Tamsen Fadal

There's more to imagine when you listen.

Hey everybody, welcome back to The Tamsen Show.

If you have followed me for a while, you know I talk a lot about dating.

I've shared advice, hard lessons, a lot of mistakes I've made because I have made a lot of them.

And what you might not know is that years ago, many years ago, I actually ran a matchmaking business in New York City.

It was early 2000s and I sat across from women every single day.

who wanted love and who were ready for love, or thought they were, but who kept getting caught in the same traps over and over again.

And the truth is, I wasn't just watching it happen, I was living it too.

I dated through my 20s and my 30s.

I thought I'd found forever.

I got divorced, and then I found myself again starting over in my 40s.

And along the way, I learned something that stings to admit.

Even when you do know better, it's still so easy to repeat the same patterns.

I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, The Materialist, about the dating scene in New York.

The dinners, the setups, the heartbreaks.

That was my life and a lot of women's lives.

And even now, years later, I see women making some of the same mistakes over and over again.

And it's not because we're being foolish, not because we don't know what we deserve, but because love is really vulnerable.

And when we do want it badly enough, we can talk ourselves into almost anything.

And I call it turning red flags into pink flags.