if you don’t have a support system, you shouldn’t be dating.

You should be building a community instead.

You don’t need a partner. You need witnesses. People who know who you are when you’re not being manipulated. People who’ve seen your patterns and can slap the phone out of your hand when your trauma type starts acting up. Because you might think you’re emotionally intelligent, but love has a way of turning the lights off. And if you’re the only one holding the candle, it’s real easy for someone else to blow it out and convince you darkness is romantic!

Support is not just for breakups. It’s for prevention. It’s the voice in your ear before you romanticize dysfunction. Before you mistake discomfort for depth. Before your abandonment issues put on lipstick and start calling people “twin flame.”

And I don’t care how articulate you are. Manipulation is not about being smarter. It’s about being slicker. Some of the most “grounded” people I know have never had to crawl out of an emotional alleyway barefoot. But their partners have. And that’s the mismatch: You could have degrees. They’ve got survival skills. You have ideas. They have instincts. You’re sitting across the table thinking, this feels familiar, and they’re thinking, perfect.

Without a support system, you will start to confuse attention with intimacy, validation with love, and bare minimum gestures with divine intervention. You’ll hand over your body like a lease you can’t afford and call it chemistry. You’ll ignore red flags because at least it’s not silence. You’ll settle for being “chosen” by someone who wouldn’t even survive a conversation with your boundaries.

You think you’re dating. You’re not. You’re outsourcing your coping mechanisms to someone you’re sexually attracted to.

It’s not always the men with money, power, or intellect that destroy women like Cassie or Halle. It’s the ones with life experience. The ones who’ve had just enough pain to know how to perform care. Who say all the right things and almost mean them. You know—those emotionally literate, spiritually bankrupt types who read Bell Hooks once and think they’re equipped to love you.

They’re not.

But you’ll believe they are if your reality is already wobbly. If your rent depends on tips and your healing depends on hope, you will ignore your intuition in favor of potential. And that’s how smart, educated women end up wrecked. Because degrees don’t teach you discernment. GPAs don’t raise your self-worth. You can have a Master’s and still lose your mind over someone who hasn’t read a book since high school but knows exactly how to say, “You’re not like other women.”

Experience trumps education, every time. Especially when that experience is in manipulation. Men are taught to explore life, while women are taught to explore men & education (sometimes to find a man). A dynamic has already been established to subdue women.

So if you don’t have community, you’ll romanticize codependency. If you don’t have income, you’ll mistake consistency for love. If you don’t have your own sense of purpose, someone’s attention will feel like salvation.

And that’s how you get stuck. Not just in bad relationships, but in entire lifepaths you didn’t choose—because you were too exhausted, too lonely, too desperate to choose anything at all, even yourself.

Women are taught how to be desirable before they are taught how to be safe. We’re raised to attract instead of discern. To dream of love before we’re even allowed to define ourselves. So we don’t just date people—we merge with them. We let them rearrange our nervous systems, reset our clocks, rewire our sense of worth… and then wonder why we can’t hear ourselves think.

Dating without a support system isn’t just dangerous, it’s spiritual malpractice. This is self-betrayal awareness. It’s one thing to be lied to. It’s another thing to lie to yourself because you want the fantasy to pan out.

You participate in your own undoing because you think love will make you exempt from the consequences. But just because you were sincere doesn’t mean you were safe. Just because you meant well doesn’t mean you were well-equipped.

People will study you before they seduce you. They will assess your loneliness, your routines, your softness. They will notice how much you explain yourself. How you shrink when you feel misunderstood. And they’ll press exactly where your need outweighs your boundaries.

That’s how a lot of women end up losing to people with “less.” Less schooling. Less status. Less language. But more life. And if you’ve never had to sleep with one eye open, if you’ve never had to emotionally finesse someone just to get out of a situation with your sanity intact, you’re not ready to date people who have. Because when survival is a second language to you but a native tongue to them, you will misread everything. You’ll think their mystery is depth. You’ll call their avoidance “being private.” You’ll confuse your own discomfort for a personal flaw you need to work on—when really, it’s your gut trying to scream through all the “growth” quotes you screenshot on Instagram.

Women who don’t have a support system will fall in love with the wrong person and then spend months, even years, trying to make the betrayal look poetic. *cough cough* Beyoncé, Mariah the Scientist, Summer Walker, and so on…

And this is where shit gets serious and a VERY hard conversation to have… as I mentioned earlier women will participate in their own undoing with voluntary delusion. And no, this is not victim-blaming. It’s about catching the lie you told yourself before it metastasizes into lifestyle choices. You cannot prevent every betrayal. But you can stop cosigning your own manipulation because you want the story to work more than you want the truth.

I’ve literally seen women on this very app publish articles on how they want men to lie to them to fulfill a fantasy… so bear with me. Victim-blaming says “You deserved what happened.” This says “You’re responsible for what you continue to allow after the red flags become billboards.” It’s a hard line. You’re allowed to get fooled once. You’re not obligated to stay foolish.

There’s a difference between being used and giving someone the tools to use you again because you’re afraid of starting over. When you don’t have a support system, that “starting over” feels like death. You’ll accept mistreatment just to avoid it. You’ll sell your discernment for the illusion of safety. That’s why community is survival, not a luxury.

You need people around you who can tell you:

That man doesn’t like you, he’s just familiar with your trauma.

That woman doesn’t respect you, she just likes the version of you that doesn’t challenge her.

That person isn’t confusing, they’re inconsistent. You just keep translating chaos into depth.

And if you don’t have those people, you’ll start playing both roles: the one being deceived and the one doing the deceiving. Internally, you’ll justify it all. You’ll say “It’s complicated.” You’ll say “It’s not that bad.” You’ll say “But they’re working on themselves.” You’ll say anything but “I’m scared to be alone.”

If you’re not surrounded by people who’ve lived enough life to check you when you start spiraling in love — don’t date. Not because you’re broken, but because dating is not just romantic. It’s psychological warfare if you don’t know what you’re doing. Love requires a level of self-trust that most people only develop after they’ve been betrayed! Protecting yourself is your responsibility—but even the best defenses can’t make you invincible. Abuse can happen to anyone, no matter how prepared, aware, or equipped they are. Yet, I still strongly urge women to gain real life experience—not just knowledge—so they can recognize patterns as they happen, not just in hindsight. It’s a difficult skill to develop, but it sharpens your instincts in a way nothing else can. Because being able to name a behavior after the damage is done might help you process it. But being able to clock it while it’s happening? That’s what gives you the upper hand.

So here are ways to sharpen your instincts to match your intellect.

1. Go somewhere where nobody knows you.

   Travel. Even if it’s just the next city over. Spend time around people who aren’t impressed by your resume or your potential. That’s how you learn who you are without a script. You cannot date well if you don’t even know how you move when nobody’s watching

2. Date yourself in public.

   I’m not talking about some Instagram “self-love” brunch. I mean walk into a bar, alone, and order something you can’t pronounce. Sit with the discomfort of being perceived. If you can’t handle that, you damn sure can’t handle a partner who makes you question your reality.

3. Study power.

   Pick up a sociology book. Watch how people move in groups. Read about narcissism, not because your ex was one, but because you might be unconsciously attracted to that energy. Know the difference between seduction and strategy. Between love and leverage.

4. Stop performing healing.

   Go to therapy if you need to. But don’t make a personality out of your progress. The more invested you are in looking like you’ve healed, the less likely you are to admit when you’re falling back into patterns. You’ll ignore red flags to protect your ego.

5. Get around older women who’ve lost before.

   Talk to women who’ve rebuilt their lives. Listen to them. They’ve already paid the price for the lessons you’re romanticizing.

6. Living alone or being solely responsible for yourself

   When your survival depends on your decisions—rent, safety, meals, emergencies—you learn to trust your gut and double-check your surroundings. You stop outsourcing your safety to others and start treating your instincts like a skill set instead of a feeling.

7. Practicing saying no without explanation

   Saying “no” without a PowerPoint presentation to justify it retrains your brain to prioritize your comfort over approval. Women are taught to be agreeable at the cost of their safety. Start small—decline invitations, pause conversations, walk away. The more you do it, the faster your instincts speak up when someone’s crossing a line.

8. Watching how others live—critically, not cruelly

   Pay attention to women in relationships around you. Not to judge, but to study. What do they excuse? What do they settle for? What did they ignore early on that became the downfall? People will show you what it costs to lie to yourself long enough. Learn from their receipts

9. Getting comfortable with solitude

   If you can’t sit with your own silence, you’ll accept someone else’s chaos just to fill it. Being alone without being lonely is a skill that makes you immune to low-effort charm. The more you enjoy your own company, the less likely you are to entertain people who interrupt your peace instead of adding to it.

10. Immersing yourself in unfamiliar social settings (and staying long enough to adapt)

    Social awkwardness is often just unpracticed awareness. You don’t need to become extroverted, but you do need to get fluent in human nuance. Attend events where no one knows you. Join a class where you’re a beginner. Sit through the discomfort of small talk, read the room, learn to hold eye contact without apologizing for it. Social fluency isn’t about being charismatic—it’s about learning rhythm, pacing, and body language so you stop misreading intention or over-sharing as a defense mechanism. The less awkward you feel around people, the harder it is for someone to disarm you through charm.