- My dating history is a hot mess inside of a dumpster fire,
inside a train wreck, swirled up in a tornado.
All of the lessons that I needed to learn over the years
have showed up in the form of my lovers.
Like, oh yeah, I dated my family dynamic,
my fear of commitment, my bad boundaries,
my fear of commitment, my low sense of self worth,
my fear of commitment, my fear of commitment,
my fear of commitment.
Which all things considered is a little ironic.
I never saw myself as someone
who was actually afraid of commitment.
I've always deeply yearned to be a wife and a mother.
And I joke that cats are really great birth control
until I find my person.
But then sometimes I realize
just how much I prefer cats to humans.
- Hey Anna, I have to rehome
my cat because my baby's allergic.
- Well, you've known that cat for 11 years.
- I know, I'm so torn up about it.
But I was hoping you'd take her.
- You've known that baby, what, like three weeks?
It seems pretty easy, just rehome the baby.
- I'm not gonna give away my baby.
- That cat has been with you
through every major adult moment of your entire life.
Your marriage, your divorce, your second marriage.
That cat is the longest standing relationship
you have ever had.
Just rehome the baby and then make another one.
It's easy, it's fun.
- Okay.
- But I have finally accepted on a conscious level
that subconsciously I have sought out people
who are also afraid of commitment,
ensuring that our relationship will never go anywhere,
but that I can feel superior
like I'm trying to find what I want.
And there's one event I remember in particular
that solidified this belief.
I was maybe seven or eight,
and my mom had recently shaved her head when she was drunk.
It was very Brittany Spears.
She looked very fierce bald.
And she was crying on the stairs,
because she was raising three children alone
while my dad was overseas fighting a war or whatever,
which I'm sure we can agree
is the easier of the two situations.
And she said to me.
- Anna, don't have children.
Have a career.
Don't make the mistake I made, be ambitious.
- And you know, when I was a kid,
hearing these words from my distraught mom.
(laughing) You are such a loser mom (laughing).
I laughed in her face and then ran outside
to play basketball because kids are assholes.
I was also the only girl on Juniper Berry Street.
Clearly physically inferior when it came to sports ball.
So I'd try to throw off the neighborhood kids
by gaining a psychological advantage.
(thumping beat)
I like your butts.
- [Girls Together] What?
- Ha, psych, swish, swish bish.
- [Girls Together] Hey, that's cheating!
- I don't play the game, I play the players.
Also, your butts are ugly.
- Is it?
- That's so mean.
- But I digress.
For a lot of us, relationships are the way
that we grow and gain insight
into some of the most powerful lessons
that are integral to our development.
And we fall into the trap of dating those lessons.
And sometimes the lessons are so obvious
that everyone we love wants to eye roll into oblivion.
(phone dinging)
- Girl, put your phone down.
Stop texting him.
He didn't respond the last four times.
Is he not going to respond now?
Delete his number!
- And look, our issues are never going away.
(laughing) Mine certainly aren't.
But that's the nature of having
this terrible disease called humanity.
We are always gonna have something
that we're working through.
But we can choose to work on our issues
outside of any healthy, romantic relationships
that we're in.
And I say this from 15 years of experience
of doing the exact opposite.
- No, no. - Give me the phone.
- No. - Give me the phone.
- No Michelle, he's gonna respond.
No, he's gonna respond!
So if you feel attacked by this video
and you wanna know, well, what the hell
do I do to stop dating my issues?
The good news is there's several things you can do.
Can you guess what the first one is?
Therapy, yes, you can work on your issues in therapy.
Another thing you can do is become highly aware
of your dating patterns and integrate lessons
that you've been learning in those relationships
as you move forward in your romantic life,
which is easier said than done.
I definitely have not been doing that.
And finally, you can listen to trusted friends.
- (yelling) Michelle, no!
- No. (screaming)
Give me the phone. - No (screaming).
- So often my friends would call out
my destructive choices in partners, but I'd say,
you just don't know him like I do.
- I don't like the way he talks about women.
- He's really misunderstood.
- I don't like how dismissive he is of your friends.
- Okay, he has social anxiety.
He's really better one-on-one.
- I know you don't want to hear this,
but from my experience, I just wanna say
this seems like the beginning of something abusive.
(dramatic music) - But I love him.
No honey, ya don't.
You're addicted to emotional chaos and your subconscious
is trying to right the wrongs of your past
by seeking out similar dynamics and rewriting history.
You're like a time traveler trying to fix the timeline,
but you can't because the very nature of you time-traveling
means that you caused the future to happen.
I've been watching "Dark" on Netflix.
It's a great show, making me think a lot.
It's hard work thinking.
You know, it's way easier to go through life
unaware of why we think the things we think
that influence the things we do.
It's easier to go through life
not trying to pinpoint patterns or things in the past
that are no longer serving us,
and then attempting to change them
to create a life of joy and happiness.
It's hard work to reparent your inner child
and be the adult observer all the time.
It's mentally exhausting.
And look, all of this may sound incredibly cheesy,
but I'm a philosophy major dropout
dressed as a fucking clown.
So cheesy is the least of my problems.
I'm Anna Akana, and thank you to the patrons
who supported this video.
And thank you to Squarespace
for sponsoring today's existential crisis.
If you don't know what Squarespace is by now,
you're clearly not spending enough time
on the internet in this D.C. era.
So if you need a website, go with Squarespace.
They have an all-in-one platform
that's so incredibly easy to build a site
that looks beautiful.
They provide intuitive marketing tools and analytics.
And if you or your grandma do any kind of podcasting,
everyone's doing podcasting these days,
Squarespace offers Audio Blocks,
which helps you embed audio on your site
and tag it for iTunes.
Plus, if you're not a clown, but an entire circus,
you can have multiple contributors
receive selective access to your site's website manager.
Head to squarespace.com for a free trial.
And whenever you're ready to launch,
go to squarespace.com/anna to save 10% off
your first purchase of a website or domain.
(snapping) Squarespace.