In doing this, I gave my anxiety way too much credit, congratulating it on predicting the end of my relationship. I internalized the old adage of: “Well, of course that was too good to be true”. Another thought I internalized was: “What makes you think you’re going to have a happy, successful relationship? It’s not like it runs in the family.”
It wasn’t until I reflected on the entirety of a past relationship with a close friend that I was helped to realize that the end of this relationship didn’t make it a failure, and that it wasn’t because of who I was as a person. That second realization was harder to swallow. Why wouldn’t someone break up with you if you weren’t worth their time? Going back through journal entries from after that breakup, I wrote that I actually believed I was a lesser person without him in my life (measuring my worth based on the success of my relationships). Clearly, this destructive line of thinking could not go on for very long. In prayer one day, agonizing over my perceived lack of worth and subpar personality, I received the following inspiration: “I want you to love yourself as I created you and to stop trying to change what I created.”
Fellow adult children of divorce, this is the core of it all. Your self-worth is found in the pouring-forth of the love of God, the Creator of all things—yourself included. I challenge you to remind yourself of this not only before going on dates, but every single day. Our parents’ failed relationships don’t define our worth; our failed dates or failed longer-term relationships don’t define our worth; our personality and struggles with anxiety don’t define our worth. God Himself defines our worth. And He created you ex nihilo, out of nothing, just so He could love you.
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*Pseudonym used for privacy’s sake and with the permission of the author.
Rebecca attended a Life-Giving Wounds Retreat in 2019 and was amazed at the amount of healing and bonding that occurred in just three days. She decided to be as involved as she could with this burgeoning ministry. In her spare time, she loves reading, baking, and listening to podcasts!