Dating after divorce can feel like climbing a mountain. Not because apps are broken or women are impossible to please, but because of something deeper most men don’t even realize. In this video, I reveal the silent fear that keeps good-hearted men single, even when they desperately want to find love again. Fear doesn’t mean you’re broken, it means you care about love. But if you don’t face it, you hand over your power. Watch now and learn how to turn your fear into fuel for attraction, growth, and a fulfilling relationship.
P.S. If you’re a man navigating dating after divorce, don’t go it alone. My free masterclass was made for you—learn how to rebuild confidence, attract the right women, and avoid common post-divorce mistakes. Watch it here.
Ready for tailored support? Book your 1:1 dating strategy call with me here and let’s map out your next steps.
See you next week,
Kimberly
Here’s the transcript:
Okay. Most men say that dating after divorce is incredibly tough and some of the reasons for that are online dating or because many women only want men for their looks or age or money or because it’s really hard to meet somebody decent these days. These are reasons that good hearted men, such as yourself, will give for the reasons why modern dating feels too tough, too arduous, or too frustrating.
But if we cut through the surface, there is something a lot deeper. That is going on, which is a silent fear that a lot of men and women carry within themselves when they put themselves out there again. And it’s this fear that quietly keeps so many good hearted men, single, even when they desperately wanna find [00:01:00] love again.
And so in today’s video, I’m gonna unpack what this fear is. I’m gonna explain why it’s hard to recognize, and I wanna show you how you can move through this fear with strength and with clarity. So that you can have the relationship you truly desire. Now, if you’re brand new to this channel, welcome aboard.
My name is Kimberly. I tuck all things life and dating and relationships, and I am a coach that has been working with men for many years now to help them navigate modern dating, navigate themselves, navigate women so they can go on to have deeply loving successful relationship. And what I wanna talk about right now is the psychology of hidden fear.
Now, fear is a tricky one, and it rarely announces itself as fear. Instead, it’s sneaky, right? It likes to show up as logical sounding. [00:02:00] Excuses, dating apps don’t work for me. Women my age aren’t interested or don’t look after themselves. I’m too busy with work or with my kids right now. And what these are, are protective stories that wonderful brain is telling you in order to prevent you from avoid or to, you know, to help you to avoid risk.
And psychologists call this avoidance behavior, da, da, da. So a lot of you guys are out there saying, why do I attract? You know, avoidant women, sometimes the avoidance begins within ourselves. So this avoidant behavior IE protecting ourself from rejection or protecting ourself from pain, um, is really stopping us from truly putting ourselves out there.
Now, underneath all of it, fear is simple. I don’t [00:03:00] want to be hurt again. I don’t want to go through the emotional pain of a relationship that didn’t work out or the emotional pain of feeling like I wasn’t really chosen by my partner. Fear of rejection, fear of choosing the wrong person, repeating the mistakes that have hurt us in the past.
Fear of losing this freedom that we feel we might have now that we’re single or so on and so forth. And this fear is not weakness. It is survival. But if we leave it unchecked, then it keeps us stuck. It stops us from growing, from confronting these things and ultimately having the kind of success in our lives in dating or in our relationships that we truly crave.
So I have a lot of compassion for this fear. And that’s because divorce is very painful. I have seen many men, uh, come work with me very shortly after a [00:04:00] separation or after a divorce, and it hurts. It’s a painful process. Many men tell me, they say. Well, it did shake my confidence quite a bit and I am feeling like I’m at this new juncture of my life and I’m not quite sure what my identity is or who I am or what I like or what brings me joy anymore.
And it also rattles one’s trust in others because we go into a marriage trusting it’s going to work out. Trusting that love will carry us through, right? We, we trust these things and sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. So we start to blame our trust factor, my ability to trust others or, or, or whatever it might manifest into.
So it makes sense that your brain builds walls of excuses. I’ll try later. I’m gonna just gonna take a break. Um, it’s just, dating is just not worth it. Women are not worth it. Whatever you wanna say, and I [00:05:00] really do want you to hear this. There is really nothing wrong with you for feeling fear. Every man I’ve ever coached has felt it in some form.
Women feel it in in forms. Fear is a part of our. Emotions. It’s a part of our journey as a human being on this planet. But here comes your strength. If you don’t face your fear, you hand over your power. You let fear dictate your future instead of you deciding what you wanna learn from that fear and how you wanna move forward.
So the way it’s gonna shape your dating life is through that avoidance, through either never dating or. Always knowing that you’re kind of just giving the tiniest bit of effort to dating, but never fully giving yourself to dating. So it’s the kind of, I’m half in, half out mentality, or [00:06:00] it’s gonna look like blaming external factors.
It was the restaurant that was too noisy. That’s why I didn’t connect with that woman. It was, she was too busy at that point in her life. That’s why I didn’t connect with her. It was that dating app. Um, you know, set me up for failure. You’re gonna look at the outside world to explain what’s happening internally, and it can also manifest in terms of men kind of overcompensating, um, in their behaviors or chasing younger women, because you’re not gonna consciously know this, but deep down.
You probably know that that’s not gonna be a winning strategy for you, but it feels safe to kind of play on the surface here. Or maybe you overinvest with women. Um, ’cause you, you, you, you don’t know this consciously, but this is how fear shapes your dating life. That overinvestment too early, um, pushes people away.
So you don’t have the connection you’re truly after or you’re really trying to control every part of what’s happening in dating. [00:07:00] Because you, you think that having full control will stop you from having things not work out or feeling that pain again. Um, and so I’ve seen men and, and this fear manifests in different ways for different men, right?
So some men settle, they rush into relationships with women that show them the tiniest modicum of, um, attention, and they dive into that. They ignore compatibility. And of course you, I’ve talked about this on my channel a lot. Women feel that fear shows up very much as pressure. It shows up as insecurity, it shows up as neediness.
Um, and that will push women away. A client of mine was avoiding dating for many years. He was telling himself that, um, quote, dating apps are not for me. And the truth was, and by the way, there’s more to dating than just using dating apps. I know it’s crazy. Um, but the truth for this client in particular was he was, he was really terrified [00:08:00] of rejection.
And once he started to work with that part of himself and faced that, he realized it wasn’t about apps at are. At all, right? It was about his deeper fear of being seen for who he was and then being turned down anyways. And that’s why working with our fear, learning to reframe it and turn it into strengths is the mindset work that is really the precursor to having success in dating and long-term relationships because.
Again, fear doesn’t mean you’re broken. Um, it is there to teach you something. It says, Hey, there’s something important here going on. You need to listen to me, right? And it means that if you have fear, it means that you also care about love. It means that you also care about connection, and that’s a really wonderful thing.
So the work is not to eliminate fear, but it is to transform it into fuel. So what do you do? You name it. You have to acknowledge what’s really going [00:09:00] on in order to learn from it and move forward. So you name it, write down the fear that you’ve been hiding under or the excuses you’ve been hiding under.
I’m too this. I’m too, that. Women are too this. Women are too, that dating apps are not enough of this or too much of that. So write down your fear that you’ve been hiding under. Right. Challenge it. Ask yourself, is this really based on fact? Is this factual across the board? Is it a part of my experience?
Therefore I made it? So is it part of a past story you’re telling yourself and then you have to reframe it and work with it? So instead of, what if I get hurt again? You start to ask yourself, what if I learned enough to choose differently this time? Okay, what if my experiences are my biggest teacher and they’re trying to tell me to pay [00:10:00] attention to different things, and you act anyways because confidence is moving forward despite feeling fierce.
And another client of mine admitted that he started to feel too old to date. And that fear made him feel incredibly small. It was actually some something that I, the word small is something that I use with my partner when we’re feeling. Overwhelming emotions or a conflicting amount of emotions. We’re not really sure how to communicate to each other.
We say, I’m feeling really small right now. So this fear for this client made him feel very small, but we worked with this. And when he learned to reframe it, he owned his age. He looked at all the benefits of being where he was, and he leaned into his life wisdom. Um, women started to find him very magnetic because he just stopped hiding.
He was unashamedly. Who he was. He was always happy to continuously grow, [00:11:00] but instead of trying to wear that really thick mask of, I hope people see this about me and not this about me. I hope they see how wonderful I am in this area, but don’t notice my age or whatever it might be. When you just are unashamedly who you are, you become very magnetic to people because that’s true authenticity.
Right. You can’t just be half authentic, right? It’s true. Authenticity. And so this is the truth that many of you need to hear is fear is always gonna be there when you’re dating again after divorce, and you’re navigating things that are frustrating or complicating or complex or you know, that you weren’t very successful when you dated, when you were younger.
So therefore you assume you’re just not gonna be successful nowadays. Um, but fear is gonna be there. No matter what. And this is all about you making a choice. You can let that fear run the show. Um, that can be the driving force that keeps you single, that keeps you stuck, that [00:12:00] keeps you, um, making excuses.
Or you can face your fears, you can own them, um, and you can grow stronger because of them. That’s the work, that’s mindset work. That’s, that’s the hardest part of dating. That’s the, the harder part is confronting oneself, not navigating the world of others. And that’s what makes you magnetic to the right types of women, by the way, because women don’t want fearless men, right?
They want real men. Men that kind of feel the fear and do it anyways. Men who own their scars that face those fears and that still move forward. And so I wanted to talk about this in today’s video because it’s often the true fears we have that keep us stuck. But when we reach out to a dating coach or buy a dating product online, we’re [00:13:00] usually focusing on some kind of bandaid solution or some trick, or some hack or some whatever to get us to where we wanna get.
But what we’re not really addressing and where real transformation lies is within is really understanding what am I afraid to admit to myself and to others? What is it that’s truly holding me back from being my fullest unique self and fully expressing myself and working with that so that you can show up?
Um. In that true authenticity, not part authenticity, not a sliver of it here, but not over there. Um, when you really work with that, that’s your mindset. Um, you really can turn the dial in terms of the success you have, and it’s often a part that’s not a dress when you listen to. Dating coaches. Um, in particular dating coaches.
I think [00:14:00] relationship, um, coaches. I, I do relationship work myself. Relationship coaches will talk often about. Figure out who you are. Figure out your own strengths, your own weaknesses, and how those are contributing to a relationship. Because oftentimes dating and relationships are like holding up a mirror.
Those things are reflected back to you. It’s easy to see them in another person. It’s harder to see them in ourselves. We have this thing called flawed self-assessment. Um, and so a lot of people out there in particular have part of the self-awareness that we need to have, right? We know kind of what we like and what we don’t like, and a little bit about who we are.
Um, we’re not always sure about how certain parts of us are preventing us from having the success we want and how those things get reflected back to us, uh, in the manifestations of life. The feedback you get from women or feedback you get at work or from your family and things like that. So women don’t want fearless men.
They want real men. And, uh, I hope that this was a [00:15:00] helpful video today to just get you thinking about a different. Part of yourself that you can lean into that’s gonna lead you to have the success you want. This isn’t about a bio or how to send a message to a woman. It’s about. A, a, accessing your inner truth and working with that before you do any of these other things, and then blame those other things for not having the success you want.
It starts from within. So I hope this was a helpful video guys. Um, I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this. Did you get into dating after divorce for some time and. Kind of expect it to go a certain way, and then later on, did you reflect back on it was an inner fear that really stopped you, or did you get to a point where you started to recognize that where you were playing maybe on the surface wasn’t really the work you needed to do in order to heal yourself from your divorce or your past relationship?
I’d love to [00:16:00] hear your thoughts and comments, especially if you have learned and grown from something like this, because I think it’d be very helpful for other men to hear. Um, other women to hear as well. Um, so thanks guys for tuning in and look forward to another episode next week. Chow.
