What 45 minutes with a psycho-sexologist taught me about my ‘doomed’ love life

I’ve been debating therapy for a few years – my mind constantly overwhelmed by the ping-ponging of the ‘should I, shouldn’t I?’ narrative, bubbling thoughts itching to be released from the clutches of my tightly-wound psyche. 

When I was offered a 1-on-1 session with Bumble’s relationship expert and psycho-sexologist Chantelle Otten, I don’t think I’ve ever accepted anything so quickly. I was eager to offload the heaviness of my internal dialogue. 

Typically, I survive by shouldering my problems. I’ll talk about them to anyone who listens until I’m blue in the face, but ultimately – in typical only child fashion – I am my own resolve. 

When this opportunity landed in my inbox, I was riding the comedown of a minor ‘situationship’ relapse, frustrated by my eagerness to try and win an ounce of real affection from someone who I know wants nothing to do with me. 

To set the psychological scene a little further, the sentiment among single, straight women in their 20s and beyond is often this: romantic love is something we want, often crave, but we’re deterred by the hurdles – unequal domestic labour, having to emotionally ‘coach’ a partner, unsure whether marriage or kids is something we actually want or just a heteronormative structure to adhere to.

The need for a relationship – the financial gain, companionship, domesticity – isn’t as strong as it once was. 

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I’ll happily lay my feelings on the line knowing I’m about to get run over with high-speed rejection. Perhaps I ever so slightly relish the confusion and ache of it all. And I know many women who are struggling to differentiate limerance from genuine feeling, stuck between the push and pull – the anxiety, confusion, and underwhelm – of dating these days, too. 

I knew I needed to get an expert’s take and figure out why the hell dating feels so murky these days. While it’s easy to take the blanket approach of ‘all men are rubbish’, could I also be getting in my own way?

The tendencies Otten picked up were that I have distinct relational patterns: intellectual over-analysis, paired with emotional vulnerability over-exposure.

As someone immersed in today’s dating world, I’m not afraid (after two or three pints) to ask some pretty hard-hitting questions. After the initial chit-chat, I’ll ask dates where they sit politically, gauge whether they’re interested in the world’s wider goings-on, and whether they’ve heard of ‘heterofatalism’. Intense as that may sound, after previously dating misaligned men, I see it as streamlining compatibility.

I’m not the only one. Democrats in the US don’t want to date Republicans, Liberals in the UK don’t want to date Tories, and the sentiment has also filtered into the Australian narrative as political alignment becomes increasingly important for women. 

Within minutes, Otten held up a mirror to the tactic, catching me unawares. Instead of proof of my high standards, could this interrogation be a form of armour?

She asked me to consider whether demanding intellectual alignment and emotional depth was actually setting someone up to fail. If I came across as “too intense”, I didn’t have to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of real intimacy. It’s an unconscious avoidance strategy: pre-rejecting men before they ever have the chance to reject the real, un-analysed me. 

As we peeled back the layers of my love life, we unearthed a contradiction I fear many women can relate to: the intimacy paradox. I desperately crave being known, chosen and valued as a person, yet use physical intimacy as a wall between being really seen. Otten identified this as a defence mechanism born out of past emotional and self-esteem issues.

The cycle consists of a fear of being treated as a disposable entity, paired with offering intimacy as a flippant baseline, cloaked with the mentality of “maybe they’ll like me more if I do this”.

I’ve spoken with many women who’ve grappled with a version of this dichotomy. The pain and disappointment feel familiar, almost safe, and in psychology, people often re-create familiar dynamics – even painful ones – because they are predictable. Ultimately, feeling objectified or discarded feels safer than being truly vulnerable and risking rejection for who you really are. Ouch.

Naturally, trying to shirk the weight of the conversation, I began to fidget, laughing awkwardly to myself.

“You’re allowed to cry... because then you’re not protecting yourself, and the best place to not protect yourself is in therapy,” Otten reminded me. She offered a mental shift that feels particularly helpful in this validation-happy dating climate: shift from “am I chosen?” to “do I like them?“, and stop using physical intimacy to test if someone will validate your worth.

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If I hadn’t already realised my self-worth was on the floor, we then tackled my inclination to ‘crack a nut’. Sound familiar? It’s the habit of targeting emotionally unavailable, distant or avoidant men, spending energy trying to unearth hidden depth, emotional articulation, or affection from them.

In my own words: “How many times are you going to try and crack a nut that doesn’t want to be cracked?“Oh, the humiliation ritual of it all. 

On social media, there’s an influx of women deterring other women from chasing unreciprocated effort. The attempts behind decoding someone feels like intimacy, but it’s wasted labour. To keep the “nut” in orbit long enough to crack it, it’s easy to bend over backwards, lower boundaries, and accept bare-minimum effort, like casual hookups or sporadic texts.

If this pattern feels even vaguely familiar, Otten suggests holding your boundaries and observing whether the other person has the desire and capacity to step across the bridge to meet you where you are, focusing on your own emotional availability rather than fixing your partners, and moving away from hyper-analysing others, looking inward to understand why you crave connections that require you to sacrifice your own needs.

My intention for the session wasn’t to magically develop an emotionally available headspace, but to heal my relationship with my own agency. As I closed the Zoom session, I felt a little drained from the concentrated emotional off-load, but also lighter from it, too.

Maybe dating isn’t doomed; I just became immune to using cynicism to protect myself from the terrifying vulnerability of real connection. And that’s something we could all work on.