I’m a guy who has been dating a woman for several months. She is self-employed and I swear about 20% of our conversations is her explaining all the things she has to do every day that may prevent her from being able to commit to seeing me. She swears she just got backed up on things and she’ll become more available, but I see her inventory continuing to grow, not shrink. She is also constantly supervising people on a variety of house projects (mutual disinterest in me getting involved there).
So I decided to ask the internet (DuckDuckGo (DDG) specifically): Am I dating a workaholic? What I found surprised me. I imagined I’d find a bunch of stupid little Cosmo-style quizzes, with the understanding that the reader would find out they were dating an workaholic and leave the relationship. Instead what I found was article after article after article with titles like,
- How to Date a Workaholic: 8 Steps (with Pictures)
- Dating a Workaholic (13 Tips to Make It Work)
- 12 Tips to Cope when Dating a Workaholic
The internet is assuming I WANT to date a workaholic.
Contrast that with results to the question Am I dating someone emotionally unavailable? DDG more straightforwardly answer the question (“17 Signs Someone is Emotionally Unavailable”) with a sprinkling of advice for how to cope.
I see workaholism as basically identical to emotional unavailability, but obviously it’s treated differently by society (maybe because it comes with money and home repairs?). So what is going on? Would you date a workaholic?
Ouch, sorry to hear that. It’s harder to evaluate a relationship in such a context. Though, like you said, she’s barely there so… maybe that helps since it’s not too different from not being in a relationship anyway. I hope you have better luck going forward.
I’ve been doing some processing and realizing though she is unreliable and has a lot of committments, a bigger problem for me is that I kind don’t know what to do with romance at this point in my life. I guess I don’t believe in it anymore. I’m kind of OK being who I am in my life and I don’t want to play games of pretending to be something I’m not for someone else. I think that after you’ve had several romantic partners who mostly disappear, you start to wonder if this romance thing isn’t just entirely transactional, and at a high cost.