In my less mature years, I thought it was pretty cool that he spent so much time chasing women. I can’t say I wanted to do the same thing — not every single minute of life — but I didn’t see anything wrong with how he lived. I had also never given his actions much thought beyond the surface, “guys doing what guys do”.
As years passed, we would talk when he was going through painful times in his life. There seemed to be a common denominator in those moments. His low points always seemed to be related to women leaving him and him being single.
I witnessed him in relationship after relationship, at low point after low point, and I eventually realized that I had been wrong all those years. My friend wasn’t a player at all. He was actually just horribly afraid to be alone.
He had cheated time after time in one relationship after another. I had been viewing that almost as a strength. In reality, my friend had been treating women like that out of weakness.
Every time a relationship ended — usually from his doing — he would go into a really deep depression and then almost an obsession to find the next girlfriend. It was a very predicable cycle. When he was in that state of mind, even if he had to pull a woman from the bottom of the dumpster and bathe her himself, he would date whoever came along.
He had dreams. We would talk about our dreams and future plans to each other. But his real life completely revolved around his relationships with women. School didn’t matter. Work didn’t matter. Personal achievements didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered to him was finding someone to be with.
For years, every time he called me upset about another woman, I tried to convince him to focus on school or focus on his goals in life — all the things he told me he wanted to accomplish. And occasionally, he would do that for a very brief period of time. Before long though, every time, he would be calling me to say that he had met “the one”.
He went through that for a long time. We lost touch for years, but I talked to him recently and I was floored by the changes he had made.
He ended up going to counseling to work through some of the traumas he had experienced as a teenager. He had gone back to school, and had a great job doing something he loves to do.
He seemed like a different person. He even talked about, how important it was for him to find himself and focus on his goals in life. He told me that, if he had continued on the same path and never attempted to achieve the things he wanted to achieve, he would have regretted it for the rest of his life.
When I told him that I’m a Life Coach and I have a podcast, he wanted me to impress upon you that, if you see even a tiny bit of yourself in him, you have to find a way to focus on you and your own dreams. Don’t allow yourself to be so focused on finding someone else to complete you that you can’t be a whole person alone.