Dr. Bonnie on Bad Dates, Falling in Love, and Beating Dating Fears

The Short Version: Hoping to bring grace, patience, and perseverance to your dating life? Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil walked us through dating’s highs and lows and shared her advice for savoring every stage of the journey, even the complicated ones.

Dating and relationships aren’t easy for anyone. The culture most of us live in is flooded with content about couples and relationships, and much of it is staged for the camera.

Still, all that media paints and reinforces a picture of perfect love. Yet if love were perfect, it wouldn’t really be love.

If we can see dating as a beautiful journey and treat it that way, we’re free to enjoy the best parts without worrying too much about where it ends up.

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

Seeing dating like that isn’t always easy, though.

We start dating because we want love, and that’s far from a low-stakes game. How, then, do we handle a journey whose goal is love in a healthy way, without getting overly attached to how it turns out?

Dr. Bonnie drew on her many years of personal and professional experience to share some wisdom.

We spoke with Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil, who is a relationship counselor, an author, and a prominent voice in the dating world. She talked about bad dates and the dating process, and explained why you should keep your chin up even if the road starts to feel like a minefield.

Relationships, like dating, are a journey too, and we need patience and resilience along the way. Dr. Bonnie covered everything with us, from first dates to making it last over the long haul, and she pointed us to the wisdom daters can pull from 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.”

How Dr. Bonnie Became a Relationship Expert

A marriage and relationship therapist, Dr. Bonnie said her own family was always on her mind while she was in school. “My inspiration for working with couples was my own parents,” she said. “For the first 25 years of their marriage, my father cheated. And for the last 25 years, he stopped cheating.”

She told us this is what led her to work with couples, particularly those dealing with infidelity. Unlike many others in the field, Dr. Bonnie urges couples to do everything they can to save the relationship and stay together, and she sees therapy as one place where they can do that.

“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.”

Dr. Bonnie’s specialty is helping couples repair their relationship after infidelity.

Digging into her family tree and getting to know her family more deeply helped Dr. Bonnie grasp the nuances of finding love. Even with her father’s chronic adultery, her father and his wife still found a loving way forward that let them both flourish in their marriage.

In the dating and relationship world, Dr. Bonnie is known as the “adultery buster.” Plenty of her books, such as “Make Up, Don’t Break Up: Finding and Keeping Love for Singles and Couples,” and “Adultery: The Forgivable Sin,” have helped couples cope with and get through one of the most painful, difficult experiences a relationship can go through.

“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 among the toughest parts of dating, particularly when you’re ready for real commitment and a serious connection. But according to Dr. Bonnie, it’s the key to finding love that’s right for you and ready for you.

Getting Past the “Potholes on the Road to Love”

“Make Up, Don’t Break Up: Finding and Keeping Love for Singles and Couples” is aimed at singles and couples who want to start or save a relationship. She wrote it with couples in mind who are thinking about breaking up and feel their relationship has changed at its core since it began. Her advice, though, isn’t to throw in the towel; she’s there to help couples find a way through.

Helping couples stay together and work through cheating has been Dr. Bonnie’s focus ever since she entered the relationship field. Still, her advice for couples is useful for daters too, and the stories she tells in her book offer plenty of helpful information and wisdom.

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 directed us to one particular chapter of her book, titled “Potholes on the Road to Love.” Before meeting her husband, she went on lots of dates with lots of interesting people. Had she quit after the fourth bad date, or even the fortieth, she’d never have had the chance 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 dating escapades with us, including a few of the worst and the funniest. A Jersey Girl in New York, she was trying to handle the busy personal, professional, and romantic whirl of the city.

Bad dates are simply part of the search for love, so try not to take them personally.

She’d been on a couple of dates with a guy she liked, and she was excited to see where things between them might go. For their third date, he proposed stopping by his mother’s place to 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.”

Still, Dr. Bonnie said yes. They picked up some flowers along the way and then headed off to begin 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.”

Keep in mind that every bad date shows you something new about yourself, about what you want in a relationship, and about what you’re sure you don’t want from one.

Rejection Stinks. Learn to Welcome It.

Rejection ranks among the hardest parts of dating, and there’s no avoiding it. Dr. Bonnie told us how she handled rejection and why trying to dodge it will never get you the results you’re after.

Dr. Bonnie said that once the bad dates and letdowns were behind her, she was in school, studying hard and not focusing much on dating. One day a professor she was chatting with asked her why she spent all her time 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.

Reaching any goal in life, whether it’s finding a great partner or getting a book published, will come with rejection. Once we find a way to stop fearing rejection so much, we can see it as simply one more part of the journey.

Rejection can sting, but it’s necessary: it’s part of what guides us to the people we’re truly compatible with. How do you make yourself less sensitive to it, then? You embrace it. That means never letting fear of rejection stop you from pursuing dating, or anything else.

Rejection leaves room for other, better possibilities.

Say you go on a date, have a wonderful time, and then never hear from that person again. Or you do hear back, and they tell you they’re not interested in a second date. That could be crushing and sideline you from dating for a while. It doesn’t have to, though.

Understand that rejection frees up your time and your heart for other possibilities. Particularly early in dating, it helps to treat rejection as a blessing: you no longer have to spend time on someone who isn’t right for you.

“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.”