Is Your Type Keeping You Single?
Let me say something your friends have probably already told you.
You have a type.
Maybe you have been saying for years that you do not. Maybe you genuinely believe you are open, that you go for all sorts of people, that you are not fixed on any one idea. And then you look at the last few men you were actually excited about and realise that, underneath the surface, they were essentially the same.
I did this for years. Mine were intelligent, passionate, fascinating to talk to. They had strong opinions, interesting careers, and a way of making me feel deeply seen in conversation. They were also, without exception, far more invested in their own world than in me. They never really had time. I was always second. And yet I kept finding myself drawn back to that same dynamic, different faces, same experience.
At some point, I had to ask the obvious question. What if the type is the problem?
Why the Subconscious Holds On to Familiar Patterns
Your subconscious is not concerned with whether a relationship is good for you. It is concerned with what feels familiar, because familiar feels safe.
Every relationship you have experienced has created a pattern. Your subconscious learns what this kind of person looks like, how they behave, how they communicate, and how things tend to unfold. It stores the sequence. The attraction, the shift, the confusion, the disappointment. It remembers how it ends.
So when you meet someone who matches enough of those familiar traits, your subconscious recognises it immediately. It knows what to do. It knows how this story goes. And that sense of knowing, even if the outcome is painful, feels safe.
This is why you can be fully aware that someone who barely communicates or keeps you at a distance is not right for you, and still feel drawn to them. They fit the pattern. Someone who shows up consistently, who communicates clearly, who actually wants to spend time with you, can feel unfamiliar. And unfamiliar can feel uncomfortable.
The Ick Is Not Always What You Think
This is one of the most important things to understand.
When someone treats you well, when he is consistent, kind, and clearly interested, and you suddenly feel yourself pulling away or losing interest, that feeling is not always intuition. It is often your subconscious reacting to something that does not match your usual pattern.
It is not that he is wrong for you. It is that your subconscious does not recognise what is happening. It has no reference point for what comes next.
Without that reference, it defaults to discomfort. It labels it as something being off, when in reality it may simply be unfamiliar.
That feeling is worth paying attention to, not as a sign to leave, but as something to understand more deeply.
What Changes When You Try a Different Type
When you go on a date with someone outside your usual pattern, something shifts.
There is no script running in the background. No familiar sequence waiting to play out. You are not reacting based on past experiences in the same way, because this situation is genuinely new.
That allows you to show up differently.
The version of you who dates someone within your usual type is shaped by everything that has happened before. She is aware, careful, often overthinking, trying to read signals and stay one step ahead.
The version of you who dates someone outside that pattern does not have that same background noise. She can be more present. More open. More herself.
It becomes a different experience, not just because of who you are dating, but because of who you are being in that moment.
Instant Chemistry Is Not Always Compatibility
One of the most persistent myths in dating is that chemistry either exists from the very first moment or it never will. That if there are no fireworks in the first five minutes, you might as well save everyone the time.
That myth is keeping a lot of women single.
What you are often calling chemistry in those early moments is recognition. The subconscious firing up because it has encountered something familiar. It reads as attraction because it is exciting, it is charged, it has the particular quality of something you have felt before. But what you have felt before is also what has hurt you before. That charge is not a guarantee of compatibility. It is, in many cases, a guarantee of repetition.
The slow burn is real. I have been on third dates with men I would have written off after the first, and they genuinely surprised me. Something shifted, the nerves settled, the real person started to show, and what I found there was warmth and humour and care that no amount of opening-night electricity could have predicted.
Breaking the Pattern Makes Change Easier
There is a practical point here that I want to make clearly, because it matters.
If you have always been the woman who gives everything, who abandons her own needs in relationships, who loses herself trying to earn someone’s consistent presence, and you decide to work on showing up differently, you can absolutely do that work with your usual type. But it will be hard. Genuinely hard. Because every time you are with that familiar type, the subconscious is already running the old programme. You will have to be conscious and deliberate and self-monitoring almost constantly, because the pull toward the old pattern will be strong and well-practised.
If instead you show up to someone outside that pattern, someone who does not trigger the subconscious programme in the same way, you have a much better chance of being the version of yourself you are working toward. Not because you have arrived there yet necessarily, but because you are not fighting the old wiring at every turn. The field is clearer. The new version of you has more room.
Give It More Than One Date
If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this.
Stop letting a single first date be the moment that decides everything. First dates are small, pressured, often awkward. Both people are nervous. The real personality has not fully surfaced yet. The ease that comes with even a little familiarity is not there yet.
Give it two dates. Give it three. Let him show you who he actually is. Let yourself show up differently than you have before.
The relationship you want might not announce itself with fireworks. It might arrive quietly, consistently, as something that just keeps getting better.
Listen to the Full Episode Here
And to find out exactly what your biggest block in love is right now, take the quiz here:
Alexandra Bellerose is a hypnotherapist and EFT tapping practitioner specialising in love, subconscious rewiring, and manifesting the relationship you have always known was possible. She hosts Shift and Receive, a podcast for ambitious women who are ready to crack the code on love.