Why My Biggest Dating Mistake is Giving Him the Benefit of the Doubt

We had plans to meet up two days before he was set to go on an extended trip. He cancelled last minute due to sickness. I was very disappointed, but I said ok, if you’re sick, you’re sick. He said he will send me something while he is away on a trip, and he didn’t. The excuse that time was that he was really busy and didn’t have my address on him. I said it’s ok, I know you’re busy.

When he returned home for two weeks before he was set to go back again, our plans were to spend as much time as possible together. This time, his family was keeping him away from me. I said well, your family comes first.  There were many more scenarios I won’t bore you with. When I think of all my previous dating mistakes, I know for sure giving him the benefit of the doubt on all these excuses takes the cake.

I pride myself on being a positive person. I always look to find the good in people and trust first until given a reason not to trust. Naive of me, perhaps. According to my closest friend/my amateur dating coach, my problem has always been trusting people, especially men. I give people the benefit of the doubt until a big proof slaps me in the face. The big proof of guilt this time came in a form of a text few months into us dating. He was dating other women behind my back.

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Of course, I had doubts that all these excuses were lies. I thought about them over and over again and decided to take his word for it. I am a trusting person after all. Until I have cold hard proof, he shall get the benefit of the doubt. But the cold hard proof I should have listened to was my gut feeling telling me these were lies. Not only that, but if he truly cared, he would have found a way to do everything we said he would do. But he didn’t because he didn’t care. That was the truth my gut was telling me, but my head was looking for proof.

Since that relationship, I have been struggling with balancing my overly positive instinct and my brain that has learned that my gut feeling is sometimes correct. What’s even more challenging is that my instincts can be both positive and doubtful at the same time. My rule now is, if it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably non-sense.

I know as women, we are constantly told to trust our womanly intuition. Hell, Oprah was basically made it one of her commandments. But how do we learn what is a good gut feeling and what is a misleading gut feeling, because those happen too. I don’t know. All I know is, there should be a limit on benefit of the doubt situations before a person gets their trust card revoked.  I should have revoked his a long time ago.