Bad Dates, Falling in Love, & Finding Courage: Dr. Bonnie Talks Overcoming Fear in Dating

The Short Version: Want to learn how to date with grace, patience, and perseverance? Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil talked us through the ups and downs of dating and gave her advice for enjoying every step of the journey, even when it gets complicated. 

Nobody’s journey through dating and relationships is easy. Most of us live in a culture that’s saturated with content about relationships and couples, and most of it is put on for the camera. 

Yet, this media imagines and reinforces the ideal of perfect love. And love wouldn’t be love if it were perfect. 

When we can look at and treat dating as a beautiful journey, we’re empowered to enjoy its best parts without being too concerned about the destination.

Whether you find a partner doesn’t matter as much as the personal development you discover along the way.

But it’s not always easy to look at dating this way. 

We enter dating because we’re looking for love, and that’s no low-stakes game. So how do we healthily navigate a journey where the goal is love, without getting too tied to the outcome?

We talked to Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil, a relationship counselor, author, and big voice in the dating space about bad dates, the dating process, and why you should keep your head up, even when the journey feels like a minefield. 

Much like dating, relationships are also a journey, and we have to be patient and resilient along that journey, as well. Dr. Bonnie talked to us about it all, from the first dates to making it work in the long term, and told us what kind of wisdom daters can find in her books. 

“I’m sharing my true stories of dating in my books, and they’re not always pretty,” Dr. Bonnie said.

“But that’s why I want to put them out. I want people to know that I went through the same crap that they’re going through. And I want them to know it’s worth it. I met my husband after all of it– it’s worth it.”

Dr. Bonnie is a marriage and relationship therapist, and during her time in school, she told us her own family was always at the forefront of her mind. “My inspiration for working with couples was my own parents,” she told us. “For the first 25 years of their marriage, my father cheated. And for the last 25 years, he stopped cheating.”

Dr. Bonnie told us this inspired her to work with couples, specifically couples struggling with infidelity. Unlike many other voices in the space, Dr. Bonnie encourages couples to try as hard as they can to make it work and stay together. She sees therapy as one of the spaces where couples can do this.

“When I was going to family therapy school after my Master’s degree, I studied my family tree,” Dr. Bonnie said. “And I decided to bring my family to the center of the study because I think I unconsciously wanted to help my parents and understand our dynamic better.”

Exploring her family tree and gaining a deeper understanding of her family helped Dr. Bonnie understand the nuances of finding love. Despite her father’s chronic adultery, he and his wife found a loving path forward where they could both flourish in their marriage.

Dr. Bonnie is regarded in the dating and relationship space as the “adultery buster.” Many of her books, like “Make Up, Don’t Break Up: Finding and Keeping Love for Singles and Couples,” and “Adultery: The Forgivable Sin,” have helped couples deal with and move through one of the most challenging and hurtful things that can happen in a relationship.

“Love is an important thing,” Dr. Bonnie told us. “And you don’t find love that quickly and easily, which is why everybody dates and gets so overwhelmed. But a lot of times, we see love and we stop it before it even starts because we’re afraid.”

Patience can be one of the most grueling parts of dating, especially when you’re ready for serious connection and real commitment. But Dr. Bonnie told us it’s the key to finding the love that’s right and ready for you.

“Make Up, Don’t Break Up: Finding and Keeping Love for Singles and Couples” is a book for singles and couples about starting and saving relationships. Dr. Bonnie wrote it for couples who are considering a breakup and feel like their relationship has fundamentally changed from where it started. But Dr. Bonnie’s advice is not to throw in the towel– she wants to help couples make it work.

Staying together and working through cheating has been the focus of Dr. Bonnie’s career since she got started in the relationship space. But Dr. Bonnie’s advice for couples is still useful for daters, and we can get a lot of useful information and wisdom from the stories she shares in her book.

Everybody is going to have a bad date– or many– but becoming a resilient dater, and person, is about getting back up after the disappointments and correcting your path.

Dr. Bonnie pointed us to one specific chapter in her book, called “Potholes on the Road to Love.” Before Dr. Bonnie met her husband, she went on plenty of dates with plenty of interesting people. If she had given up after the fourth– or even fortieth– bad date, she wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet her soulmate.

“Some of it’s funny and some of it is sad,” Dr. Bonnie told us. “But I wanted people to identify with it and see that I went through all these things, too. My mother always said: ‘It only takes one. But you can’t give up and you have to believe it’s going to happen.’”

Dr. Bonnie shared some of her worst– and funniest– dating escapades with us. She was a Jersey Girl living in New York, trying to navigate the hustle and bustle of the personal, professional, and romantic scene of the city. 

She had been seeing a guy for a couple of dates, and she was into him and excited about where their future might be headed. For their third date, he suggested they stop by to visit his mother and bring her some flowers. 

“I’m thinking to myself, oh that’s so nice, because the way a man treats their mother is very important,” Dr. Bonnie told us, “but I was also nervous because we had not been dating very long and it felt like a big deal to meet his mother.”

But Dr. Bonnie agreed. The two stopped to pick up some flowers, and then got on their way to start their third date.

“I’m Jewish, so I didn’t recognize where I was going when we first walked in,” Dr. Bonnie said. “But then I realized where we were. We were at a mausoleum, going to visit his mother and bring her flowers.”

Remember, each bad date teaches you something new about yourself, what you’re looking for in a relationship, and what you definitely aren’t looking for from one.

Rejection is one of the most difficult aspects of dating, but it’s unavoidable. Dr. Bonnie gave us some insight into how she dealt with rejection, and why trying to avoid rejection will never yield the results you want it to.

Dr. Bonnie told us she was in school, studying diligently, and not paying too much attention to dating. This was after all the bad dates and disappointments. She was speaking with a professor when he asked her why she was always in the library.

“He pretty much said that he could tell I didn’t have a life, and wanted to know what was going on,” Dr. Bonnie said. “I told him how scary a lot of my dating experiences had been, and that dating and the idea of rejection was so scary to me.”

Her professor’s advice? 

Desensitize yourself to rejection.

The process of achieving any goal in life, whether that’s finding a great partner or publishing a book, is going to come with rejection. When we can find a way to stop being so scared of rejection, we can situate it in the journey as just another aspect of the experience. 

Rejection can hurt, but it’s essential– it’s part of what leads us to who we’re really compatible with. So how do you desensitize yourself to rejection? You welcome it. That means not letting the fear of rejection be the reason you don’t pursue dating, or anything else.

Let’s say you go out on a date and have a great time, but then never hear back from that person. Or maybe you hear back, and they say they aren’t interested in another date. This could be devastating, and put you out of the dating game for a while. But it doesn’t have to be.

Recognize that a rejection opens your time and heart to other possibilities. Try to see rejection, especially early on in dating, as a blessing– you don’t have to waste any more of your time with someone who isn’t right.

“Rejection can be a blessing,” Dr. Bonnie said. “It takes a long time to meet the one, and if you want to meet them and fall in love with them, rejection is always going to be part of that journey.”