Boyfriend’s baby talk a big-time turnoff

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/10/2016 (3287 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: My boyfriend calls me baby names when no one else is around. I don’t like it much, but I put up with it until last weekend when he introduced me to his old girlfriend at a social event and they started talking baby talk to each other. I wanted to puke.

When she finally walked away, I was just drunk enough to go grab her arm and ask if he taught her to baby talk. She said, “No, I taught it to him and it still turns me on when he talks that way. It’th tho cute!”

I found my own way home and am not taking his calls. Am I overreacting?

— All Alone Now, North End

Dear All Alone Now: Feeling alone after any breakup is a natural ending, like cooled-off bathwater is a signal the good part is over. Finally, you pick yourself up, get out and dry off. You are turned off him now. Go out and find a great guy, one who also thinks baby talk between couples sounds stupid.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: I fall in love at first sight regularly and always get hurt and rejected about two months into it. Why do people stop loving me when they get to know me? I’m a nice person. I get even nicer and more loving as time goes on. I tell everything that’s happened to me about a month into it, how I feel about them and really reveal my soul. I ask them not to do the things other people have done to me.

My brother told me I have bad timing and a too-much-information problem, but how can another person fall in love with you when they don’t have all your information? How much should you tell? What should I be leaving out? I have been hurt so many times now I feel like giving up. What should I do?

— Young Lover, 17, South End

Dear Young Lover: What you’re feeling right off that top — that giddy feeling, being totally obsessed, loving the new person’s looks and smile, thinking everything about them is perfect — is called infatuation, not love. You take your initial impression of their personality, and lacking full information, you add to it a bunch of positive attributes about their underlying character from your own imagination. Then you mistakenly call it love. 

It usually takes many months or even a year or more — a long test drive with bumps in the road — to really know if it’s the big L.

So it’s not like you’ve been rejected from love five times, but you have had some infatuation buildups toward love that crashed. Big deal. It happens to everybody who’s new at the game.

A new relationship is not sturdy in the beginning. While it is gaining strength, it can’t withstand the weight of too many dire confessions. If you spill every bad thing that happened to you since you were a little kid, your new relationship can’t handle it. So you “take time to make time” as the song goes. You have to balance great new experiences together with glimpses into your life, the good times and the bad.

Don’t feel like you’re a loser in love. Everyone is a loser at infatuation until one of those new relationships turns into full-out love in the end. As for “love at first sight,” it is often recognizing someone who is a combination of a few people you already know and love, except for small differences in looks and personality.

Anyone who’s spouting “I love you” after a few weeks is not likely in love. Sometimes saying I love you too soon is like saying, “I’m lonely and I need to love someone,” and that neediness scares people away. By the way, when you tell a new person about putting up with bad behaviour from other girlfriends, it invites the bad ones to hang around.

Please send your questions and comments to lovecoach@hotmail.com or Miss Lonelyhearts c/o the Winnipeg Free Press, 1355 Mountain Ave., Winnipeg, MB, R2X 3B6

Miss Lonelyhearts
Advice Columnist

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