Dating After Abuse: The Man I Almost Never Met

Last year, I sent an amend to a man I had never met. I had no idea it was his birthday, and I had no idea that message would lead to the first safe and healthy relationship of my life.

In this episode, I am sharing why I walked away before our first date, what years of being single forced me to face, and why his kindness made me question everything.

This is about dating after abuse, learning to trust yourself when someone starts to matter, and choosing love without giving yourself away.

On July 14th I am coaching you in this free training: Dating After Abuse: How to Have Safe and Healthy Love

It will be shared lived once, and then it disappears forever

Register here

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Transcript

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Last year on June 24th, I sent an amends text message to a man that I had never met. When I tell this story almost a year later, it sounds like I reached out because some part of me knew he was supposed to come back into my life, and then the timing worked out exactly how it should have. But I was not trying to reconnect with him when I sent that text. I was not secretly hoping he would ask me out. And at that point, there had never been a first date. We had met on Tinder December 2024, talked until January 2025, spent some hours on the phone, and shared enough of our lives that I knew I really liked him. He was sweet, communicative, and there was something about the way that he showed up that felt different from what I knew. Looking back on those messages now, I can see how guarded I was with him because every kind thing he tried to do made me wonder what he wanted, what I was missing, or what the kind behavior might cost me later. In the same time frame, my narcissist's ex-husband had started to make a mess alongside litigation and other things that were happening, and I knew that my life was about to become very hard. I was not ready to bring somebody else so new to my world into it. And my past had taught me that I was called too much when my life became difficult, and eventually people left, so I had learned to stop sharing the hardest parts of my life with people I didn't completely trust. What I had told myself back then is that I was stepping away to be fair to him. He had not met me, he had not chosen court, conflict, my ex, lawyers, everything that comes with trying to co-parent with a narcissist. For me, it felt wrong to let him become invested in me when I could already see how painful my life was about to become. I very plainly said something to him about things were about to get messy with my ex and I just needed to tap out. He did send some messages afterwards saying he would like to be there for me, and I did not respond. When I decided to be done, I did shut the door, even though I liked him, and that never felt good for me. It felt very cold. Now I do not regret doing that because I did not have the capacity to start a relationship at that point. I was very right about what was coming, and it was even worse than I had in my head. What stayed with me was that I had made the best decision for both of us, and then I ignored someone who would be nothing but kind when he was trying to tell me he would show up. From January until June, we did not speak. I think he sent me one text message in like April. I remember being in an airport and being like, oh my god, I'm not gonna respond to this. Again, not because I didn't want to, just like, oh, I don't really know how to handle this. He had dated somebody else during that time, and I continued to deal with my ex-husband, court, co-parenting, and all of the things that made me leave in the first place. He came into my mind time to time, but it wasn't because I had a plan to bring him back. I had thought about him because there was something in the way that I had ended it that did not really align with who I wanted to be. June 18th of last year, my life went to absolute hell. There was a very big court decision to go 50-50 with my narcissistic ex-husband, and I was in so much emotional pain and fear for my son, I felt like I could do nothing. In all of this chaos, I had reached out to my first sponsor. Now I'm not in AA anymore, but sobriety taught me a lot about what to do when I was in pain, and I wasn't at risk for drinking, but I couldn't stop feeling the way that I felt, and it just felt extremely heavy, especially when everything around me felt like it was outside of my control. My first sponsor is very direct, very no bullshit, and has a strong Scottish accent. And I knew that he would be able to move me through something like that. And he got quite upset with me. It's like I'd almost forgotten how to handle this. He said, Meg, you know what the fuck to do. Trust God, clean house, serve others. And the amends process is part of that. An amend in AA is not something you do so that somebody forgives you. It is a way to clean up your side of the street, and it's not an apology where you're waiting for reconnection or reassurance. It's you looking at your part and what happened and taking responsibility for it without controlling the response. I've made hundreds of amends over the years, and my now boyfriend was on my easy amends list because I knew what parts of this belonged to me. I had really liked him. I was just afraid that the reality of my life would make me too much. And instead of giving him the opportunity to decide whether he wanted to know me through a hard season, I had decided for him. So after that conversation with my first sponsor, I decided to go look at my amends list and see which ones were on the easy. There's like easy, medium, and hard. And on June 24th, I reached out to my now boyfriend. And he seemed very confused by the message, which kind of makes sense because we had never met in person. A fair amount of time had passed, and it was also his birthday, which I did not know at the time. He had told me that I did not need to say sorry, that he hadn't thought much of it, and then he asked me if I wanted to meet him. He had asked me more than once, and I remember thinking, well, it's his birthday, like maybe he's drinking. And from my perspective, I was making an amend while he was responding as though I had asked him to kind of hang out. I've made a lot of amends before, and sometimes people did come back into my life after a while and my dad's a good example of that. But it could never be the reason for making the amend. It's taking responsibility because it's mine to take, and what happens next belongs to the other person. The complicated part for me is that my life was incredibly painful. Almost everything that had made me end the connection in January was still there and even worse in some areas. Court was still a big part of my life. My ex-husband was now back in the picture full out. I was very afraid for my son, and I was carrying a lot of emotional weight and uncertainty that made me believe I wasn't sure it was a good time to allow somebody else into my world. Meeting him at that time did not make any logical sense, but I wanted to anyways. The woman that I had been in past relationships made choices from need. I needed somebody to want me because that made me feel valuable. I needed the relationship to work and I would adjust myself until it did. My boundaries became very flexible until it threatened the connection. By January, I was no longer making decisions from that place. Yes, I wanted love and forever, and I would have preferred to have somebody beside me, but I did not need a man to make me whole. For the first time in my life, another person could be something I desired without it becoming my source of my identity. So when he asked me whether I wanted to meet or not, I was not actually asking myself whether he wanted me enough. I was allowing myself to admit that I did really want to meet him. I'm Megan Webster, I'm an abuse recovery coach, a trauma-informed strategist, and the woman a narcissist hopes to never meet twice. This is the Narcissist Worst Nightmare podcast, where I am telling you how I went from believing I would never date again to making an amend to a man I had never met, agreeing to have coffee at my house and beginning the first safe and healthy relationship of my life. This week, my boyfriend and I will be celebrating our one year together, and I wanted to share the real story of what dating after abuse did look like for me. And I'm not just gonna tell you about the pretty pieces that I know what they became. I want to talk to you about the years that I spent single, what I had to face when there was no relationship distracting me from myself, why I thought his kindness was suspicious, and why I ended our connection the first time, even though I liked him. This will be a two-part episode, so stay tuned. We are going to drop the second one tomorrow. And on July 14th, I am also teaching a free live training called Dating After Abuse, How to Have Safe and Healthy Love. We are going to talk about how to know whether you are ready to date again, how to create standards without turning them into walls, what commitments you need to make to yourself before you do try to meet somebody, how to build a dating profile that filters people, how to recognize warning signs, and what to do when an old wound appears with a new person. This training will be live one time and then it's going to disappear for good. The registration link is going to be below this video. Before I can tell you about our first date, I do need to talk about who I had to become during the years where I was single and with myself. So I was intentionally single from the end of my marriage in 2022 until the end of 2025, and I was not quietly entertaining anybody during that time. There were no apps and no dates, I was not texting somebody every night while claiming I was focusing on myself, and I did not have a man sitting at the edge of my life giving me just enough attention to stop me from feeling completely alone. I really did need that time period because being alone forced me to face how much of my value I had tied to romantic relationships. I had built businesses, become a mom, gotten sober, and moved through situations that required an enormous amount from me. There were many areas of my life where I was capable and powerful, but romantic relationships brought out a pattern where I abandoned myself very quickly. I would know what I wanted until I became afraid the other person might leave. I could recognize that something felt wrong and still spent more energy understanding the person who hurt me than understanding why I was allowing it to continue. Once I loved someone, their pain became more important to me than the effect their behavior was having on my life. I truly thought that my love could save or help people. I believed that broken people who refused to change would become different if I loved them in a way nobody else had. I looked at their childhood, their history, their wounds, and every painful thing that had happened to them, and then I used it all to excuse the way they were treating me. My empathy gave me an explanation for almost anything. And the problem was that the explanation never stopped the harm. My kindness and empathy had been weaponized against me, and I had to face my own participation in that pattern. I continued giving access after people showed me what they were willing to do with it. I let someone break a boundary, listen to their explanation, and then move the boundary so the relationship could continue. I kept thinking the next apology would mean something different. My two previous relationships, both with narcissists, followed a very similar pattern. At the beginning, there was a very small window, which I used to call attention, affection, and caring, but now I recognize it as love bombing and feature faking. There was intensity and promises, I felt chosen, and I believed that I had met someone who saw me in a way that other people did not. Then they would ask me to move in, I would get there, and it was like meeting a completely different person. The abuse would begin and I would feel blindsided and trapped, but I stayed because I thought that was what love was. I believed the person from the beginning who was still somewhere inside of them, and if I was loving enough, patient enough, understanding enough, we could get back to the version of the relationship that had me fall in love. I really did not believe people when they showed me who they were. I believed the apology that came after that, the promises about what would happen next, and I believed the explanation for the behavior more than I believed what the behavior was doing to me. My choice to spend years alone meant I could not distract myself with another relationship until I understood it. I had to face my parental wounds and why narcissistic men felt familiar to me. I had to look at how much being needed made me feel valuable, and I had to admit that being chosen by a man had become a measurement of my worth. I was successful in every other area of my life, but when somebody wanted me, I gave that desire more authority than my own judgment. Being alone required me to learn that I could build a life I valued without waiting on a man to create it with me. I could build safety for myself and my son, I could create a home, earn money, take myself somewhere beautiful on a trip, make a meal that felt special, celebrate something without needing somebody else to witness it, to validate it, and to sit in pain without immediately reaching for a relationship, another person to make it go away. When I did that, I became the most confident and most free version of myself. My life was already mine, and anybody entering into that was entering into something that I deeply valued. I could finally look at a man and ask whether I wanted the life that came with him. Did I like who I was around him? Did I respect how he treated people? Did his life reflect the values he claimed to have? And did his presence create something that I genuinely wanted more of? Now these questions were new to me because I had spent so much time asking how I could make myself more valuable for somebody else to stay. A lot of the time when my abuse recovery clients come to me, they will say something on two opposite ends of the spectrum. It is either I am never fucking dating again or I wonder if I will ever date again. And I understand this because I said it too. I told my best friend that I was going to buy an island and mini cows and live there because after what I had experienced, which is a decade worth of narcissism, opening my life to another person sounded like volunteering to go through the same pain all over again. Why would I rebuild myself, become someone I respected, and then risk handing somebody else access to the parts of me that had taken years to recover? That fear makes sense. Rebuilding your life after abuse is not creating life where nobody can reach you. It is about becoming someone who does not leave herself when somebody does. You can say that you want love and still belong to yourself. You can be open to connection while understanding that access to your life is not automatic. I didn't think that I was ready to date again. I think that people chase readiness as though there is going to be a morning where the fear disappears and then suddenly they know how to date from the place they've never experienced. They imagine they will recognize everything immediately, trust the right person with hesitation, and nothing old will ever come in pulling them back. I had never dated as this version of myself. I had never entered a connection after spending years building a life that did not require one. I had never tried to remain connected to myself while engaging in dating. So I had no reference point for what readiness was supposed to feel like. I did know what I wanted in my forever, and I also knew I could not build a shared life without refusing to meet anybody. So I decided to try. I was not telling myself that I had healed every part of my past or that nobody would ever hurt me. I simply believed I'd built enough of a relationship with myself to end up dating differently and pay attention to what was happening. And the fear that I carried was not only about what someone might do to me. I was afraid of what I might do once I cared about him. Would I stop listening to myself? Would I see behavior that bothered me and immediately try and explain it? Would I make a man's potential more important than the choices he was making in front of me? I was afraid that I would repeat my own patterns in my own past, and that is a very difficult fear to admit because it means accepting that the other person was not the only risk in my past relationships. I had left myself repeatedly, and I needed to know whether I could choose differently when something real was on the table. I was also afraid that I might get used again, financially, emotionally, physically. And there was a part of me that believed I might be too much for someone. Well, another part of me believed I was not going to be enough. There was still a part of me that believed I might be too much for some people. Well, another part believed I would never be enough. Those two fears working together, you ask for almost nothing because you're afraid your needs will push someone away. Then you give constantly because you believe your value has to be proven. So you become the person who can do everything alone and then wonder why nobody knows how much you are carrying. There were three specific parts of me that had to get stronger before I could recognize a healthy person. Discment, guarded empathy, and self-concept. Discernment for me meant that I was going to look at behavior without talking myself out of what I actually saw. I decided to observe things and go with what I see and know, not what my heart felt. Chemistry could not be enough because my past relationships had chemistry, intensity, and very convincing beginnings. I needed to know whether a man had the actual capacity to participate in the kind of relationship that I wanted. Did he have his own work, life, friends, family, and responsibilities? Could he communicate when a conversation became uncomfortable? Would he respect a no without trying to punish me for it? And was he kind when there was nothing immediate for him to gain? Guarded empathy for me meant I could keep my heart without allowing someone else's pain to become a pass for their behavior. I had already decided that nobody was ever going to change how I showed up in the world. Abuse was not going to take away my ability to love people deeply, but I had to stop allowing empathy to override what was happening around me. I could understand where somebody's behavior come from and still say that it did not belong in my life. I could still care about their past or their pain without volunteering to become the place they put it. My self-concept meant somebody liking me did not suddenly become the most important fact in the room. I knew who I was, what I had built, what kind of mom I wanted to be, and what I wanted my life to feel like with someone else beside me. Instead of rearranging all of that to make space for a man, I could look at whether the way that he lived was compatible with the life I already had. I did not have complicated rules around texting or how quickly someone could ask for a date or how many days someone needed to pass before I gave them more access. What I required was a man to demonstrate safety, emotional security, and intelligence, reciprocity and a willingness to show up. I wanted interdependence. He needed to have his own life and to be excited to share it with me because I did not want to be somebody's whole world. I wanted a man who had the capacity for commitment, communicated directly and well, lived very transparently, and treated people with kindness while staying very loyal to his family. I also needed him to be a good male role model. I am a mother, and although I never had a plan to introduce my son to anybody quickly, the character of the person I was choosing would eventually affect more than me. On dating apps, I watched for love bombing, men who could not stop talking about their ex, pushy behavior, and conversations that became sexual immediately. I paid attention to what happened when I did not move as quickly as somebody else wanted, because a man can be incredibly pleasant while things are going his way. People's responses to boundaries tell you something. I did not care whether someone thought my standards were excessive because I had spent enough of my life negotiating against myself. There is a huge difference, by the way, between standards and walls. A wall makes connection impossible because nobody can ever provide enough evidence that they are safe. A standard allows access to develop while you pay attention to what the other person does with it. I did not want to spend my life hiding from love, but I also was not going to hand my heart to someone because he knew how to say all the right things for three weeks. I wanted to be open and discerning at the same time. The free dating after abuse training on July 14th, I'm going to help you look at whether you were opening yourself to dating from choice or searching for somebody to prove that you are lovable. You need to know the promises you're making to yourself before somebody else because writing down what you deserve is easy when there's nobody standing in front of you with kind eyes, making you laugh and giving you a reason to hope. So my Tinder profile was designed to repel certain people. I wrote that I was a business owner, a single mom, and I said I could outcook your mother, and I still laugh about this to this day. I knew that lying would irritate some men while others would find it funny, which gave me very useful information before we spoke. The men who became offended by that were not my people. And I was also not lying. I'm an excellent cook. I used to own a catering company, and I spent a long time working in the restaurant industry. So even when my now boyfriend thought I might be full of shit about the cooking, he learned eventually that I was completely serious. I also put in my profile that there would be a test, and I think I called them preliminaries. There were four questions. Were you or are you active military? What would your ex say about you if I called them right now? How would you describe your ideal partner? And when had you last cried? A part for me that I still find kind of funny is that I never gave my boyfriend that test. I created these questions as though I was going to be interviewing every single man that I matched with, and then I only went on one date, which was with my boyfriend. I did not remember much of his profile, but I do remember a photo where he was sitting in a kayak looking directly at the camera. He had very kind eyes and something about him felt warm. In our first messages, I could tell he was genuinely interested in me. We had switched over to talking on the phone, and our conversations became more open. We talked about past, our kids, and what it was like to own a business. The conversation flowed easily, we laughed, and I appreciated that he was willing to share parts of his life. He had said things to me in the early conversations, like would it be okay to say good morning and good night? And I thought that was very sweet because he did not assume that consistent access to me was welcome. He did ask and then he followed through. His communication was very consistent, and he had asked me to meet him several times that I kept putting off. It was not because I did not want to meet him, because I absolutely did. My hesitation came from knowing whether or not I could trust myself to make a good decision. How would I know he was safe? How would I know I was not missing something that would become very obvious six months later after I had already allowed him into my life? Every time I very politely danced around it and said no, he respected it. He did not guilt me or pressure me or act like I owed him anything. And he continued to show up in the same way. At one point when we were texting early on, I had become sick and my son was home with me, and my now boyfriend had offered to bring me whatever we needed. And I remember FaceTiming my best friend and being like, hey, like, I don't know what to do with this. This is too nice. People are not like this for no reason. Like, I don't know what this guy wants. I've not even agreed to go on a date with him. And she pointed out that if he did come over, he would know where I lived. And I immediately thought, like, yeah, that's what that's too much for me. I couldn't understand at that time why a man who had never met me would inconvenience himself without expecting something in return. Why he might want my address or seeing me when I'm sick. All of the things obviously were my past cropping up, but knowing who he is today, the offer itself just makes sense. He is a very giving, loving, supportive person to a lot of people in his life. And when we spoke about it recently, his explanation was that I didn't know a lot of people in New Brunswick and I was sick, and if I needed something, he would have been happy to do it. It's just who he is. He cares deeply about people and looks after everybody in his life and notices when there's something practical he can do for help. At that point, his kindness created distress in me because I had never experienced it. Care came with conditions. Attention had been used to gain access. And that kind of behavior at the beginning of a previous relationship had eventually become something so different once I was attached. So when he had offered to help me, I did not just see the offer in front of me, I saw all of my past experiences standing with it. Dating after abuse can look like meeting someone who's respectful and kind, and you can feel more suspicious rather than less. You can receive consistency and search for hidden motive because unpredictability is what you know. I was not wrong to protect my address when I was not comfortable. What was different is that I did not ignore my own concern because I liked him, and I also did not decide he was dangerous and then I felt afraid. I just said no and he respected it. Now, please do not mistake what I am saying here. I'm not saying a man is safe because he offers to bring you medication. Some people behave well in the beginning because they want access, and some people know how to imitate care long enough to create attachment. You do not owe somebody trust because they perform kindness. You give the connection enough time for behavior to become a pattern. My boyfriend and I have done an excellent job of allowing our relationship to move slowly. We did not rush into things, we did not merge our lives immediately, we did not bring our kids into it until like honestly the last couple of weeks when we understood fully what we were building. I have never had a relationship move this slow, and I'm actually really grateful for it because it's allowed me to see that his kindness remained when there was nothing new about me. It gave him the opportunity to know my real life, which has not been easy over the last year, and not a version that was created for dating. It gave us both room to decide whether we wanted to keep choosing the relationship. Our first date was coffee at my house, which was something I had never done before. Even after delaying every invitation to meet, I somehow allowed this man to walk directly into my space. I don't remember what we were wearing or what the first words that were exchanged, but I do remember the energy in the room because it was intense. He was no longer a picture of a man in a kayak or a voice that I knew through the phone. He was sitting in my home. And all of the work that I'd done while I was alone was about to meet the reality of allowing another person to know me. And I know this is an awful place to stop for today, but part two begins right after this. I help women leave unhealthy relationships through the emotional exit, financial autonomy, and the relational rebuild afterwards. On July 14th, I am teaching you how to date safely after abuse, what healthy love looks and feels like. This training is for the woman who has done the meaningful work after abuse and is beginning to feel that she might want to date again, along with the woman who is already dating, and discovering that old patterns and old wounds can show up in moments when somebody starts to matter. We are going to take a look at if you are ready enough to begin, how to create standards without making love impossible, what promises you need to make to yourself, how to build a profile that filters people out, what warning signs to be cautious of, and what do you do when your patterns, wounds, and attachments start appearing inside of a new connection. The registration link is right below this video. At the end of the training, I will also be inviting women who are ready for deeper relational work into the Black Cat Academy. This is our six-month dating program where we work on discernment, standards, desire, feminine sovereignty, power dynamics, and relational recalibration. This is not about finding a man who makes wounds disappear. It's about becoming the woman who can choose love without giving yourself away. If this episode cracks something open in you good, that means you're waking up, please share this with another person that needs it. Send me a DM on Instagram to tell me what landed the hardest for you. Register for dating after abuse, how to have safe and healthy love happening on July 14th. I am teaching this once and then it disappears, guys. So you can go ahead and register below and come back for part two because I'm going to tell you what happened when we finally met, how loving a safe person brought pieces of my past back to the surface, what it has meant for me to learn how to stay when conflict happens, and why words do not mean anything to me today when the behavior stays the same. This is the Nurses' Worst Name Here podcast, where the woman who thought she would never date again learned that opening her heart did not require her to hand her life away.