Last night I met a lady who asked me if her new boyfriend was the ‘real thing’ because he was ‘too good to be true’. She said he did everything right but she still worried he was maybe just interested in sex.
Obviously I could not tell her for sure. I don’t know her boyfriend nor do I really know her. What I do know is that I can help her figure it all out for herself, as truly she is the only one who can come up with the answer.
But this made me think….
How many of us hope there is a magic answer, a way to simply KNOW when we have met The One?
Truth is: there is! (But it’s not really magic. 🙁 )
The way to know when you’ve found true love is by embracing and practicing a new approach to dating.
Before I tell you more about how that is even possible I want to start with a few questions about YOU and how you feel about love!
1. Do you feel dating is exhausting and results are never what you want them to be?
2. Do you expect love will just happen eventually if you’re patient enough?
3. Do you doubt it is even possible to meet The One and prefer to focus on other areas of your life?
You may be at a stage in your life where all your friends are getting married and you feel somehow left behind when you go to their weddings as a single woman…
Or you may be the only girl with no kids and no husband in a group of friends who seem to never stop chattering about how wonderful family life can be…
Or you may even be that girl who dates but is so unsure of what true love looks like that is overwhelmed by the fear of failure and brings it about every time…
So why do we feel like this? What are the causes of such widespread belief among women that dating and relationships in general are difficult and painful? Why do we doubt love is real even when we find it?
I spoke to women all over the world and boiled it down to 3 reasons why women don’t feel empowered when it comes to their love lives.
1. Culturally-ingrained gender roles
What do I mean by that? One of my favorite classical quotes says “In love, there is always one who kisses and the other who offers the cheek”. Most cultures expect the man to do the kissing or the chasing or initiating the dialogue, while the woman sits back and waits to be conquered, seduced, taken in some cases. Notice how the words and tenses we use to describe this dynamic tell it all: the men DO while the women WAIT for them to do it!
2. Romantic fairy tales and movies
How many of you grew up dreaming of being a princess? Yes, there were the dresses, the castles and the unicorns, you name it: all fantasyland which shaped our creative imagination and gave us the foundation for dreaming of an amazing life and imagining our wedding day in excruciating detail
But again what is the common thread that runs through all these stories?
The princess always needs saving, she always goes through some pain and suffering before Prince Charming steps in and saves the day. How do you think this affects our adult selves? Is there still at some level, in the deep recesses of our minds, a hope (an expectation?) that maybe, just maybe, if we sit quietly in our tower, Prince Charming will show up one day to kill the dragon of loneliness?
3. Poor role models and bad personal experiences
As human beings we learn most things through experience: watching our mothers brush their teeth or putting on make-up, observing how our parents, relatives and friends interact with each other and then trying these things out for ourselves. If these experiences are positive, we thrive and grow and feel happy.
If somewhere along the way we encounter pain, heartbreak, difficulties, we somehow grow to accept these as the norm too, because this is ‘how things go’. It is entirely possible that children of divorced parents believe at some very intimate level that all relationships are eventually doomed so they go into their own relationship expecting this to happen and unconsciously sabotaging it.
And then you think of your own life and how your relationships didn’t work out…Often, we describe these experiences as ‘failures’. In time, if you keep having negative experiences and you never learn the life lessons they really are, you start believing you yourself are a failure… And what devastating consequences this concept has on your self-esteem and your belief in yourself as a powerful human being! So you simply give up control and go into pain avoidance mode! ‘If i don’t put myself in that situation I will not be hurt again’.
Does all this feel right to you?
As a 21st century woman you have been exposed to thousands of empowering messages that tell you that it’s ok to initiate conversation with an attractive guy in the right setting, that you no longer have to wait for him to call or text back. Modern technology, online dating, smartphone apps are now making it easier for us to take control of our lives and choose to engage in conversation, to communicate, to ask for what we want.
But has this all penetrated deep down into our psyche? Are we really completely free of the anxiety of ‘what if he doesn’t like me?’, ‘what if he thinks I’m too aggressive?’, ‘What if he just wants sex and he will abandon me after?’
This is all because no one has ever really taught us how to do this. We don’t learn in school or at work how to become good at taking charge of our relationships. How can we – women – find the courage and the skills to take our love life into our own hands and once and for all become masters of our own happiness? (See?? Even here I have to use the masculine word because the feminine means something completely different).
In my next post I will share with you my answer to that question: we can take control of our love lives – and KNOW when we found The One – by CHOOSING to change how we think about love.
