How important is dating to you? Do you passively date? Is it intentional? Do you mindlessly swipe, hoping for the best? Have a new partner every other year…month? You been back and forth with the same (or similar) somebody, thinking that things will change or you will finally find it/them enough? Or do you wait at home, hoping that whomever is gonna show up will do so on the off chance you leave your home to do something other than go to work or the grocery? Oh, me honey? Dating is so important I've found myself on a couple Tinder billboards and am presently working for a dating app company. I shoot my shot, swipe and have friends set me up with their friends.
I do all this in an attempt to "match" with a hopeful partner.
It's not necessarily that I'm a serial dater (delulu is the solulu, okay). It's just that, I'm not waiting around for love to magically appear in my life and be what I want it to be. I am actively creating both the life and love that I want. And that life includes intentionally sharing my journey with someone I can grow with. I wish that meant that my dating life has been full of lovely experiences, but I have a history of letting my lessons linger painfully.
Present-day though, I’m doing a much better job of choosing the who and for how long.
My understanding is that the relational wounds I have are not finna heal themselves OUT of relationship. My non-romantic relationships are solid—in them I am loved and supported and treated with the utmost respect. There is so much healing that happens in my life platonically. Romantically though….yikes.
So, how do we do this relational healing without so many emotional scrapes of the knees? Cause I be out here strugglin’ sometimes.
I remember my first crush. I was in pre-school. Every few days like clockwork, me and this kid ran face first into one another on the playground. We never spoke two words. We just stood there, avoiding eye contact while the teacher rinsed our bloody faces off at a large circular water fountain. The metal ones you pushed with your foot. She’d bend down with a wet paper towel cleaning each of us off gently, telling us to be more careful. It happened so often, it almost became routine. I wasn’t trying to run face first into the kid, it just happened. I never seemed to see him when we weren’t smacking into one another. At times, it feels as if my dating life is a series of me running full-speed into another person face-first. I’m extremely of tired of the bloody noses, though.
The last blog post I wrote (in June '22) about falling in love was more about dating someone I actually liked, and felt liked by for the first time since my divorce in 2017. At the time I hadn’t quite defined love in a way that didn’t feel like complete self-sacrifice. (Did I know this then? Not even a little. I was in deep, honey.)
One problem with getting married so young is that after my divorce, I had more experience being wife than I had experience being a girlfriend. I didn't know how to just date. From the earliest exchanges of communication, lifelong commitment was on my brain. While I've grown a lot, I can't say that, that part has changed much. I have a serious, "urge to merge".
I am a lovergirl. Hopeful romantic.
Diehard monogomist. I am unashamed of my love-pursuit;
I just be trying to do it differently when I can.
Better.
Because of this, I choose to seek help often. That used look like talking about trivial dating nonsense to friends for hours on end. I got tired of the single-complaining-to-the-single. Or side-eyeing folks in shitty relationships shelling out dating advice. So, I got serious about the information I received about love and utlized my life coach who is well-versed in dating, relationships and making healthier love-pursuit choices.
I believe in getting professional support in all areas of my life that need assistance. Why would dating be any different? While working with Marisa, a friend and I attended one of her relationship workshops. My homegirl and I were eager to get new tools and try dating in a different way. With Marisa's journal prompts, homework and heartfelt sharing—I began opening myself up to dating differently. I began to unlearn ideas that in the past left me scraping for scraps and begging men for emotional crumbs. I found it most helpful to have Marisa there to cheer me on, hold me accountable and aid in strengthening my dating muscles as swiped and first-dated my way out of old ideals.
As I got more clear about what I wanted a partner to feel like, I realized there was so much more to love-pursuit than surface-level attraction and shared interests. In my twenties, I was with folks 'cause I thought I was supposed to be with them. Having a deep connection wasn't high on my priority list, but being a wife was.
I wanted to release that mentality in my thirties, especially considering young marriage didn't turn out to be the success marker I thought it would be.
Although, I had a coach encouraging me to take it slow and enjoy the moment, in 2022 I hop-skip-jumped into a relationship with marriage still on my mind. (Turns out, releasing old ideals takes more time than I had patience for.) I immediately decided that liking a person alone was enough to begin creating a future with them. But after a few months of a disregulated nervous system, I realized that the relationship I immediately leapt in was not sustainable over time. I misread mutual interest and heartfelt laughter as love. I learned that the kind of love I want does not disregulate me regularly.
That expereience wasn’t love at all, at least not the love for me. But, because (idk…trauma-response, anxious-attachment, the general desire to be bae’d up) I allowed the discomfort of lonely to outweigh the discomfort of disregulation until I didn't.
And then I began to date someone else…
More on that in the next blog,
but I’ll leave you with this:
The kind of love you want is undoubtedly out there, my question though is…are you willing to work for it?
And what does that work look like? If you need some help trying to figure that out, hit up my girl, Marisa.
She doesn’t miss.
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