When someone tells you they're not ready, indirectly or directly,

and you stick around anyway, they're much more likely to lose respect for you,

because they realize that you don't take yourself seriously. Seriously. Should you date someone or continue to date someone who is still getting over an X?

This is a question I get asked a lot.

People wondering, is there a certain amount of time I should leave it for?

How do I know if someone is actually emotionally available

So we're going to be talking today about the people who have real potential and the people who make really bad bets for your time, your energy, and your emotions.

I'm also going to tell you something that people in this position do that makes them incredibly appealing and even makes them appear to be emotionally

available when in fact they are the exact opposite.

So stay tuned for that.

Let's deal first with the big misconception, thinking that it's about time. That if someone has been broken up for six months or a year that must be okay but

someone who is fresh out of a breakup is a bad person to invest in. The reality is that there are people

who have been broken up with someone for a year who are still very much not over that person,

and then there are people that have been broken up for three weeks that are completely done with that person.

There's also misconceptions about how the length of a relationship can affect things.

We often associate long relationships with taking a long time to get over.

But there are people who have been stale relationships who leave after years and have a fine time moving on.

There are other people who have only been dating someone for a month and are truly heartbroken

for a long time afterwards.

So time is very misleading and a bad thing to base your

decision on when deciding to invest in someone like this. So if it's not necessarily

about time, either in the length of the relationship or how long they've been broken up for, how can we tell if we should continue with someone?

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