Common Ground Coaching

Look back honestly at your last three relationships. Not the endings…. the transitions. Was there ever a real gap? A stretch of weeks or months where you weren’t in something, weren’t talking to someone new, weren’t quietly keeping a door cracked open just in case the current one closed? Or did one relationship blend almost seamlessly into the next, with barely a pause in between?

If you’re struggling to remember a time when you were actually fully single (not dating, not talking to someone, not keeping an option warm) you may be living out a pattern that finally has a name: monkey-barring. Like swinging from one bar to the next without ever touching the ground, it’s the habit of lining up your next connection before letting go of your current one, so you’re never left standing in the space between relationships.

It’s often mistaken for confidence, for never having trouble finding someone. It’s usually something else entirely.

The Reframe: The Problem Isn’t the New Person, It’s the Empty Space You’re Avoiding

The instinct is to look at monkey-barring and ask, “what’s wrong with this new relationship, was it rushed, was it the wrong person?” That question, while reasonable, misses the actual pattern. The issue was rarely the specific person you swung toward. It was what you were swinging away from: the discomfort of being alone with yourself, even briefly, between one attachment and the next.

Here’s the reframe worth sitting with: monkey-barring isn’t a relationship problem. It’s a discomfort-with-solitude problem wearing a relationship costume.

This matters because it changes what the actual work is. If you treat this as a dating problem, the fix looks like “choose better next time”, screen more carefully, wait longer before committing. But if the real issue is an inability to tolerate the gap, better screening won’t touch it. You’ll just do the same swing with a more carefully chosen next bar.

Why the Gap Feels So Unbearable

For a lot of people, being between relationships doesn’t feel like freedom, it feels like exposure. Without someone else’s attention to hold, you’re left facing your own company, your own thoughts, your own unanswered questions about who you are outside of being wanted. If that confrontation has historically felt unsafe or unbearable, because being alone once meant being unseen, unvalued, or genuinely unsafe, it makes complete sense that your system would do almost anything to avoid recreating it, including reaching for the next person before the current one has even fully let go.

There’s also a quieter mechanism at work: the belief, often unexamined, that your worth is confirmed by being chosen. If someone wanting you feels like the only reliable evidence that you matter, then the moment between relationships (when no one is actively choosing you) can feel less like rest and more like a referendum on your value. Monkey-barring, in that light, isn’t recklessness. It’s a fairly logical response to a belief that hasn’t been tested: that alone equals unworthy, so alone must be avoided at all costs.

None of this means you’re incapable of being single, or that something is fundamentally broken in how you attach. It means the gap has never actually been given a chance to prove it’s survivable, because you’ve never let yourself stay in it long enough to find out.

What This Pattern Actually Costs You

You never get an honest read on why the last relationship ended. When you swing straight into something new, there’s no time to actually process what happened in the last one, what you needed, what went wrong, what you’d do differently. That unprocessed material doesn’t disappear. It usually gets carried, unexamined, into the next relationship.

You choose from urgency instead of clarity. A person chosen because they were available at the moment you needed a new bar to swing to is a very different choice than a person chosen after real reflection on what you actually want. Urgency narrows your options to whoever’s closest, not whoever’s best.

You never find out who you are without someone else’s hand to hold. This might be the steepest cost. If you’ve never had an unattached stretch of time, you genuinely don’t know, not guess, know, what your own preferences, rhythms, and interests look like when they’re not being shaped around a partner. That’s a real gap in self-knowledge, and it doesn’t close on its own.

How to Actually Let Go of One Bar Before Reaching for the Next

1. Name the swing when you feel it happening. The moment you notice yourself getting emotionally invested in someone new while a current relationship is still technically ongoing, even just texting, even just “it’s not serious yet”, pause and name it plainly: I’m reaching for the next bar before I’ve let go of this one. Naming it doesn’t require you to stop immediately. It interrupts the autopilot.

2. Practice tolerating small gaps before attempting a large one. If a full stretch of singleness feels unbearable, start smaller. A day without texting anyone new. A weekend without lining up plans that double as a backup option. Build your tolerance for the gap gradually, the way you’d build any other capacity, through manageable reps, not a single overwhelming leap.

3. Get specific about what “alone” actually threatens. Ask yourself directly: what am I afraid will happen, or what will I have to face, if there’s truly no one else in the picture? The answer is often more specific than “I’ll be lonely”, it might be “I’ll have to sit with the question of whether I’m actually likable outside of being useful to someone,” or “I’ll have to feel how much the last relationship actually hurt.” Naming the real fear is more useful than managing the vague one.

4. Let the last relationship finish before the next one starts…. on purpose. This might mean an actual conversation, a clean ending, or simply a period of reflection before you let yourself get invested in someone new. It doesn’t need to be dramatic. It needs to be real, and it needs to happen before the next bar, not during the swing.

5. Build a version of a full life that doesn’t require a partner to feel complete. Friendships, hobbies, routines, a sense of who you are on a random Tuesday with no plans…. these aren’t consolation prizes for being single. They’re the actual foundation that makes the gap between relationships survivable, and eventually, even enjoyable.

The Question Worth Asking Yourself

Not “why do I keep meeting new people so quickly”, that question keeps the focus on the people, when the people were never really the point.

The more useful question is: What would I have to feel, if there were truly no one else to hold onto right now?

That question is uncomfortable on purpose. It’s also the doorway to finding out something you may have never had the chance to learn: that you are someone you can actually stand to be alone with, not despite the gap, but because of what you find once you finally let yourself stay in it.

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You don’t need a hand to hold to prove you’re worth choosing. Sometimes the bravest swing is the one where you let go and just stand there for a while.