Let's Stop Diagnosing Our Dates

Can We Leave the Therapist’s Office Now?

For someone who spent nearly a decade in therapy, this may sound like an odd thing to say, but I think we’ve collectively overstayed our appointment.

To be clear, therapy changed my life. It gave me language for things I had spent years trying to explain. I learned about trauma, boundaries, hypervigilance, emotional regulation, and all the other concepts that helped me make sense of experiences that once left me confused and ashamed. Therapy gave me tools. It gave me peace. It helped me heal.

But somewhere along the way, I think many of us accidentally brought the entire therapist’s office home with us.

These days, it feels like every disagreement, every awkward text exchange, and every disappointing date is immediately subjected to a full psychological evaluation. Spend five minutes on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, or one of the countless “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” groups and you’ll find people diagnosing strangers with the confidence of licensed professionals. He’s a dismissive avoidant. She’s a narcissist. He’s breadcrumbing. She’s codependent. He’s gaslighting. They’re trauma bonded. They’re enmeshed. They’re emotionally dysregulated. He’s inauthentic. She’s not doing the work.

By the time we’re finished, a man who took eight hours to reply to a text has somehow become a graduate-level case study without any consideration that there might be an alternative explanation. Maybe he’s golfing. Maybe he’s taking a nap. Maybe he’s making tacos. Maybe he’s simply not that interested.

Not every inconvenience is pathology. Sometimes people are just disappointing.

The irony is that many of these concepts are important and incredibly useful. Learning about narcissistic abuse helped many people leave harmful relationships. Understanding boundaries has improved friendships and marriages. Recognizing unhealthy patterns can absolutely save lives. The problem is that psychology was meant to explain people, not replace them.

Somewhere along the way, I think we’ve confused understanding people with categorizing them. We’ve stopped asking, “Who is this person?” and started asking, “What diagnosis best explains why they annoyed me?” Curiosity tends to disappear once we’ve decided we already know who someone is.

A family member once dated someone who had a diagnosis for everybody. If someone in the family didn’t immediately warm to her, she concluded that they were intimidated by beautiful women because unresolved childhood wounds had left them deeply insecure.

Meanwhile, the rest of us suspected Aunt Linda was still annoyed because this woman had spent Thanksgiving criticizing the way she prepared the brisket she had been tending all afternoon.

It’s amazing how much simpler life becomes when we allow for the possibility that not every interpersonal conflict requires a psychological explanation. Sometimes people aren’t projecting their childhood wounds onto us.

Sometimes they just think we’re annoying.

I think that’s part of the reason dating doesn’t feel fun anymore. We’ve become amateur detectives searching for clues instead of humans getting to know other humans. Three conversations into a dating app exchange and we’re already consulting our internal DSM-V. If he doesn’t ask enough questions, he’s avoidant. If she values her independence, she must be fearful avoidant. If he still talks to his ex-wife, there must be enmeshment. If she wants to spend weekends with her girlfriends, she probably has commitment issues.

We’re not dating anymore. We’re conducting investigations.

I’ve been guilty of it too. After all, if you spend enough time in therapy, it’s tempting to believe you can identify every attachment style by the third text message. Sometimes I have to remind myself that not every person who frustrates me requires a two-hundred-word psychological dissertation.

Sometimes they’re just human.

Over the past year, I’ve met men who disappointed me in different ways. One swept me up in excitement and possibility before ultimately proving he didn’t have the emotional capacity to sustain what we had started. Another brought laughter, chemistry, and encouragement into my life but simply didn’t have room for anything more. Years ago, I would have spent endless hours trying to determine exactly what attachment style they were and which childhood wounds were responsible for their behavior.

Now, I find myself asking simpler questions. Were they kind? Mostly. Did I enjoy them? Very much. Were they capable of giving me what I needed? No. Most importantly, do I wish them well? Absolutely.

Those answers tell me far more than any attachment-style quiz or Instagram carousel ever could.

Perhaps we’ve become so fluent in therapy speak that we’ve forgotten something surprisingly simple: people are not diagnoses. They’re stories.

Human beings are wonderfully frustrating and frustratingly wonderful. People are contradictory. They are loving and selfish, brave and insecure, emotionally available one day and overwhelmed the next. Sometimes they communicate beautifully and sometimes they retreat. Sometimes they disappoint us not because they’re pathological, but because they’re imperfect.

Including ourselves.

In fact, the funniest example of therapy speak invading everyday life came from my own household.

A few months ago, I received a phone call from my son’s principal because my nine-year-old had informed another child that he refused to play with him because the boy wasn’t “emotionally regulated.” He had also grown frustrated with classmates because their brains weren’t developed enough for mature conversations.

As if that wasn’t enough, he later broke up with his third-grade girlfriend after she played Legos with another boy and informed me that he had “batteries.”

I stared at him.

“Batteries?”

“You know, Mom. Batteries.”

After several minutes, I realized he meant boundaries.

At that moment, I did what any responsible parent would do. I checked every parental control setting in the house.

Because when third graders are discussing emotional regulation and attachment wounds during recess, perhaps we’ve all gone a little too far.

Maybe the goal of therapy was never to live there forever. Maybe the goal was to heal enough that we could rejoin humanity. To recognize red flags without seeing monsters around every corner. To maintain boundaries without building walls. To use the language when it serves us without allowing it to replace common sense, compassion, and curiosity.

People are more than labels. Sometimes they’re not avoidant; they’re tired. Sometimes they’re not narcissists; they’re selfish. Sometimes they’re not gaslighting us; they simply disagree. And sometimes they’re not our forever person. They’re just another flawed, funny, complicated human being trying to figure life out alongside the rest of us.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to my regularly scheduled EMDR session with my long-term therapist to process my latest breakup.

Cheerio.